flock hath least part of the milk; he which goeth a warfare hath not half his wages. Therefore they are wearied and discouraged; they change their studies; some become aprentices, some turn to physic, some to law: all shun and flee the ministry." "Sad was the state of religion at these times," says Strype; "the substantials being lost in contending for externals; the Churchmen heaped benefices upon themselves, and resided upon none, neglecting their cures. Many of them alienated their lands, made unreasonable leases and waste of woods, and granted reversions and advowsons to their wives and children, or to others, for their use. Churches ran greatly into dilapidations and decays, and were kept nasty and filthy and indecent for God's worship. Among the laity there was little devotion, the Lord's day greatly profaned and little observed, the common prayer not frequented. Some lived without any service of God at all; many were heathens and atheists; the Queen's own court a harbour for epicures and atheists, and a kind of lawless place, because it stood in no parish; which things made good men fear some sad judgments impending over the nation.” 1

Illiteracy of the Clergy.-The mass of the clergy were so illiterate that, even had they been pure of life, they could have done little to elevate the people, or reflect honour upon the Church. In 1530, Tyndale declared that there were 20,000 priests in England who could not translate the Lord's Prayer into English (Answer to Sir Thomas More, p. 75); and Bishop Hooper found scores of the clergy in Gloucestershire who were unable 1 Strype's Parker, p. 395,

to tell who was the author of the Lord's Prayer, or where it was to be read.1 Such a deficiency of Protestant clergy had been experienced at the Queen's accession that for several years it was a common practice to appoint laymen, usually mechanics, to read the service in vacant churches.2

Reference has been already made to the statement of Neal, that there were only two thousand preachers to serve near ten thousand parish churches, so that there were almost eight thousand parishes without preaching ministers; also that in 1578, out of one hundred and forty clergymen in Cornwall, not one was capable of preaching; and throughout the kingdom those who could preach were in the proportion of about one to four,- -a statement that Hallam regards as highly probable, seeing that "the majority of the clergy were nearly illiterate, and many of them addicted to drunkenness and low vices." Bakers, butchers, cooks, and stablemen, men wholly illiterate, and not a few utterly licentious (and these were the class of which the clergy were to a large part composed), could not be expected to add dignity to the ministry or shed lustre upon the Church.3

1 Rev. R. Demaus, Life of Tyndale, p. 28. 2 Strype's Annals, pp. 138, 177.

3 “It pierces our hearts with grief to hear the cries of the country people for the word of God. The bishops either preach not at all or very seldom. . . . And whereas the Scriptures say that ministers of the gospel should be such as are able to teach sound doctrine, and convince gainsayers, yet the bishops have made priests of the basest of the people, not only for their occupations and trades whence they have taken them, as shoemakers, barbers, tailors, water-bearers, shepherds, and horse-keepers, but also for their want of good learning and honesty.”—Supplication of Puritan Ministers to Parliament in 1586, Neal, vol. i. p. 317.

Character of the Bishops. —"The bishops of this reign," says Hallam, "do not appear, with some distinguished exceptions, to have reflected so much honour on the Established Church as those who attach a superstitious reverence to the age of the Reformation are apt to conceive. In the plunder that went forward they took good care of themselves. Charges against them of simony, corruption, covetousness, and especially destruction of their Church estates for the benefit of their families are very common, sometimes, no doubt, unjust, but too frequent to be absolutely without foundation. The peculation of the bishops almost passes belief.1 They were guilty of the grossest malversation, sold the livings in their gift in order to enrich themselves, and made long and dishonest leases of the ecclesiastical lands, not hesitating even to plunder their own dioceses, cut down the timber, and dispose of the brick and the lead which were used in the buildings. Aylmer, bishop of London, cut down and sold the timber in his diocese

until prevented by an injunction. When he grew old and reflected that a large sum of money would be due from his family for dilapidations of the palace of Fulham, etc., he actually proposed to sell his bishopric to Bancroft.2 The Bishop of Lichfield is said to have made seventy "lewd and unlearned ministers for money in the course of a single day. Archbishop Parker disposed of the benefices in his gift according to a fixed tariff, regulated according to the age and money power of

1 See Strype's Annals, vol. iii. pp. 331, 463, 467.

2 Strype's Aylmer, p. 169. See Hunt's Religious Thought, p. 74, note; Froude's History, vol. xii. pp. 4–7 and p. 543.

the applicant. They were disposed of to boys under fourteen, provided they could raise the necessary sum of money.1

NOTES

Who that knows anything of Bishop Latimer does not know his famous Sermon of the Plough, preached in St. Paul's, London, in 1548, in which he thus attacked his own order: "But this much I dare say, that since lording and loitering hath come up, preaching hath come down, contrary to the apostles' times; for they preached and lorded not, and now they lord and preach not. . . . For ever since the prelates were made lords and nobles, the plough standeth; there is no work done, the people starve. They hawk, they hunt, they card, they dice; they pastime in their prelacies with gallant gentlemen, with their dancing minions, and with their fresh companions, so that ploughing is set aside; and by their lording and loitering, preaching and ploughing is clean gone." It is in this sermon that the famous passage, which has become classical in pulpit literature, occurs: "And now I would ask a strange question: Who is the most diligentest bishop and prelate in all England? . . . There is one that passeth all the others, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all others ; he is never out of his diocese,” etc.

The order which Latimer thus so trenchantly assailed were the Protestant bishops of King Edward vi.'s reign.

In the Appendix to his work on Church and State under the Tudors, Mr. Child has introduced a somewhat lengthy note on the alleged corruption of the clergy in the sixteenth century. Canon Dixon, in his History of the Church of England, vol. i. p. 23, had alleged that "no general charge of corruption has ever been made good against the English clergy." Mr. Child subjects this statement to a searching examination, and reaches the conclusion that "to say, as Canon Dixon does, that no proof of deep corruption has been made good against the English clergy, is simply to fly in the face of the evidence, not only of satirists and lampooners, but of annalists and historians, of records and law reports." It is true that the evidence

1 Froude's History, vol. xi. p. 82.

he adduces is mainly directed to prove the deep corruption of the “late pre-Reformation clergy," but he indicates very plainly how it was not confined to the Catholic clergy, but extended to their Protestant successors.

"Three times in modern English history have the bulk of the clergy, as a class, been corrupt and rotten. In Henry VIII.'s reign, when the remedy came by the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. In Whitgift's primacy, when it came through the rise of the Puritans. In Queen Anne's reign, when it came through the lay-Reformers, the moral teachers Defoe, Steele, and Addison, in their penny folio half sheets, the Review, the Tatler, the Spectator, the Guardian,” etc. In 1588 a small minority of the clergy, for the most part at work in towns, were intensely earnest, thoroughly pious, spiritually-minded men, but with a narrowness of view, and no great learning, and consequently with little general culture. At this time the bishops were thrusting hundreds of men into the ministry of the Church who were utterly unfit for their work."Introduction to the Epistle, by E. Arber, p. viii.

J