tear my heart. The case is not much better in many who, having got into
orders, come for institution, and cannot make it appear that they have
read the Scriptures, or any one good book since they were ordained; so
that the small measure of knowledge upon which they get into holy
orders, not being improved, is in a way to be quite lost; and they think
it a great hardship if told they must know the Scriptures and the body
of divinity better before they can be trusted with the care of
souls."[140]

Archbishop Secker, who wrote at a later period, testifies to the same
state of religious petrification: "In this we cannot be mistaken, that
an open and professed disregard is become, through a variety of unhappy
causes, the distinguishing character of the present age; that this evil
is grown to a great height in the metropolis of the nation; is daily
spreading through every part of it; and, bad in itself as any can be,
must of necessity bring in others after it. Indeed it hath already
brought in such dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher
part of the world, and such profligate intemperance, and fearlessness of
committing crimes, in the lower, as must, if this impiety stop not,
become absolutely fatal. And God knows, far from stopping, it receives,
through the ill designs of some persons, and the inconsiderateness of
others, a continual increase. Christianity is now ridiculed and railed
at, with very little reserve; and the teachers of it, without any at
all."[141]

The Church had not the moral power or purity to assert her own
authority. She had lost the respect of the world because she had no
respect for herself. She was therefore enervated at a time when all her
power was needed to resist the skeptical and immoral tendencies of the
day. But a new religious power, from an unexpected source, began to
influence the English mind. We refer to the movement inaugurated by the
Wesleys and Whitefield, who were fellow-students in Oxford University.
They were appalled at the dissoluteness of the students, the frigid
preaching of the day, and the universal religious destitution of the
nation. These themes burdened the hearts of the "Holy Club" at Oxford
from day to day, and sent them from their cloisters to visit prisons,
preach in surrounding towns, and impart religious truth wherever a
willing recipient could be found. No sooner had John Wesley returned
from his missionary voyage to Georgia than there were unmistakabl