To complete the picture of the times, it should be added that there was little vital piety among the clergy to counteract the tendency to religious indifference.The appointments to the livings in England and Ireland lay in the hands of the government and the upper classes, who preferred men of refinement {15} and prudence, inclined to political moderation or subserviency, to men of spiritual warmth and religious independence.The Nonconformists themselves felt the somnolent influence creeping over them, after the excitement of the battle in which they had been engaged was over.Their pastors were restrained in their ministrations, and consequently in their activities, by laws which were a plain violation of the principles of toleration, but which, as they did not issue in any overt act of bitter persecution, were not resented with keenness by the higher class of Dissenters, who, to tell the truth, after what they had come through in the previous age, were not much inclined to provoke anew the enmity from which they had suffered, but were rather disposed, provided only their individual convictions were not interfered with, to take advantage of what liberty they had, to proclaim peace with others, and to embrace the opportunities thrown open to them in the -- rowing cities and manufactories, of promoting the temporal interests of themselves and their families.In these circumstances, the younger ministers were often allured (as Butler was) to go over to the Established Church; and those who remained were infected with the spirit which prevailed around them, and sought to appear as elegant and as liberal as the clergy of the church, who were beginning to steal from them the more genteel portion of the younger members of their flocks.The design of those who favored this movement was no doubt to make religion attractive and respected.The result did not realize the expectation.The upper classes were certainly not scandalized by a religion which was so inoffensive, but they never thought of heartily embracing what they knew had no earnestness; and, paying only a distant and respectful obeisance to religion in the general, they gave themselves up to the fashion.able vices, or, at best, practised only the fashionable moralities of their times.The common people, little cared for by the clergy, and caring nothing for the refined emptiness presented to them instead of a living religion, went through their daily toils with diligence, but in most districts, both of town and country, viewed religion with indifference, and relieved their manual labor with low indulgences.England is rapidly growing in wealth and civilization, and even in industry, mainly from the intellectual stimulus imparted by moral causes acting in the {16} previous ages; but it is fast descending to the most unbelieving, condition to which it has ever been reduced.From this state of religious apathy it is roused, so far as the masses of the people are concerned, in the next age, and ere the life had altogether died out, by the trumpet voices of Whitfield and Wesley.It was in a later age, and after the earthquake convulsions of the French Revolution had shaken society to its foundation, that the upper classes were made to know and feel that when " the salt has lost its savor," it is good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men, and that a dead religion is of no use either to rich or poor, either for political ends or for personal comfort.
An analogous, but by no means identical, process begins and goes on, and is consummated in Scotland about half an age or an age later in point of time.All throughout the seventeenth century, Scotland, like England, had been ploughed by religious contests.But the penetrating observer notices a difference between the shape taken by the struggle in the two countries.In England, the war had been a purely internal one between opposing principles, the prelatic and puritan; whereas, in Scotland, the battle had been mainly against an external foe, that is, an English power, which sought to impose a prelatic church on the people contrary to their wishes.Again, in England the contest had been against an ecclesiastical power, which sought to crush civil liberty; whereas, in Scotland, the power of the Church of Scotland had been exerted in behalf of the people, and against a foreign domination.This difference in the struggle was followed by a difference in the state of feeling resulting when the contest was terminated by the accession of William and Mary.
The great body of the people, at least in the Lowlands, acquiesced in the Revolution Settlement, and clung round the Government and the Presbyterian Church as by law established.But there soon arose antagonisms, which, though they did not break out into open wars, as in the previous century, did yet range the country into sections and parties with widely differing sympathies and aims.In fact, Scotland was quite as much divided in opinion and sentiment in the eighteenth, as it ever was in the seventeenth century.In saying so, I do not refer to the strong prelatic feeling which existed all over the north {17} east coast of Scotland, or to the attachment to the house of Stuart which prevailed in the Highlands, -- for these, though they led to the uprisings of 1715 and 1745, were only the backward beatings of the retreating tide, -- but to other and stronger currents which have been flowing and coming into more or less violent collision with one another from that day till ours.
