Deists.

Gibbon made loud professions of independence and of an earnest desire
for the enlargement of popular liberty. But he was less attached to
principle than to expediency. At the very time the first volume of his
history appeared, in which he pays lofty tributes to human freedom, he
came into Parliament as an avowed abettor of the ministry of George
III., in their attempts to subjugate the American colonies. He was
doubtless well paid for his votes; for he was at the same time a member
of the Board of Trade, a nominal office with a large salary.[139] A
verse, attributed to Fox, expresses the popular sentiment concerning
him;

"King George in a fright
Lest Gibbon should write
The story of England's disgrace,
Thought no way so sure,
His pen to secure,
As to give the historian a place."

In addition to these evidences of religious decay we may add the most
unwelcome of all: the moral prostration of the English Church. Instead
of being "a city set upon a hill," she was in the valley of humiliation;
and few were the faithful watchmen upon her walls. The period commencing
with the Restoration, and continuing down to the time of which we speak,
was one of ministerial and laic degeneracy. Bishop Burnet, writing of
his own generation, said, "I am now in the seventieth year of my age,
and as I cannot speak long in the world, in any sort, I cannot hope for
a more solemn occasion than this of speaking with all due freedom, both
to the present and to the succeeding ages. Therefore I lay hold on it to
give a free vent to those sad thoughts that lie on my mind both day and
night, and are the subject of many secret mournings. I cannot look on
without the deepest concern, when I see the imminent ruin hanging over
this church, and, by consequence, over the whole Reformation. The
outward state of things is black enough, God knows, but that which
heightens my fears rises chiefly from the inward state into which we are
unhappily fallen.... Our ember-weeks are the burden and grief of my
life. The much greater part of those who come to be ordained are
ignorant to a degree not to be apprehended by those who are not obliged
to know it. The easiest part of knowledge is that to which they are the
greatest strangers. Those who have read some few books, yet never seem
to have read the Scriptures. Many cannot give even a tolerable account
of the Catechism itself, how short and plain soever. This does often