AN UNUSUAL VIEW OF THE EPWORTH RECTORY.
Added to this, the Church, which should have been the light of the world, was in a most deplorable state. Irreligion and spiritual indifference had taken possession of priest and people, and ministers were sleeping over the threatened ruins of the Church, and, in too many instances, were hastening, by their open infidelity, the day of its ruin. The Established Church overtopped everything. She possessed great power and little piety. Her sacerdotal robes had been substituted for the garments of holiness; her Prayer Book had extinguished those earnest, spontaneous soul-breathings which bring the burdened heart into sympathetic union with the sympathizing Saviour. Spirituality had well-nigh found a grave, from which it was feared there would be no resurrection. Isaac Taylor says: "The Church had become an ecclesiastical system, under which the people of England had lapsed into heathenism;" and "Nonconformity had lapsed into indifference, and was rapidly in a course to be found nowhere but in books." In France hot-headed, rationalistic infidelity was invading the strongholds of the Reformation, and French philosophers were spreading moral contagion through Europe, which resulted in the French Revolution. The only thing which saved England from the same catastrophe was the sudden rise of Methodism, which, as one writer says, "laid hold of the lower classes and converted them before they were ripe for explosion." When preachers of the Gospel celebrated holy communion and preached to a handful of hearers on Sabbath morning, and devoted the afternoon to card-playing, and the rest of the week to hunting foxes, what else could have been expected? It is doubtful if in any period of the history of the Church the outlook had been darker.
The North British Review says: "Never has a century risen on Christian England so void of soul and faith; it rose a sunless dawn following a dewless night. The Puritans were buried, and the Methodists were not born." The Bishop of Lichfield said, in a sermon: "The Lord's day now is the devil's market day. More lewdness, more drunkenness, more quarrels and murders, more sin is conceived and committed, than on all the other days of the week. Strong drink has become the epidemic distemper of the city of London. Sin in general has become so hardened and rampant that immoralities are defended, yea, justified, on principle. Every kind of sin has found a writer to teach and vindicate it."
"The philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke; the moralist was Addison; the minstrel was Pope; and the preacher was Atterbury. The world had an idle, discontented look of a morning after some mad holiday."
Over this state of moral and religious apostasy a few were found who made sad and bitter lamentations. Bishop Burnet was "filled with sad thoughts." "The clergy," he said, "were under more contempt than those of any other Church in Europe; for they were much more remiss in their labors and least severe in their lives. I cannot look on," he says, "without the deepest concern, when I see imminent ruin hanging over the Church, and, by consequence, over the Reformation. The outward state of things is black enough, God knows, but that which heightens my fears arises chiefly from the inward state into which we are fallen."
Bishop Gibson gives a heart-saddening view of the matter: "Profaneness and iniquity are grown bold and open." Bishop Butler declared the Church to be "only a subject of mirth and ridicule." Guyes, a Nonconformist divine, says that "preacher and people were content to lay Christ aside." Hurrian, another Dissenter, sees "faith, joy, and Christian zeal under a thick cloud." Bishop Taylor declares that "the spirit was grieved and offended by the abominable corruption that abounded;" while good Dr. Watts sings sadly of the "poor dying rate" at which the friends of Jesus lived, saying: "I am well satisfied that the great and general reason of this is the decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of men, and the little success that the administration of the Gospel has made of late in the conversion of sinners to holiness."
This was the state of the English Church, and of Dissenters as well, at the opening of the eighteenth century. And well it might be when, as has been said, the philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke, the moralist was Addison, the minstrel was Pope, and the preacher was Atterbury. But when darkness seems most dense the day-star of hope is near to rising.