Throughout the eighteenth century the old laws which required due attendance on public worship were still in force. They were, in fact, formally confirmed in the thirty-first year of George the Third;[1051] and however much they had fallen into neglect, they were not removed from the statute-book till the ninth and tenth years of the present reign.[1052] We are told, however, that when the Toleration Act was passed in 1689, by one of the chief provisions of which persons who frequented a legal dissenting congregation were excused from all penalties for not coming to church, there was a general and observable falling off in the attendance at divine worship.[1053] Hitherto congregations had been swelled by numbers who went for no better reason than because it was the established rule of the realm that they must go. Henceforward, mistaken or not, it was the popular impression that people 'had full liberty to go to church or stay away; and the services were much deserted in favour of the ale-houses.'[1054] At the beginning, however, of the eighteenth century, the churches were once again fuller than they had been for some time previously. Dissent was at that time thoroughly unpopular; and the practice of occasional conformity brought a considerable number of moderate Dissenters into church. It was observed that churches in London which once had been very thinly attended now had overflowing congregations.[1055] Unfortunately, this revival of church attendance was not long-lived. Year after year it continued to fall off, until it had become in many parts of the country deplorably small. In 1738 Secker deplored the 'greatly increased disregard to public worship.'[1056] It was never neglected in England so much as during the corresponding period in Germany. Even in the worst of times, as a modern writer has truly observed, the average Englishman never failed to acknowledge that attendance at church or chapel was his duty.[1057] Only it was a duty which, as time went on, was continually less regarded alike in the upper and lower grades of society. Bishop Newton, speaking in 1768 of Mr. Grenville, evidently regarded his 'regularly attending the service of the church every Sunday morning, even while he was in the highest offices,' as something altogether exceptional in a Minister of State.[1058] His namesake, John Newton, the well-known writer of 'Cardiphonia' and the 'Olney Hymns,' says that when he was Rector of St. Mary, Woolnoth, in London, few of his wealthy parishioners came to church.[1059] Religious reformers, towards the end of the century, awoke with alarm to the perception of serious evil, betokened by the general thinness of congregations. The migration of population from the centre of London to its suburbs had already set in; but the following assertion was sufficiently startling nevertheless. 'The amazing and afflictive desertion of all our churches is a fact beyond doubt or dispute. In the heart of the city of London, in its noblest edifices, on the Lord's day, repeated instances have been known that a single individual hath not attended the divine service.'[1060] Another writer observes, in similar language, that 'the greater part of our churches, particularly in the metropolis, present a most unedifying and afflicting spectacle to the eyes of the sincere, unenthusiastic Christian.' 'Attendance was almost everywhere,' he adds, 'most shamefully small.'[1061] Some of the remoter parts of England seemed to be absolutely in danger of relapsing into literal heathenism. Hannah More said, in a letter to John Newton (1796), that in one parish in her neighbourhood, 'of nearly two hundred children, many of them grown up, hardly any had ever seen the inside of a church since they were christened. I cannot tell you the avidity with which the Scriptures were received by many of these poor creatures.'[1062] But things had indeed come to a pass in the country district where this indefatigable lady pursued her Christian labour. 'We have in this neighbourhood thirteen adjoining parishes without so much as even a resident curate.'[1063] Of such villages she might well add, that they 'are in Pagan darkness, and upon many of them scarcely a ray of Christianity has shone. I speak from the most minute and diligent examination.'[1064] No doubt the locality of which she spoke was suffering under very exceptional neglect; but somewhat similar instances could have been produced in other parts of England. A hundred years earlier, Ralph Thoresby, travelling in Yorkshire, had expressed his amazement that 'on the Lord's Day we rode from church to church and found four towns without sermon or prayers.'[1065] This is scarcely the place to enter further into the degree of spiritual destitution which prevailed in many parts of England, and into the causes which brought it about. It may be enough here to remark that the re-quickening of religious activity in the Church of England, mainly through the labours of clergy and laymen of the Evangelical school, came none too soon.

It should be added that, owing mainly to the thoroughly bad system of bundling three or four poor livings together, in order to provide respectable maintenance for a clergyman, it was very common in country places to have only one service on the Sunday. Nothing could be more likely than this to promote laxity of attendance at divine worship.

Dean Sherlock, in a treatise upon religious assemblies published by him in 1681, remarked severely upon the unseemly behaviour which was constantly to be seen in church—the looking about, the whispering, the talking, the laughing, the deliberate reclining for sleep. Whether it had arisen out of contempt for all the externals of worship, or whether it were owing rather to a wild fear of any semblance of fanaticism or of hypocrisy, this rude and slovenly conduct had come, he said, to a great height, and brought great scandal upon our worship. The essayists of Queen Anne's reign made a steady and laudable effort to shame people out of these indecorous ways. The 'Spectator' constantly recurs to the subject. At one time it is the Starer who comes in for his reprobation. The Starer posts himself upon a hassock, and from this point of eminence impertinently scrutinises the congregation, and puts the ladies to the blush.[1066] In another paper he represents an Indian chief describing his visit to a London church. There is a tradition, the illustrious visitor says, that the building had been originally designed for devotion, but there was very little trace of this remaining. Certainly there was a man in black, mounted above the rest, and uttering something with a good deal of vehemence. But people were not listening; they were most of them bowing and curtseying to one another.[1067] Or a distinguished Dissenter came to church. 'After the service was over, he declared he was very well satisfied with the little ceremony which was used towards God Almighty, but at the same time he feared he was not well bred enough to be a convert.'[1068]

Addison, however, and his fellow-writers, who might be abundantly quoted to a similar effect, succeeded in making their readers more sensible than they had been of the impropriety of all such conduct. During the latter half of the century, the careless and undevout could no longer have ventured, without fear of censure, on the irreverent familiarities in church which they could have freely indulged in for the first twenty years of it.[1069]

Polwhele, remarks that in Truro Church, about the year 1800, he had seen several people sitting with their hats on,[1070] as they might have done at Geneva, or in the time of the older Puritans. This, however, was something wholly exceptional at that date. One of the things which had displeased English Churchmen in William the Third was this Dutch habit. He so far yielded to their feeling as to uncover during the prayers, but put on his hat again for the sermon.[1071] A minute in the Representation of the Lower House of Convocation, during their session of 1701,[1072] shows that this irreverent custom was then not very unfrequent. After all, this was but a very little matter as compared with gross desecrations such as happened here and there in remote country places during the last ten years of the preceding century. 'Amongst the Lambeth archives is a very long letter by Edmund Bowerman, vicar of Codrington, who gives a curious account of his parish. The people played cards on the communion table; and when they met to choose churchwardens, sat with their hats on, smoking and drinking, the clerk gravely saying, with a pipe in his mouth, that such had been the practice for the last sixty years.'[1073] This was in 1692. In 1693, Queen Mary wrote to Dean Hooper that she had been to Canterbury Cathedral for the Sunday morning service, and in the afternoon went to a parish church. 'She heard there a very good sermon, but she thought herself in a Dutch church, for the people stood on the communion table to look at her.'[1074]

Throughout the eighteenth century, a variety of secular matters used to be published, sometimes by custom and sometimes by law, during the time of divine service. In a general ignorance of letters, when a paper on the church door would have been an almost useless form, such notices were to a great extent almost necessary. But in themselves they were ill becoming the place and time; and a statute passed in the first year of our present sovereign has now made them illegal.[1075] The publication just before the sermon of poor-rate assessment, and of days of appeal in matters of house or window tax,[1076] must often have had a very distracting effect upon ratepayers who otherwise might have listened calmly to the arguments and admonitions of their pastor. John Johnson, writing in 1709, remarked with much truth that it was quite scandalous for hue-and-cries, and enquiries after lost goods, to be published in church.[1077] Even in our own generation. Mr. Beresford Hope, telling what he himself remembers, records how in the church he frequented as a boy, the clerk would make such announcements after the repeating of the Nicene Creed, or of meetings at the town hall of the executors of a late duke.[1078]

