Theological Essays and Other Papers, vol 2 | Page 8

Thomas De Quincey
their duties, but too much of their professional
rights; and if we may credit the indirect report of the contemporary
literature, all apostolic or missionary zeal for the extension of religion,
was in those days a thing unknown. It may seem unaccountable to
many, that the same state of things should have spread in those days to
Scotland; but this is no more than the analogies of all experience
entitled us to expect. Thus we know that the instincts of religious
reformation ripened everywhere at the same period of the sixteenth
century from one end of Europe to the other; although between most of
the European kingdoms there was nothing like so much intercourse as
between England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. In both
countries, a cold and lifeless state of public religion prevailed up to the
American and French Revolutions. These great events gave a shock
everywhere to the meditative, and, consequently to the religious
impulses of men. And, in the mean time, an irregular channel had been
already opened to these impulses by the two founders of Methodism. A
century has now passed since Wesley and Whitefield organized a more
spiritual machinery of preaching than could then be found in England,
for the benefit of the poor and laboring classes. These Methodist
institutions prospered, as they were sure of doing, amongst the poor
and the neglected at any time, much more when contrasted with the
deep slumbers of the Established Church. And another ground of
prosperity soon arose out of the now expanding manufacturing system.
Vast multitudes of men grew up under that system--humble enough by
the quality of their education to accept with thankfulness the
ministrations of Methodism, and rich enough to react, upon that
beneficent institution, by continued endowments in money. Gradually,
even the church herself, that mighty establishment, under the cold
shade of which Methodism had grown up as a neglected weed, began to

acknowledge the power of an extending Methodistic influence, which
originally she had haughtily despised. First, she murmured; then she
grew anxious or fearful; and finally, she began to find herself invaded
or modified from within, by influences springing up from Methodism.
This last effect became more conspicuously evident after the French
Revolution. The church of Scotland, which, as a whole, had exhibited,
with much unobtrusive piety, the same outward torpor as the church of
England during the eighteenth century, betrayed a corresponding
resuscitation about the same time. At the opening of this present
century, both of these national churches began to show a marked
rekindling of religious fervor. In what extent this change in the Scottish
church had been due, mediately or immediately, to Methodism, we do
not pretend to calculate; that is, we do not pretend to settle the
proportions. But mediately the Scottish church must have been affected,
because she was greatly affected by her intercourse with the English
church (as, _e.g._, in Bible Societies, Missionary Societies, &c.); and
the English church had been previously affected by Methodism.
Immediately she must also have been affected by Methodism, because
Whitefield had been invited to preach in Scotland, and did preach in
Scotland. But, whatever may have been the cause of this awakening
from slumber in the two established churches of this island, the fact is
so little to be denied, that, in both its aspects, it is acknowledged by
those most interested in denying it. The two churches slept the sleep of
torpor through the eighteenth century; so much of the fact is
acknowledged by their own members. The two churches awoke, as
from a trance, in or just before the dawning of the nineteenth century;
this second half of the fact is acknowledged by their opponents. The
Wesleyan Methodists, that formidable power in England and Wales,
who once reviled the Establishment as the dormitory of spiritual drones,
have for many years hailed a very large section in that
establishment--viz., the section technically known by the name of the
Evangelical clergy--as brothers after their own hearts, and
corresponding to their own strictest model of a spiritual clergy. That
section again, the Evangelical section, in the English church, as men
more highly educated, took a direct interest in the Scottish clergy, upon
general principles of liberal interest in all that could affect religion,
beyond what could be expected from the Methodists. And in this way

grew up a considerable action and reaction between the two classical
churches of the British soil. Such was the varying condition, when
sketched in outline, of the Scottish and English churches. Two
centuries ago, and for half a century beyond that, we find both churches
in a state of trial, of turbulent agitation, and of sacrifices for conscience,
which involved every fifth or sixth beneficiary. Then came a century of
languor and the carelessness which belongs to
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