Eighteenth-century England presented a picture of substantial religious diversity. The Restoration Church of England had not regained all the ground lost after the Civil War, but despite some evidence of laxity among its clergy and institutions, the Church of the eighteenth century was not moribund. Roman Catholics and the various groups of Protestant Dissenters pursued an active independent existence through the century, but some of the latter (like some sections of the Church of England) were subject to doctrinal heterodoxy. The Evangelical Revival that encompassed the Church of England and established Dissent, as well as spawning new denominations, was a reaction against spiritual and theological laxity, and elevated the doctrine of grace in preference to High Church religious austerities.
Keywords: lvinistic Methodism, deism, Evangelical Revival, Georgian Church of England, latitudinarianism, religious pluralism, Roman Catholic, Protestant Dissent, John Wesley