It

being only that of preaching, men had been able to take a Lectureship who disapproved of various particulars in the order and government of the Established Church, and would not have entered themselves in the list of her regular ministers.1 There had been some advantage and some evil in this. had enlarged to some extent the action of the Church, and provided within its limits a field of activity for men whose preaching was acceptable to a great number of Churchmen, but who hovered upon the borders of Nonconformity. Only it secured this advantage in a makeshift and scarcely authorised manner, and at the risk of introducing into parishes a source of disunion which was justly open to complaint. Lecturers were added to the Church system in towns without being incorporated into it. Room should have been found for them, without permanently attaching to a parish church a preacher whose views might be continually discordant with those of the Incumbent and his Curates. Under the circumstances, it was perhaps no more than a prudent requirement of the Act of Uniformity, that Lecturers should duly sign the Articles and before their first lecture read the Prayers, and make the same declarations as were obligatory upon other clergymen. They retained, however, something of the distinctive character which had marked them hitherto. Generally, they were decided Low Churchmen; the more so as lectureships were very commonly in the choice of the people, and the bulk of the electors were just that class of tradesmen in whom the Puritan, and afterwards the so-called Presbyterian, party in the Church had found its strongest support. For a like reason they were sometimes, no doubt, too much addicted to those arts by which the popular ear is won and retained, and which were particularly offensive to men whose most characteristic merits and faults were those of a different system. Bishop Newton said that lectureships were often disagreeable preferments, as subject to so many humours and caprices. On the other hand, the principal Lecturers in London held a position which able men might well be ambitious of holding. Nor was the long list of eminent men who The Scourge,

The Church of England's Complaint, &c., 1709, 21-2. No. 10, 1717. Folwhele's Preface to Lavington, 220.

2 Bishop Newton's Life and Works, i. 85.

had held London lectureships composed by any means. exclusively of the leaders of one section of the English Church. If it contained the names of Tillotson, and Burnet, and Fleetwood, and Blackhall, and Willis, and Hoadly, and Herring, it contained also those of Sharp and Atterbury, of Stanhope, Bennet, Moss, and Marshall. The Lecture of St. Lawrence Jewry was conspicuously high in repute. 'Though but moderately endowed in point of profit, it was long considered as the post of honour. It had been possessed by a

The

remarkable succession of the most able and celebrated preachers, of whom were the Archbishops Tillotson and Sharp; and it was usually attended by a variety of persons of the first note and eminence, particularly by numbers of the clergy, not only of the younger sort, but several also of long standing and established character.' 1 On Friday evenings it was in fact described as being 'not so much a concourse of people, but a convocation of divines.' 2 suburbs, too, of London had their Lecturers, supported by voluntary contributions, 'the amount of which put to shame the scanty stipends of the curates.'3 At the end of the period the Lecturers kept their place, but in diminished numbers; their relative importance being the more dimmed by the increase in number of the parochial clergy, and by the migration from the old city churches to new ones in the suburbs and chapels of ease where no such foundations existed.

5

It is almost sad to note in Paterson's Pietas Londinensis' the number of commemorative sermons founded in London parishes under the vain hope of perpetuating a name for ever. At that time, however, all these lectures were constantly observed on their appointed days.' Funeral sermons had for some time been flourishing far too vigorously. Bossuet and Massillon have left magnificent examples of the noble pulpit oratory to which such occasions may give rise. But in England, funeral sermons were too often a reproach to the

1 J. Nichol's Literary Anecd. of Eighteenth Cent. iv. 152.

2 Archbishop Sharp's Life, by his Son, i. 31.

Hardships of the Inferior Clergy in and about London, &c. 1722, 85. A London Parishes, &c. 5 Paterson's Piet. Lond. 49, 50.

clergy who could preach them, and to the public opinion which encouraged them. Just in the same way as a book could scarcely be published without a dedication which, it might be thought, would bring only ridicule upon the personage extravagantly belauded in it, so it was with these funeral sermons. A good man like Kettlewell might well be 'scandalised with such fulsome panegyrics; it grieved him to the soul to see flattery take sanctuary in the pulpit.' They had become an odious system, an ordinary funeral luxury, often handsomely paid for, which even the poor were ambitious to purchase.

Towards the end of the century guinea or half-guinea funeral sermons, though they held their ground here and there, were happily falling into disuse.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century baptisms during time of public service were decidedly unfrequent. There had been at one time such great and widely-spread scruples at the sign of the cross and the use of sponsors, that many people had preferred, where they found it possible, to get their children baptized at home, that these adjuncts of the rite might be dispensed with. During the Commonwealth, so long as the public ceremonial of the Church of England was prohibited, private baptism had become a custom even among those Churchmen who were most attached to the Anglican ritual. Such, thought Sherlock, were the principal causes of a neglect which seems to have become in his time almost universal.3 Often the form for public baptism was used on such occasions. But this irregularity was not the worst. There can be no doubt that these 'home christenings' had got to be very commonly looked upon as little more than an idle ceremony, and an occasion for jollity and tippling. The flagrant abuse could not fail to shock the minds of earnest men. We find Sherlock, Bull, Atterbury,

of E. 1709, 23.

