ABSTRACT
T he writer on this period of English History is confronted with two great difficulties: (1) the vast amount of material that is available as evidence and comment; and (2) the apparently contradictory character of the evidence as to the goodness or badness of the age which he has to study.
It is quite true, as regards the first part of the century, that brilliant as is the literature of the age of Queen Anne, there is hardly anything of the first rank that can be placed under the head of contemporary history. When one has mentioned Swift and Bolingbroke, one has named the only two authors of really great talent who attempted to write the history of their own times; and neither of these two has done so with anything like completeness. Nevertheless, even for this part of the period there are smaller writers, of whom perhaps the best is the continuator (? Tindal) of Rapin’s History of England. But, as the century advances, the number of persons who write memoirs, letters, and other materials for history, becomes very large indeed. One need do no more than mention such writers as Horace Walpole, Lord Hervey, Lady Mary W. Montagu, John Byrom, Lord Chesterfield, Gray, Burke, Fanny Burney, and many others, some of whom will be mentioned below. No doubt the majority of these writers were not specially concerned with the affairs of the English Church, or with religion of any kind. But the affairs of Church and State were so closely intertwined that every leading statesman had an immense influence on the Church, and, either from choice or necessity, many of the clergy, and most of the bishops, were politicians. If we wish to know the worst,—and sometimes more than is true,—about the clergy, we shall find it often enough in the pages of Horace Walpole. Sidelights as to the way in which statesmen regarded the Church, and Church appointments, appear from time to time in the Memoirs of Lord Hervey. And much that bears directly upon the English Church, and the condition of religion in England will be found in the speeches and writings of Burke; as also in the cogitations of the Essayists, in the Tatler, Spectator, Guardian, Rambler, and Idler.
But the student who has made himself acquainted with most of what has been mentioned above will still have a vast mass of literature to explore in the writings of those who treated of religious questions in general, or of the Church of England in particular. It will suffice to mention the voluminous pamphlets, sermons, and more substantial writings in connexion with the Trinitarian controversies, Deism, Romanism, the Nonjurors, Nonconformity, the Bangorian Controversy, Convocation, Clerical Subscription, Methodism and the Evangelical movement. Nor can the philosophical writers be neglected, least of all those who had such influence upon religious thought as Locke, Berkeley, Butler, and Hume.
Add to all this original material the treatment of it in our own day by such writers as Abbey and Overton, Bogue and Bennett, Burton, Coxe, Hallam, Hunt, Lecky, Macaulay, Lord Mahon, Perry, Leslie Stephen, Skeats, Stoughton, and Thackeray, and we have an amount of literature to be read, or at least to be consulted, which may well seem to be overwhelming.
But, great as is the difficulty of mastering the more important portions of the multitudinous data, the difficulty of drawing from these facts correct conclusions as to the character of the eighteenth century is at least as great. Was it, on the whole, a good or a bad age in Church and State? Was it one on which Englishmen and Churchmen can look with thankfulness and pride; or one which they study, when they are compelled to study it, with shame and distress? Or is it of that chessboard character, which can be called either black or white, according to the squares to which we direct our attention? If the last view is nearest to the truth, it would seem as if, both at the time and during the century which followed, it was the black squares which attracted most attention. The eighteenth century is commonly condemned as a dull, coarse, irreligious age, in which politicians were faithless and venal; in which bishops were place-seekers, who neglected all duties, except controversial pamphleteering; in which the clergy were ignorant, vulgar, and fanatical, nominally Hanoverian, but Jacobite at heart; in which the educated laity were either sceptics who questioned the fundamentals of revealed religion, or scoffers who openly derided all forms of religion alike; and in which the upper classes, whether educated or not, set an example of unbridled profligacy, which the lower orders, sunk in materialism and misery, were only too ready, according to their opportunities, to follow. 1
