Position of CHAPTER XVIII CHURCH LIFE (1660-1714) THERE is no such great dividing-line in the fifty years that followed the Restoration as in the half century that preceded it. It was the wars that changed England. When the Church they were over, and Church and king had their own again, the clergy soon settled down to their duties, and the external business of the Church went on, with no striking changes or important reforms, till a new era began with the Hanoverian kings. at the Restoration. It will be the object of this chapter to collect, from the documents and histories of the time, scattered instances of the social position of the Church and the clergy, of the nature of church customs and usages, and the outward expression of spiritual and devotional life among the laity. The Restoration period was notoriously an age of great men in the Church. Jeremy Taylor, Pearson, South, Barrow, Stillingfleet, Bull, Burnet, and Henry Wharton, are names which stand for divers and splendid qualities. Something has already been said of them; and they are a small selection indeed from the notable men who have left memorials of their piety and scholarship. Ichabod, 1663. But it may be that the work of these great men is to be regarded as altogether exceptional. This at least may be argued. In Ichabod, or the Five Groans of the Church, 1663, the writer (probably Ken) observed that the children of the Church were discontented, the government complained of, the ordinances neglected, the ministers despised, the peace disturbed, the safety endangered. CHAP. XVIII POVERTY OF THE CLERGY 321 After a vindication of the discipline and orders of the Church, and a distinct assertion of the Apostolical succession as the foundation, he speaks of the number of young ministers now ordained, often unsettled, rash and inexperienced, some even men expelled from college, many unlearned. Four hundred and twenty-six tradesmen who, "having intruded in former years into the sacred calling of a minister, are now ordained into it,” are but part of those who accepted ordination at the Restoration settlement, of whom the whole number is 1342; and their adhesion is due not to the conscience of the Church's principles, but to the prosperity of her cause. And the morals of such men, too, cause scandal, and the simony, the pluralities, the non-residence, and the curates whom the non-resident clergy employ: "I do not know by what law of God or man a clergyman may turn his tithe to private advantage any more than a layman." He calculates that out of 12,000 Church livings, about 3000 are impropriated, and 4165 sinecures or "non-resident" livings. It is clear that the measures of the Parliamentary Committee under the Commonwealth had been ineffectual, and the need for the purchase of impropriations, which Laud and Charles I. had at heart, still remained—and was to remain-pressing. In 1680 was of the clergy. The poverty of the clergy was notorious. The subject of clerical incomes naturally aroused attention after the disasters of the war. The Dolben Papers contain a list of the clergy of England and their incomes. published a Book of the Valuations of all the Ecclesiastical Preferments in England and Wales, estimating their liability to tithes. In 1685 a translation of the Frenchman Simon's book on Ecclesiastical Revenues was published in London. The evidence that can be collected shows the life of privation which many of the parish priests must have undergone. The moral as well as the material effects of the Civil War were felt severely, and not less the effects of the relaxed morality of the Restoration. In Lee's Life of Kettlewell a gloomy account is given of the general standard of clerical performance. The retirement of the nonjurors had led to the appointment of inferior men, who had every temptation to slackness. A notable decrease in the daily services followed, and the weekly celebration of Y 66 the holy communion "was now much unfrequented in comparison of what it had been." The cathedral statutes fell into neglect, and preparation for baptism and the holy communion was practically abandoned. Burnet admits that public morals much deteriorated and disbelief in revealed religion spread. "The nation," he writes of the period of the Revolution, was falling under a general corruption both as to morals and principles "; and Bentley, in his Boyle Lectures, took up the tale against the philosophy of Hobbes as at the root of the evil, declaring that "of this the taverns and coffee-houses, nay, Westminster Hall and the very churches, were full.” Thus it would seem that the public morals reflected the decline in the influence of the clergy; but it is hazardous to assert that this was the case. Undoubtedly the poverty of the clergy remained to the end of the period a serious distress. Swift declares that a reader in a London church would receive £20 a year, a lecturer in a town £60, a chaplain £30, and vails or perquisites; while country incumbents would receive from £20 to £60, and, curates rarely more than £30. Some of these stipends were not low, but the literature of the time shows that the majority of them were thought not to afford a living. From this it might be expected that the clergy were not drawn from a high social class; and indeed, the literature of the period is full of jests at the poor. men who took holy orders, and remained in