and Principles of the Times, showing their chief characteristics to be "a vain, luxurious, and selfish effeminacy." our principles," said he, "are as bad as our manners; religion is universally ridiculed, and yet our irreligion is shallow. Thus by a gradual and unperceived decline, we seem gliding down from ruin to ruin; we laugh, we sing, we feast, we play, and in blind security, though not in innocence, resemble Pope's lamb, licking the hand just raised to shed his blood."[1]
In 1690 John Evelyn had noted in his Diary the prediction of the Bishop of St. Asaph that the judgment would come in thirty years; and he himself, gentleman and courtier, wrote that if ever corruption betokened a judgment at hand, then was the time. In 1713, in a Pastoral Charge to his clergy. Bishop Burnet said: "I see the imminent ruin hanging over the Church, and by consequence over the whole Reformation. The outward state of things is bad enough. God knows; but that which heightens our fears rises chief from the inward state into which we have unhappily fallen." In 1748 the excellent David Hartley said, in his Observations on Man:
"There are six things which seem more especially to threaten ruin and dissolution to the present States of Christendom—
"1. The great growth of atheism and infidelity, particularly amongst the governing parts of the States.
"2. The open and abandoned lewdness to which great numbers of both sexes, especially in the high ranks of life, have given themselves up.
"3. The sordid and avowed self-interest which is almost the sole motive of action in those who are concerned in the administration of public affairs.
"4. The licentiousness and contempt of every kind of authority, divine or human, which is so notorious in inferiors of all ranks.
"5. The great worldly-mindedness of the clergy and their gross neglect in the discharge of their proper functions.
- ↑ Leslie Stephen: Op. cit. ii. 195.
