royal command.  Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what was really valuable in his speculations eagerly welcomed a theory which, while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the obligations of morality and degraded religion into a mere affair of state.  Hobbism soon became an almost essential part of the character of the fine gentleman.  All the lighter kinds of literature were deeply tainted by the prevailing licentiousness.  Poetry stooped to be the pander of every low desire.  Ridicule, instead of putting guilt and error to the blush, turned her formidable shafts against innocence and truth.  The restored Church contended indeed against the prevailing immorality, but contended feebly, and with half a heart.  It was necessary to the decorum of her character that she should admonish her erring children, but her admonitions were given in a somewhat perfunctory manner.  Her attention was elsewhere engaged.  Little as the men of mirth and fashion were disposed to shape their lives according to her precepts, they were yet ready to fight for her cathedrals and places, for every line of her rubric and every thread of her vestments.  If the debauched cavalier haunted brothels and gambling houses, he at least avoided conventicles.  If he never spoke without uttering ribaldry and blasphemy, he made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and Howe to gaol for preaching and praying.  Thus the clergy, for a time, made war on schism with so much vigour that they had little leisure to make war on vice.”

“Charles the Second wished merely to be a King who could draw without limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private tastes, who could hire with wealth and honours persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and who, even when the state was brought by maladministration to the depths of humiliation and to the brink of ruin, could still exclude unwelcome truth from the purlieus of his own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear whatever might disturb his luxurious repose.  Later in life, the ill-bred familiarity of the Scottish divines had given him a distaste for Presbyterian discipline, while the heats and animosities between the members of the Established Church and the Nonconformists, with which his reign commenced, made him think indifferently of both.  His religion was that of a young prince in his warm blood, whose inquiries were applied more to discover arguments against belief than in its favour.”

“The wits about the Court, who found employment in laughing at Scripture, delighted in turning to ridicule what the preachers said in their sermons before him, and in this way induced him to look upon the clergy as a body of men who had compounded a religion for their own advantage.  So strongly did this feeling take root in him that he at length resigned himself to sleep at sermon-time—­not even South or Barrow having the art to keep him awake.  In one of these half-hours of sleep, when in Chapel, he is known to have missed, doubtless with regret, the gentle reproof of South to Lauderdale during a general somnolency:—­’My lord, my lord, you snore so loud you will wake the King.’”