Butler, the famous author of Butler’s “Analogy,” himself, with
all his high gifts, supplies, in his own person, an expressive
proof of the spiritual blindness and death which lay on the
churches of Wesley’s day. He forbade Whitefield and the Wesleys
to preach in his diocese, tho all around his cathedral city lay
the most degraded and hopeless class in England--the coal-miners
of Kingswood, as untouched by any of the forces of Christianity
as if they had been savages in Central Africa. That the best,
the wisest, the most powerful, the most earnestly convinced
of the bishops of that day should take this attitude toward
Wesley and his work shows what was the general temper of the
clergy of that time. Butler’s conscience was not disquieted by
the lapse into mere heathenism of a whole class within sound
of the bells of his cathedral; but he grows piously indignant
at the spectacle of an ecclesiastical irregularity.--W. H.
FITCHETT, “Wesley and His Century.”
(2650)
=Regulation, Timepiece=--See SYNCHRONISM.