might yet lift up its head and find a wealthier home in the deaneries and rectories of England. And so they were more inclined to control their sympathies in that direction than they might have been under other circumstances. It may be added, the extreme vehemence, not to say virulence of party feeling, in ecclesiastical as in political matters, which prevailed in England so long as a decisive and universally recognised settlement was yet in suspense, obliged both High and Low Churchmen to keep tolerably close to the strict letter of the Act of Uniformity. When so much jealousy and mutual animosity were abroad, neither the one nor the other could venture, without raising a storm of opprobrium, to test to what extreme limits its utmost elasticity could be strained. Notwithstanding such considerations, differences in religious opinion within the Church, especially as to those points which the Puritan controversy had brought into prominence, did not fail to find expression in the modes and usages of worship. Something has been already said on this point, in speaking of the furniture of churches, the decoration of the sanctuary, and the observance of fasts and festivals. What has now to be added relates rather to varieties in the manner of conducting services. The rubric which occupies so prominent a place in our Prayer-book, stating 'that such ornaments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof, at all times of their ministration, shall be retained and be in use, as were in the Church of England, by the authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI.,' was of course not forgotten-as indeed it could not be--in the eighteenth century. High Churchmen not unfrequently called attention to it. John Johnson, writing in 1709, said he was by no means single in his belief that this order was still legally enjoined.' Archbishop Sharp appears to have been of the same opinion, and used to say that he preferred the Communion office as it was in King Edward's Book.2 Nicholls, in his edition (1710) of Bishop Cosin's annotated Prayer-book, insisted upon the continuous legality of the vestments prescribed in the old rubric, which was 'the existing law,' he said, 'still in force 1 J. Johnson's Vade Mecum, i. 21. 2 Life of Archbishop Sharp, by his Son, i. 355. 'Codex Juris Ecclesiastic rubric as practically obscute stealy m Charles L's reign the rubric had been sanctioned by Bishop Andreves Bure Williams, and probably by saver pris El r only in some cathedrals and r also in some of the London States ment in copes,' had been ytbed in the sure more ornate vestments was not minster, and Durham seem to have been the ne At Norwich, however, the orpe presented Sheriff of Norfolk in the place of one that hat seem during the Civil Wars. does not appear worn. Those at Westminster ve te occasions, such as Coronations and F only at Durham that the cope was festival days. Defoe wrote in span that tog veral by some of the residents, and be them describes them a with embroidery and embossed work of was a kind of load to stand under th times told of Warburton, when Freedy ý b 1759, throwing off his cope in a pet and again, because it disturbed his ang seem to have been totally discontinued v The surplice was of course, trogios the period the 1 B. Hope, Worship, &c., 109, 129. approval in An Account of London Parishes, ke Heylin's Cyprian. An u., quored by B. Hone. Weng Blomefield's Hist. of Norwich, quoel • Defoe's Tour, 1727, iii. 189, also Thoreng ba universally recognised vestment of the Church of England clergy. Not that it had altogether outlived the unreasoning hatred with which it was regarded by ultra-Protestants outside the National Church. It was still in the earlier part of the century inveighed against by some of their writers as 'a Babylonish garment,' ''a rag of the whore of Babylon,'' a 'habit of the priests of Isis.'3 In William III.'s time, its use in the pulpit was evidently quite exceptional. The writer of a letter in the Strype Correspondence-one of those in whose eyes a surplice was a fool's coat '-making mention that on the previous day (in 1696) he had seen a minister preach in one, added that to the best of his remembrance he had never but once seen this before. During the next reign the custom was more common, but was looked upon as a decided mark of High Churchmanship. There is an expressive, and amusingly inconsequential though' in the following note from Thoresby's Diary for June 17, 1722: 'Mr. Rhodes preached well (though in his surplice.)'5 In villages, however, it was very frequently worn, not so much from any idea of its propriety as what Pasquin in the Tatler is made to call the most conscientious dress,' but simply from its being the only vestment provided by the parish. Too frequently it betrayed in its appearance, 'dirty and contemptible with age,' a careless indifference quite in keeping with other externals of worship. At the end of the seventeenth century many Low Church clergy were wont so far to violate the Act of Uniformity as often not to wear the surplice at all in church. They would sometimes wear it, said South, in a sermon preached in King William's reign, and oftener lay it aside. Such irregularities appear, however, to have been nearly discontinued in Queen Anne's time." About The Scourge, by T. Lewis, Feb. 11, 1717. 