THE KING’S BUSINESS
376
ica Samuel Blair declared, that^ re ligion “lay a-dying.” IDEE PUEPIT. But what was the pulpit doing in those days? Nothing. “Natural theology without a simple distinctive doctrine of Christianity; cold morality or barren orthodoxy formed the staple teaching both in established church and dissenting chapel.” The best sermons were only Moral Essays, a thousand of which held not enough gospel truth to convert one soul. All seemed to agree to let the Devil alone. It was the church and not Satan that was chained. The grand, weighty truths for which Hooper and Latimer went to the stake, and Baxter and Bunyan to jail, seemed like relics of the past. The land was flooded with irreligion and infidelity. Collins and Tindal stigmatized Christianity as priestcraft. Woolston declared the miracles of the Bible to be allegories and Whiston denounced them as impositions and frauds. Clark and Priestly openly taught Arianism and Socinianism, and helped to make heresy fashion able. Blackstone, the lawyer, went from church to church and heard every clergyman of note in London ; and says he heard not one discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero, or from which one could tell whether the preacher were a disciple of Con fucius, Mahomet or Christ. An open disregard of religion was, as Archbishop Seeker said, “the char acteristic of the age.” Even the Bishops led the way in worldliness, as Archbishop Cornwallis gave balls and routs at Lambeth Palace, till even the king interfered; and it was said that the best way to stop Whitefield in his work of reform was to make him a Bishop. Such a state of things caused true disciples great humilia tion and drove them to God in sheer despair. All over the Christian world
apostasy from God that well nigh wrecked religious life in England and America, pealed out his trumpet call, summoning the whole Christian world to prayer, in 1747. In that tract, in which he pleads for a “visible union of God’s people in extraordinary prayer,” he refers to the day of fast ing and prayer kept at Northampton the year before, which was followed that same night by the utter disper sion and defeat of the French Ar mada under the Duke’ d’Anville; and Edwards adds, “this is the nearest parallel with God’s-wonderful works of old in times of Moses, Joshua and Hezekiah, of any that have been in these latter ages of the world.” That trumpet peal "to universal prayer in 1747 marked a turning point in modern history. This is one of those instances in which the subject can be understood only from a high point of prospect, that sweeps a wide horizon. We can understand the need of God’s inter position, and the desperate necessity that drove his disciples to prayer, only by a knowledge of the condition of the world at that time. And that at least one example may be given in full, let us stop to take in if possi b le the whole range of this ajwful spiritual desolation. The opening part of the eighteenth century presented a prospect as dreary and hopeless as has been seen per haps since the dark ages. The lead ers of English society were Hume, Gibbon and- Bolingbroke, giants of in fidelity: in France, Voltaire, Rous seau and Madame de Pompadour: in Germany, Frederic the Great, the friend and companion of Voltaire, and like him a deist. “Flippancy and frivolity in the church, deism in theology, lasciviousness in the novel and the drama”—such was the state of things in England, which Isaac Taylor said was in a condition of “virtual heathenism,” .while in Amer
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker