The appearance of the first volume of Macaulay’s History in 1848 again brought Eachard’s work into prominence.  Macaulay’s famous description of the clergy of the seventeenth century in his third chapter was based mainly on Eachard’s account.  The clergy and orthodox laity of our own day were as angry with Eachard’s interpreter as their predecessors, nearly two centuries before, had been with Eachard himself.  The controversy began seriously, after some preliminary skirmishing in the newspapers and lighter reviews, with Mr. Churchill Babington’s Mr. Macaulay’s Characters of the Clergy in the Latter Part of the Seventeenth Century Considered, published shortly after the appearance of the History.  What Mr. Babington and those whom he represented forgot was precisely what Eachard’s opponents had forgotten, that it was not the clergy universally who had been described, for Macaulay, like Eachard, had distinguished, but the clergy as represented by its proletariat.

If Eachard had occasionally given the reins to humour, Macaulay had occasionally perhaps given them to rhetoric.  But of the substantial accuracy of both there can be no doubt at all.

On the intelligent, discriminating friends of the Church, Eachard’s work had something of the same effect, as Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage had in another sphere.  It directed serious attention to what all thoughtful and right-feeling people must have felt to be a national scandal.  It was an appeal to sentiment and reason on matters with respect to which, in this country at least, such appeals are seldom made in vain.  It did not, indeed, lead immediately to practical reform, but it advanced the cause of reform by inspiring and bringing other initiators into the field.  And pre-eminent among these was Swift.  Swift was evidently well acquainted with Eachard’s work.  In the apology prefixed to the fourth edition of the Tale of a Tub in 1710, he speaks of Eachard with great respect.  Contemptuously explaining that he has no intention of answering the attacks which had been made on the Tale, he observes:  ’When Dr. Eachard wrote his book about the Contempt of the Clergy, numbers of these answerers immediately started up, whose memory, if he had not kept alive by his replies, it would now be utterly unknown that he were ever answered at all.’  No one who is familiar with Swift’s tracts on Church reform can doubt that he had read Eachard’s work with minute attention, and was greatly influenced by it.  In his Project for the Advancement of Religion, he largely attributed the scandalous immorality everywhere prevalent to the insufficiency of religious instruction, and to the low character of the clergy, the result mainly of their ignorance and poverty.  His Letter to a Young Clergyman is little more than a didactic adaptation of that portion of Eachard’s work which deals with the character and education of the