It was chiefly in the earlier part of the period that an observer visiting one church after another would have noticed the great differences in points of order. Such departures from uniformity were slight as compared to what they had been in the reigns of Elizabeth or Charles the First, yet were sufficient to arouse considerable uneasiness in the minds of many friends of the Church, as well as to point many sarcasms from some of its opponents. There were some special reasons for disquietude in those who feared to diverge a hand-breadth from the established rule. Although since the Restoration, the Church of England was undoubtedly popular, and had acquired, out of the very troubles through which she had passed, a venerable and well-tried aspect, there was, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, a wide-spread feeling of instability both in ecclesiastical and political matters, to an extent no longer easy to be realised. No one felt sure what Romish and Jacobite machinations might not yet effect. For if the Stuarts remounted the throne, Rome might yet recover ascendancy. The Protestantism of the country was not yet absolutely secure. And therefore many Churchmen who, if they consulted their feelings only, would have been thoroughly in accord with the Laudean divines in their love of a more ornate ritual, were content to stand fast by such simple ceremonies as were everywhere acknowledged to be the rule. However much they might have a right to claim as their legitimate due usages which their rubrics seemed to authorise, and which were scarcely unfrequent even in the days of Heylyn and Cosin, they were not disposed to insist upon what would in their day be considered as innovations in the direction of Rome. Better to widen that breach rather than in any way to lessen it. So, too, with men of a different tone of mind, who, so far as their own tastes went, disliked all ceremonial and thought it rather an impediment than a help to devotion, and who would have been glad if the Church of England had approximated more closely to the habits of Presbyterians and Independents. They, too, in the early part of the last century felt, for the most part, they must be cautious, if they would be loyal to the communion to which they had yielded allegiance. If they indulged in Presbyterian fancies, they might perchance bring in the Presbyterians, an exchange which they were not the least prepared to make. The Dutch propensities of William, the ratification of Scotch Presbyterianism in the reign of Anne, the frequent alarm cry of Church in danger, made it seem quite possible that if civil dissensions should arise, Presbyterianism 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.[1079] 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.[1080] 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 at this day.'[1081] Bishop Gibson, the learned author of the 'Codex Juris Ecclesiastici' (1711), although he marked the rubric as practically obsolete, steadily maintained that legally the ornaments of ministers in performing Divine Service were the same as they had been in the earlier Liturgy.[1082] In Charles I.'s reign the rubric had been by no means obsolete. But after the Restoration the use of the more ornate vestments was not revived. Even the cope, though prescribed for use as an Eucharistic vestment in cathedrals and collegiate churches, had become almost obsolete. Norwich, Westminster, and Durham seem to have been the only exceptions. At Norwich, however, the cope, presented by the High Sheriff of Norfolk in the place of one that had been burnt during the Civil War,[1083] does not appear to have been much worn. Those at Westminster were reserved for great state occasions, such as Coronations and Royal funerals.[1084] It was only at Durham that the cope was constantly used on all festival days. Defoe wrote in 1727 that they were still worn by some of the residents, and he then described them as 'rich with embroidery and embossed work of silver, that indeed it was a kind of load to stand under them.'[1085] A story is sometimes told of Warburton, when Prebendary of Durham in 1759, throwing off his cope in a pet, and never wearing it again, because it disturbed his wig.[1086] Their use does not seem to have been totally discontinued until 1784.[1087]

The surplice was of course, throughout the period, the 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,'[1088] 'a rag of the whore of Babylon,'[1089] a 'habit of the priests of Isis.'[1090] 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.[1091] 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).'[1092] 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,'[1093] but simply from its being the only vestment provided by the parish. Too frequently it betrayed in its appearance, 'dirty and contemptible with age,'[1094] 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.[1095] Such irregularities appear, however, to have been nearly discontinued in Queen Anne's time.[1096] About 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.[1097]

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 use. 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.'[1098]

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.'[1099] 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.[1100] 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.'[1101]

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.[1102] 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,'[1103] 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 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.[1104] 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')[1105] 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.[1106] 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.[1107] 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.[1108] The canonical skull-cap was next supplanted—not without much scandal to persons of grave and staid habit—by the fashionable peruke.[1109] There is a letter from the Duke of Monmouth, then Chancellor of Cambridge, to the Vice-Chancellor and University, October 8, 1674, in which this innovation is severely condemned.[1110] A few years later, Archbishop Tillotson himself set the example of wearing the obnoxious article.[1111] Many country incumbents not only dropped all observance of the old canonical regulations, but lowered the social character of their profession by making themselves undistinguishable in outward appearance from farmers or common graziers. South spoke of this in one of his sermons, preached towards the end of William III.'s reign.[1112] So also did Swift in 1731.[1113] The Dean, however, himself seems to have been a glaring offender against that sobriety of garb which befits a clergyman. In his journal to Stella, he speaks in one place of wearing 'a light camlet, faced with red velvet and silver buckles.'[1114] Of course eccentricities which Dean Swift allowed himself must not be taken as examples of what others ventured upon. But carelessness in all such matters went on increasing till about the seventh decade of the century. After that time a number of remonstrances and protests may be found against the brown coats, the plaid or white waistcoats, the white stockings, the leathern breeches, the scratch wigs, and so forth, in which clerical fops on the one hand, and clerical slovens on the other, were often wont to appear. A writer at the very end of the century pointed his remarks on the subject by calling the attention of his brother clergy to the distinctly anti-Christian purpose which had animated the French Convention in their suppression of the clerical habit.[1115]

If a modern Churchman could be carried back to the days of Queen Anne, and were at Church while service was going on, his eye would probably be caught by people standing up where he had been accustomed to see them sitting, and sitting down when, in our congregations, every one would be standing up. Some people, following the common custom of the Puritans, stood during the prayers.[1116] Some, on the other hand, sat during the creed.[1117] In both these cases there was plain neglect of the rubric. Where the Prayer-book was silent, uncertainty and variation of usage were more reasonable. Thus some stood at the Epistle, as well as at the Gospel,[1118] and some whenever the second lesson was from one of the Evangelists.[1119] What Cowper calls the 'divorce of knees from hassocks,' was perhaps not so frequent then as now.[1120] In pictures of church interiors of that date, the congregation is generally represented as really kneeling. Still, it was much too frequent, and quite fell in with the careless, self-indulgent habits of the time. Before the middle of the century it had become very general. In one of the papers of the 'Tatler,' we find there were some who neither stood nor knelt, but remained lazily sitting throughout the service like 'an audience at a playhouse.'[1121] Sitting while the Psalms were being sung was, notwithstanding many remonstrances, the rule rather than the exception during the earlier part of the century. The Puritan commission of 1641 had spoken of standing at the hymns as an innovation.[1122] Even Sherlock, in 1681, speaks of 'that universal practice of sitting while we sing the Psalms.'[1123] In 1717, Fleetwood speaks of standing at such times as if it were a singularity rather than otherwise.[1124] Hickes, on the other hand, writes in 1701, as if those who refused to stand at the singing of psalms and anthems were for the most part 'stiff, morose, and saturnine votists.'[1125] In fact, High Churchmen insisted on the one posture, while Low Churchmen generally preferred the other; and so the custom remained very variable, until the High Church reaction of Queen Anne's time succeeded in establishing, in this particular, a rule which was henceforth generally recognised. In 1741, Secker speaks of sitting during the singing as if, though common enough, it were still a mere careless habit.[1126]

At the beginning of the century many who had been brought up in Puritan traditions thoroughly disliked the custom of congregational responses. They called it 'a tossing of tennis balls,'[1127] and set it down as one of the points of formalism.[1128] Partly, perhaps, from a little of this sort of feeling, but far more often for no other reason than a lack of devotional spirit, that cold and most unattractive custom, which prevailed throughout the Georgian age, of making the clerk the mouthpiece of the congregation, fast gained ground. This, however, was much less general in the earlier part of the period than at its close. In Queen Anne's time there were many zealous Churchmen who both by word and example endeavoured to give a more hearty character to the public worship, and who thought that such 'unconcerned silence[1129] was a much greater evil than the risk of an occasional 'Stentor who bellowed terribly loud in the responses.'[1130] Most people are familiar with the paper in the 'Spectator,' which describes Sir Roger de Coverley at church, and his patriarchal care that his tenants and dependents should all have prayer-books, that they might duly take their part in the service.[1131]

The period which immediately followed the Revolution of 1689 was not one when minor questions of ritual, upon which there was difference of opinion between the two principal parties in the English Church, were likely to rest in peace. Turning eastward at the creeds was a case in point. There was quite a literature upon the subject. Many Low Churchmen, among whom may be mentioned Asplin, Hoadly, and Lord Chancellor King, contended that it was a papal or pagan superstition which ought to be wholly discontinued. The High Church writers, such as Cave, Meade, Bingham, Smallbroke, Whiston, Wesley, and Bisse, answered that it was not only the universal custom in the primitive Church, but edifying and impressive in itself as symbolising unity in the faith, hope of resurrection, and expectation of our Saviour's coming. The usage was very generally maintained.

