England in the Eighteenth Century
“Our light looks like the evening of the world f in those pathetic and expressive words a “Proposal for a National Reformation of Manners,” published in 1694, described the moral condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A new century was dawning, but it seemed as if in the spiritual sky of England the very light of Christianity itself was being turned, by some strange and evil force, into darkness. And it was upon a moral landscape of this sort, dark with the shadows as of some dreadful and swift-coming spiritual eclipse, that Wesley was about to begin his work. It is impossible to understand the scale and power of that work without some preliminary attempt to realise the field upon which it was done.
It would be easy to multiply testimonies showing how exhausted of living religion, how black with every kind of wickedness, was the England of that day. Its ideals were gross; its sports were brutal; its public life was corrupt; its vice was unashamed. Walpole, indeed, did not invent political corruption, but he systematised it; he erected it into a policy; he made it shameless! Cruelty fermented in the pleasures of the crowd, foulness stained the general speech. Judges swore on the bench; the chaplain cursed the sailors to make them attentive to his sermons; the king swore incessantly, and at the top of his voice. The Duchess of Marlborough, a story runs, called on a lawyer without leaving her name. “I could not make out who she was,” said the clerk afterwards, “but she swore so dreadfully she must be a lady of quality.”
Ferocious laws still lingered on the Statute-Book. Justice itself was cruel. As late as 1735 men were pressed to death who refused to plead on a capital charge. The law under which women were liable to be publicly flogged, or to be burned at the stake, was not repealed till 1794.
Temple Bar was adorned with a perpetually renewed fresco of human heads. It was the age of the pillory and of the whipping-post; of gin-hells, and of debtors’ j)risous, hideous enough to have darkened Dante’s Inferno with a new gloom. Drunkenness was the familiar and unrebuked habit even of Ministers of the State. Adultery was a sport, and the shame lay not on the false wife or on the smiling gallant, but on the betrayed husband.
But it is unfair to judge any age by its vices. Human wickedness blackens, more or less, every century. Who wants to know how low England had sunk in the eighteenth century must judge of it, not by its worst, but by its best elements — by its religion, or what in it was mistaken for religion; and by the teachers of that religion. For there is no surer test of a religion than the sort of teachers it produces.
It is hardly fair, perhaps, to go to a satirist in search of a portrait; and Thackeray’s portraits of eighteenth-century divines are, no doubt, etched in acid. But they are not untrue to life; their power, indeed, lies in their truth. Of George II., the little, hot-tempered, pugnacious monarch, with the morals and manners of a Jonathan Wild in purple, Thackeray writes in sword-edged phrases. And George II. had divines who matched his morals; who even consented to treat his amazing morals as virtues!
The King was dead; and “it was a parson,” says Thackeray, “who came and wept over this grave, with Walmoden (one of the dead King’s many mistresses! sitting on it, and claimed heaven for the poor old man slumbering below. Here was one who had neither dignity, learning, morals, nor wit — who tainted a great society by a bad example; who in youth, manhood, old age, was gross, low, and sensual; and Mr. Porteus, afterwards my Lord Bishop Porteus, says the earth was not good enough for him, and that his only place was heaven 1 Bravo, Mr. Porteus! The divine who wept these tears over George the Second’s memory wore George the Third’s lawn.”
Thackeray draws a life-like picture of another divine of that day — the type of a class — Selwyn’s chaplain and parasite, who has written down his own character in his own letters. And Thackeray sets the dreadful portrait in the perspective of history, when “all the foul pleasures and gambols in which he revelled were
played out; all the rouged faces into which he leered were worms and skulls; all the fine gentlemen whose shoebuckles he kissed lay in their coffins. This worthy clergyman takes care to tell us that he does not believe in his religion, though, thank heaven, he is not so great a rogue as a lawyer. He goes on Mr. Selwyn’s errands, any errands, and is proud, he says, to be that gentleman’s proveditor. He waits upon the Duke of Queensberry — old Q’ — and exchanges pretty stories with that aristocrat. He comes home ‘after a hard day’s christening,’ as he says, and writes to his patron before sitting down to whist and partridges for supper. He revels in the thoughts of oxcheek and burgundy — he is a boisterous, uproarious parasite, licks his master’s shoes with explosions of laughter, and cunning smack and gusto, and likes the taste of that blacking as much as the best claret in old Q.’s cellar. He has ‘Rabelais’ and ‘Horace’ at his greasy fingers’ ends. He is inexpressibly mean — curiously jolly; kindly and good-natured in secret — a tender-hearted knave, not a venomous lickspittle. Jesse says that at his chapel in Long Acre, ‘he attained a considerable popularity by the pleasing, manly, and eloquent style of his delivery.’”
