Or, if circumstances had been somewhat different, and Herring and Sherlock, Doddridge and Chandler, had seen their plans extensively advocated, and carried triumphantly through Parliament, the result would in all probability have been a disappointing one.  It would infallibly have been a slipshod comprehension.  Carelessness and indifference would have had a large share in promoting it; relaxation, greater than even then existed, of the order of the Church, would have been a likely consequence.  The National Church was not in a sufficiently healthy and vigorous condition to conduct with much prospect of success an enlarged organisation, or to undertake, in any hopeful spirit, new and wider responsibilities.  Nor would accessions from the Dissenting communities have infused much fresh life into it.  They were suffering themselves under the same defect; all the more visibly because a certain vigour of self-assertion seemed necessary to justify their very existence as separatist bodies.  The Presbyterians were rapidly losing their old standing, and were lapsing into the ranks of Unitarianism.  A large majority of the general Baptists were adopting similar views.  The ablest men among the Congregationalists were devoting themselves to teaching rather than to pastoral work.  Unitarianism was the only form of dissent that was gaining in numbers and influence.  The more orthodox denominations were daily losing in numbers and influence, and were secluding themselves more and more from the general thought and culture of the age.

After all, the greatest question which arose in the eighteenth century in connection with Church Comprehension was that which related to the Methodist movement.  Not that the word ‘Comprehension’ was ever used in the discussion of it.  In its beginnings, it was essentially an agitation which originated within the National Church, and one in which the very thought of secession was vehemently deprecated.  As it advanced, though one episcopal charge after another was levelled against it; though pulpit after pulpit was indignantly refused to its leaders; though it was on all sides preached against, satirised, denounced; though the voices of its preachers were not unfrequently drowned in the clanging of church bells; though its best features were persistently misunderstood and misrepresented, and all its defects and weaknesses exposed with a merciless hand, Wesley, with the majority of his principal supporters, never ceased to declare his love for the Church of England, and his hearty loyalty to its principles.  ‘We do not,’ he said, ’we dare not, separate from the service of the Church.  We are not seceders, nor do we bear any resemblance to them.’  And when one of his bitterest opponents charged him with ‘stabbing the Church to her very vitals,’ ’Do I, or you,’ he retorted, ’do this!  Let anyone who has read her Liturgy, Articles, and Homilies, judge....  You desire that I should disown the Church.  But I choose to stay in the Church, were it only to reprove those who betray her with a kiss.’[380] He stayed within it to the last, and on his deathbed, in 1791, he implored his followers even yet to refrain from secession.