The injunction of the 17th Canon, to bow with reverence when the name of the Lord Jesus is mentioned in time of divine service, was observed much as now. In the recital of the Creed it was the general custom. At other times, High Churchmen were for the most part careful to observe the practice,[1132] and Low Churchmen did not. Later in the century the canon was probably observed much more generally in country villages than among town congregations. Bisse observed that it was a primitive usage which ought least of all to be dropped at a time when Arian opinions were abroad.[1133]

At the close of the seventeenth century we find South and others bitterly complaining of the liberties taken with the Prayer-book by some of the 'Moderate' clergy. Some prayers, it appears, were omitted, and some were shortened, and in one form or another 'the divine service so curtailed,' says South in his exaggerated way, 'as if the people were to have but the tenths from the priest, for the tenths he had received from them.'[1134] No doubt the expectation of immediate changes in the liturgy, and the knowledge that some of the bishops were leaders in that movement, had an unsettling effect, adapted to encourage irregularities. At all events we hear little more of it, when the agitation in favour of comprehension had ceased. There was often a lax observance of the rubrics;[1135] but there appear to be no complaints of any serious omissions, until three or four of the Arian and semi-Arian clergy ventured, not only to leave out the Athanasian Creed, but to alter the doxologies,[1136] and to pass over the second and third petitions of the Litany.[1137]

The Athanasian Creed, however, might fairly be said to stand on a somewhat different footing. If it had been a pain and a stumbling block only to those who had adopted Whiston's opinions about the Trinity, men to whom the ordinary prayers could not fail to give offence, it would have been clear that such persons had no standing-ground in the ministry of the Church of England. But the case was notoriously otherwise. Persons who have not the least inclination to adopt heterodox opinions, may most reasonably object to the use in public worship of elaborate scholastic definitions on questions of acknowledged mystery. Those clergymen, therefore, whether in the eighteenth or in the nineteenth century, who have been accustomed to neglect the rubric which prescribes the use of this Creed on certain days, might feel reasonably justified in so doing, on the tacit understanding that, at the demand of the bishop they should either read the formula, notwithstanding their general dislike to it, or give up their office in the Church. No doubt it was quite as often omitted in the last century as in our own;[1138] and in George III.'s time, even if a desire had existed to enforce its use, there would have been the more difficulty in doing so from its having been forbidden in the King's Chapel.[1139]

The habit of reading continuously, as parts of one service, Morning Prayer, the Litany, and part of the office for the Communion, had hardly become fixed at the commencement of the century. John Johnson,[1140] writing in 1709, said it was an innovation. The old custom had been to have, on Sundays and holy days, prayers at six, and the Litany at nine, followed after a few minutes' interval by the Communion service. Even in Charles I.'s time they had often become joined, as a concession to the later hours that were gradually gaining ground, or, as Heylin expressed it, 'because of the sloth of the people.' But 'long after the Restoration' the distinction was maintained in some places, as in the Cathedrals of Canterbury and Worcester. And throughout the last century, 'Second Service' was a name in common general use for the Communion office.[1141]

Bull, Sherlock, Beveridge, and other Anglican divines, who belong more to the seventeenth than to the eighteenth century, had expressed much concern at the unfrequency of celebrations of the Eucharist as compared with a former age. Our Reformers, they said, had regarded it as an ordinary part of Christian worship.[1142] In the first Prayer-book of Edward VI. there had been express directions relating to a daily administration, not only in cathedrals, but in parish churches. But now, said Beveridge, people have so departed from primitive usage that they think once a week is too often.[1143] It had come to be monthly or perhaps quarterly. The Puritans, with the idea that the solemnity of the rite was enhanced by its recurring after comparatively lengthened intervals, discouraged frequent communions, and many Low Churchmen of the next generation held the same opinion.[1144] In the country, quarterly communions had become the general rule. The number of communicants had also very much diminished. No doubt this was owing in great measure to the general laxity which followed upon the Restoration. But the cause already mentioned contributed to keep away even religious people. It must be also remembered that, during the period of the Reformation, and for some time after, stated attendance at the Holy Communion was regarded not only as a religious duty, but as an ordinary sign of membership in the National Church, and of attachment to its principles. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, although the odious sacramental test was yet to survive for many a long year, that feeling had very generally passed away, and was being gradually superseded in many minds by an opposite idea that this Sacrament was not so much a help to Christian living, as a badge, from which many excellent people shrunk, of decided religious profession. With the rise of the religious societies there was a change for the better. The High Church movement of Queen Anne's time, regarded in its worthiest form and among its best representatives, was one in which the sacramental element was prominently marked. If a comparison is made between the number of churches in London where the Sacrament was weekly administered in Queen Anne's reign, and on the other hand, in the period from about the middle of George I.'s reign to the third or fourth decade of the present century, the difference would be strikingly in favour of the earlier date. In 1741, we find Secker admonishing the clergy of the diocese of Oxford, that they were bound to administer thrice in the year, that there ought to be an administration during the long interval between Whitsuntide and Christmas. 'And if,' he adds somewhat dubiously, 'you can afterwards advance from a quarterly communion to a monthly one, I make no doubt but you will.'[1145] Of course there were many verbal and many practical protests against the prevalent disregard of this central Christian ordinance. Thus both Wesley from a High Church point of view, and the Broad Church author of the 'Free and Candid Disquisitions,' urged the propriety of weekly celebrations. And before the end of the century there was doubtless some improvement. In many parish churches the general custom of a quarterly administration was broken through in favour of a monthly one, and in many cathedrals the Sacrament might once more be received on every Lord's Day.[1146] But Bishop Tomline might well feel it a matter for just complaint, that being at St. Paul's on Easter Day, 1800, 'in that vast and noble cathedral no more than six persons were found at the table of the Lord.'[1147] Before leaving this part of the subject, it should be added that, previous to the time when the Methodist organisation became unhappily separated from the National Church, the sermons of Wesley and his preachers were sometimes followed by a large accession of communicants at the parish church.[1148]

Kneeling to receive the Sacrament had been one of the principal scruples felt by the Presbyterians at the time when the great majority of them were anxious for comprehension within the National Church. Archbishop Tillotson, acting upon his well-known saying, 'Charity is above rubrics,' and in accordance with the practice of some of the Elizabethan divines, was wont to authorise by his example a considerable discretion on this point.[1149] Bishop Patrick, on the other hand, though no less earnest in his advocacy of comprehension, did not feel justified in departing from prescribed order, and when Du Moulin desired to receive the Sacrament from him, declined, 'not without many kind remarks,' to administer to him without his kneeling.[1150] After all schemes of comprehension had fallen through, the concession in question became very unfrequent. A pamphleteer of 1709 speaks doubtfully as to whether it still occurred or not.[1151] A greater licence in regard of posture was one of the suggestions of the 'Free and Candid Disquisitions.'

Through the Georgian period, a negligent habit was by no means unusual of reading the early part of the Communion service from the reading desk. Dr. Parr, in 1785, speaking of the changes he had introduced into his church at Hatton, evidently thought himself very correct in 'Communion service at the altar.'[1152]

Even in Bishop Bull's time the offertory was very much neglected in country places.[1153] Later in the century its disuse became more general. There were one or two parishes in his diocese, Secker said, where the old custom was retained of oblations for the support of the church and alms for the poor. But often there was no offertory at all: he hoped it might be revived and duly administered.[1154]

Some remarks have already been made upon the traces which were to be found in a few exceptional instances, during the eighteenth century, of the Eucharistic vestments as appointed in Edward VI.'s Prayer-book.

The sacramental 'usages,' so called, belong to the history of the Nonjurors rather than to that of the National Church. There was, however, no time when the theological and ecclesiastical opinions prevalent among the Nonjurors did not find favour among a few English Conformists, lay and clerical. Thus, the mixture of water with the wine, in conformity with Eastern practice, and in remembrance of the water and the blood, seems to have been occasionally found in parish churches. Hickes said he had found it to be the custom at Barking.[1155] Wesley also, and the early Oxford Methodists, approved of it.[1156]

In the early part of the seventeenth century George Herbert had said that the country parson must see that on great festivals his Church was 'perfumed with incense,' and 'stuck with boughs.'[1157] Even as late as George III.'s reign it appears that incense was not quite unknown in the English Church. We are told that on the principal holy days it used to be the 'constant practice at Ely to burn incense on the altar at the Cathedral, till Thomas Green, one of the prebendaries, and now (1779) Dean of Salisbury, a finical man, who is always taking snuff, objected to it, under pretence that it made his head to ache.'[1158]