“Was infidelity endemic, and corruption in the air?” asks Thackeray, as he contemplates such amazing divines. The bad morals of George II., he goes on to say, bore their fruit in the early years of George III., and the result was a court and a society as dissolute as England ever knew. Thackeray was a satirist, but these pictures owe nothing to the gall in his inkpot. The satire, we repeat, lies in their truth.
Now, a religion has always the sort of clergy it deserves; and, taken as a class, the clergy of the eighteenth centui-y were gross and unspiritual because they represented a faith exhausted of all spiritual force. If, in the England of that day, we look behind all mere failures in external morality to the spiritual causes which account for them, these are clear. It was the age of a shallow and confident Deism; a Deism exultant and militant, served by wit and humour as well as defended by logic. It had captured literature; it coloured the general imagination; it stained the common speech; it sat enthroned in the place of Christian faith.
Now Deism of any type is morally impotent; and Deism of the eighteenth-century type is nothing but a little patch of uncertain quicksand set in a black sea of atheism. It does not deny God’s existence, but it cancels Him out as a force in human life. It breaks the golden ladder of revelation betwixt heaven and earth. It leaves the Bible discredited, duty a guess, heaven a freak of the uncharted imagination, and God a vague and far-off shadow. Men were left by it to climb into a shadowy heaven on some frail ladder of human logic. And while in those sad days there was this obscuring mist of Deism outside the Churches, inside them there was a mist almost as evil and dense. Open and confessed Arianism had captured almost completely the dissenting Churches; and an unconscious and practical Arianism reigned, in spite of its Articles, in the Angelican Church. The sense of sin was faint; and with it had grown faint, too, the doctrine of a divine and redeeming Christ.
The religious literature of that age shows how curiously pale and ineffective the notion of God had become for even those who professed to be His ministers. In the theology of the time “God,” says Sir Leslie Stephen, “was an idol compounded of fragments of tradition and of frozen metaphysics.”^ There was a God; and He had once touched human life. But it was a long time ago, and in a far-off land. He had now emigrated from His own world. The grotesque Deity of Bishop Warburton was, to quote Leslie Stephen again, “a supernatural chiefjustice whose sentences were carried out in a non-natural world; a constitutional monarch who had signed a constitutional compact and retired from the active government of affairs.” Of God as the Father of our spirits, as actually living in His own universe and ruling men’s lives; God of whom it might be said in Tennyson’s words:
“Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet,”
no trace is to be found in the theology of the eighteenth century. Superstition, according to its theologians, consisted in the belief that God ever revealed Himself in the affairs of the modern world. Fanaticism was the imagination that He revealed Himself by any touch, or breath, or thrill of influence to the personal soul.
Deism, we repeat, thick with Arctic fogs and frozen with Arctic chills, constitutes the working theology of that unhappy age. In that theology Christ is attenuated
•“History of English Thought,” &c., vol. ii. p. 338.
to a shadow. He serves as a label for a creed, but He has only the oflBces of a label. His Gospel did not consist of “good news,” but only of good advice. It was not a deliverance, but a philosophy. A decent Chinaman who took Confucius seriously might almost have preached nine-tenths of the sermons of that period. If he had concealed his pig-tail, altered his complexion, disguised himself in cassock and bands, learned a few technical i phrases, and spoken of the Gospels as true but very remote histories, he might have passed for a sound divine, with a very orthodox appetite for a fat benefice. Lecky says, with cruel accuracy, “Beyond a belief in the doctrine of the Trinity and a general acknowledgment of the veracity of the Gospel narratives, the divines of that day taught little which might not have been taught by the disciples of Socrates or the followers of Confucius.”
