satirical writer of free thoughts about men and manners observes, If the esquire happen to be wrong-headed, illiterate, sottish, or profane, what can the poor parson do? Can there be agreement betwixt virtue and vice? any communion betwixt light and darkness? If they should ever descend so low as to invite the poor vicar from his solitude, soup-maigre, and match-light, to make one of a party of frolic and madness; and he should refuse the invitation, or come awkwardly to it; if he should refuse to go to the utmost stretch of intemperance, or disrelish the many ungracious jokes which are always cracked over the doctor; it gives a sort of check to the merriment, and throws a damp upon the spirits of the good company; they immediately treat him with that indifference and contempt (if not with rudeness and ill manners) as may sufficiently discourage him from ever venturing among them again. From that moment he has a mark of contempt put upon him, as a sour, morose, ill-natured fellow.'

VOL. II.

T

CHAPTER VI.

HONOUR AND CONTEMPT OF THE CLERGY.

READERS of the preceding chapters do not require to be

of the Reformation was a very great diminution of the dignity and social influence of the clerical order. The regulars were the aristocratic section of the national hierarchy; and by the revolution which dissolved the colleges of these superior clergy, and having confiscated their estates turned them adrift on the world to subsist on small annuities, or reduced them into the ranks of the inadequately beneficed seculars, the priesthood lost its personal connexions with the highest families of the land, and found itself hated and despised by the members of those powerful and patrician classes, in which the rupture with Rome and subsequent ecclesiastical changes had been most productive of humiliation and pecuniary loss.

The Catholic aristocracy, who before the Reformation had looked down upon the parochial clergy as a plebeian class, entertained no disposition to regard them more favourably, when they added the sin of heresy to the disqualifications of ignoble lineage. Again, the Protestant aristocracy-many of whom had been impelled to join the ranks of the reformers by a desire to deprive the ecclesiastics of their excessive wealth and power were sharers in the disdain which the Catholic gentry cherished for the plebeian seculars, and were not likely to countenance any policy that promised to reinvest the clerical order with dangerous influence and inordinate riches. Thus despised. on the one hand by the aristocracy, who disdained their domestic humility and abhorred their heresy, and coldly regarded on the other hand by the aristocracy, who, whilst openly defending the

new religious doctrine, secretly chuckled over the impoverishment and social abasement of its official teachers, the reformed clergy had to endure for many days the scornful animosity of their fervent foes and the disdainful pity of their lukewarm friends. Stripped of its finest endowments the clerical profession ceased, to a great extent, to be a vocation suitable to well-born and ambitious youth. Whilst the younger sons of the superior Catholic families never for a moment thought of taking orders. and becoming candidates for the modest preferments of what they deemed an heretical establishment, the younger sons of the higher Protestant gentry were seldom drawn within the lines of a clergy whose most fortunate members, beneath the episcopal grade, were very needy and humble persons in comparison with the abbots and regular priests of past time.

Moreover, whilst the reformed church was loathed by the Catholics as an unspeakably wicked contrivance, it was distrusted and lightly esteemed by its Elizabethan supporters as a novelty, an experiment, a compromise which might work well, but very probably would prove a failure. Reflecting with pious pride and gratitude on the unbroken line of our episcopal ordinations, the Anglican churchman of the present day in his ecclesiastical retrospect passes lightly over the convulsions of the Reformation period, and refuses to regard his church as severed from the Holy Catholic organization. To his mind, the sixteenth century, instead of witnessing the creation or establishment of his church, beheld only its reformation, and by ' reformation' he means a process that, without touching the spiritual foundations or everlasting truths of the Church, merely relieved it of certain superficial errors and imperfections, which will in time be removed from all other parts of the sacred and universal Church of which the Anglican establishment is an inseparable portion. Whether he is right in this view it is my purpose neither to affirm nor inquire; but they err greatly who imagine that any numerous section of the reformers of the sixteenth century took the same view of the grand religious revolt against the Papacy. Alike by the majority of those who opposed, and the majority of those who promoted it, the movement known as 'the Reformation' was regarded as a movemeut that aimed at the destruction of an

