Yet after all it is doubtful whether the clergy, even if they had been far more energetic and spiritually-minded than they were, could have effected such a reformation as was needed.[698] For there was a long train of causes at work dating back for more than a century, which tended not only to demoralise the nation, but also to cut it off from many influences for good which under happier circumstances the Church might have exercised.  The turbulent and unsettled condition of both Church and State in the seventeenth century was bearing its fruit in the eighteenth.  As in the life of an individual, so also in the life of a nation, there are certain crises which are terribly perilous to the character.  In the eighteenth century England as a nation was going through such a crisis.  She was passing from the old order to the new.  The early part of the century was a period of many controversies—­the Deistic controversy, the Nonjuring controversy, the Bangorian controversy, the Trinitarian controversy, the various ethical controversies, and all these following close upon the Puritan controversy and the Papal controversy, both of which had shaken the Constitution to its very foundation.  How was it possible that a country could pass through such stormy scenes without having its faith unsettled, and the basis of its morals weakened?  How could some help asking, What is truth? where is it to be found among all these conflicting elements?  The Revolution itself was in its immediate effects attended with evil.  England submitted to be governed by foreigners, but she had to sacrifice much and stoop low before she could submit to the necessity.  All the romantic halo which had hung about royalty was rudely swept away.  Queen Anne was the last sovereign of these realms round whom still lingered something of the ‘divinity that doth hedge a king.’  Under the Georges loyalty assumed a different form from that which it had taken before.  The sentiment which had attached their subjects to the Tudors and the Stuarts was exchanged for a colder and less enthusiastic feeling; mere policy took the place of chivalry.

Nor was it only in her outward affairs that the nation was passing through a great and fundamental change.  In her inner and spiritual life she was also in a period of transition.  The problem which was started in the early part of the sixteenth century had never yet been fairly worked out.  The nation had been for more than a century and a half so busy in dealing with the pressing questions of the hour that it had never yet had time to face the far deeper questions which lay behind these—­questions which concerned not the different modes of Christianity, but the very essence of Christianity itself.  The matters which had so violently agitated the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were now virtually settled.  The Church was now at last ‘established.’  But other questions arose.  It was not now asked, ’Is this or that mode of Church government most Scriptural?’