In 1704 Archbishop Sharp, while urging his clergy to present 'any that are resolved to continue heathens and absolutely refuse to come to church,' and, while admitting that the abuses of the commutation for penance were 'a cause of complaints against the spiritual courts and of the invidious reflections cast upon them,' adds that 'he was very sensible both of the decay of discipline in general and of the curbs put upon any effectual prosecution of it by the temporal courts, and of the difficulty of keeping up what little was left entire to the ecclesiastics without creating offence and administering matter for aspersion and evil surmises.Watts declares that in his day 'there was cascade casino langley bc a general decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of men.The turbulent and unsettled condition of both Church and State in the seventeenth century was bearing its fruit in the eighteenth.of cascade casino langley bc Porteus's Works, p.151 160.But here again, as on so many other points, the abuse arose rather from cascade casino langley bc the circumstances of the time than from the faults of the men.From one point of view the Church of England seemed to be signally successful from another, signally unsuccessful.After the accession cascade casino langley bc of George III.It was in consequence of the successful results of their efforts that the ground was opened to the heart stirring preachers and disinterested workers who gave practical effect to the truths which had been so ably vindicated.Nor will other proofs of repentance be sufficient if submission to the discipline of the Church of Christ, when cascade casino langley bc it hath been offended and requires due satisfaction, be obstinately refused.See a full account of the whole transaction in Wilberforce's History of the American Church, ch.Reason and faith, though not really antagonistic, are often in seeming cascade casino langley bc antagonism.But we find nothing of the sort.
