respect would return and the village preachers would disappear. Rowland Hill made a similar point in his reply to the bishop of Rochester. He percep-tively pointed out that very few people ever became Dissenters by conviction.

One of the most strenuously resisted of the clergy’s claims was that the preachers were prompted by political motives. Almost every apologist sought in some way to refute this allegation. When the bishop of Salisbury suggested that the village preachers were responsible for spreading the false but prevalent philosophy of the times, Henry Wansey insisted that he had chosen the wrong target; that infidelity and atheism were deeply entrenched within the established church. Though he assured the bishop that he had no wish to see the contemporary prosperity of religious dissent founded upon the ruins of the Church of England, he allowed himself the provocative observation that there was as much vital religion in Revolutionary France as there had been during the previous century.45 William Kingsbury, from his more orthodox evangelical perspective, emphasized the benevolent and wholly religious character of village preaching. Contrary to the accusations made by William Bowen, one of the Salisbury clergy, the village preachers had no secret agenda to subvert the established church or to deceive the populace with covert political designs. Nor was the attempted historical parallel with seventeenth-century regicide a sustainable one. It had been Parliament and not the early Dissenters who had determined the fate of Charles I.46 In Scotland the SPGH and its promoters repudiated the political charge vigorously. Under the rules of the society lay agents were expressly forbidden to speak on political matters.47