2 Sherlock, On Public Worship, 114. The Scourge, May 16, 1717. Quoted in Stoughton's Church of the Revolution, 323. R. Thoresby's Diary, ii. 341. Secker's Eight Charges, 182. Tatler, No. 129. 8 R. South's Sermons, iv. 191, also Strype Corresp. quoted by Stoughton, Ch. of the Rev., 323. Mr. Wordsworth, however, mentions a portrait of 1730, showing the interior of an English Church in which the celebrant at the Eucharist is robed in a black gown.-Univ. Soc. in the Eighteenth Cent., 533. this date, the growing habit among clergymen of wearing a wig is said to have caused an alteration from the older form of the surplice. It was no longer sewn up and drawn over the head, but made open in front.' Those who abominated the surplice had looked with aversion on the academical hood. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, some Low Church clergymen they would hardly be graduates of either University-objected to its Christopher Pitt, recommending preachers to sort their sermons to their hearers, bids them, for example, not to be so indiscreet as to 'rail at hoods and organs at St. Paul's.' 2 Next, says Addison, after the clergy of the highest rank, such as bishops, deans, and archdeacons, come 'doctors of divinity, prebendaries and all that wear scarfs.' It was an object therefore of some ambition in his day to wear a scarf. There was many a clerical fop, we are told in a later paper of the 'Spectator,' who would wear it when he came up to London, that he might be mistaken for a dignitary of the Church, and be called 'doctor' by his landlady and by the waiter at Child's Coffee-house. Noblemen also claimed a right of conferring a scarf upon their chaplains. In this case, those who knew the galling yoke that a chaplaincy too often was, might well entitle it 'a badge of servitude,' and 'a silken livery.'5 At this point, a short digression may be permitted on the subject of clerical dress during the last century. In the time of Swift and the Spectator,' clergymen generally wore their gowns when they travelled in the streets of London. But they wore them, so Hearne says, with a difference, very characteristic of those days of hot party strife. The Tory clergy only wore the M.A. gown; 'the Whigs and enemies of the Universities go in pudding-sleeve gowns,' 7 or what was otherwise called the 'crape' or 'mourning gown.' In the country the correct clerical dress was simply the cassock. Fielding's genius has made good Parson Adams a familiar 1 Walcot's Cathedrals, &c., 121. 2 Christopher Pitt's Art of Preaching, c. 1740. 821. 4 Id. No. 609. Anderson's Br. Poets, viii. Id., and Oldham, in The Tatler, No. 255. Swift's 'Project for the Adv. of Rel.'-Works, ix. 97. Spectator, No. 609. Eighteenth Century, 36, 516. picture to most readers of English literature. We picture him careless of appearances, tramping along the muddy lanes with his cassock tucked up under his short great-coat.1 A clergyman, writing in 1722, upon the hardships and miseries of the inferior clergy in and about London,' compares with some bitterness the threadbare garments of the curate with 'the flaming gown and cassock' of the non-resident rector. He could wish, he said (if the wish were canonical') that he might appear in a common habit rather than in a clerical garb, which only excited derision by its squalor. He thought it a desirable recommendation to the religious and charitable societies of the day, that they should make gifts to the poorer clergy of new gowns and cassocks. Soon, however, after Fielding's time, the cassock gradually fell into disuse as an ordinary part of a clergyman's dress. It was still worn by many throughout the Sunday; but on week days, was regarded as somewhat stiff and formal, even by those who insisted most on the proprieties. * Ever since the Restoration, the old strictness about clerical dress had become more and more relaxed. The square cap had been out of favour during the Commonwealth, and was not generally resumed.3 The canonical skull cap was next supplanted-not without much scandal to persons of grave and staid habits-by the fashionable peruke. There is a letter from the Duke of Monmouth, then Chancellor of Cambridge, to the ViceChancellor and University, October 8, 1674, in which this innovation is severely condemned. A few years later, Archbishop Tillotson himself set the example of wearing the obnoxious article. Many country incumbents not only 'Fielding's Joseph Andrews, b. i. ch. 16, b. ii. ch. 3, 7, &c. 2 Cf. C. Churchill's Independence:— 8 'O'er a brown cassock which had once been black, Hardships, &c., of the Inf. Clergy, in a letter to the Bishop of London, 1722, 20, 93, 246. Admonition to the Younger Clergy, 1764, and Philagoretes on the Pulpit, &c., quoted by Chr. Wordsworth, Universities, &c., 526, 529. 5 J. C. Jeaffreson's B. of the Clergy, ii. 253. Mrs. Abigail, &c., with some Free Thoughts on the Pretended Dignity of the Clergy, 1700. 8 Quoted in Justice and Necessity of Restraining the Clergy, &c., 1715, 41. |