she wanted
some cream of tartar; but as soon as my wife got out of bed, she vowed
she should come down. She found Mr. Porter (the clergyman), Mr. Fuller,
and his wife, with a lighted candle, and part of a bottle of port wine
and a glass. The next thing was to have me down stairs, which being
apprised of, I fastened my door. Up stairs they came, and threatened to
break it open; so I ordered the boys to open it, when they poured into
my room; and as modesty forbid me to get out of bed, so I refrained;
but their immodesty permitted them to draw me out of bed, as the phrase
is, topsy-turvey; but, however, at the intercession of Mr. Porter, they
permitted me to put on * * * my wife's petticoats; and in this manner
they made me dance, without shoes and stockings, until they had emptied
a bottle of wine, and also a bottle of my beer. * * * About three
o'clock in the afternoon, they found their way to their respective
homes, beginning to be a little serious, and, in my opinion, ashamed of
their stupid enterprise and drunken perambulation. Now let any one call
in reason to his assistance, and reflect seriously on what I have
before recited, and they will join me in thinking that the precepts
delivered from the pulpit on Sunday, though delivered with the greatest
ardour, must lose a great deal of there efficacy by such examples."

Such were the amusements and such the moral reflections of a country
tradesman in the middle of the last century, Fielding, Smollett, and
the other novelists described the same kind of life: the same
succession of brawls, drunken sprees, cock-fights, boxing matches, and
bull-baitings. It would be difficult to imagine a state of society more
ripe for a revival. Mr. Thomas Turner had moral and religious
aspirations, but these could not be satisfied by the clergyman of his
parish or the curate of Laughton, the companions of his debauches but
not the sharers of his remorse. When the clergy were sincere and moral,
they were still too cold and commonplace to seriously influence their
flocks. The sermons of the time were at best, moral essays, teaching
little, as Mr. Lecky says, "that might not have been taught by
disciples of Socrates and Confucius." They might encourage honesty and
temperance where those virtues already existed, but they had no spell
to arouse religious feelings, nor to reclaim the vicious. How great,
then, must have been the effect of the impassioned eloquence of a
Whitefield, which could