The Young People's Wesley

stirring events. War was sounding its clarion notes through the land. Marlborough had achieved a series of brill

egain the throne and to subject the people to absolute despotism. To add to their dismay, the fleets of France and Spain were hovering along the English coast, ready, at any favorable moment, to pounce upon her. The means of public communication by railroad and telegraph w

l, with his infidel dagger concealed under a cloak of mingled popery and Protestantism; Collins, with a heart full of deadly hate for Christianity; Chubb, with his deistical insidiousness; and Shaftesbur

serious. Occasionally they gave a sober rebuke of the religion of the day. Berkeley attacked, with his keen logic and finished style, the skeptical opinions which prevailed. Most of his articles

tity; but Swift, greater intellectually than any of them, and a high church dignitary to boot, would have disgraced the license of

killed in knavery; disgrace was not in cheating, but in being cheated. Both sexes were given to profanity and drunkenness. Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, could swear more bravely than her husband could fight. The wages of the poor were spent in

EW OF THE EPW

which bring the burdened heart into sympathetic union with the sympathizing Saviour. Spirituality had well-nigh found a grave, from which it was feared there would be no resurrection. Isaac Taylor says: "The Church had become an ecclesiastical system, under which the people of England had lapsed into heathenism;" and "Nonconformity had lapsed into indifference, and was rapidly in a course to be found nowhere but in books." In France hot-headed, rationalistic infidelity was invading the strongholds of the Reformation, and French philosophers were spreading moral contagion throu

Lichfield said, in a sermon: "The Lord's day now is the devil's market day. More lewdness, more drunkenness, more quarrels and murders, more sin is conceived and committed, than on all the other days of the week. Strong drink has

n; the minstrel was Pope; and the preacher was Atterbury. The world

of any other Church in Europe; for they were much more remiss in their labors and least severe in their lives. I cannot look on," he says, "without the deepest concern, when I see imminent ruin hanging over

t aside." Hurrian, another Dissenter, sees "faith, joy, and Christian zeal under a thick cloud." Bishop Taylor declares that "the spirit was grieved and offended by the abominable corruption that abounded;" while good Dr. Watts sings sadly of the "poor dying rate" at which the

l it might be when, as has been said, the philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke, the moralist was Addison, the minstr

the twelfth. He was born in the third year of the eighteenth century. His long life of eighty-eight years covered eleven of the twelve years of Queen Anne's reign, thirteen of that of George I, thirty-three of George II, and more than thirty of George III. This remarkable child was