a condition little above that of domestic service. Rising from the condition wittily satirised in a squib of the time, when the young servitor was glad of anything he could pick up, a humble lad could find his way into the ministry of the Church. "I am a rising lad, mother, and have gott prefarment in college allready, for our sextoun beeing gonn intoo Heryfordshear has left mee his depoty, which is a very good place," the letter begins; and it concludes with believing he shall do very well "if you wull but send me t'other crowne." It was not to be wondered at if some attained no higher dignity than that expressed in Oldham's famous lines: Their social position. Diet, an horse, and thirty pounds a year, Besides th' advantage of his lordship's ear, Are things that in a youngster's sense sounds great. XVIII EACHARD'S “CONTEMPT OF THE CLERGY" 323 Little the unexperienced wretch doth know Who though in silken scarf and cassock drest When dinner calls, the implement must wait, If he be deign'd the honour to sit down. 1670. From descriptions such as this, from a pamphlet called The Character of a Whig under several Denominations, 1700, and from Eachard's Grounds and Occasions of the Eachard's Contempt of the Clergy and Religion, 1670, a famous Grounds of the Contempt picture of the social position of the clerical estate of the Clergy, under the later Stewarts has been drawn. But it bears small resemblance to the truth. Eachard complains, from the standing-point of a university don, of the ignorance of some of the clergy and the extreme poverty of others; and as a cause of the latter alleges the "infinite number that are in holy orders," the eagerness and ambition which leads them into the profession, and the ease of procuring men for £25 or £30 a year, and the disproportionate revenues of the bishops. Steele, in the Tatler (1710), mocks at the exclusion of the clergy from the later courses of the dinner, and asks what a Roman Catholic priest would think of such treatment? But all this, and the mirth of the playhouses, was admittedly an exaggeration. Never was the class more respected. Socially, in the later seventeenth century the clergy probably stood higher than ever before that period. Fielding, Fane, Finch, Mountague, Compton, Grenville, Berkeley, Crewe, and Trelawney are among the ancient and honourable names which a contemporary notes among the clergy; and another added, "as for the gentry, there are not many good families in England but either have or have had a clergyman in them." The aspersions on the marriages of the clergy-the statement that their wives were often waiting-maids, or even cast-off mistresses of their patrons-have been disproved by a careful investigation. A sermon of Sprat's in 1678 concludes with a statement which, while eulogising the married state, appears to show that the material condition of the clergy was improving. "As more clergymen were impoverished by the calamities of the late war and oppression of the Church and State than ever in the like space before, so I think it may be said without envy that more clergymen or their heirs than ever in one time before, since they were allowed marriage, have been brought to a plentiful and prosperous condition by his Majesty's, and with him the Church's, most happy restoration"; and the same writer, when Bishop of Rochester, speaks of clerical learning and the clergy's libraries in a manner which implies the sufficiency of each. None the less, the smallness of the revenues of the clergy cannot be denied; even dignitaries like Grenville, who kept up the old hospitality, soon found themselves in difficulties; and it is on that, not on want of learning, breeding, or character, that the real weakness of their position must be allowed to rest. There was no great division between town and country clergy-certainly no greater one than between town and country gentry. Popular feeling was very largely directed by their writings, and their intervention in politics, as in the case of the seven bishops or that of Sacheverell, was often decisive. The Clergy The Clergyman's Vade Mecum, a work written by John Johnson of Cranbrook, is full of interesting details as to the position, legal, and to some extent social, of the man's Vade clergy at the close of the seventeenth century. Its Mecum. success for it was very frequently reprinted-shows the importance that attached to questions relating to the clerical estate. On the whole, it may be said that the social standing of the clergy, far from declining, advanced during the period under review; and of their influence there are many remarkable instances. Among them may perhaps be noted the extraordinary interest which was aroused by the sermons of the day. The publication of sermons was found lucrative both by preacher and printer. In spite of length-Barrow once preached for three hours and a half on charity before the Lord Mayor; of elaboration-till Tillotson introduced popularity a simpler style; of facetiousness-South's sermons of sermons. kept his congregation in constant mirth; and of the difficulties of extemporary preaching, which Burnet and others began to encourage, the popularity of sermons increased rather than diminished between the days of Charles I. and Anne. The most remarkable example of this taste is the fact that after Tillotson's death two thousand five hundred guineas were The |