“The Lord’s day is now the devil’s market day. More lewdness, more drunkenness, more quarrels and murders, more sin is contrived and committed on this day than on all the other days of the week together. Strong liquors are become the epidemic distemper of this great city. More of the common people die of consumptions, fevers, dropsies, cholics, palsies, and apoplexies, contracted by the immoderate use of brandies and distilled waters, than of all other distempers besides, arising from other causes. Sin, in general, is grown so hardened and rampant, as that immoralities are defended, yea, justified on principle. Obscene, wanton, and profane books find so good a market as to encourage the trade of publishing them. Every kind of sin has found a writer to teach and vindicate it, and a bookseller and hawker to divulge and spread it.” These were not rash and random statements. From the report of the society before which the bishop preached, it appears that in that very year, 1724, the society had prosecuted not fewer than 2723 persons for lewd, profane, drunken, and gambling practices; and that during the last thirty-three years the number of their prosecutions had been 89,393. From the literature of the period, we learn that gin-drinking in the great towns of England had become a mania; the sellers of this pernicious spirit announcing on their signboards that they would make a man drunk for a penny, and find him straw on which to lie till he recovered the use of his lost faculties. In 1736 every sixth house in London was a licensed grogshop, and parliament, to check the evil, enacted that all intoxicating spirits should pay a duty of £1 per gallon, and every victualler £50 per annum for his licence. In the higher classes of society, the taint left by Charles II and his licentious court still festered. Among the lower classes, laziness and dishonesty were next to universal. Superstition flourished almost as vigorously as it had done in the middle ages, and nearly every old mansion in England was haunted by a ghost, and almost every parish tormented by a witch. In the metropolis, Ranelagh and Vauxhall were the resorts of thousands, of the upper strata of society; and puppetshows, hops, balls, prize-fights, merry meetings, cockfights, and badger-baitings furnished entertainment for the masses. In the rural districts, rustic squires found their greatest enjoyment in hunting foxes, and in gorging venison, and guzzling sack; while the peasantry relieved the monotony of their daily toils at wakes and fairs, and in wrestling, cudgel playing, and foot racing.