Increased intelligence brought political reforms, and these in turn were followed by a reform in morals and manners. During the reign of the Stuarts the morals of the people had been extremely low. As an illustration might be mentioned the disrespect shown to the clergy. A parish priest was only permitted to dine at the second table, after his superiors (?) had been served. He might fill himself with the beef and cabbage, but did not dare to touch the better dishes until invited to do so by the hostess. A law had been passed during the reign of Charles II., that no clergyman should marry a servant-girl without the consent of her mistress. Most of the prominent statesmen during the previous half century were unbelievers in any form of religion. Such were the irreligious tendencies of the age, that drunkenness and foul talk were considered no reproach to Robert Walpole, prime minister of England. Purity of life was sneered at by the nobility as "out of fashion." For example, Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son (which were designed for publication), {151} instructs him in the art of seduction, as part of a polite education. At the lower end of the social scale lay the masses of the extremely poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive. The manufacture of gin and rum had been discovered in 1684; and intemperance overran the nation as a plague. Tavern-keepers, on their sign-boards, invited the people to come and get drunk for a penny. For two pence they might get dead drunk, and have "a place to lie down with no charge for straw." Much of this social degradation was due, without doubt, to the apathy and sloth of the religious teachers. Such was the condition of society when a remarkable religious revival began in a small knot of Oxford students whose revolt against the wickedness of the times expressed itself in enthusiastic religious worship and an austere and methodical regularity of life, that gave them the nickname of "Methodists." Of these students, three soon attracted special attention by their religious fervor and even extravagance. One of these, George Whitfield, became the greatest orator. His voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, in the dens of London, and in the dark and gloomy mines of Cornwall. Whitfield's preaching was such as England had never heard before, theatrical, extravagant, sometimes common-place, but winning favor by its earnestness and deep tremulous sympathy for the sins and sorrows of mankind.