In 1696, however, appeared a pamphlet, entitled A Letter to a Convocation-man, charging, with sufficient plainness, the reduction of convocation to a mere customary form, upon the king's general indifference to church affairs, and unfriendly eye to the national establishment, abetted by the ignorance of Tenison, now primate, and his anxiety to stand well at court*. In the following year, William Wake, then one of the royal chaplains, and eventually archbishop of Canterbury, published a learned answer to this piece, in an octavo volume. This, in its turn, was answered, after a lapse of three years, by Atterbury. The subject now attracted universal attention, and a great ferment arose in the public mind: many persons, whose moderation was unsuspected, beginning to consider the church as defrauded of those rights which justly belonged to her, and which ought, for the general good, to be rendered active once more. The prevalence of this impression caused a meeting of the Convocation, in the year 1700, for the despatch of business'. The spirit, however, shown by the lower house was so little satisfactory to the court, that it withheld the authority required for condemning some obnoxious books, and enacting new canons. William's government continued at variance with the lower house of Convocation; which was bent upon assuming all the rights and privileges belonging to the House of Commons'. Anne was more favourable to the clergy; and their representatives, accordingly, displayed an activity under her which had been denied them in the last reign. Under George I. this was not immediately prevented: but the Convocation gave offence, in 1717, by attacking Hoadley, now bishop of Bangor, eventually of Winchester, who had published matter in favour of religious liberty, which the great body of the clergy highly disapproved, and which led to a long paper war, known as the Bangorian Controversy. The prelate was really a man of merit in various ways, though, perhaps, too much of a politician, and certainly Nicholls, 102. The Authority of Christian Princes over their Ecclesiastical Synods asserted, Lond. 1697. In his Rights, Powers, and Prici leges of an English Convocation. Wake answered this in 1703, by an elaborate folio, entitled The State of the Church and Clergy of England. 7 Nicholls, 105. 8" Absque enim Principis licentia, neque illic fas est canonas condere, aut etiam de iis deliberare, aut denique de libris contra fidem conscriptis cognoscere." Ibid. 9 Hallam, iii. 327. with a decided leaning towards low-church views in theology. Both his politics and theology were, however, in favour at court; and hence it interposed for his protection, by proroguing the Convocation'. That body has never since been allowed to sit for the despatch of any business, but merely meets, at the beginning of every Parliament, in stately form, to hear divine service, and go through the preliminaries necessary for the constitutional exercise of its powers. § 14. Court patronage, in the earlier years of the Hanoverian dynasty, was not only exercised by statesmen whose principles were distrusted by the church generally, and whose integrity was suspected in every quarter; there was also a dangerous relaxation of morals, and a poisonous taint of infidelity, very rife among public men. The religious current of queen Anne's feelings was succeeded, at St. James's, by one very different, and, on many accounts, unquestionably worse. George I. did not, indeed, by any means approach the reckless profligacy of Charles II.; but still he was, very considerably, an unblushing man of pleasure his mistresses were obtruded on the public notice, and a virtuous contempt or pity for their infamy and his, was obviously what no courtier could venture upon showing'. The highest circle in society being thus debased, superior life widely took the leprous infection; and, as men hate what to such a state of religion, there was a great laxity of manners. To this evil the conduct of the court had its share in contributing. George, though by no means profligate in his own character, yet tended to encourage licentious gallantry; according to the mode of debauched courts on the continent, the king's mistresses made their appearance regularly among the nobility, were visited by women of the highest rank and fashion, and even introduced to the young princesses, his grand-daughters. The minister, and all who possessed, or sought royal favour, paid a most submissive attention to the royal favourites. Where such persons presided, modesty and chastity could not be expected greatly to prevail. Decency and morality were by no means characteristics of George's court." Bisset's Georg III. i. 118. reproves and threatens themselves, the fashionable world. became a school for disputants against revealed religion3. Among persons thus unhappily perverted, the teachers of christianity, with their duties and rights, were naturally food for wanton mirth; or with graver spirits, all that antiquity had provided for spiritualizing the nation, was regarded merely as a fund for managing the populace, and securing political influence. It was impossible to prevent unfriendly, or even serious minds, however disposed, from exaggerating the evils brought by such patronage upon the church. Men could not, indeed, fail of being preferred, at least occasionally, who must have remained at the bottom of any lay profession. Clergymen of enterprising talent, also, were driven by prevailing infidelity to spend their powers upon defending the mere outworks of christianity, and to give their instructions that prominently didactic cast which loud claims to an enlarged spirit of philosophy would alone endure. § 15. The needed check to prevailing licentiousness, and a supine disregard of irreligious habits in the multitude, was early, but rather irregularly,' given. Samuel Wesley came of a puritanical family, and married into one: both he and his