plication of benefices in a single hand, was clerical poverty. There was in the last century a far wider gap between the different classes of the clergy than there is at the present day. While the most eminent or most fortunate among them could take their places on a stand of perfect equality with the highest nobles in the land, the bulk of the country curates and poorer incumbents hardly rose above the rank of the small farmer. A much larger proportion than now lived and died without the slightest prospect of rising above the position of a stipendiary curate; and the regular stipend of a curate was 30%. a year. When Collins complained of the expense of maintaining so large a body of clergy, Bentley replied that 'the Parliamentary accounts showed that six thousand of the clergy had, at a middle rate, not 50l. a year;' and he then added that argument which was subsequently used with so much effect by Sydney Smith-viz. that 'talent is attracted into the Church by a few great prizes.' Some years later, when Lord Shelburne asked Bishop Watson 'if nothing could be gotten from the Church towards alleviating the burdens of the State,' the Bishop replied that the whole revenue of the Church would not yield 150l. a year to each clergyman, and therefore a diminution would be inexpedient, unless Government would be contented to have a beggarly and illiterate clergy, which no wise minister would wish.' He might have added that, even as it was, a great number of the clergy, if not 'beggarly and illiterate,' were either weighed down with the pressure of poverty, or, to escape it, were obliged to have recourse to occupations which were more fit for illiterate men. Dr. Primrose, in his adversity, and Parson Adams are specimens of the better type of this class of clergy, and it is to be feared that Parson Trulliber is not a very unfair specimen of the worst. There is an odd illustration of the immeasurable distance which was supposed to separate the bishop from he curate in Cradock's 'Reminiscences.' Bishop Warburton was to preach in St. Lawrence's Church in behalf of the London Hospital. I was,' writes Cradock, ' introduced 1 Sometimes even lower than this. 2 Remarks on a Discourse of Freethinking, by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, xl. (edition of 1743). 3 Anecdotes of the Life of R. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, i. 159. into the vestry by a friend, where the Lord Mayor and others were waiting for the Duke of York, who was their president; and in the meantime, the bishop did everything in his power to entertain and alleviate their patience. He was beyond measure condescending and courteous, and even graciously handed some biscuits and wine in a salver to the curate who was to read prayers!'1 So far as one can judge, this wide gulf which divided the higher from the lower clergy was by no means always a fair measure of their respective merits. The readers of 'Joseph Andrews' will remember that Parson Adams is represented not only as a pious and estimable clergyman, but also as a scholar and a divine. And there were not wanting in real life unbeneficed clergymen who, in point of abilities and erudition, might have held their own with the learned prelates of the period. Thomas Stackhouse, the curate of Finchley, is a remarkable case in point. His 'Compleat Body of Divinity,' and, still more, his 'History of the Bible,' published in 1733, are worthy to stand on the same shelf with the best writings of the bishops in an age when the Bench was extraordinarily fertile in learning and intellectual activity.2 John Newton wrote most of his works in a country curacy. Romaine, whose learning and abilities none can doubt, was fifty years old before he was beneficed. Seed, a preacher and writer of note, was a curate for the greater part of his life. It must be added, however, that as the eighteenth century advanced, a very decided improvement took place in the circumstances of the bulk of the clergy-an improvement which would have been still more extensive but for the prevalence of pluralities. Lord Macaulay's well-known description of the state of the country clergy at the close of the seventeenth century 1 Quoted in Kilvert's Life of Bishop Hurd, p. 97. Dean Swift, in his Project for the Advancement of Religion, speaks of curates in the most contemptuous terms. 'In London, a clergyman, with one or two sorry curates, has sometimes the care of above 20,000 souls incumbent on him.' 2 Still more to the present point is Stackhouse's Miseries and Great Hardships of the Inferior Clergy in and about London. He tells us, 'the inferior clergy were objects of extreme wretchedness. They lived in garrets, and appeared in the streets with tattered cassocks. The common fee for a sermon was a shilling and a dinner, for reading prayers twopence and a cup of coffee,' and much more to the same effect. See Appendix to vol. iii. of Hunt's Religious Thought in England, PP. 404, 405. became, happily, less and less applicable as the years rolled on. The following description, written in 1700, gives us a sad picture of the condition of one class of clergy at that time:-'Some years past there arrived in these parts a little Sir John, who was a Poor Scholar at the University, and went on the errands of several gentlemen of his college, and with the help of that and the college broth made shift to pick up a sorry livelihood. His father kept a blind victual-house, his mother is a renowned ale-wife. He got wherewith to take his B.A. and M.A., and came hither in hopes of a small curacy under a fat parson who had swallowed more livings than he could digest. . . . He died soon after the arrival of our little Dominus vobiscum, who might have died of hunger had not a gentleman of estate and quality took the priest-errant into his house to teach his son Latin, where Sir John did all the spiritual drudgeries of the family, blessed the meat with a good grace, and had the honour of sitting at the lower end of the table, whence (according to his bounden duty) he always very mannerly arose at the serving of the second course, and with a bow as low as to the altar took with him the plate he had ate on. In process of time he skrewed himself into the good graces of Mrs. Abigail, my lady's waiting-woman, and got from his master a living,' &c.