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to savour of either of these two extremes there was a danger of casting away also much that might have been edifying and elevating. On the one hand, ornate and frequent services and symbolism of all kinds were regarded with suspicion,' and consequently infrequent services, and especially infrequent communions, carelessness about the Church fabrics, and bad taste in the work that was done, are conspicuous among the Church abuses of the period. On the other side, fervency and vigour in preaching were regarded with suspicion, as bordering too nearly upon the habits of the hated Puritans of the Commonwealth, and a dry, dull, moralising style of sermon was the result. And, generally, this fear on both sides engendered a certain timidity and obstructiveness and want of elasticity, which prevented the Church from incorporating into her system anything which seemed to diverge one hair's breadth from the groove in which she ran.

Again, the Church was an immense engine of political power. The most able and popular statesmen could not afford to dispense with her aid. The bench of bishops formed so compact a phalanx in the Upper House of the Legislature, and the clergy could and did influence so many elections into the Lower House, that the Church had necessarily to be courted and favoured, often to the great detriment of her spiritual character.

Nor, in touching upon the general causes which impaired the efficiency of the Church during the eighteenth century, must we omit to notice the want of all synodal action. There may be different opinions as to the wisdom or otherwise of the indefinite prorogation of Convocation, as it existed in the early years of the eighteenth century. That it was the scene of unseemly disputes, and altogether a turbulent element in the Constitution, when the Ministry of George I. thought good to

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1 A striking instance is found in the alarm created by Bishop Butler's famous Durham Charge (1751). His remark upon the neglect of the service of the Church, not only upon common days, but also upon saints' days' was cited as a proof of his attachment to the idolatrous communion of Rome, that makes much of saints, saints' days, and all the trumpery of saint worship.' See notes to the Preface by the editor of Butler's Works (Bishop Halifax, of Gloucester). On the other hand, it is said that by the High Churchmen Butler was regarded as little better than a Dissenter. See Dr. Doran's Queens of England of the House of Hanover, vol. i. p. 400.

prorogue it sine die in 1717, is not denied; but that the Church should be deprived of the privilege, which every other religious body enjoyed, of discussing in her own assembly her own affairs, was surely in itself an evil. And we must not too hastily assume that she was not then in a condition to discuss them profitably. The proceedings of the later meetings of Convocation in the eighteenth century which are best known are those which concerned subjects of violent altercation. But these were by no means the only subjects suggested for discussion.1 The re-establishing and rendering useful the office of rural deans, the regulating of marriage licences, the encouragement of charity schools, the establishment of parochial libraries, the licentiousness of the stage, protests against duelling, the want of sufficient church accommodation, the work of Christian missions both to the heathen and our own plantations-these and other thoroughly practical questions are found among the agenda of Convocation during the eighteenth century; and the mention of them suggests some of the very shortcomings with which the Church of the Hanoverian period is charged.

The causes which led to the unhappy disputes between the Upper and Lower Houses were obviously only temporary; it is surely not chimerical to assume that time and a change of circumstances would have brought about a better understanding between the bishops and the inferior clergy, and that Convocation would have seen better days and have been instrumental in rolling away some at least of the reproaches with which the Church of the day is now loaded. To the action of Convocation in the early part of the eighteenth century the Church was indebted for at least one good work. The building and endowment of the fifty new churches in London would probably never have been effected had not Convocation stirred itself in the matter. There was ample room for similar work, of which every good Christian of every school of thought might have approved. And there were

1 Bishop Fitzgerald (Aids to Faith, Essay ii. § 7) stigmatises the impotency and turbulence of Convocation, but entirely ignores the practical agenda referred to above. See Cardwell's Synodalia, on the period.

* See the introduction to Palin's History of the Church of England from the Revolution to the Last Acts of Convocation.

* See Cardwell's Synodalia, xlii.

many occasions on which it would appear, primâ facie, that synodal deliberation might have proved of immense benefit to the Church. For instance, on that very important, but at the time most perplexing, question,' How should the Church deal with the irregular but most valuable efforts of the Wesleys and Whitefield and their fellow-labourers?' it would have been most desirable for the clergy to have taken counsel together in their own proper assembly. As it was, the bishops had to deal with this new phase of spiritual life entirely on their own responsibility. They had no opportunity of consulting with their brethren on the bench, or even with the clergy in their dioceses; for not only was the voice of Convocation hushed, but diocesan synods and ruridecanal chapters had also fallen into abeyance. The want of such consultation is conspicuous in the doubt and perplexity which evidently distracted the minds both of the bishops and many of the clergy when they had to face the earlier phenomena of the Methodist movement.

