Saints to be employed with any good effect.

And thus, both on the objective and on the subjective side, the people
were practically debarred from influences which might have made their
religion a more lovely or a more hearty thing.

Again, if the clergy showed, as they confessedly did, an inertness, an
obstructiveness, a want of expansiveness, and a dogged resistance to any
adaptation of old forms to new ideas, they were in these respects
thoroughly in accord with the feelings of the mass of the nation. The
clergy were not popular, but it was not their want of zeal and
enterprise which made them unpopular; if in exceptional cases they did
show any tendency in these directions, this only made them more
unpopular than ever. Had it been otherwise we might naturally have
expected to find the zeal which was lacking in the National Church
showing itself in other Christian bodies. But we find nothing of the
sort. The torpor which had overtaken our Church extended itself to all
forms of Christianity. Edmund Calamy, a Nonconformist, lamented in 1730
that 'a real decay of serious religion, both in the Church _and out of
it_, was very visible.' Dr. Watts declares that in his day 'there was a
_general_ decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of men.'[699]
A modern writer who makes no secret of his partiality for Nonconformists
owns that 'religion, whether in the Established Church or out of it,
never made less progress than after the cessation of the Bangorian and
Salter's Hall disputes. Breadth of thought and charity of sentiment
increased, but religious activity did not.'[700] In 1712 Defoe
considered 'Dissenters' interests to be in a declining state, not so
much as regarded their wealth and numbers as the qualifications of their
ministers, the decay of piety, and the abandonment of their political
friends.' Such is the testimony of Nonconformists themselves, who will
not be suspected of taking too dark a view of the condition of
Nonconformity. There is no need to add to this the evidence of
Churchmen. It is a fact patent to all students of the period that the
moral and religious stagnation of the times extended to all religious
bodies outside as well as inside the National Church. The most
intellectually active part of Dissent was drifting gradually into
Socinianism and Unitarianism.

There is yet one more circumstance to be taken into account in
estimating the extent to which the clergy were responsible for the
irre