At no period of her history has the Church of England been in greater danger than she was from her own bishops and clergy in the reign of George the Second. On the one hand was a party embittered by defeat, shut out from all hope of preferment, and inflamed by a spirit of intolerance in things political and ecclesiastical; on the other was a party just as intolerant in reality, but hiding its intolerance under the cloak of broad and liberal views, and with leaders using the intellect and learning they undoubtedly possessed, to subvert, or at least to set aside, the doctrines of the Church they had sworn to believe. Indifference in practice quickly succeeded indifference in belief, and herefrom may be traced most of the ills which afflicted the Church of England during the eighteenth century. It was no wonder, when the established Church was spiritually dead, that earnest-minded men, disgusted at this condition of things, and hopeless of remedying it, set up religious bodies of their own. The growth of Methodism in the eighteenth century was directly due to the shortcomings of the Church, which had lost its hold on the masses of the people. The year after Queen Caroline’s death, in 1738, John Wesley returned from Georgia, and, aided by his brother Charles, began the mission which was attended with such marvellous results. True, the Wesleys, in words at least, never wavered in their adherence to the Church of England, but the discouragement they met with from the bishops and the often ill-directed zeal of their followers led in time to the inevitable separation, which was followed later by schisms among the Methodists themselves. One of the most typical of the Georgian bishops was Hoadley, who became successively Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury and Winchester, “cringing from bishopric to bishopric”. Hoadley’s career was a striking illustration of the superiority of mind over body. When he was an undergraduate at Cambridge he had an illness which crippled him for life; he was obliged to walk with a crutch, and had to preach in a kneeling posture. His appearance was exceedingly unprepossessing, but he completely overcame these natural disadvantages by the sheer force of his will. He had taken up the Church as a profession, and from the professional point of view he certainly succeeded in it; but he does not seem to have believed in the teaching of the Church whose principles he had nominally accepted. He was a conformist simply because it paid him to conform. Even a favourable biographer writes: “So far indeed was Hoadley from adhering strictly to the doctrines of the Church that it is a little to be wondered at on what principles he continued throughout life to profess conformity”.