d stimulus to keep alive its zeal. For
so soon as the press of danger ceased, and party strifes abated, with
the accession of the House of Brunswick, Christianity began forthwith to
slumber. The trumpet of Wesley and Whitefield was needed before that
unseemly slumber could again be broken.

It will not, however, be forgotten that twice in successive generations
the Church of England had been deprived, through misfortune or through
folly, of some of her best men. She had suffered on either hand. By the
ejection of 1602, through a too stringent enforcement of the new Act of
Uniformity, she had lost the services of some of the most devoted of her
Puritan sons, men whose views were in many cases no way distinguishable
from those which had been held without rebuke by some of the most
honoured bishops of Elizabeth's time. By the ejection of 1689, through
what was surely a needless strain upon their allegiance, many
high-minded men of a different order of thought were driven, if not from
her communion, at all events from her ministrations. It was a juncture
when the Church could ill afford to be weakened by the defection of some
of the most earnest and disinterested upholders of the Primitive and
Catholic, as contrasted with the more directly Protestant elements of
her Constitution. This twofold drain upon her strength could scarcely
have failed to impair the robust vitality which was soon to be so
greatly needed to combat the early beginnings of the dead resistance of
spiritual lethargy.

But this listlessness in most branches of practical religion must partly
be attributed to a cause which gives the history of religious thought in
the eighteenth century its principal importance. In proportion as the
Church Constitution approached its final settlement, and as the
controversies, which from the beginning of the Reformation had been
unceasingly under dispute, gradually wore themselves out, new questions
came forward, far more profound and fundamental, and far more important
in their speculative and practical bearings, than those which had
attracted so much notice and stirred so much excitement during the two
preceding centuries. The existence of God was scarcely called into
question by the boldest doubters; or such doubts, if they found place at
all, were expressed only under the most covert implications. But, short
of this, all the mysteries of religion were scrutinized; all the deep
and hidden things of faith were brought in