[81] "Toplady, in one of his sermons, says, 'I believe no denomination of professing Christians (the Church of Rome excepted) were so generally void of the light and life of godliness, so generally destitute of the doctrine and the grace of the Gospel, as was the Church of England, considered as a body, about fifty years ago. At that period, a converted minister in the Establishment was as great a wonder as a comet.'"--_Southey's Commonplace Book._ The Dissenters, also, were not without talented and useful ministers. At the very time, when Whitefield commenced his illustrious career, Dr. Isaac Watts was still rendering important service to the Church of Christ; Dr. Philip Doddridge was at the height of his Christian usefulness; Dr. Nathaniel Lardner, the learned author of the "Credibility of the Gospel History," was preaching at Crutched Friars; Dr. Samuel Chandler, another able writer, was lecturer at the Old Jewry Chapel; Daniel Neal, the historian of the Puritans, was pastor of a congregation in Jewin Street; and Dr. John Gill, the ultra-Calvinist, was now minister at Horsley Down, and writing his ponderous commentary on the sacred Scriptures. All these were pious, able, useful men. Their service to the cause of Christ was great. Their names and memories can never perish. But, notwithstanding all that has just been said, and all that might be added, there cannot be doubt that England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland,--the Established Church, the Presbyterians, and the Dissenters,--all greatly needed a ministry like that of Whitefield and his friends, the Oxford Methodists. Speaking generally, to the churches of the land might have been appropriately applied the language once addressed to the church in Sardis: "I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead." The country was filled with abounding wickedness, in its most flagrant forms; and Christian men were at their wits' end how to stem the disastrous deluge. The secular press of the period--newspapers and magazines--contain abundant evidence of this. Extracts and summaries, to this effect, have already been published in "The Life and Times of Wesley," and it would be wearisome to repeat them here; but there is another class of evidence which, without any repetition, may be fitly introduced.