rted
with much vehemence, and often with much bitterness. Happily for
England, the Puritan view, in all its broader and more general features,
had won peaceful possession of the ground. The harsher and more rigid
observances with which many sectarians had overburdened the holy day,
were kept up by some of the denominations, but could not be maintained
in the National Church. In fact, their concession was the price of
conquest. Anglican divines, and the great and influential body of laymen
who were in accord with them, would never have acquiesced in
prescriptions and prohibitions which were tenable, if tenable at all,
only upon the assumption of a Sabbatarianism which they did not pretend
to hold. But the Puritan Sunday, in all its principal characteristics,
remained firmly established, and was as warmly supported by High
Churchmen as by any who belonged to an opposite party. It has been aptly
observed that several of Robert Nelson's remarks upon the proper
observance of Sunday would have been derided, eighty or a hundred years
previously, as Puritanical cant by men whose legitimate successors most
warmly applauded what he wrote.[1262] No one whose opinion had any
authority, desired, after Charles II.'s time, to revive the 'Book of
Sports,' or regretted the abolition of Sunday wakes. Amid all the laxity
of the Restoration period--amid the partial triumph of Laudean ideas
which marked the reign of Queen Anne--amid the indifference and
sluggishness in religious matters which soon afterwards set
in--reverence for the sanctity of the Lord's Day, and a fixed purpose
that its general character of sedate quietness should not be broken
into, grew, though it was but gradually, among almost all classes, into
a tradition which was respected even by those who had very little care
for other ordinances of religion.

Such, undoubtedly, was the predominant feeling of the eighteenth
century; and it is difficult to overestimate its value in the support it
gave to religion in times when such aid was more than ordinarily needed.

There are many aspects of Church life in relation to the social history
of the period which the authors of these chapters are well aware they
have either omitted entirely, or have very insufficiently touched upon.
It is not that they have undervalued their interest as compared with
matters which have been more fully discussed, but simply that the plan
of their work almost precluded the attempt at anything like com