’Is this or that form of worship most in accordance with the mind of Christ?’ but, ‘What is this Scripture to which all appeal?’ ’Who is this Christ whom all own as Master?’ This is really what is meant, so far as religion is concerned, when it is said that the eighteenth century was the age of reason—­alike in the good and in the bad sense of that term.  The defenders of Christianity, no less than its assailants, had to prove, above all things, the reasonableness of their position.  The discussion was inevitable, and in the end productive of good, but while it was going on it could not fail to be to many minds harmful.  Reason and faith, though not really antagonistic, are often in seeming antagonism.  Many might well ask, Can we no longer rest upon a simple, childlike faith, founded on authority?  What is there, human or Divine, that is left to reverence?  The heart of England was still sound at the core, and she passed through the crisis triumphantly; but the transition period was a dangerous and a demoralising one, and there is no wonder that she sank for a time under the wave that was passing over her.

It has been already said that the morbid dread of anything which savoured either of Romanism or Puritanism tended to reduce the Church to a dead level of uniform dulness.  The same dread affected the nation at large as well as the Church.  It practically cut off the laity from influences which might have elevated them.  Anything like the worship of God in the beauty of holiness, all that is conveyed in the term symbolism, the due observance of fast and festival—­in fact, all those things which to a certain class of minds are almost essential to raise devotion—­were too much associated in men’s minds with that dreaded enemy from whom the nation had but narrowly escaped in the preceding age to be able to be turned to any good effect in the eighteenth century.

On the other hand, stirring appeals to the feelings, analyses of spiritual frames—­everything, in short, which was termed in the jargon of the seventeenth century ‘savoury preaching’ and ‘a painful ministry,’ was too much associated in men’s minds with the hated reign of the Saints to be employed with any good effect.

And thus, both on the objective and on the subjective side, the people were practically debarred from influences which might have made their religion a more lovely or a more hearty thing.

Again, if the clergy showed, as they confessedly did, an inertness, an obstructiveness, a want of expansiveness, and a dogged resistance to any adaptation of old forms to new ideas, they were in these respects thoroughly in accord with the feelings of the mass of the nation.  The clergy were not popular, but it was not their want of zeal and enterprise which made them unpopular; if in exceptional cases they did show any tendency in these directions, this only made them more unpopular than ever.  Had it been otherwise we might naturally