“They readily consented; and when I came, at the time appointed, to my great surprise, I found a vast concourse of people, and among them several of my parishioners, who had never been at church in all their life. After a prayer and thanksgiving suitable to the uncommon circumstances, I preached a sermon, of which, so far as I can recollect, the reader may find the substance, with some additions, in the following pages. May it have a better effect upon him than it had upon some of the gentlemen who heard it! Instead of a prayer-book, they pulled out their favourite companion, a bottle; and imparted the strong contents to each other, as heartily as I did the awful contents of my text to the _decent_ part of the congregation. Gentle reader, receive them as cordially as they did their stupifying antidote, and I ask no more.” This, certainly, was a disgraceful scene, but not so disgraceful as that which occurred a few days afterwards, and which Fletcher, in a foot-note, relates. Among the many thousands, who came to view the results of the earthquake, were a company from Bridgnorth, headed by a young clergyman, who “brought music along with them, and set a-dancing upon the very place where the awful earthquake had happened.” The text of Fletcher’s almost impromptu sermon was Numb. xvi. 30—34. The sermon itself occupies seventy pages. Addressing the irreverent “gentlemen” before him, the bold preacher cried:— “O ye Christian Dathans, ye lofty Abirams, ye, who, like those proud Israelites, are in your respective parishes ‘_princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown_,’ the eyes of this populous neighbourhood are upon you, especially the eyes of poor illiterate colliers, waggoners, and watermen. Do you not consider that they mind your _examples_, rather than God’s precepts? Are you not aware that they follow you as a bleating flock follows the first wandering sheep? Because they cannot read the sacred pages, or even tell the first letters of the alphabet, think you they cannot read _secret contempt of Almighty God_ on the sleeves, in which they sometimes see you laugh at godliness? And suppose ye, they cannot make out _open pollution of His Sabbaths_ when they see the remarkable seats, which you so frequently leave empty at church? Do you not know that the lessons of practical atheism, which you thus give them in the free school of bad example, they learn without delay, practise without remorse, and teach others with unwearied diligence? Alas! the pattern of indevotion, which you set in the house of God, carries, before you are aware, its baneful influence through a hundred private houses. Oh! how many are now numbered among the dead, who have taken to the ways of destruction by following _you_! How many are yet unborn, upon whom a curse will be entailed, in consequence of the spreading plague of irreligion, which