Days appointed by authority of the State for services of humiliation or of thanksgiving were far more frequent in the earlier part of the last century than they are now.  In King William’s time there were monthly fasts throughout the war, every first Wednesday in the month being thus set apart.[1041] Thus also, during the period when success after success attended the arms of Marlborough, there were never many months passed by without a day of thanksgiving.  During the civil wars of the preceding century fast days had been very frequent.  To a certain extent no doubt they had been used on either side as political weapons of party; but they were also genuinely congenial to the excited religious feeling of the nation, solemn appeals to the overruling power which guides the destinies of men.  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, although religious energies were so far more languid than they had been in the preceding age, the great war that was raging on the Continent was still regarded somewhat in the light of a crusade.  Not that it inspired enthusiasm, or awoke any spirit of romance.  There was no such high-strung emotion in those who anxiously watched its progress.  Still it was generally felt to be a struggle in which great religious principles were involved.  The Protestant interest and the religious future of the Church and State of England were felt to be deeply concerned in its ultimate issues.  And thus a good deal of half-religious, half-political feeling was centred on these appointed days of solemn fast or thanksgiving.  The prayer for unity, calling upon the people to take to heart the dangers they were in by their unhappy divisions, seems to have been very generally read upon these occasions.[1042] A political element in them was always clearly recognised by the Nonjurors.  The more moderate among them, who attended other services of the National Church, would not, except in rare instances, attend these.  ’They held that to be present on such special occasions, which were significant of a direct purpose, was to profess allegiance to the new reigning family, and therefore an act of dissimulation; but not so their attendance on the ordinary services.’[1043]

The prayers appointed for these set days of humiliation appear to have often had the reputation of being neither impressive nor edifying.  Winston spoke, indeed, in the highest terms of a prayer drawn up by Tenison on occasion of the great hurricane of 1703.  He thought it a model composition, unequalled in modern and unsurpassed in ancient times.[1044] But its excellences, he added, were especially marked by the strong contrast with the jejune and courtly formulas which usually characterized such prayers, and most of all those which had been written for the days of fasting during the war.[1045] They were, too commonly, examples of the bad custom, scarcely to be extenuated by long established precedent, of clothing in the outward form of adulation of powers that be, what was ordinarily meant for nothing