1 Teale's Lives, 253. So also Complaint of the Ch. 2 Gay's Shepherd's Week (1714) 'The Dirge,' 121. Cf. Brand's Pop. Antiq. of Portland: The minister has half a guinea for every funeral sermon, an honour of which all are ambitious for their friends and children,' &c. ii. 279. Also Fielding's Jos. Andrews, p. i. ch. 16.

Sherlock On Public Worship, pt. ii. ch. 4. 4 Id.

5 Nelson's Life of Bull, 39, 366.

F. Williams' Memoirs of Atterbury, i. 266.

Stanhope,' Berriman,2 Secker,3 and a number of other Churchmen, using their best endeavours to bring about a more seemly reverence for the holy ordinance.

The taking of fees for baptism was a scandal not to be excused on any ground of prescription. This appears to have been not very unusual, and to have been done without shame and without rebuke. Probably it chiefly grew out of the above-mentioned habit of having this sacrament celebrated privately in houses.

5

Early in the century the sign of the cross in baptism was still looked upon by many with great suspicion. Even in 1773 Dean Tucker speaks of it as one of the two principal charges-the other being that of kneeling at the Eucharistmade by Dissenters against the established ritual. Objections to the use of sponsors were not so often heard. They would have been fewer still if there had been many Robert Nelsons. His letters to his godson, a young man just setting out to a merchant's office in Smyrna, are models of sound advice given by a wise, Christian-hearted man of the world. Wesley thought the office a good and expedient one; but regretted, as many other Churchmen before and since have done, the form in which some of the questions are put.7

A discussion which was started between 1710 and 1730 about lay baptism can only be very briefly noticed in a chapter which has mainly to do with the externals of public worship. Uncomfortable doubts had been aroused in some minds as to whether baptism performed in various irregular ways in the time of the Commonwealth had been indeed true Sacraments of the Gospel. Several Nonjurors, as Dodwell, Lawrence, Hickes, and Brett, declared in the negative, and many of the stronger Sacerdotalists among the conforming clergy were of the same opinion. Men, on the other hand,

1 Nichol's Lit. An. iv. 169.

2 J. Burtson's Hist. of Merch. Taylors, 1075.

3 Secker's Eight Charges, 254.

4 Gilbert Wakefield's Memoirs, 282; Miseries of the Inferior Clergy, &c., 1722, 18.

5 Dean Tucker's Works, 1772; Letter to Dr. Kippis, 23; Works, vol. i.

• Secretan's Life of Nelson.

Wesley's Works, x. 507-9.

8 Lathbury's Hist. of Nonjurors, 381-3; Life of Archbishop Sharp, i. 373-7,

of less extreme views, were much annoyed that a question should be opened upon which the judgment alike of the Primitive Church and of the Church of England seemed perfectly clear. There was, however, some doubt as to the proper course to take. Archbishop Tenison, Burnet, and other bishops, submitted to Convocation a declaration on the subject for the quieting of doubts and scruples.' Some members of the Upper House declined to sign it: they entirely agreed with it, they said, in substance, but were afraid of encouraging irregularities. In the Lower House this opinion was more strongly expressed, and the declaration was set aside so emphatically as to give some countenance to the belief that the majority of the assembly denied the validity of lay baptisms, and, in fact, of baptisms by persons not episcopally ordained.' It appears, however, from a letter of Atterbury, who was then prolocutor of the House, that this was not the case. The general wish, he assured Trelawney, was to declare nothing at all concerning it.'2 In any case, as the question was distinctly forced on their consideration, such reticence was not altogether creditable to the candour of the body.

In the latter part of the seventeenth and through the earlier years of the eighteenth century, we find earnest Churchmen of all opinions sorely lamenting the comparative disuse of the old custom of catechizing on Sunday afternoons. Five successive archbishops of Canterbury-Sheldon, Sancroft, Tillotson, Tenison, and Wake-however widely their opinions might differ on some points relating to the edification of the Church, were cordially agreed in this.3 Sherlock, Kettlewell, Bull, Beveridge, Sharp, Fleetwood, may be mentioned as others, who both by precept and example insisted upon its importance. After Bishop Frampton's inability to take the oaths had caused his deprivation, the one public

ii. 27; Fleetwood's Judgment of the Ch. of E. in the Case of Lay Bapt. 1712Works, 515; Nichol's Lit. An. iv. 228; Hunt, Rel. Th. in E. iii. 49; Perry's Hist. of the Ch. of E. iii. 253; Whiston's Argument, &c. 1714, 3.

1 E. Calamy's Hist. Acct. of my own Life, ii. 238. Calamy, notwithstanding his general friendliness towards the English Church, naturally expressed himself on this occasion with considerable warmth and indignation.

2 F. Williams' Life of F. Atterbury, i. 175.

8 J. Nichol's Lit. Anecd. i. 475; Tillotson's Works, iii. 514-16.