versal profligacy of royal courts would indicate that it was regarded as the high prerogative of kings and princes to break all the ten commandments" (44).
Daniels notes wryly that during those times, "nothing could be a greater proof of royalty than a fearless disobedience of the law of God" (44).
Despite the poor religious example set by the kings, however, the Church provided an even worse one, which Charles John Abbey and John Henry Overton (1878, p. 5) describe as "in many respects, in an undoubtedly unsatisfactory condition, sleepy and full of abuses." Moreover, the monarchy and the church were essentially joined in their degeneracy, because "the King, as head and father of the people, was also the supreme temporal ruler of the National Church," his people since the Reformation having "invested their sovereign with many attributes of a Pope" (Abbey & Overton, 1878, p. 20). English clergyman Benjamin Hoadly exerted his best efforts to help reform the profligate church, stating at one point, "I have used...my best endeavours to serve a cause upon which the Gospel, the Reformation, and the Church of England, as well as the common rights of mankind entirely depend" (Abbey & Overton, 1878, p. 34). Hoadly ended his impassioned speech by pledging, "I now offer up the whole of what I have done, and can do, to the glory of God, the honour of Christianity, the interest of the Reformation, and the good of human society" (Abbey & Overton, 1878, p. 34).
It was thanks to Christians such as Hoadly and the four young Methodists that Christendom was redeemed from the corruption of the English Church. The Wesleys, in particular, evidenced a deep commitment to Christian principles, both in their theology and their actions. Abbey and Overton (1878, p. 113) recount an amusing incident in which a local schoolmaster found it impossible to correct the cruelty of some of his students who mocked those that were so unfortunat...