The bad case into which Church music had fallen was much owing to those worthy men, the Parish Clerks. These officials were a great institution in the English Church of the last century. The Parish Clerks of London, from whom all their brethren in the country borrowed some degree of lustre, were an ancient and honourable company. They had been incorporated by Henry III. as 'The Brotherhood of St. Nicolas.' Their Charter had been renewed by Charles I., who conferred upon them additional privileges and immunities, under the name of 'The Warden and Fellowship of Parish Clerks of the City and Suburbs of London and the Liberties thereof, the City of Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, and the fifteen Parishes adjacent.'[1159] They had a Hall of their own in Bishopsgate Street; at St. Alban's Church they had their anniversary sermon; at St. Bridget's they had maintained, until about the end of the seventeenth century, a 'music-sermon' on St. Cecilia's day;[1160] and Clerkenwell derives its name from the solemn Mystery Plays which their guild in old days used to celebrate near the holy spring.[1161] There were certain taverns about the Exchange where they met as a kind of Club, 'men with grave countenances, short wigs, black clothes or dark camlet trimmed with black.'[1162] In pre-Reformation days they had ranked among the minor orders of the Church as assistants of the Priests;[1163] and so, especially in country churches, they might consider themselves as holding a position somewhat analogous, though on a humbler scale, to that of Precentors. In 1722 a clergyman, writing to the Bishop of London on the subject of the poverty and distressed condition of some of the poorer curates, spoke of the desirability of again admitting men in holy orders to be Parish Clerks. Early in the present century Hartley Coleridge made a somewhat similar suggestion. 'How often in town and country do we hear our divine Liturgy rendered wholly ludicrous by all imaginable tones, twangs, drawls, mouthings, wheezings, gruntings, snuffles and quidrollings, by all diversities of dialect, cacologies and cacophonies, by twistings, contortions and consolidations of visage, squintings and blinkings and upcastings of eyes.... Then, too, the discretion assumed by these Hogarthic studies of selecting the tune and verses to be sung makes the psalmody, instead of an integral and affecting portion of the service, as distracting and irrational an episode as the jigs and country dances scraped between the acts of a tragedy.'[1164] There would be no difficulty, he thought, in getting educated persons to discharge the office for little remuneration or none, if it were not for the troublesome and often disagreeable parish business annexed to the office. As it was, the Clerk occupied a very odd position, uniting the menial duties of a useful Church servant to other functions, the decent performance of which was utterly beyond the range of an illiterate man. Many of our readers may be acquainted with the witty satire in which, with a perpetual side glance at the fussy self-importance visible in Bishop Burnet's History, Pope writes 'the Memoirs of P.P., Clerk of this Parish.' With what delightful complacency this diligent representative of his class speaks of taking rank among 'men right worthy of their calling, of a clear and sweet voice, and of becoming gravity'—of his place in the congregation at the feet of the Priest,—of his raising the Psalm,—of his arraying the ministers with the surplice,—of his responsible part in the service of the Church! 'Remember, Paul, I said to myself, thou standest before men of high worship, the wise Mr. Justice Freeman, the grave Mr. Justice Tonson, the good Lady Jones, and the two virtuous gentlewomen her daughters, nay the great Sir Thomas Truby, knight and baronet, and my young master the Squire who shall one day be lord of this manor.' With what magisterial gravity he descants of whipping out the dogs, 'except the sober lap-dog of the good widow Howard,'—tearing away the children's half-eaten apples, smoothing the dog's ears of the great Bible! How he prides himself in sweeping and trimming weekly the pews and benches, which were formerly swept but once in three years,—in having the surplice darned, washed and laid up in fresh lavender, better than any other parish,—in having discovered a thief with a Bible and key—in his love of ringing,—in his tutoring young men and maidens to tune their voice as it were with a psaltery,—in being invited to the banquets of the Church officers,—in the hints he has given to young clergymen,—in his loyal attachment to the interests of 'our High Church.'[1165] Such was the Parish Clerk of the eighteenth century, the personage upon whom the charge of the musical part of the service mainly devolved,—whose duty it was to give out[1166] the Psalm, to lead it,[1167] very commonly to read it out line by line,[1168] and frequently to select what was to be sung. No wonder, Secker, speaking of Church psalmody, requested his clergy to take great care how they chose their clerks.[1169] And no wonder, it may be added, that Church psalmody, under such conditions, fell into a state which was a reproach to the Church that could tolerate it.

In the first years of the eighteenth century there were still occasional discussions whether organs were to be considered superstitious and Popish.[1170] They had been destroyed or silenced in the time of the Commonwealth; and it was not without much misgiving on the part of timid Protestants that after the Restoration one London church after another[1171] admitted the suspected instruments. An organ which was set up at Tiverton in 1696 gave rise to much dispute, and was the occasion of Dodwell writing on 'The lawfulness of instrumental music in holy offices.'[1172] A pamphleteer in 1699, who signs himself N.N., quoted Isidore, Wicliffe, and Erasmus against the use of musical instruments in public worship.[1173] Scotch Presbyterians and English Dissenters entirely abjured them, till Rowland Hill, near the end of the century, erected one in the Surrey Chapel.[1174] It was noted on the other hand, as one of the signs of High Church reaction in Queen Anne's time, that churches without organs had thinner congregations.[1175]

It is perhaps not too much to say, that through a great part of the eighteenth century chanting was almost unknown in parish churches, and was regarded as distinctively belonging to 'Cathedral worship.' Watts, who, although a Nonconformist, was well acquainted with a great number of Churchmen, and was likely to be well informed on any question of psalmody, remarked, in somewhat quaint language, that 'the congregation of choristers in cathedral churches are the only Levites that sing praise unto the Lord with the words of David and Asaph the seer.'[1176]

Even in Cathedrals musical services were looked upon with great disfavour by many, and by many others with a bare tolerance nearly allied to disapproval. Could the question of their continuance have been put to popular vote they might probably have been maintained by a small majority as being conformable to old custom, but without appreciation, and with an implied understanding that they were wholly exceptional. The Commissioners of King William's time had suggested that the chanting of divine service in cathedrals should be laid aside;[1177] and even Archbishop Sharp, although in many respects a High Churchman, told Thoresby that he did not much approve of singing the prayers, 'but it having been the custom of all cathedrals since the Reformation, it is not to be altered without a law.'[1178] Exaggerated dread of Popery suspected latent evils, it scarcely knew what, lurking in this kind of worship. Perhaps, too, it was thought to border upon 'enthusiasm,' that other religious bugbear of the age. A paper in the 'Tatler' speaks of it not with disapproval, but with something of condescension to weaker minds, as 'the rapturous way of devotion.'[1179] In fact, cathedrals in general were almost unintelligible to the prevalent sentiment of the eighteenth century. Towards the end of the period a spirit of appreciation grew up, which Malcolm speaks of as being in marked contrast with the contemptuous indifference of a former date.[1180] They were regarded, no doubt, with a certain pride as splendid national memorials of a kind of devotion that had long passed away. Some young friends of David Hume, who had been to service at St. Paul's and found scarcely anybody there, began to speak of the folly of lavishing money on such useless structures. The famous sceptic gently rebuked them for talking without judgment. 'St. Paul's,' he said, 'as a monument of the religious feeling and taste of the country, does it honour and will endure. We have wasted millions upon a single campaign in Flanders, and without any good resulting from it.'[1181] There was no fanatic dislike to cathedrals, as when Lord Brooke had hoped that he might see the day when not one stone of St. Paul's should be left upon another.[1182] They were simply neglected, as if both they and those who yet loved the mode of worship perpetuated in them belonged to a bygone generation. In the North this was not so much the case. Durham Cathedral especially seems to have retained, in a greater degree than any other, not only the grandeur and hospitality of an older period, but also the affections of the townsmen around it. Defoe, in 1728, found a congregation of 500 people at the six-o'clock morning service.[1183] In most cases, even on Sundays, the attendance was miserably thin. Doubtless, many individual members of cathedral chapters loved the noble edifice and its solemn services with a very profound attachment; but, as a general rule, they belonged to the past and to the future far more than to the present. The only mode of utilising cathedrals which seems to have been thoroughly to the taste of the last century was the converting them into music-halls for oratorios. Early in the century we find Dean Swift at Dublin consenting—not, however, without much demur—to 'lend his cathedral to players and scrapers,' to act what he called their opera.[1184] Next, in St. Paul's, at the annual anniversary of the Sons of the Clergy, sober Churchmen saw with disgust a careless, pleasure-loving audience listening to singers promiscuously gathered from the theatres, and laughing, and eating, and drinking their wine in the intervals of the performance.[1185] Then came the festivals of the Three Choirs at Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford, very open to objection at a time when the managers thought of little but how to achieve for their undertaking popularity and pecuniary success. Sublime as is the music of 'The Messiah,' it was not often performed in the last century without circumstances which jarred strongly against the devotional feeling of a deeply religious man like John Newton, and led him to what might otherwise seem a most unreasonable hatred of oratorios.[1186]

