Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century Church discipline was in some respects a much greater reality than it is in our own day.  No doubt in its later years the difference lay more in possibilities than in actual fact; so that the alterations in the law of excommunication made by the Act of 1813, exceedingly important as they were to persons who had come under censure of the ecclesiastical courts, had no very visible or direct bearing upon the English Church in general.  Excommunication had been for some time becoming more than ever an unfamiliar word, limited almost entirely to the use of law courts.  When, therefore, various obsolete practices relating to it were swept away and its consequences rendered less formidable, it is probable that few but lawyers were cognisant of any change.  But in the first half of the last century, amid a number of complaints that notorious vice so continually escaped the formal censure of the Church, it is also evident that presentments and excommunications were far from uncommon, and that even open penance was not an excessive rarity.  Episcopal instructions on the subject are frequent.  Thus Archbishop Sharp requests his clergy to be very careful of anything like persecution; but where they cannot reform habitual delinquents, such as drunkards, profane persons, neglecters of God’s worship, &c., by softer means, to take measures that they be presented.  He would then do all he could before proceeding to excommunication.  When that sentence had been actually denounced he allowed the clergyman to absolve the offender in sickness, when penitent, without the formal absolution under the Court Seal.  Commutation for penances he did not approve of, but would sometimes allow them on the advice of the minister of the parish; the commutation to be entirely applied to Church uses and as notoriously as the offence had been.  The public good was to be the rule.[1248] Secker’s instructions to the clergy of Oxford in 1753 are still more full, though he prefaces them by the acknowledgment that he is ’perfectly sensible that both immorality and religion are grown almost beyond the reach of ecclesiastical power, which, having been in former times unwarrantably extended, hath been very unjustly cramped and weakened many ways.’[1249] Five years later, in his first Canterbury Charge, Secker speaks much less confidently on this subject.  Wickedness, he said, of almost every kind, had made dreadful progress, but ecclesiastical authority was ’not only too much hindered, but too much despised to do almost anything to any purpose.  In the small degree that it could be exerted usefully he trusted it would be.’[1250] He expressed himself to the same effect and still more regretfully in his last written production, his ’Concio coram synodo’ in 1761.’[1251]

Fleetwood reminded the clergy and churchwardens that they were to present not only for flagitious conduct, but also for non-attendance at worship, for neglecting to send children or servants to be catechized, for not paying Church rates, and for public teaching without licence.[1252]