was dancing or jumping about, without a violin or any musick, singing of foolish healths, and drinking all the time as fast as it could be well poured down; and the parson of the parish was one among the mixed multitude.  If conscience dictates right from wrong, as doubtless it sometimes does, mine is one that I may say is soon offended:  for, I must say, I am always very uneasy at such behavior, thinking it not like the behaviour of the primitive Christians, which, I imagine, was most in conformity to our Saviour’s gospel.

“Thursday, Feb, 25th.  This morning, about six o’clock, just as my wife was got to bed, we was awaked by Mrs. Porter, who pretended she wanted some cream of tartar; but as soon as my wife got out of bed, she vowed she should come down.  She found Mr. Porter (the clergyman), Mr. Fuller, and his wife, with a lighted candle, and part of a bottle of port wine and a glass.  The next thing was to have me down stairs, which being apprised of, I fastened my door.  Up stairs they came, and threatened to break it open; so I ordered the boys to open it, when they poured into my room; and as modesty forbid me to get out of bed, so I refrained; but their immodesty permitted them to draw me out of bed, as the phrase is, topsy-turvey; but, however, at the intercession of Mr. Porter, they permitted me to put on * * * my wife’s petticoats; and in this manner they made me dance, without shoes and stockings, until they had emptied a bottle of wine, and also a bottle of my beer. * * * About three o’clock in the afternoon, they found their way to their respective homes, beginning to be a little serious, and, in my opinion, ashamed of their stupid enterprise and drunken perambulation.  Now let any one call in reason to his assistance, and reflect seriously on what I have before recited, and they will join me in thinking that the precepts delivered from the pulpit on Sunday, though delivered with the greatest ardour, must lose a great deal of there efficacy by such examples.”

Such were the amusements and such the moral reflections of a country tradesman in the middle of the last century, Fielding, Smollett, and the other novelists described the same kind of life:  the same succession of brawls, drunken sprees, cock-fights, boxing matches, and bull-baitings.  It would be difficult to imagine a state of society more ripe for a revival.  Mr. Thomas Turner had moral and religious aspirations, but these could not be satisfied by the clergyman of his parish or the curate of Laughton, the companions of his debauches but not the sharers of his remorse.  When the clergy were sincere and moral, they were still too cold and commonplace to seriously influence their flocks.  The sermons of the time were at best, moral essays, teaching little, as Mr. Lecky says, “that might not have been taught by disciples of Socrates and Confucius.”  They might encourage honesty and temperance where those virtues already existed, but they had no spell to arouse religious