wife, however, conformed to the national church, and imbibed a decided preference for it; which was rendered more satisfactory to its best friends, by their strong understandings and exemplary conduct. He was a clergyman, and having attained some degree of eminence during the infatuated reign of James II., he had a prospect offered him of obtaining preferment, on condition of abetting the court policy; but although his politics were of the Tory school, he was a zealous protestant, and nothing could make him forget the paramount calls of a Scriptural faith. On the revolution, accordingly, he wrote in favour of that great national change. This gained him the rectory of "Like William III. the first George was vehemently suspected of heresy and infidelity, because in his tolerant court there were those who avowed their scepticism, without imitating Bolingbroke, the infidel minister of Anne, by combining it in monstrous alliance with intolerance," (Bogue and Bennett's History of Dissenters. Lond. 1833. ii. 108.) The authors, however, show, in a note below, containg a citation from Mist's Journal, a Tory newspaper, that current objections to George's government commonly ran on the disgraceful influence of loose women about the court. Epworth, and subsequently the far less valuable one of Wroote, both crown benefices in Lincolnshire. He held Epworth more than forty years, with signal advantage to the parish, which he served with a zeal, faithfulness, and ability, that are very rarely surpassed. He had three sons, of whom Samuel, the eldest, was educated at Westminster, and became a superior scholar. He died master of Tiverton school, in Devonshire, when under fifty. John, the second son, was born in 1703, and was placed at the Charter-house in 1714; a school to which he remained strongly attached through life, never failing to visit his old haunts there, on his annual visits to London. In his seventeenth year he went to Christchurch, Oxford, where he displayed those exemplary morals and studious habits, which bore honourable witness to the great advantages that he had enjoyed under his paternal roof. He does not, however, appear to have felt any extraordinary force of religious feeling, until his mind was occupied by the contemplation of deacon's orders; these he took in 1725, and in the following year he was elected fellow of Lincoln college. By this time, such a marked seriousness had come over him, that it was urged to his disadvantage at the election; but he had unquestionably qualities to secure the suffrages of conscientious electors, and they did not suffer themselves to violate their obligations, because they had a candidate whom a few thoughtless observers thought ridiculously particular. In 1728 he was ordained priest; in the following year, after an absence in Lincolnshire as his father's curate, he returned to Oxford, where his brother Charles, who five years younger than himself, then resided as a student of Christchurch. John had urged greater seriousness upon him, some time before, but a natural liveliness of disposition seemingly rendered such admonition useless. When John, however, came back to college, in 1729, he found himself to have made a powerful impression upon his brother's mind. Charles attended the sacrament every week, having persuaded two or three fellow-students to accompany him, and rigidly observed such methods of study as were prescribed by the university statutes. These highly-methodical habits obtained for him the appellation of Methodist, a term which eventually distinguished the religious body that he was largely instru was mental in forming, and another of a kindred spirit. To Charles Wesley and his young friends John cordially joined himself, and the party soon afterwards obtaining a few accessions, Oxford generally fixed attention upon its movements. The members spent some evenings in the week together, chiefly in reading the Greek Testament, and devoted portions of their mornings to visits among the sick in the city, and among prisoners in the gaols. Proceedings so unusual with university students, made considerable noise, and the elder Wesley became rather uneasy he went in consequence to Oxford, in 1731, to make his own observations, but came away perfectly satisfied, writing to his wife from London, immediately afterwards, that he was well repaid for the expense and trouble of his recent visit to the university, by seeing there" the shining piety of their two sons." This venerable ecclesiastic died in 1735, after having vainly attempted to persuade his son John into an application for succeeding him at Epworth. That remarkable man professed himself unequal to the charge of two thousand souls, and satisfied that his own good, and the good of others, would be best promoted by his continuance at Oxford. He embraced, however, an invitation to go as a missionary into Georgia, then a colony in its first infancy; and landed in that country, with his brother Charles, now in orders, in 1736. Both were severely disappointed: prospect of preaching to the Indians, which they had contemplated, there was none; nor were the licentious, turbulent, struggling spirits that had just sought refuge from domestic ills in expatriation, at all suited for benefiting by clerical services rendered under notions of ascetic strictness and high ecclesiastical authority. The brothers, accordingly, soon aroused a storm of opposition in the infant colony, and Charles, after the trial of a few arduous months, returned to England, with despatches from the governor. John remained in Georgia, but only to make his difficulties greater, by mingling his austere piety and exalted estimate of ministerial prerogatives with a proposal of marriage, which he afterwards retracted. He thus gave a colour for charging his severity to the rejected party, upon resentment for her marriage of another. At length, after a series of mortifications, including a vexatious action at |