In Queen Anne's time, there was often no part of the Church service in which the High or Low Church tone of the congregation was more closely betokened than when the preacher had just entered the pulpit. In the one case, the Bidding Prayer was said; in the other, there was an extempore prayer, often of considerable length, commonly called the pulpit prayer. The Bidding Prayer had its origin in pre-Reformation times. 'The way was first for the preacher to name and open his text, and then to call on the people to go to their prayers, and to tell them what they were to pray for; after which all the people said their beads in a general silence, and the preacher also kneeled down and said his.'[1187] It was thus not a prayer, but an exhortation to prayer, and instruction in the points commended to private but united worship. In Henry VIII.'s time the Pope's name was omitted, and prayer for the King under his proper titles strictly enjoined. In Elizabeth's reign, praise for all who had departed in God's faith was substituted for prayer in their behalf.[1188] By the existing Canons, as agreed upon in 1603, preachers were instructed to move the people to join with them in prayer before the sermon either in the Bidding form, 'or to that effect as briefly as conveniently they may.'[1189] It was, however, no longer clear whether it were itself a prayer, or, as in former time, an admonition to pray. On the one hand, it was called 'a form of prayer,' and was followed without a pause by the Lord's Prayer, and then by the sermon. On the other hand, it was prefaced not by the familiar 'Let us pray,' but by the old bidding, 'Ye shall pray,' or 'Pray ye,' and the congregation stood as listeners until the Lord's Prayer began.[1190] Hence a difference in practice arose, curiously characteristic of the controversies, ecclesiastical and political, which were being agitated at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. In Charles I.'s reign, many of the clergy had chosen to consider it a prayer, and taking advantage of the permission to vary it, had converted it into one of those extempore effusions which Puritan feeling considered so peculiarly edifying.[1191] It need hardly be added that the Anglican party were more than ever careful to adhere to the older usage. After the Restoration, the Bidding Prayer was for a time not very much used, and the pulpit prayer, as adopted by Low Churchmen from Puritans and Presbyterians, began in many places to assume a most prominent position. 'Some men,' Sherlock said, in 1681, 'think they worship God sufficiently if they come time enough to church to join in the pulpit prayer.'[1192] High Churchmen could not endure it. 'It is a long, crude, extemporary prayer,' said South, 'in reproach of all the prayers which the Church, with such an admirable prudence and devotion, has been making before.'[1193] The use, however, of extempore prayer in this part of the service was defended by some of the clergy and bishops, as agreeable to the people, as conformable to the custom of the Reformed Churches abroad,[1194] and attractive to those among the Presbyterians and other denominations who only needed encouragement and a few slight concessions to exchange occasional for constant conformity. Meanwhile, at the end of the preceding century, 'the Bidding' had been more generally revived. Archbishop Tenison, in a circular to the clergy in 1695, had called attention to the neglect of it,[1195] and the Bishop of London revived its general use in his own diocese, to the astonishment, says Fleetwood, of many congregations who stared and stood amazed at 'Ye shall pray.'[1196] In Queen Anne's time it became very general,[1197] being quite in accord with the High Church sentiment which had then strongly set in. A political bias also was suspected. Not, perhaps, without reason; for it was a time when political prepossessions which could not openly be declared found vent in all kinds of byways. After the Revolution, while the title of the new sovereign was not yet secure, the Clergy were specially enjoined, that however else they might vary their prayer or exhortation to prayer before the sermon, they were in any case to mention the King by name. It was said—whether in sarcasm or as a grave reality—that the semi-Jacobite parsons, of whom there were many, found satisfaction in discovering a mode by which they could 'show at once their duty and their disgust'[1198] in a manner unexceptionally accordant with the law and with the Canon. 'Ye are bidden to pray,' or, as a certain Dr. M—— always worded it, 'Ye must pray,[1199] did not necessarily imply much heart in fulfilling the injunction by which the people were called upon to pray for their new lords. But, curiously enough, when George I. came to the throne, the political gloss attached to 'the Bidding' became reversed. In the royal directions to the archbishops, the canonical form, with the royal titles included, was strictly enjoined;[1200] and consequently not those who used, but those who neglected it, ran a risk of being set down as having Jacobite proclivities. It had, however, never been really popular, and few objected to its gradual disuse. Ever since the Revolution, it had introduced into a portion of the public worship far too decided an element of political feeling. The objection was the greater, because the liberty of variation had given it a certain personal character. If the preacher did not keep strictly to the words of the Canon, he could scarcely avoid making it appear, by the names omitted or inserted, what might be his political, his ecclesiastical, or his academical opinions. Those, again, whose respect for dignities was in excess—a foible to which the age was prone—would go through a list of titles, illustrious, right reverend, and right honourable,[1201] which ill accorded with a time of prayer. Before the middle of the century, except in university churches or on formal occasions, the Canon became generally obsolete, and the sermon was prefaced, as often in our own day, by a Collect and the Lord's Prayer.

At the opening of the eighteenth century the pulpit was no longer the power it had been in past days. It had been the strongest support of the Reformation; and monarchs and statesmen had known well how immense was its influence in informing and guiding the popular mind on all questions which bore upon religion or Church politics. In proportion, however, as the agency of the press had been developed, the preachers had lost more and more of their old monopoly. Numberless essays and pamphlets appeared, reflecting all shades of educated opinion, with much to say on questions of social morality and the duties of Churchmen and citizens. They did not by any means interfere with the primary office of the sermon. They were calculated rather to do preaching a good service. When other means of instruction are wanting, the preacher may feel himself bound to include a wide range of subjects. When the press comes to his aid, and relieves him for the most part of the more secular of his topics, he is the more at liberty to confine himself to matters which have a primary and direct bearing upon the spiritual life. In any case, however, whether the change be, on the whole, beneficial or not to the general character of preaching, it must evidently deprive it of some part of its former influence.

Yet in the reigns of William and Queen Anne good preaching was still highly appreciated and very popular. Jablouski said of his Protestant fellow-countrymen in Prussia, that the sermon had come to be considered so entirely the important part of the service that people commonly said, 'Will you go to sermon?' instead of 'to church.'[1202] It was not quite so in England; yet undoubtedly there was very generally something of the same feeling. 'Many,' said Sherlock, 'who have little other religion, are forward enough to hear sermons, and many will miss the prayers and come in only in time to hear the preaching.'[1203] If some of the incentives to good preaching, and some of the attributes which had distinguished it, were no longer conspicuous, other causes had come in to maintain the honour of the pulpit. That stir and movement of the intellectual faculty which was everywhere beginning to test the power of reason on all questions of theology and faith had both brought into existence a new style of preaching, and had secured for it a number of attentive hearers. The anxious and earnest, but, notwithstanding its occasional virulence, the somewhat unimpassioned controversy with Rome, and the newly aroused hopes of reconciling the moderate Dissenters, had tended to a similar result. A rich, imaginative eloquence, though it could not fail to have admirers, was out of favour, not only with those who considered Tillotson the model preacher, but also with High Churchmen. Jeremy Taylor would hardly have ranked high in Bishop Bull's estimation. His wit and metaphors, and 'tuneful pointed sentences,' would almost certainly have been adjudged by the good Bishop of St. David's unworthy of the grave and solemn dignity of the pulpit.[1204] And brilliant as were the sallies of Dr. South's vigorous and highly seasoned declamations, they were rarely of a kind to kindle imagination and stir emotion. The edge of his arguments was keen and cold; and they were addressed to the common reason of his hearers, no less than those of the 'Latitudinarian' Churchmen with whom he most delighted to contend.

That degradation of religion, which, even in the earlier years of the century, was beginning to lower the Gospel of redemption into a philosophy of morality, has been already alluded to. Under its depressing influence, preaching sank to a very low ebb. Hurd, in 1761, said, with perfect truth, that 'the common way of sermonising had become most wretched, and even the best models very defective.'[1205] By that date, however, improvement had already begun. It was sometimes said, and the assertion was not altogether unfounded, that these cold pulpit moralities were in a great measure the recoil from Methodist extravagances. But far more generally, as the century advanced, Methodism promoted the beneficial change which had already been noted in the case of Secker. The more zealous and observant of the Clergy could not fail to learn a valuable lesson from the wonderful power over the souls of men which their Methodist fellow-workmen—the irregulars of the Church—had acquired. And independently of their example, the same leaven was working among those sharers in the Evangelical revival who remained steadfast to the established order, as among those who felt themselves cramped by it. Whatever in other respects might be their faults of style and matter, they were, at all events, in no point what some sermons were called—'Stoical Essays,' 'imitations from a Christian pulpit of Seneca and Epictetus.'[1206] There were many mannerisms, and there was much want of breadth of thought, but in heart and purpose it was a true preaching of the Gospel.

Even towards the end of the century there were a few notable instances of the power which a great preacher might yet command. We are told of Dean Kirwan, who had left the Roman for the English Church, that even in times of public calamity and distress, his irresistible powers of persuasion repeatedly produced contributions exceeding a thousand or twelve hundred pounds at a sermon; and his hearers, not content with emptying their purses into the plate, sometimes threw in jewels or watches in earnest of further benefactions.[1207] A sermon of Bishop Horsley once produced an effect which would hardly be possible except under circumstances of great public excitement. When he preached in Westminster Abbey, before the House of Lords, on January 30, 1793, the whole assembly, stirred by his peroration, rose with one impulse, and remained standing till the sermon ended.[1208]

Amid the excited and angry controversies which occupied the earlier years of the century, the pulpit did not by any means retain a befitting calm. Later in the century there was no great cause for complaint on this ground.

Whiston says that he sometimes read in church one of the Homilies. So, no doubt, did others. But even in 1691 we find it mentioned that they could not be much used without scandal, as if they were read from laziness. 'The more the pity,' says the writer in question, 'for they are good preaching.'[1209] It was one of Tillotson's ideas to get a new set of Homilies written, as a supplement to the existing ones. There was to be one for each Sunday and principal holy day in the year; and the whole was to constitute a semi-authorised corpus of doctrinal and practical divinity adapted for general instruction and family reading. Burnet, Lloyd, and Patrick joined in the scheme, and some progress was made in carrying it out. It met, however, with opposition, and was ultimately laid aside.[1210]

To nearly every one of the London churches in Queen Anne's time a Lecturer was attached, independent in most cases of the incumbent.[1211] A great many of these foundations were an inheritance from Puritan times. The duty required 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.[1212] There had been some advantage and some evil in this. It 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.[1213] 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 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 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.'[1214] On Friday evenings it was in fact described as being 'not so much a concourse of people, but a convocation of divines.'[1215] The suburbs, too, of London had their Lecturers, supported by voluntary contributions, 'the amount of which put to shame the scanty stipends of the curates.'[1216] At the end of the period the Lecturers kept their place, but in diminished numbers;[1217] 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.

