effect was injurious to it in a high degree.  With a few exceptions, such as Butler, Berkeley, and Wilson, the clergy shared the indifference of their flocks.  The upper ranks were indolent, selfish, often immoral; the lower, poor, ignorant, and degraded in social position.  Bishops and prominent clergymen, under the system of pluralities, left their congregations to the care of hungry curates, and sought promotion by assiduous attendance at ministers’ levees, or by paying court to the king’s mistresses.  It is not surprising that public respect for them and for their calling almost died away.  Pope wrote sneeringly:[94]

      EVEN in a BISHOP I can spy desert;
      Seeker is decent, Rundle has a heart.

A naked Venus hung in the room where prayers were read while Queen Caroline dressed, which Dr. Madox sarcastically termed “a very proper altar-piece."[95] Of the High Churchmen Defoe declared that “the spirit of Christianity is fled from among them.”  When the Prince of Wales died, George the Second appointed governors and preceptors for the prince’s children.  Horace Walpole’s description[96] of one of these is significant.  “The other Preceptor was Hayter, Bishop of Norwich, a sensible well-bred man, natural son of Blackbourn, the jolly old Archbishop of York, who had all the manners of a man of quality, though he had been a Buccaneer and was a Clergyman; but he retained nothing of his first profession except his seraglio.”

While the attention of the upper clergy was largely absorbed by thoughts of private profit and by the pursuit of worldly advancement, the lower ranks were left in a position degrading alike to themselves and to religion.  In the country a clergyman was little above a peasant in social consideration, and seldom equal to him in the comforts of life.  To eke out the sustenance of himself and family, hard labor in his own garden was by no means the most menial of the services he was obliged to perform.  His wife was usually a servant-maid taken from a neighboring country house, and the kitchen was his most common resort when he visited the home of a squire.  A private chaplain was little above a servant.  In London, many clergymen fell into the prisons through debt or crime.  From the ranks of the lower clergy were recruited the “buck-parsons,” so long a scandal to the church and to public morality; and the large body of “Fleet parsons,” of infamous character, in the pay of gin shops and taverns, who, for a trifling sum, performed what were legal marriages between boys and girls, drunkards and runaways.