Now Christianity does not consist in a code of ethics. It is not a chapter of remote history. It is a group of great and majestic truths; truths which transcend the understanding, and are robed in mystery; but which must shape our lives. First and last it is a message of redeeming love. The mystery of a divine propitiation through the blood of Christ, of access to God through the priestly offices of Christ, is of its very essence. Its supreme gift is the life of God restored in the soul by the mighty grace of the Holy Spirit.
But all these great doctrines, which do not so much belong to Christianity as constitute it, had somehow slipped, not merely from human faith, but almost from human recollection at this stage of English-speaking j Christianity. The message of “entrance into the Holiest I by the blood of Jesus” had no meaning for men who I believed they could saunter into God’s presence with a j few polite compliments at any time. In the religion of I that day there were no tears of repentance. The note of passion is silent; the hush of reverence is missing. And all this because the vision of God had grown faint: the sense of sin — of what sin means, and of God’s remedy for it — had perished.
Now a religion exhausted of its supernatural contents in this fashion has no power over the human conscience. It transfigures no lives. It inspires no martyrs. It creates no saints. It sends out no missionaries. It generates a morality of ignoble temper. It resembles nothing so much as an atmosphere exhausted of oxygen.
And the religion of the eighteenth century was treated as it deserved to be treated. Its very sacraments, “the symbols of atoning grace,” became, in Cowper’s phrase,
“An oflSce key, a pick-lock to a place.”
Swift, in one of his letters to Stella, writes: “I was early in to see the Secretary, Bolingbroke, but he was gone to his devotions and to receive the Sacrament; several rakes did the same. It was not for piety, but for employment, according to Act of Parliament.” Such a religion could not inspire a saintly or an heroic ministry; and certainly there was not much that was saintly, and still less that was heroic, in the temper of the Anglican clergy in the days of the early Georges. The first great duty of religion was to be tepid. There must be no enthusiasm, no heroics. Extremes were to be shunned. “We should take care never to overshoot ourselves, even in the pursuits of virtues,” was the counsel of one of the preachers of that age. “Whether zeal or moderation be the point we aim at, let us keep fire out of one and frost out of the other.” “Those words,” says Miss Wedgwood, “are the motto of the Church of the eighteenth century.” Its divines were much more afraid of being suspected of believing too much, than of doubting everything.
Christianity was diligently watered down, by its own teachers, into insipid platitudes. The sin against the Holy Spirit is by Bishop Clarke diluted into “a perverse refusal to be convinced by the highest evidence of the truth of Christianity.” The motive by which religion was urged on the conscience was at bottom an appeal to cowardice. Bishop Sherlock, indeed, resolves religion into a judicious balance of odds. “It is ten to one,” he says, in substance, “that religion is true. If it turns out to be false the Christian has only lost one-tenth of the amount he staked. If it turns out to be true, the sinner has made a very bad bargain indeed.” Loc is the one instrument of a tepid religion. So all the teaching and preaching of the eighteenth-century divines is in the terms of logic, and has the chill of logic. The reli-: glous teachers of that day, in a word, had but half -beliefs, * and out of half-beliefs no heroic morality can be extracted.
Leslie Stephen says of Ihe most famous ])ie:i< li(M’ of that day, Blair, that “he was a mere washed-out dealer ’ of second-hand commonplaces, who gives the impression that the real man has vanished and left nothing but a wig and gown.” Bishop Warburton’s conception of the Christian Church may be gathered from a sentence in one of his letters. “The Church,” he says, “like the ark of Noah, is worth saving, not for the sake of the unclean beasts that almost fill it and make most noise and clamour in it; but for the little corner of rationality that is much more depressed by the stiuk within than by the tempest without.” Middleton, another Church dignitary of that day, wrote a letter to Lord Hervey ridiculing the Articles which he was about to sign in order to take possession of a living.
“Though there are many things in the Church (he says) that I wholly dislike, yet while I am content to acquiesce in the ill I shall be glad to taste a little of the good, and so have some amends for that ugly assent and consent which no man of sense -will approve of. We read of some of the earliest disciples of Christ who followed Him, not for His works, but for His loaves. To us who had not the happiness to see the one it may be allowed to have some inclination to the other. Your lordship knows a j certain person who, with a very low notion of the Church’s sacred bread, has a very high relish for a very large share of the temporal. My appetite for each is equally moderate. I have no pretensions to riot in the feast of the elect, but with the sinner In the Gospel to gather up the crumbs that fall from the table.”