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.'[1218] 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 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 taken sanctuary in the pulpit.'[1219] They had become an odious system, an ordinary funeral luxury, often handsomely paid for, which even the poor were ambitious to purchase.

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.[1220] 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. This flagrant abuse could not fail to shock the minds of earnest men. We find Sherlock,[1221] Bull,[1222] Atterbury,[1223] Stanhope,[1224] Berriman,[1225] Secker,[1226] 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.[1227] Probably it chiefly grew out of the above-mentioned habit of having this sacrament celebrated privately in houses.

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[1228] as one of the two principal charges—the other being that of kneeling at the Eucharist—made 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,[1229] 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.[1230]

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.[1231] 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 ministerial act in which he delighted to take part was to gather the children about him during the afternoon service, and catechize them, and expound to them the sermon they had heard.[1232] It seemed to them all that no preaching could take the place of catechizing as a means of bringing home to the young and scantily educated the doctrines of the Christian faith and the practical duties of religion, and that it was also eminently adapted to create an intelligent attachment to the Church in which they had been brought up. Such arguments had, of course, all the greater weight at a time when elementary schools were as yet so far from general, and the art of reading was still, comparatively speaking, the accomplishment of a few.

A vigorous but not very effectual attempt was made by many bishops and clergymen to enforce the canon which required servants and apprentices, as well as children, to attend the catechizing. Bull, for example, and Fleetwood, not only urged it as a duty, but charged the churchwardens of their dioceses to present for ecclesiastical rebuke or penalty all who refused to comply.[1233] In the Isle of Man the commanding personal influence of Bishop Wilson succeeded in carrying the system out. But elsewhere pastoral monitions and ecclesiastical menaces were generally unavailing to overcome the repugnance which people who were no longer children felt to the idea of submitting themselves to public questioning.[1234] Bishop Bull, at Brecknock, practically confessed the futility of the effort by giving a dole of twelve-pence a week to old people of that town on condition of their submitting to the ordeal.

Richard Baxter, in the seventeenth century, had said of confirmation that, so far from scrupling the true use of it, there was scarce any outward thing in the Church he valued more highly. But he liked not, he added, the English way. Dioceses were so vast that a bishop could not perform this and other offices for a hundredth part of his flock. Not one in a hundred was confirmed at all; and often the sacred rite wore the appearance of 'a running ceremony' and 'a game for boys.'[1235] Half a century later, in 1747, we find exactly the same reproach in Whiston's 'Memoirs.' 'Confirmation,' he said, 'is, I doubt, much oftener omitted than performed. And it is usually done in the Church of England in such a hurry and disorder, that it hardly deserves the name of a sacred ordinance of Christianity.'[1236] Fifty years again after this a clergyman, speaking of the great use of confirmation fitly prepared for and duly solemnised, describes it as being very constantly nothing better than 'a holiday ramble.'[1237] If, as Secker in one of his Charges said, the esteem of it was generally preserved in England,[1238] it certainly retained that respect in spite of circumstances which must inevitably have tended to bring it into disregard and contempt. But there was generally one preservative at least to keep the rite from degenerating into a mere unedifying ceremony. There was no period in the last century when the office and person of a bishop was not looked upon with a good deal of reverence among the people generally; nor is there any part of a bishop's office in which he speaks with so much weight of fatherly authority as when he confirms the young. And, besides, it would be very erroneous to suppose that there were not many bishops and many clergymen who did their utmost to make the rite an impressive reality.

That abominable system of clandestine marriages which reached its acme in the neighbourhood of the Debtors' Prison in the Fleet, has been made mention of by many writers.[1239] Apart from these glaring scandals there had been up to that date much irregularity in marriages. Banns were an established ordinance; but notwithstanding the remonstrances of some of the clergy, who urged, like Parson Adams, that the Church had prescribed a form with which all Christians ought to comply,[1240] they were, as Walpole says, 'totally in disuse, except among the inferior people.'[1241] Licences were obtained too easily,[1242] and not sufficiently insisted upon, and evening marriages were by no means unknown.[1243] After 1753 these abuses ceased. But most readers will remember that until a very recent date Church feeling had not restored to their proper honour the publication of banns. They were thought somewhat plebeian; and the high-fashionable and aristocratic method was to celebrate a marriage by special licence in a drawing-room, and with curtailed service.[1244]

The costly but ugly and unmeaning appurtenances which a simpler taste will soon, it is to be hoped, banish from our funerals, were customary long before the eighteenth century began. In George III.'s reign a prodigal expenditure on such occasions began to be thought less essential. Before that time the relatives of the deceased were generally anxious that the obsequies should be as pompous as their means would possibly allow. It was still much as it had been in the days of Charles II., when 'it was ordinarily remarked that it cost a private gentleman of small estate more to bury his wife than to endow his daughter for marriage to a rich man.'[1245] The bodies of 'persons of condition,' and of wealthy merchants or tradesmen, were often laid out in state in rooms draped with black, illuminated with wax candles, and thrown open to neighbours and other visitors.[1246] Sometimes, as at Pepys' funeral, an immense number of gold memorial rings were lavished even among comparatively slight acquaintances.[1247]

Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century Church discipline was in some respects a much greater reality than it is in our own day. No doubt in its later years the difference lay more in possibilities than in actual fact; so that the alterations in the law of excommunication made by the Act of 1813, exceedingly important as they were to persons who had come under censure of the ecclesiastical courts, had no very visible or direct bearing upon the English Church in general. Excommunication had been for some time becoming more than ever an unfamiliar word, limited almost entirely to the use of law courts. When, therefore, various obsolete practices relating to it were swept away and its consequences rendered less formidable, it is probable that few but lawyers were cognisant of any change. But in the first half of the last century, amid a number of complaints that notorious vice so continually escaped the formal censure of the Church, it is also evident that presentments and excommunications were far from uncommon, and that even open penance was not an excessive rarity. Episcopal instructions on the subject are frequent. Thus Archbishop Sharp requests his clergy to be very careful of anything like persecution; but where they cannot reform habitual delinquents, such as drunkards, profane persons, neglecters of God's worship, &c., by softer means, to take measures that they be presented. He would then do all he could before proceeding to excommunication. When that sentence had been actually denounced he allowed the clergyman to absolve the offender in sickness, when penitent, without the formal absolution under the Court Seal. Commutation for penances he did not approve of, but would sometimes allow them on the advice of the minister of the parish; the commutation to be entirely applied to Church uses and as notoriously as the offence had been. The public good was to be the rule.[1248] Secker's instructions to the clergy of Oxford in 1753 are still more full, though he prefaces them by the acknowledgment that he is 'perfectly sensible that both immorality and religion are grown almost beyond the reach of ecclesiastical power, which, having been in former times unwarrantably extended, hath been very unjustly cramped and weakened many ways.'[1249] Five years later, in his first Canterbury Charge, Secker speaks much less confidently on this subject. Wickedness, he said, of almost every kind, had made dreadful progress, but ecclesiastical authority was 'not only too much hindered, but too much despised to do almost anything to any purpose. In the small degree that it could be exerted usefully he trusted it would be.'[1250] He expressed himself to the same effect and still more regretfully in his last written production, his 'Concio coram synodo' in 1761.'[1251]

Fleetwood reminded the clergy and churchwardens that they were to present not only for flagitious conduct, but also for non-attendance at worship, for neglecting to send children or servants to be catechized, for not paying Church rates, and for public teaching without licence.[1252]

While a system of Church discipline carried out by presentments and excommunications was still, more or less effectually, in force, commutation of penance was very properly a matter for grave and careful consideration. It was obvious that laxity on such a point might fairly lay the Church open to a reproach, which Dissenters did not fail to make, of 'indulgences for sale.'[1253] One of William III.'s injunctions of 1695 was that 'no commutation of penance be made but by the express order of the bishop, and that the commutation be applied only to pious and charitable uses.'[1254] Early in Queen Anne's reign, in consequence of abuses which existed, the subject was debated in Convocation, and some stringent resolutions passed, by which it was hoped that commutations, where allowed, might be rendered perfectly unexceptionable.[1255] Some lay chancellors, on the other hand, wished to do away with penance altogether, and to substitute a regular system of fines payable to the public purse.[1256]

The poet Wordsworth has said that one of his earliest remembrances was the going to church one week-day to see a woman doing penance in a white sheet, and the disappointment of not getting a penny, which he had been told was given to all lookers-on.[1257] This must have been a very rare event at that date—about 1777.[1258] Early in the century this sort of ecclesiastical pillory was somewhat more common. But it was evidently quite unfrequent even then. Pope's parish clerk is made to speak of it as distinctly an event. This, which was called 'solemn penance,' as contrasted with that lesser form which might consist only of confession and satisfaction, was an ordeal which sounds like a strange anachronism in times so near our own. Bishop Hildesley thus describes it in the Isle of Man, where it was enforced upon certain delinquents far more generally than elsewhere. 'The manner of doing penance is primitive and edifying. The penitent, clothed in a white sheet, &c., is brought into the church immediately before the Litany, and there continues till the sermon is ended; after which, and a proper exhortation, the congregation are desired to pray for him in a form prescribed for the purpose.' This having been done, so soon as it could be certified to the bishop that his repentance was believed to be sincere, he might be received back again, 'by a very solemn form,' into the peace of the Church.[1259] In England generally the ceremony was in all respects the same,[1260] except that no regular form existed for the readmission of penitents. Jones of Alconbury, in the 'Free and Candid Disquisitions' (1749), spoke of the need of a recognised office for this purpose. That which was commonly used had no authority, and was very imperfect. A form also for excommunication was also, he thought, a definite want of the English Church. For want of some such solemnity, excommunication was very deficient in impressiveness, not at all understood by the people in general, and less dreaded than should be, as signifying for the most part nothing more than the loss of a little money.[1261]

