ligion and immorality which prevailed. A change of manners was fast
rendering ineffectual a weapon which they had formerly used for waging
war against sin. Ecclesiastical censures were becoming little better
than a mere _brutum fulmen_. Complaints of the difficulty, not to say
impossibility, of enforcing Church discipline are of constant
occurrence. In 1704 Archbishop Sharp, while urging his clergy to present
'any that are resolved to continue heathens and absolutely refuse to
come to church,' and, while admitting that the abuses of the commutation
for penance were 'a cause of complaints against the spiritual courts and
of the invidious reflections cast upon them,' adds that 'he was very
sensible both of the decay of discipline in general and of the curbs put
upon any effectual prosecution of it by the temporal courts, and of the
difficulty of keeping up what little was left entire to the
ecclesiastics without creating offence and administering matter for
aspersion and evil surmises.'[701] The same excellent prelate, when, a
writ _de excommunicato capiendo_ was evaded by writs of _supersedeas_
from Chancery, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking him 'to
represent the case to the Lord Chancellor, that he might give such
directions that his courts might go on to enforce ecclesiastical
censures with civil penalties, without fear of being baffled in their
proceedings.'[702] In the later meetings of Convocation this subject of
the enforcement of Church discipline was constantly suggested for
discussion; but, as questions which were, or were supposed to be, of
more immediate interest claimed precedence, no practical result
ensued.[703] The matter, however, was not suffered to fall altogether
into abeyance. In 1741 Bishop Secker gives the same advice to the clergy
of the diocese of Oxford as Archbishop Sharp had given nearly forty
years before to those of the diocese of York, but he seems still more
doubtful as to whether it could be effectually carried out. 'Persons,'
he writes, 'who profess not to be of our Church, if persuasions will
not avail, must be let alone. But other absentees must, after due
patience, be told that, unwilling as you are, it will be your duty to
present them, unless they reform; and if, when this warning hath been
repeated and full time allowed for it to work, they still persist in
their obstinacy, I beg you to do it. For this will tend much to prevent
the contagion from spreading, of which there