There is yet another element which must be touched upon in noting the general causes of the low estate of the Church of the eighteenth century; it is what Germans would call the Zeitgeist, and is well described by a thoughtful writer of the present day. He writes of the England of the period, 'The elimination from public and religious life of the whole element of poetry, of all that softens, elevates, and withdraws human beings from themselves, could not fail to exercise a very injurious influence on the national character, and a still worse influence on the national literature,'' and, it may be added, a yet worse influence on the National Church. The eighteenth century was essentially a prosaic age in every department of life-in politics, in philosophy, and in religion. It was the age of 'reason,' the age of 'common sense,' the age of 'experience,' the age of 'enquiry,' but not the age of sweetness and light.' As an illustration of the influence of this grovelling tendency let us compare two classes of Churchmen as they were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. In both centuries there were what would now be called High Churchmen ;' but what a contrast

1 Fortnightly Review, December 1869, Pope's 'Essay on Man,' by T. E. Keppel.

there is between those of the later and those of the earlier period. Compare such men as Andrewes and Hammond with such men as Sacheverell and Swift, and the difference will be apparent. To the former, Churchmanship meant a lofty conception of the English as a branch of the great Church Catholic-a spiritual society with which politics had only an accidental and secondary connection. To the latter, the political aspect of High Churchmanship was predominant. The Church, in their view of it, was not so much a spiritual society as a political establishment, whose privileges were to be jealously guarded.' Or take, again, the connection between the Church and the reigning monarch. There was what may be termed a court religion of the seventeenth as well as of the eighteenth century. But how different the two! The spirit of the earlier period was a loftier, a more romantic, a less selfish, though possibly a more dangerous spirit than that of the later era. All that is expressed in the once familiar terms 'non-resistance,' ' passive obedience,' 'Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right,' and so forth, was quite alien to the spirit of the eighteenth century.

It will thus be seen that there were many general causes at work which tended to debase the Church during the period which comes under our consideration. No doubt some that have been mentioned were symptoms as well as causes of the disease; but, in so far as they were causes, they must be fully taken into account before we condemn indiscriminately the clergy whose lot it was to live in an age when circumstances were so little conducive to the development of the higher spiritual life, or to the carrying out of the Church's proper mission to the nation. It is extremely difficult for any man to rise above the spirit of his age. He who can do so is a spiritual hero. But it is not given to everyone to reach the heroic standard; and it surely does not follow that because a man cannot be a hero he must therefore be a bad man.

Bearing these cautions in mind, we may now proceed to

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In this sense Lord Bolingbroke called himself a High Churchman. My next,' he writes to Swift, shall be as long as one of Dr. Manton's sermons, who taught my youth to yawn and prepared me to be a High Churchman, that I might never hear him nor read him more.'-Letter quoted in Jesse's Court of England, 1688-1760, ii. 89. Bolingbroke would hardly have ventured to write thus to a High Churchman of the old type.

consider some of the more flagrant abuses, the existence of which has affixed a stigma, not altogether undeserved, upon the English Church of the eighteenth century.

One of the worst of these abuses-worst both in itself and also as the fruitful source of many others-was the glaring evil of pluralities and non-residence, an evil which, in spite of occasional protests, existed during the whole of the century, and which attained to such a height that Bishop Horsley, in his charge to the diocese of Rochester in 1800, declared that 'the evil of non-residence was grown to so gigantic a size that a remedy in one way or another could be at no great distance.' The abuse attracted attention at quite an early period in the eighteenth century, and was, in fact, inherited from a still earlier generation. In the conclusion to the History of His Own Times,' Bishop Burnet passes some severe but well-deserved strictures on the scandalous practices of non-residence and pluralities, which are sheltered by so many colours of law among us.' 'This,' he proceeds, 'is so shameful a profanation of holy things that it ought to be treated with detestation and horror. Do such men think on the vows they made on their ordination, on the rules in the Scriptures, or on the nature of their function, or that it is a cure of souls? How long, how long shall this be the peculiar disgrace of our Church, which, for aught I know, is the only Church in the world that tolerates it?' This was written in 1708, though it was not published until after the writer's death in 1715. Bishop Burnet could utter this protest with a clear conscience; for, whatever his faults may have been, he was scrupulously conscientious in the matter of residing in and attending to the duties of his diocese. He felt so strongly upon these points that when he was appointed preceptor to the young Duke of Gloucester he wished to resign his bishopric, 'thinking the discharge of this duty to be inconsistent with his duties to his diocese; and he accepted the office at last only on the condition that the Prince should reside at Windsor, which was then within the diocese of Salisbury, and that he himself should be allowed ten weeks annually to visit his diocese.'

Unhappily the bishops of the next generation could not remonstrate against the evil with the same good grace,

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