The strongly marked division of opinion which had prevailed during the reign of Elizabeth and Charles I. as to the mode of observing Sunday no longer existed. Formerly, Anglicans and Puritans had taken for the most part thoroughly opposite views, and the question had been controverted with much vehemence, and often with much bitterness. Happily for England, the Puritan view, in all its broader and more general features, had won peaceful possession of the ground. The harsher and more rigid observances with which many sectarians had overburdened the holy day, were kept up by some of the denominations, but could not be maintained in the National Church. In fact, their concession was the price of conquest. Anglican divines, and the great and influential body of laymen who were in accord with them, would never have acquiesced in prescriptions and prohibitions which were tenable, if tenable at all, only upon the assumption of a Sabbatarianism which they did not pretend to hold. But the Puritan Sunday, in all its principal characteristics, remained firmly established, and was as warmly supported by High Churchmen as by any who belonged to an opposite party. It has been aptly observed that several of Robert Nelson's remarks upon the proper observance of Sunday would have been derided, eighty or a hundred years previously, as Puritanical cant by men whose legitimate successors most warmly applauded what he wrote.[1262] No one whose opinion had any authority, desired, after Charles II.'s time, to revive the 'Book of Sports,' or regretted the abolition of Sunday wakes. Amid all the laxity of the Restoration period—amid the partial triumph of Laudean ideas which marked the reign of Queen Anne—amid the indifference and sluggishness in religious matters which soon afterwards set in—reverence for the sanctity of the Lord's Day, and a fixed purpose that its general character of sedate quietness should not be broken into, grew, though it was but gradually, among almost all classes, into a tradition which was respected even by those who had very little care for other ordinances of religion.

Such, undoubtedly, was the predominant feeling of the eighteenth century; and it is difficult to overestimate its value in the support it gave to religion in times when such aid was more than ordinarily needed.

There are many aspects of Church life in relation to the social history of the period which the authors of these chapters are well aware they have either omitted entirely, or have very insufficiently touched upon. It is not that they have undervalued their interest as compared with matters which have been more fully discussed, but simply that the plan of their work almost precluded the attempt at anything like complete treatment of the whole of a subject which may be viewed from many sides.

C.J.A.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 838: Review of Milner's Church Arch, in Q. Rev. vol. vi. 63.]

[Footnote 839: Warburton and Hurd's Correspondence, 3.]

[Footnote 840: James Fergusson's History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, 246.]

[Footnote 841: Id. 246.]

[Footnote 842: Id. 255.]

[Footnote 843: M.E.C. Walcot, Traditions, &c., of Cathedrals, 47.]

[Footnote 844: Quoted in Q. Rev. vol. vi. 62.]

[Footnote 845: Id. vol. lxix. iii.]

[Footnote 846: Parentalia, p. 305. Q. Rev. vol. ii. 133.]

[Footnote 847: Il Penseroso.]

[Footnote 848: Persian Letters, No. xxvi.]

[Footnote 849: Paterson's Pietas Londinensis, 1714, 236.]

[Footnote 850: Cawthorne's Poems.—Anderson's English Poets, x. 425.]

[Footnote 851: Seward's Anecdotes, 1798, ii. 312.]

[Footnote 852: J. Fergusson's Mod. Archit. 282.]

[Footnote 853: Its advocates were very desirous, about this time, of substituting the term 'English' for 'Gothic.'—Sayers, ii. 440. Q. Rev. ii. 133, iv. 476.]

[Footnote 854: Sayers' 'Architect. Antiquities.'—Life and Works, ii. 476.]

[Footnote 855: Gentleman's Mag. 1799, 858.]

[Footnote 856: Gentleman's Mag. 1799, 667-70, 733-6, 858-61.]

[Footnote 857: A.P. Stanley's Hist. Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 540-2.]

[Footnote 858: M.E.C. Walcot, Traditions & Customs of Cathedrals, 47-55.]

[Footnote 859: Gentleman's Mag. 1799, 669.]

[Footnote 860: Id.]

[Footnote 861: Walcot, 52.]

[Footnote 862: Id. 51.]

[Footnote 863: London Parishes, &c., 146.]

[Footnote 864: H. Walpole's Letters, i. 360.]

[Footnote 865: Defoe's Tour through the whole Island, i. 85.]

[Footnote 866: Many of them, however, could not yet have recovered from the treatment they had endured in the time of the Commonwealth. Though the Parliamentary committee appointed to decide the question had happily decided against the demolition of cathedrals, they were allowed to fall into a miserable state of dilapidation and decay.]

[Footnote 867: Secker's Eight Charges, 151-4.]

[Footnote 868: In his Charge to the Clergy of St. Asaph, 1710.]

[Footnote 869: Bishop Butler's Primary Charge, 1751.]

[Footnote 870: Horne's 'Thoughts on Various Subjects'—Works, i. 286.]

[Footnote 871: J. Hervey, 'Medit. among the Tombs'—Works, i. 1.]

[Footnote 872: W. Longman's History of St. Paul's, chap. 4. See especially the account quoted there from Earle's Microcosmography, 1628.]

[Footnote 873: Quoted in Id.]

[Footnote 874: Hen. IV. part ii. act i. sc. 2.]

[Footnote 875: Pilkington, quoted in Walcot's Cathedrals, 82.]

[Footnote 876: 'Heraclitus Ridens,' quoted in J. Malcolm's Manners, &c. of London, i. 233.]

[Footnote 877: Walcot, 81.]

[Footnote 878: A.P. Stanley's Hist. Memorials of Westminster, 535.]

[Footnote 879: Pepys' Diary, vol. v. 113, 114.]

[Footnote 880: Lord Braybrook's note to Pepys, v. 114.]

[Footnote 881: Burns' Eccles. Law, i. p. 328. High Churchmen, however, sometimes had their jest at the special love of the opposite party for 'their own Protestant Pews.'—T. Lewis's Scourge, Apr. 8, 1717, No. 10.]

[Footnote 882: Anderson's British Poets, ix. 82.]

[Footnote 883: Paterson's Pietas Londinensis, passim.]

[Footnote 884: Prior's Poems, 'Epitaph on Jack and Joan'—British Poets, vii. 448.]

[Footnote 885: 'Baucis and Philemon'—B. Poets, ix. 13.]

[Footnote 886: Fielding's Jos. Andrews, book iv. chap. i.]

[Footnote 887: A.J.B. Beresford Hope, Worship in the Church of England, 1874, 17.]

[Footnote 888: Such an instance was once mentioned to the writer by Bishop Eden, the late Primus of the Episcopal Church in Scotland.]

[Footnote 889: Walpole's Letters, ii. 35, quoted by Walcot, 56.]

[Footnote 890: Walcot, 53.]

[Footnote 891: Considerations on the present State of Religion, 1801, p. 47.—Polwhele's Introduction to Lavington, Sec. ccxx. &c.]

[Footnote 892: Considerations, &c. 53. Q. Rev. vol. x. 54.]

[Footnote 893: A.L. Barbauld's Works, by Lucy Aikin, ii. p. 459.]

[Footnote 894: 'Hints on English Architecture'—Dr. F. Savers' Life and Works, ii. 203. So also Bishop Watson, in 1800, complained that not only were there many too few churches in London, but 'the inconvenience is much augmented by the pews which have been erected therein. He would have new churches built with no appropriated seats, simply benches'—Anecdotes of Bishop Watson's Life, ii. 111.]

[Footnote 895: Fielding's Joseph Andrews, chap. 13.]

[Footnote 896: Robert Blair's The Grace, lines 36-7.]

[Footnote 897: Quoted, with some humour, by Bishop Newton, in defending Sir Joshua Reynolds' proposals for paintings in St. Paul's.—Works, i. 142.]

[Footnote 898: Christoph. Smart's Poems, 'The Hop Garden,' book ii.]

[Footnote 899: Fleetwood's 'Charge of 1710'—Works, 479.]

[Footnote 900: Secker's 'Charge of 1758'—Eight Charges, 191.]

[Footnote 901: John Byrom's Poems—Chalmer's B. Poets, xv. 214.]

[Footnote 902: Beresford Hope, Worship in the Church of E. 19.]

[Footnote 903: Tatler, No. 264.]

[Footnote 904: Parochial Antiquities—Jeaffreson, ii. 16 (note).]

