have expected to find the zeal which was lacking in the National Church showing itself in other Christian bodies.  But we find nothing of the sort.  The torpor which had overtaken our Church extended itself to all forms of Christianity.  Edmund Calamy, a Nonconformist, lamented in 1730 that ’a real decay of serious religion, both in the Church and out of it, was very visible.’  Dr. Watts declares that in his day ’there was a general decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of men.’[699] A modern writer who makes no secret of his partiality for Nonconformists owns that ’religion, whether in the Established Church or out of it, never made less progress than after the cessation of the Bangorian and Salter’s Hall disputes.  Breadth of thought and charity of sentiment increased, but religious activity did not.’[700] In 1712 Defoe considered ‘Dissenters’ interests to be in a declining state, not so much as regarded their wealth and numbers as the qualifications of their ministers, the decay of piety, and the abandonment of their political friends.’  Such is the testimony of Nonconformists themselves, who will not be suspected of taking too dark a view of the condition of Nonconformity.  There is no need to add to this the evidence of Churchmen.  It is a fact patent to all students of the period that the moral and religious stagnation of the times extended to all religious bodies outside as well as inside the National Church.  The most intellectually active part of Dissent was drifting gradually into Socinianism and Unitarianism.

There is yet one more circumstance to be taken into account in estimating the extent to which the clergy were responsible for the irreligion and immorality which prevailed.  A change of manners was fast rendering ineffectual a weapon which they had formerly used for waging war against sin.  Ecclesiastical censures were becoming little better than a mere brutum fulmen.  Complaints of the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of enforcing Church discipline are of constant occurrence.  In 1704 Archbishop Sharp, while urging his clergy to present ’any that are resolved to continue heathens and absolutely refuse to come to church,’ and, while admitting that the abuses of the commutation for penance were ’a cause of complaints against the spiritual courts and of the invidious reflections cast upon them,’ adds that ’he was very sensible both of the decay of discipline in general and of the curbs put upon any effectual prosecution of it by the temporal courts, and of the difficulty of keeping up what little was left entire to the ecclesiastics without creating offence and administering matter for aspersion and evil surmises.’[701] The same excellent prelate, when, a writ de excommunicato capiendo was evaded by writs of supersedeas from Chancery, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking him ’to represent the case to the Lord Chancellor, that he might give such directions that his courts might go