lumination. Many thousands in the lower ranks of life were infected
with this species of enthusiasm, by the unwearied endeavours of a few
obscure preachers, such as Whitfield and the two Wesleys, who propagated
their doctrine to the most remote corners of the British dominions, and
found means to lay the whole kingdom under contribution. Fanaticism
also formed a league with false philosophy. One Hutchinson, a visionary,
intoxicated with the fumes of rabbinical learning, pretended to deduce
all demonstration from Hebrew roots, and to confine all human knowledge
to the five books of Moses. His disciples became numerous after his
death. With the methodists, they denied the merit of good-works, and
bitterly inveighed against Newton as an ignorant pretender, who had
presumed to set up his own ridiculous chimeras in opposition to the
sacred philosophy of the Pentateuch. But the most extraordinary
sect which distinguished this reign was that of the Moravians, or
Hernhutters, imported from Germany by count Zinzendorf, who might have
been termed the Melchisedec of his followers, inasmuch as he assumed
among them the threefold character of prophet, priest, and king. They
could not be so properly styled a sect, as the disciples of an original,
who had invented a new system of religion. Their chief adoration was
paid to the second person in the Trinity; the first they treated with
the most shocking neglect. Some of their tenets were blasphemous, some
indecent, and others ridiculously absurd. Their discipline was a strange
mixture of devotion and impurity. Their exterior worship consisted of
hymns, prayers, and sermons; the hymns extremely ludicrous, and often
indecent, alluding to the side-hole or wound which Christ received from
a spear in his side while he remained upon the cross. Their sermons
frequently contained very gross incentives to the work of propagation.
Their private exercises are said to have abounded with such rites
and mysteries, as we cannot explain with any regard to decorum. They
professed a community of goods, and were governed as one family, in
temporals as well as spirituals, by a council or kind of presbytery,
in which the count, as their ordinary, presided. In cases of doubt, or
great consequence, these pretended to consult the Saviour, and to decide
from immediate inspiration; so that they boasted of being under the
immediate direction of a theocracy, though in fact they were slaves to
the most dangerous kind