-and so on. Much to the same effect is Swift's description of the clergy of about the same period. His wife is little better than Goody in her birth, education, or dress; and as to himself, we must let his parentage alone. If he be the son of a farmer it is very sufficient, and his sister may be very decently chambermaid to the squire's wife. He goes about on working days in a grazier's coat, and will not scruple to assist his workmen in harvest time. His daughter shall go to service, or be sent apprentice to the seamstress in the next town, and his sons are put to honest trades. This is the usual course of an English vicar, from 20/. to 60%. a year.'2 Both these portraits may be highly coloured; but there is too much reason to fear that they are not drawn wholly from the imagination. They belong, however, solely to the early 1 Mrs. Abigail, a Female Skirmish between the wife of a country squire and the wife of a D.D. . . with some free thoughts on the quality and dignity of the clergy, 1700. (Published in a collection of Tracts of the period.) 2 Swift on the Bill for Clerical Residence. part of the century. Such pictures at the close of the century would, even as caricatures, have been overdrawn. Unhappily among the evils resulting from the multiplication of a needy clergy, which may be in part attributed to the undue accumulation of Church property in a few hands, mere penury was not the worst. Some clergy struggled manfully and honestly against its pressure, but others fell into disreputable courses. These latter are not, of course, to be regarded as representative men of any class in the Church. They were simply the Pariahs of ecclesiastical society; the black sheep which will be found, in one form or another, in every age of the Church. But owing to the causes noted above, they formed an exceptionally large class at the close of the seventeenth and during the first half at least of the eighteenth century. One means by which some of them earned a disgraceful livelihood was happily put a stop to by the Marriage Act of 1753. Previously to the passing of that Act, clergymen who were confined for debt in the Fleet Prison were allowed the privilege of marrying couples within its precincts. 'The Grub Street Journal' of February 17, 1735, alludes to the 'ruinous marriages practised in the liberties of the Fleet, &c., by a sett of drunken, swearing parsons that wear black coats.' One Wyatt, according to his own memorandum book, realised 59%. 12s. 9d. in fees in one month. Another, Keith, married one hundred and seventy-three couples in one day, and, according to another authority, six thousand couples in a year. Others belonging to this class of clergy supported themselves as hangers-on to the families of the great. Domestic chaplains in great houses became less common as the century advanced. The admirable hits of Addison and Steele against the indignities to which domestic chaplains were subjected are more applicable to the early than to the latter part of the century. Boswell adduced it as an instance that 'there was less religion in the nation than formerly,' that 'there used to be a chaplain in every great family, which we do not find now ;' and was well answered by Dr. Johnson,3 Neither do you find any of the state servants in great families. There The Eighteenth Century, by A. Andrews. 2 Lord Mahon's History of England, 1713-1783, iv. 26. is a change in customs.' The change, however, was not wholly to the advantage of the Church. Bad as was the relation between the chaplain and his patron, where the former was degraded to an inferior position in the household, there was still some sort of spiritual tie between them.' The parson who was simply the boon companion of the ignorant and sensual squire of the Hanoverian period was in a still worse position. This class of clergyman is a constant subject of satire in the lighter literature and caricatures of the day. Not that they were so numerous or so bad as they are often represented to have been. There was a strong and growing tendency in the Georgian era to make the very worst of clerical delinquencies. For it is a curious fact that while the Church as an establishment was most popular, her ministers were most unpopular. Secker complained, not without reason, in 1738, that 'Christianity is now railed at and ridiculed with very little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all. Against us our adversaries appear to have set themselves to be as bitter as they can-not only beyond all truth, but beyond probability—exaggerating without mercy,' &c. And nearly thirty years later he still makes the same complaint. You cannot but see,' he warns candidates for Holy Orders, 'in what a profane and corrupt age this stewardship is committed to you; how grievously religion and its ministers are hated and despised.' 'Since the Lollards,' writes Mr. Pattison, 'there had never been a time when the ministers of religion were held in so much contempt as in the Hanoverian period, or when satire upon Churchmen was so congenial to the general feeling. There was no feeling against the Establishment, nor was nonconformity ever less in favour. The contempt was for the persons, manners, and characters of ecclesiastics.' This unpopularity arose from a complication of causes which need not be investigated in this place; it is sufficient to notice the fact, which should be 4 3 1 How nobly and successfully a domestic chaplain in a great family might do his duty in the eighteenth century, the conduct of Thomas Wilson, when he was domestic chaplain to the Earl of Derby, and tutor to his son, is an instance.--See the Life of Bishop Wilson, by the Rev. Hugh Stowell, chap. ii. pp. 20-31. 2 Bishop of Oxford's Charge, 1738. • Secker's Instructions given to Candidates for Orders. Mr. Pattison's Essay in Essays and Reviews. |