likely
consequence. The National Church was not in a sufficiently healthy and
vigorous condition to conduct with much prospect of success an enlarged
organisation, or to undertake, in any hopeful spirit, new and wider
responsibilities. Nor would accessions from the Dissenting communities
have infused much fresh life into it. They were suffering themselves
under the same defect; all the more visibly because a certain vigour of
self-assertion seemed necessary to justify their very existence as
separatist bodies. The Presbyterians were rapidly losing their old
standing, and were lapsing into the ranks of Unitarianism. A large
majority of the general Baptists were adopting similar views. The ablest
men among the Congregationalists were devoting themselves to teaching
rather than to pastoral work. Unitarianism was the only form of dissent
that was gaining in numbers and influence. The more orthodox
denominations were daily losing in numbers and influence, and were
secluding themselves more and more from the general thought and culture
of the age.

After all, the greatest question which arose in the eighteenth century
in connection with Church Comprehension was that which related to the
Methodist movement. Not that the word 'Comprehension' was ever used in
the discussion of it. In its beginnings, it was essentially an agitation
which originated within the National Church, and one in which the very
thought of secession was vehemently deprecated. As it advanced, though
one episcopal charge after another was levelled against it; though
pulpit after pulpit was indignantly refused to its leaders; though it
was on all sides preached against, satirised, denounced; though the
voices of its preachers were not unfrequently drowned in the clanging of
church bells; though its best features were persistently misunderstood
and misrepresented, and all its defects and weaknesses exposed with a
merciless hand, Wesley, with the majority of his principal supporters,
never ceased to declare his love for the Church of England, and his
hearty loyalty to its principles. 'We do not,' he said, 'we dare not,
separate from the service of the Church. We are not seceders, nor do we
bear any resemblance to them.' And when one of his bitterest opponents
charged him with 'stabbing the Church to her very vitals,' 'Do I, or
you,' he retorted, 'do this! Let anyone who has read her Liturgy,
Articles, and Homilies, judge.... You desire that I should disown the