The Nonconformists throughout the country were, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, for the most part men disposed to social quiet. They had now recovered in some measure a state of religious tranquillity, and they were rather interested quietly to preserve what they possessed, than to attempt any occupation of new ground, either in principle or in practice. They made few efforts to correct the vices of men, or to convert them from their life of sin. The round of Nonconformist duty and piety was a quiet, staid, and respectable service; nothing, we suppose, could be more unlike the satires so often pronounced upon it. Most of its ministers were men of considerable scholarly attainments, their minds fed by the rich and strengthening food to be found in some of the oldest fathers and the earliest reformers; at the same time they were accustomed to abstractions and questions, which at once enlarged and strengthened the understanding. They had no acquaintance with our large varieties of nature and language; but they were keen observers of _human_ nature, and they submitted their knowledge to the test and use of daily life. As to their people, in many instances, no doubt, they were humble, perhaps even of obscure rank, but this was not always the case. Nonconformity in those times included others than those we should even call the respectable middle classes; it represented an order of political opinion quite as much as religious doctrine and practice, not only as we have seen in London, but in many districts of the country. Some of the highest and oldest families formed the staff and stay of congregations. It was a respectable but cold piety, in many instances with assured tendencies towards Socinianism and Unitarianism. The Nonconformity into which Watts came, and with which during the whole of his life he mingled, is quite removed from that Nonconformity of Methodism and Revivalism which became the great religious movement of the last century. It was a Nonconformity educated, solid, rooted in certain principles and assurances, inclining too exclusively to a life of thought; the religion of intelligent multitudes who could not conform, especially to what the Church of England was, in that coarse and intolerant time, when her nets gathered fish of every sort, among them some chiefly remarkable for their rapacity and impurity.