unsettle the religious tone of public morals. Historians and satirists
ascribe a large effect in this change to the personal influence of
Charles II., and the foreign character of his court. We do not share
in their views; and one eminent proof that they are wrong, lies in the
following fact--viz., that the sublimest act of self-sacrifice which
the world has ever seen, arose precisely in the most triumphant season
of Charles's career, a time when the reaction of hatred had not yet
neutralized the sunny joyousness of his Restoration. Surely the reader
cannot be at a loss to know what we mean--the renunciation in one hour,
on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1662, of two thousand benefices by the
nonconforming clergymen of England. In the same year, occurred a similar
renunciation of three hundred and sixty benefices in Scotland. These
great sacrifices, whether called for or not, argue a great strength
in the religious principle at that era. Yet the decay of external
religion towards the close of that century is proved incontestably.
We ourselves are inclined to charge this upon two causes; first, that
the times were controversial; and usually it happens--that, where too
much energy is carried into the controversies or intellectual part of
religion, a very diminished fervor attends the culture of its moral
and practical part. This was perhaps one reason; for the dispute with
the Papal church, partly, perhaps, with a secret reference to the
rumored apostasy of the royal family, was pursued more eagerly in the
latter half of the seventeenth than even in any section of the sixteenth
century. But, doubtless, the main reason was the revolutionary character
of the times. Morality is at all periods fearfully shaken by intestine
wars, and by instability in a government. The actual duration of war
in England was not indeed longer than three and a half years, viz.,
from Edgehill Fight in the autumn of 1642, to the defeat of the king's
last force under Sir Jacob Astley at Stow-in-the-walds in the spring
of 1846. Any other fighting in that century belonged to mere insulated