essays or papers which may form material for history rather than history itself; and the readers of a series which is called "A History of the English Church" naturally expect to find narrative history in it. It is purposed in the present volume to make a sort of compromise by dividing the eighty-six years into four well-defined periods, and then to treat of subjects within those periods rather than to attempt a formal chronicle. Since the average length of each period will be less than a quarter of a century, the consecutive order which a reader is entitled to expect in anything that calls itself a history will, perhaps, be sufficiently presented by such a method.

First Period.

I. The First Period embraces twenty-four years, from the accession of George I. in 1714 to the "conversion" of John Wesley in 1738, or, in other words, to the beginning of the Evangelical revival. This is obviously the proper date with which to begin a new period. For not only was the Evangelical revival, from one point of view, by far the most important feature in the religious history of the eighteenth century, but it marks a change from what was an appeal mainly to the head to what was an appeal mainly to the heart, from the intellectual to the emotional. Both appeals are necessary, and they came in the order named. The Evangelical revival could never have been the force it was unless it had been preceded by the work which was done most effectually by those who placed Christianity upon a thoroughly firm intellectual basis. Such men as Butler and Waterland and Conybeare and Law not only paved the way for the Wesleys and Whitefield, for Newton, Venn, and Cecil, but rendered their mission possible; and as the former group could never have done the work of the latter, so neither could the latter have ever done the work of the former. The one set lacked the fire of energy, the other intellectual equipment. Scant justice has been done to the splendid array of writings in defence of Christianity which appeared between 1714 and 1738. They embraced, among others, Its literature. Daniel Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1719), Second Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1723), Further Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1724), his Case of Arian Subscription (1721), and Supplement (1722), and his Imbortance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity asserted (1734);

Joseph Butler's Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), and the Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736); Thomas Sherlock's Use and Intent of Prophecy (1725), and his Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1729); John Conybeare's Defence of Revealed Religion (1732); George Berkeley's Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732); William Law's Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor (1717), his Case of Reason, or Natural Religion fairly and fully stated (1731); and the First Part of William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses (1737). It may be doubted whether, in the whole course of the long history of the Church of England, from the close of the seventh to the beginning of the twentieth century, any single quarter of a century could be found in which so many first-class works of the highest kind on controversial divinity, or what would now be called Apologetics, were written.

The First Period includes the Bangorian Controversy, ending in the virtual silencing of Convocation, the later stages of the Non-Juror Controversy, the Jacobite Controversy, ending with the trial and banishment of Bishop Atterbury, the greater part of the Trinitarian, Arian, and Deistic Controversies, the very interesting correspondence of Archbishop Wake with the Gallican Church and of the Non-Jurors with the Greek Church, and the curious relation of Queen Caroline to the Church. It is certainly fraught with interest, though, alas! much of it is a melancholy interest, for we shall have to trace the rapid decay of practical activity and of spirituality, the falling off both in the number and in the attractiveness of church services, the alienation between the higher and the lower clergy, and the baneful operation of State influence upon the Church.

Period.

II. The Second Period, from 1738 to 1760, includes the rise and early history of the Methodist movement, which entered upon a new phase in 1760, when the Sacraments began to be administered in Methodist The Second chapels. It is, however, the men, who were all professedly churchmen, and the general stirring up of the dry bones which they caused, rather than the Methodist, as distinguished from the Evangelical movement, which fall

Methodism.

within the province of a writer on the Church of England. Any history of the kind which did not give full prominence to the names of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, John Fletcher, and other leaders (and especially to the first named) would be absurdly defective. It may, however, be fairly contended that as an organised system Methodism never was a Church movement, and but for the commanding influence of its great founder, would never have retained so long as it did the continually loosening tie which, in a sort of way, bound it to the Church. From this point of view, the later Methodism of John Wesley belongs no more to a history of the Church of England than, say, the Hutchinsonianism of William Jones of Nayland. The two men-Wesley and Jones-are most interesting men, and the two subjects-Methodism and Hutchinsonianism—are interesting subjects, but neither of them is strictly matter for a Church of England history. Wesley himself may have intended his united societies to have been merely an expansion of the religious societies with which he had been familiar from his childhood, and which were handmaids of the Church, but did one in ten thousand among the rapidly increasing Methodists ever regard them in that light?

