history of those times furnish indubitable proof. As the old class of doctrinal Puritans passed off the stage, and a new class of democratic Puritans succeeded, enthusiasm, fanaticism, and hypocrisy began to prevail; but even then there was the manifest growth of pure religion, and a large increase in the numbers of pious ministers and of real Christians. They must indeed be blinded by party prejudice who do not see evidence of this, even during the civil wars and the Commonwealth, in the labours and writings of such men as Manton, Owen, Baxter, and Howe, and many others whose writings and labours were greatly blessed in their days, and are still blessed to the Church in our days. However various the opinions entertained of the character of Cromwell, there are few prepared to question the growth of religion in the army and in the nation under his influence: one, and not the least evidence of this, is seen in his noble Protestant advocacy of the persecuted Vaudois of the valleys of Piedmont, and of the large and liberal collections made, at his bidding, for the relief of this suffering primitive Church and people. Under his government Protestantism and Protestant truth were vigorously and successfully upheld and promoted, amidst all the widely-spread hypocrisy and fanaticism of the day. It is impossible to read the biographies of those times, of the success of Baxter's ministry at Kidderminster, and of others in other places, and not admit in a spirit of thankfulness, that to the Church were vouchsafed, "times of

refreshing from the presence of the Lord."

The lamp of truth was kept alive; real religion was spreading through the nation; the spiritual temple of the Lord, in those "troublous times," was rising higher and higher, and extending wider and wider.

CHAPTER XVIII.

TIMES OF REFRESHING DURING THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY-ENGLAND.

THE Revolution of 1688 is justly considered "Glorious," because it secured to the Church emancipation from continued intolerance; and, so far as human enactments could do so, secured civil and religious freedom. Hallam remarks:-"The privileges of conscience had no earlier Magna Charta and petition of right whereto they could appeal against encroachment. Civil, indeed, and religious liberty had appeared, not as twin sisters and co-heirs, but rather in jealous and selfish rivalry; it was in despite of the law, it was through infringement of the constitution, by the Court's connivance, by the dispensing prerogative, by the declarations of indulgence under Charles and James, that some respite had been obtained from the tyranny which those who proclaimed their attachment to civil rights had always exercised against one class of separatists, and frequently against another." "The Act of Toleration was passed with little difficulty, though not without murmurs of the bigoted Churchmen. It

exempts from the penalties of existing statutes against separate conventicles, or absence from the Established worship, such as should take the oath of allegiance, and subscribe the declaration against Popery, and such ministers of separate congregations as should subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, except three, and a part of a fourth. It gives also an indulgence to Quakers without this condition. Meeting-houses are required to be registered, and are protected from insult by a penalty. We may justly deem this Act a very scanty measure of religious liberty; yet it proved more effectual through the lenient and liberal policy of the eighteenth century; the subscription to articles of faith, which soon became as obnoxious as that to matters of a more indifferent nature, having been practically dispensed with, though such a genuine toleration as Christianity and philosophy alike demand, had no place in our statute-book before the reign of George III." *

Amidst the continued political and religious struggles which preceded the Revolution, and which were in a great measure the effect of them, a great decay of vital religion had taken place in the nation: and this decay, torpor, and irreligion permeated all classes of society. A new school of Theology had sprung up, occupying a middle place between Laudianism on the one hand, and the doctrinal Puritans on the other. "It avoided some of the errors of both parties, to whom, however, it made

* Hallam's "Constitutional History of England," chap. xv.

ample satisfaction by new errors of its own. It did not push ritualism and the benefits of the Sacraments to the extravagant lengths of the Laudians; it avoided two great mistakes, into which many of the Church puritans had gradually fallen, namely, that of ultraCalvinism, and of a mode of preaching in which moral duties were rather implied than taught. In the new school which now appeared, morality was everything; while its views of Christian doctrines were vague and indistinct. Its teachers were rather Christian philosophers than Christian ministers; they taught morality in connexion with religion; the great verities of Christian doctrine they either did not fully appreciate or fully understand. The Church of England saw in another generation a resolute, and in some respects a successful, attempt (for the contagion spread far and wide, and lasted for a century) to dissever Christian practice from Christian doctrine; to teach the one and obliterate the other." This was in a great measure the effect and reaction of the Antinomianism and fanaticism which had been so fearfully developed under the Commonwealth, and it continued up to the time of George III. The general laxity in morals, the open licentiousness and infidelity, of such rapid growth and wide spread, in the reign of Charles II., may, in a great degree, be traced to the same time and cause. The ancient bulwarks and landmarks of religious faith and order had been torn up by the hand of violence: the horrors of civil war had tended to brutalize