Now a religion of this type, and served by such ministers, inevitably bred ignoble lives. Piety was but a skin of external habits, a form of prudence extended into the j spiritual world. If the dusty sermons of that age are put into the retort and their essence distilled, it will be seen to consist of exhortations like these: “Don’t be drunk, or you shall ruin your health; nor commit murder, or you shall be hanged. Every man should be happy, and the way to be happy is to be thoroughly respectable.”
The opinion that Christianity was untrue, but useful tft -Society, represents the working creed of the educated classes. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reports a plan on foot for taking the “not” out of the Commandments and putting it in the Creed. That is a flash of feminine satire; but it represents the theory on which whole multitudes lived.
Bishop Butler has painted the spirit of his time in dark and imperishable colours. “The deplorable distinction of our age,” he says, “is an avowed scorn of religion, and a growing disregard of it.” But Butler himself, with all his high gifts, supplies, in his own person, an expressive proof of the spiritual blindness and death which lay on the Churches of that day. He forbade Whitefield and the Wesleys to preach in his diocese, though all around his cathedral city lay the most degraded and hopeless class in England — the coal-miners of Kingswood, as untouched by any of the forces of Christianity as if they had been savages in Central Africa. That the best, the wisest, the ’ most powerful, the most earnestly convinced of the bishops of that day should take this attitude towards Wesley and his work shows what was the general temper of the clergy of that time. Butler’s conscience was not disquieted by the lapse into mere heathenism of a whole class within sound of the bells of his cathedral; but he grows piously indignant at the spectacle of an ecclesiastical irregularity! Enthusiasm in good men was, in his eyes, a more alarming spectacle than vice in bad men. What more significant inversion of spiritual values can be imagined!
No feature of the eighteenth century, indeed, is more curious, or more deeply characteristic, than its dread of “enthusiasm.” It was the accursed thing! A sound divine was much more anxious to purge himself of the suspicion of enthusiasm, than of the scandal of heresy. It was an age of compromise; of compromises in politics, in philosophy, in theology; and compromises are fatal to enthusiasm. They must kill it, or be killed by it.
Let it be remembered that two great waves of passion had recently swept over England — the Puritan wave that culminated and broke in the Civil War; and the recoil from Puritanism which found its triumph in the Restoration. Great debates, fought with sword and musket, with the prison and the pillory, with Acts of Parliament and sentences of the courts, had left England exhausted. The Whig spirit of compromise which explains the Revolution of 1688 had captured the realm of religion. Men were i still sore with the wounds of the strife. The public mind I was in a mood of reflux. It dreaded passion. It hated fanatics. Enthusiasm was a word suspect. Moderation was the chief thing.
Now enthusiasm has, or ought to have, its last stronghold in religion, and in the men who are the teachers of religion. But in the eighteenth century the clergy were the one class in the whole nation in which the fires of euthusiam were most completely extinct; and this as a result of their own acts. Within a single generation they had, first, taught the divine right of kings, and fiercely persecuted all who doubted that doctrine. Then, after 1688, they swallowed their principles, took the oath of allegiance to William, and proceeded to hunt out of rectory and parsonage the stubborn remnant of their own brethren who declined to turn their back on their principles with the same cheerful facility I Principle of the high and austere sort was, for the moment, discredited in this dreadful fashion by the example set by the clergy themselves.
There were some bright spots, it is true, even in this dark landscape. Amongst the fat, well-beneflced, unspiritual bishops of that day stand the almost saintly figures of Butler and of Berkeley. The century which counted William Law amongst its theologians, and Watts and Doddridge amongst its singers, still had some of the divine glow of religion in its veins. And there must have been many an English rectory, beside Epworth Parsonage, in which burned the clear flame of household piety.
And yet the spiritual life of England at this moment was beyond all doubt swiftly draining away. Its public life corrupt; its clergj- discredited; its Church frozen; its theology exhausted of Christian elements. This was the England of the eighteenth centurj’! It needed a spiritual revolution to save such a people. The airs of Pentecost must blow afresh over the dying land; the fires of a new Pentecost must fall to kindle the flame of faith in men’s souls once more. And Wesley was called, and trained by God, for that great task.