The reader will, therefore, find little in these pages about the marvellous organisation which Wesley either originated or adopted, not because it is a thing of naught, but simply because it is not a part of the particular subject of this book. For the same reason Whitefield's efforts, under the patronage of Lady Huntingdon, are lightly passed over, because they had even less connexion with the Church of England than the Wesleyan societies; Whitefield himself being far less of a churchman than either of the brothers Wesley. On the other hand, much more might be said, than is usually done in this connexion in describing these movements, concerning the prelates who were brought into contact with them-Gibson and Potter and, above all, that trio who were bound together almost all their lives long by the closest bonds, Butler, Secker, and Benson. To this period belongs also what is called the Anti-subscription movement, which was fraught with imminent danger to the Church; but, as it happily found quiet solution, it will not require to be dwelt upon at any great length. It

I

INTRODUCTION

7

is during this period that the Church seems to have reached its nadir. Whatever the after effects of Methodism upon it, the immediate results were only to stir up a violent hostility, which was deplorable, but not altogether unnatural or unreasonable; and, apart from Methodism, the influences which affected the Church at this period were debasing.

The Third
Period.

III. The Third Period, from 1760 to 1790, includes the first half of the long reign of George III., which, whatever it may have been from a political standpoint, was conducive, so far as George was concerned, to the interests of religion and morality. There is no doubt a danger in attributing too much importance to the higher and purer tone which prevailed at Court, because the direct influence of such improvement would necessarily be limited to a small area, and at any rate in the middle of the eighteenth century to England. As Claudian so well says:

nec sic inflectere sensus

Humanos edicta valent, quam vita regentis.

Court.

But the Court, then as now, set the fashion, and indirectly the influence of the good King and his good Queen permeated into quarters where the two were personally un- The known. And then, again, the influence was not Hanoverian only good in itself, but also took the place of an influence which was intolerably bad. The Court of the first two Georges was little less immoral than that of Charles II., and infinitely more gross; and if there be any truth in the dictum of Edmund Burke, that vice divested of all its grossness loses half of its evil, the English nation gained nothing in this respect by exchanging the Stewarts for the early Hanoverians. Infinitely greater and more extensive than that of the Court was the influence of the Evangelical party within the Church, which was now beginning to be felt, The and which steadily increased within this period. Evangelical The story of Evangelicalism as distinguished from Methodism will form the leading feature of this part of our history, and the lives of such men as Venn, Newton, Scott, and the Milners, of Cecil, Berridge, Grimshaw, and the rest, must, unless through some fault in treatment, be both profitable and attractive. In this period also were prominent

party.

High Churchmen.

many good men who did not belong to the Evangelical party, but were rather what would now be called distinctly High Church. Such were Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke among the laity, and George Horne, William Jones, Samuel Horsley, and Robert South among the clergy. The foundation of Sunday schools, the consecration of the first bishop for America, the removal of some of the disabilities of the Scottish Episcopal Church and its recognition by its sister Church of England, all belong to this period, which is, as will be seen, a singularly rich and fruitful one.

Period.

IV. The last Period embraces only ten or eleven years from 1790 to 1800, and the line of demarcation which distinguishes it from its predecessor is not so obvious as The Fourth in the case of the other three, neither is it possible to select one particular turning-point with so much certainty as in the other periods. Nevertheless, there was a greater change, and that of the most decided character, in the last few years of the century, beginning, say, from about 1789, than in any other period. Three events which had lately taken place, all outside England, affected Outside the English Church in a multitude of ways, and to influences. an extent which it is extremely difficult to express or even to grasp. These events were-(i.) The War of American Independence and its results; (ii) the altered position of the Scottish Episcopal Church; and (iii.) the French Revolution, the last, from our present point of view, being by far the most important of the three. The effects produced by these three events will be described in detail later on. It may suffice here to say that the first and the second tended to widen the horizon of the English Church by bringing it into contact with two sister Churches, the ancient Church of Scotland and the modern Church of America. The first two taught English churchmen, what many of them seem hardly to have grasped before, that there were other liturgies besides their own "incomparable" one, to use the epithet that was so often applied to our Prayer Book by men who paid scant attention to its plain rules; and that there were other kinds of bishops besides those who drove their coaches-and-six and sat in the House of Lords.