old church and the creation of a new one. The ecclesiastical directors of the change were careful to preserve the chain of episcopal connexion between the Protestant clergy and Catholic hierarchy; but in thus jealously maintaining the Apostolic succession, and providing that no enemy of the reformed body should be justified in denying its descent from the Catholic church, the Anglican bishops took thought for a matter in which, however important it was to the clerical mind, the laity felt scarcely any concern. And when the revolution was perfected, our ancestors of the laity, alike Protestant and Catholic, concurred in regarding the ecclesiastical settlement, which was one of its chief results, as a new thing.

Yet, further;-besides its newness, the reformed church laboured under the disadvantage of apparent instability. Long after Elizabeth had ascended the throne, it was only a minority of her subjects who were strongly confident or cordially hopeful that the Church would endure. Whilst the Catholics regarded it as a new offence against the Almighty, who would not suffer Himself to be mocked by it for any long time, the Puritans denounced it as a compromise between superstition and truth, which would speedily pass away and leave room for a purely evangelical structure. Nor were its most resolute upholders at all sanguine that it would endure. Was it credible, they asked, that so fair a ship would outlive the hurricane caused by two mighty winds blowing from directly opposite points of the compass? Henry the Eighth had found himself compelled to make change after change in his ecclesiastical polity. Edward the Sixth's church had been swept away by the Marian reaction. Would Elizabeth's church be more durable? At any moment she might fall by the assassin's knife or natural death; in which case the Catholics would regain the ascendancy,-and the fate of the new church would fulfil the prophecies of Rome and Geneva.

So long as the Church had the appearance of newness and instability, and had no funds for the enrichment of an ambitious hierarchy, the clerical profession had no attractions for men of birth and station, and was adopted by few persons of other than obscure parentage. Now and then the cadet of a noble but fallen family took orders in Elizabeth's church; but

usually the gentle younger sons of her reign preferred to push their fortunes at the bar, in military service, or in maritime adventure, and to leave for candidates of inferior condition the honours of an ecclesiastical system which perhaps would not outlive a generation. Most of the Queen's bishops and ecclesiastical dignitaries were persons of decidedly humble extraction; and even the best descended of them bore names unknown in history or to the majority of the people.

The records of a time, rife with animosities amongst churchmen who abused each other with equal malignity and violence, might be quoted unjustly to prove that the clergy of the later part of the sixteenth century were a mere rabble of ignorant and base-born adventurers. But allowance must be made for the habit of slander which seems to have infected every class of society during the Reformation period. Bishop Bonner was stated to have been the illegitimate son of a dissolute priest, and to have begotten sons whose birth was as shameful as his own ; but whilst it is doubtful whether he had illegitimate issue, it is certain that he was the lawful son of a poor man who lived on a small patch of land in Gloucestershire. Gardyner of Winchester, Tonstal of Durham, Oglethorpe of Carlisle, were also said to have laboured under the stain of shameful birth, at a time when illegitimacy was scorned by good society far more than it is now-a-days. If Catholic annalists may be trusted, the earlier Anglican bishops were a most unsavoury class of mortals, and the earlier rectors of the reformed church were, for the most part, illiterate mechanics. According to eminent bishops of the Elizabethan church, the Puritan divines were untaught, shallow, dirty fellows. The extravagance and excess of the abuse, which the divines of the various parties hurled at their opponents, have the effect of making the cautious reader put no reliance whatever on the statements of the vituperators when there is the slightest ground for suspecting them to be under the influence of personal enmity or factious spite.

Under Elizabeth, episcopacy suffered greatly in popular esteem from the obscure origin of the prelates; and in the seventeenth century, when bishops grew rapidly in power and arrogance, there is conclusive evidence that they smarted under a consciousness of their ancestral inferiority to the nobles and