HISTORY OP ms OWN TIME. 1^ 



question without bias or prejudice, must concede that though, from 

 the Restoration to the Accession of the house of Hanover, the An- 

 glican Church could exhibit some instances of the most commanding 

 talents, and of the most primitive virtues— men who were the pil- 

 lars of fire which brighten the darkness of the night, and make 

 straight the paths of the wilderness,-— yet that the zeal of many of 

 its ministers slackened to a degree which justifies us in affirming, 

 that they proved unfaithful to their trust. These nodded beside 

 the altar, while rash and presumptuous hands were heaping unhal- 

 lowed fuel upon it, under the plausible pretence that the sacred 

 flame was extinct. By their culpable supineness and iiidiiference, 

 a hideous breach was thus made in the fortress of our faith, by in- 

 fidels, and scorners, which had nearly enabled them to shake its 

 very foundations. The excellent Leighton spoke of the church as 

 a fair carcase, without a spirit— the best constituted in the world, 

 but one of the most corrupt in administration. And when Burnett 

 represents the clergy, in his time, as " having less authority, and 

 being more under contempt, than any other church in Europe," — 

 not that he affirms their lives were scandalous, but that " their 

 conduct was negligent ;" and when he adds " that they would 

 never regain the influence which they had lost, till they lived 

 better, and laboured more," , we must come to one or other of these 

 conclusions — either, that he who penned these sentiments in utter 

 disregard of some of the dearest interests of mankind entertained 

 the unnatural wish of lowering the consequence of the order to 

 which he belonged — that he had a secret gratification in making it 

 the specific ground of his revilings; or that, perceiving in the con- 

 stitution of the church the elements of all that is good and great-^-* 

 as bearing, most vitally and essentially, on the best interests of the 

 commonwealth — he felt that it would be a betrayal of his duty, as 

 one of the governors of that church, not to do his utmost to urge on 

 that moral and religious change which should demonstrate to the 

 public at large, that the church, however she appeared to languish 

 and decay, might soon, by the confederated zeal of a renovated 

 clergy, be raised from the ground on which she lay, and shake off 

 the dust by which her original lustre had been so long obscured.— 

 Such, then, as think Burnett capable of libelling the clergy, the 



