science with religious zeal; and they
saw that the Church of England was not doing the work that might have
been and ought to have been expected of her. She had ceased utterly to
be a missionary Church. She troubled herself in nowise about spreading
the glad tidings of salvation among the heathen. At home she was
absolutely out of touch with the great bulk of the people. The poor
and the ignorant were left quietly to their own resources. The
clergymen of the Church of England were not indeed by any means a body
of men wanting in personal morality, or even in religious feeling, but
they had as little or no religious activity because they had little or
no religious zeal. They performed perfunctorily their perfunctory
duties; and that, as a rule, was all they did.

Atterbury, Burnet, Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves
ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the
torpid condition into which the Church had fallen. Decorum seemed to
be the highest reach of the spiritual lives of most of the clergy. One
finds curious confirmation of the statements {130} made publicly by men
like Atterbury and Burnet in some of the appeals privately made by
Swift to his powerful friends for the promotion of poor and deserving
clergymen whose poverty and merit had been brought under his notice.
The recommendation generally begins and ends in the fact that each
particular man had led a decent, respectable life; that he was striving
to bring up honestly a large family; and that his living or curacy was
not enough to maintain him in comfort. We hardly ever hear of the work
which the good man had been doing among the poor, the ignorant, and the
sinful. Swift has said many hard and even terrible things about
bishops and deans, and vicars and curates. But these stern accusations
do not form anything like as formidable a testimony against the
condition into which the Church had fallen as will be found in the
exceptional praise which he gives to those whom he specially desires to
recommend for promotion; and in the fact that the highest reach of that
praise comes to nothing more than the assurance that the man had led a
decent life, had a large family, and was very poor. Such a
recommendation as that would not have counted for much with John
Wesley. He would have wanted to know what work the clergyman had done
outside his own domestic life; what ignorance had he enlightened, what
sinners had he brou