it and also over every community of Nonconformists. It is remarkable how
closely the beginning of the season of spiritual lassitude corresponds
with the accession of the first George. The country had never altogether
recovered from the reaction of lax indifference into which it had fallen
after the Restoration. Nevertheless, a good deal had occurred since that
time to keep the minds of Churchmen, as well as of politicians, awake
and active: and a good deal had been done to stem the tide of immorality
which had then broken over the kingdom. The Church of England was
certainly not asleep either in the time of the Seven Bishops, when James
II. was King, or under its Whig rulers at the end of the century. And in
Queen Anne's time, amid all the virulence of hostile Church parties,
there was a healthy stream of life which made itself very visible in the
numerous religious associations which sprang up everywhere in the great
towns. It might seem as if there were a certain heaviness in the English
mind, which requires some outward stimulus to keep alive its zeal. For
so soon as the press of danger ceased, and party strifes abated, with
the accession of the House of Brunswick, Christianity began forthwith to
slumber. The trumpet of Wesley and Whitefield was needed before that
unseemly slumber could again be broken.

It will not, however, be forgotten that twice in successive generations
the Church of England had been deprived, through misfortune or through
folly, of some of her best men. She had suffered on either hand. By the
ejection of 1602, through a too stringent enforcement of the new Act of
Uniformity, she had lost the services of some of the most devoted of her
Puritan sons, men whose views were in many cases no way distinguishable
from those which had been held without rebuke by some of the most
honoured bishops of Elizabeth's time. By the ejection of 1689, through
what was surely a needless strain upon their allegiance, many
high-minded men of a different order of thought were driven, if not from