[Footnote 905: Gay's Poems, 'The Dirge'—Anderson's B. Poets, viii. 151.]

[Footnote 906: Burns' Eccles. Law, i. 370.]

[Footnote 907: A few still remain, as at Rycote, in Oxfordshire.]

[Footnote 908: 'Smoothing the dog's ears of the great bible ... in the black letter in which our bibles are printed.'—'Memoirs of a Parish Clerk,' Pope's Works, vii. 225.]

[Footnote 909: Walcot, 115.]

[Footnote 910: Gentleman's Mag. vol. lxix. 667.]

[Footnote 911: Beresford Hope, Worship, &c., 68, 129.]

[Footnote 912: Secker's Fourth Charge (1750), 154, and Fifth Charge (1753), 180.]

[Footnote 913: Pietas Londinensis, passim.]

[Footnote 914: W. Longman's Hist. of St. Paul's, p. 145.]

[Footnote 915: Ralph Thoresby's Correspondence, ii. 384.]

[Footnote 916: Alex. Gilchrist's Life of Blake, i. 41.]

[Footnote 917: Quoted, with a similar passage from Story's Journal, by Walcot, 104.]

[Footnote 918: Ralph Thoresby's Diary, i. 60.]

[Footnote 919: Report of Conference of 1641, upon 'Innovations in Discipline,' quoted in Hunt's Religious Thought in England, i. 196.]

[Footnote 920: Quoted in Beresford Hope, Worship, &c., p. 232.]

[Footnote 921: Quoted by Hunt, iii. 48, note.]

[Footnote 922: Thoresby's Diary, i. 60.]

[Footnote 923: E. Nelson's Life of Bishop Bull, 52.]

[Footnote 924: Quoted in a review of Surtees' 'Hist. Durham,' Q. Rev. 39, 404. The charge was so persistently repeated that Archbishop Secker thought it just to his friend's memory to publish a formal defence. He regretted, however, that the cross had been erected. It was a cross of white marble let into a black slab, and surrounded by cedar work, in the wall over the Communion Table.—T. Bartlett's Memoirs of Bishop Butler, 91, 155.]

[Footnote 925: Guardian, No. 21, April 4, 1713.]

[Footnote 926: There were, however, some who put up pictures about the altar, and defended their use as 'the books of the vulgar.'—Life of Bishop Kennet, in an. 1716, 125.]

[Footnote 927: Lathbury's History of the Nonjurors, 256.]

[Footnote 928: Diary of Mary Countess Cowper (1714-20), pub. 1864, 92; and Life of Bishop White Kennet, 1730, 141-2.]

[Footnote 929: A very different anecdote may be told of an altar-piece in St. John's College, Cambridge. 'At Chapel,' wrote Henry Martyn, in 1800, 'my soul ascended to God: and the sight of the picture at the altar, of St. John preaching in the wilderness, animated me exceedingly to devotedness to the life of a missionary.'—Journal, &c., ed. by S. Wilberforce, quoted in Bartlett's Memoirs of Bishop Butler, 92.]

[Footnote 930: Longman's Hist. of St. Paul's, 141.]

[Footnote 931: 'Essay upon Painting.'—Anderson's B. Poets, ix. 824.]

[Footnote 932: Memoirs of Sir J. Reynolds, by H.W. Beechy, 224.]

[Footnote 933: Bishop Newton's Life and Works, 1787, i. 142-4.]

[Footnote 934: Memoir, &c., i. 225.]

[Footnote 935: Alex. Gilchrist's Life of W. Blake, i. 96.]

[Footnote 936: Milman's Annals of St. Paul, quoted by Longman, Hist. of St. P. 153.]

[Footnote 937: Jas. Dallaway on Architecture, &c., 443-5.]

[Footnote 938: Beresford Hope, Worship, &c. 19.]

[Footnote 939: 'When they startle at a dumb picture in a window.'—T. Lewis, in The Scourge, Apr. 9, 1717, No. 9.]

[Footnote 940: Various illustrations of this may be found in Paterson's Pietas Londinensis.]

[Footnote 941: A new one was substituted for it in 1864.]

[Footnote 942: C. Winslow, Hints on Glass Colouring, i. 206.]

[Footnote 943: Id. 207.]

[Footnote 944: J. Dallaway, Architecture, &c., 446.]

[Footnote 945: Winslow, Hints, &c., 207.]

[Footnote 946: Dallaway, 446.]

[Footnote 947: C. Winslow, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass Painting, 153.]

[Footnote 948: C. Winslow, Hints, i. 216.]

[Footnote 949: C. Winslow, Memoirs, &c., 153.]

[Footnote 950:

'Shapes that with one broad glare the gazer strike, Kings, bishops, nuns, apostles, all alike.'—T. Warton.]

[Footnote 951: Beechy's Memoirs of Sir Josh. Reynolds, 239.]

[Footnote 952: C. Winslow, Hints, &c., i. 211.]

[Footnote 953: Hartley Coleridge, Marginalia, 253.]

[Footnote 954: C. Winslow, Memoirs, &c., 176.]

[Footnote 955: Dallaway's Architecture, &c., 454.]

[Footnote 956: Q. Rev. vol. xcv. 317, 'Review of Gatty and Ellacombe on Bells.' The two next sentences are based on the same authority.]

[Footnote 957: Hearne's Reliquiae, May 22, 1733, Jan. 2, 1731, May 2, 1734, &c.]

[Footnote 958: Q. Rev. vol. xxxix. 308.]

[Footnote 959: Q. Rev. vol. xcv. 328.]

[Footnote 960: Oliver Goldsmith's 'Life of K. Nash, Works, iii. 374.]

[Footnote 961: Brand's Popular Antiquities, ii. 221.]

[Footnote 962: T. Pennant's Holywell, &c., 99.]

[Footnote 963: T. Webb's Collect. of Epitaphs, 1775, i. pref.]

[Footnote 964: Secker's Eight Charges 182. Charge of 1753.]

[Footnote 965:

'Lest her new grave the parson's cattle raze. For both his cow and horse the churchyard graze.'

Gay's Shepherd's Week.]

[Footnote 966: Q. Rev. vol. xc. 294.]

[Footnote 967: T. Webb's Collection of Epitaphs, 1775, ii. 28.]

[Footnote 968: Elegy written in a churchyard in S. Wales, 1787, W. Mason's Works, 1811, i. 113.]

[Footnote 969: Quoted in Brand's Popular Antiquities, ii. 299.]

[Footnote 970: Spectator, No. 388, May 20, 1712.]

[Footnote 971: 'Project, &c.' 1709—Swift's Works, viii. 105, with Sir W. Scott's note.]

[Footnote 972: Calamy's Own Life, ii. 289.]

[Footnote 973: Annals of England, iii. 202.]

[Footnote 974: Secker's Fifth Charge, 1753. Butler's Durham Charge, 1751.]

[Footnote 975: Considerations on the Present State of Religion, 1801, chap. v.]

[Footnote 976: Q. Rev. vol. x. 57.]

[Footnote 977: K. Polwhele's Introduction to Harrington, cclxxxi.]

[Footnote 978: Beveridge's Necessity and Advantages of Public Prayer, 34.]

[Footnote 979: Lathbury's Hist. of the Nonjurors, 77.]

[Footnote 980: Baxter's English Nonconformity, chap. 41. Quoted in Bingham's 'Origines Ecclesiasticae:'—Works ix. 128.]

[Footnote 981: Paterson's Pietas Londinensis, 305.]

[Footnote 982: Guardian, No. 65, May 26, 1713.]

[Footnote 983: R. Nelson, Practice of True Devotion, chap. i. Sec. 3.]

[Footnote 984: Brokesby's Life of Dodwell, 1715, 542.]

[Footnote 985: Nelson's Life of Bishop Bull, 375-6.]

[Footnote 986: Archbishop Sharp's Life, by his Son, i. 201.]

[Footnote 987: Whiston's Memoirs, 1749, 124.]

[Footnote 988: Thoresby's Diary, Aug. 8, 1702, i. 375.]

[Footnote 989: Goldsmith's 'Life of Nash'—Works, iii. 277-8. De Foe's Tour through Great Britain, 1738, i. 193, ii. 242.]

[Footnote 990: Lloyd's Poems, 'A Tale,' c. 1757, Cowper's Poems, 'Truth.']

[Footnote 991: B. Hope, Worship, &c., in the Ch. of E., 20.]

[Footnote 992: Pietas Londinensis, passim.]

[Footnote 993: Secker's Eight Charges, 77.]

[Footnote 994: Whiston mentions this with approval in his Memoirs, 1769, x. 138. It is mentioned of Archbishop Sharp that he always kept Wednesday and Friday as days of humiliation, and Friday as a fast.—Life, ii. 81. Hearne and Grabe were very much scandalised at Dr. Hough making Friday his day for entertaining strangers.—Hearne's Reliquiae, ii. 30. The boys at Appleby School, about 1730, always, as is incidentally mentioned, went to morning prayers in the Church on Wednesdays and Fridays ('Memoir of R. Yates,' appended to G.W. Meadley's Memoirs of Paley, 123).]