Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America онлайн

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As to the religious teachers of those times, we know of no period in our history concerning which it might so appropriately be said, in the words of the prophet, “The pastors” are “become brutish, and have not sought the Lord.” In the life of a singular man, but not a good one, Thomas Lord Lyttleton, in a letter dated 1775, we have a most graphic portrait of a country clergyman, a friend of Lyttleton, who went by the designation of “Parson Adams.” We suppose him to be no bad representative of the average parson of that day—coarse, profane, jocular, irreligious. On a Saturday evening he told Lyttleton, his host, that he should send his flocks to grass on the approaching Sabbath. “The next morning,” says Lyttleton, “we hinted to him that the company did not wish to restrain him from attending the Divine service of the parish; but he declared that it would be adding contempt to neglect if, when he had absented himself from his own church he should go to any other. This curious etiquette he strictly observed; and we passed a Sabbath contrary, I fear, both to law and to gospel.”