The question, then, arises, ’How far were the clergy responsible for this sad state of affairs?’ As a body they were distinctly superior to their contemporaries. It is a remarkable fact that when the clergy were, as a rule, very unpopular, during the reign of the Georges I. and II.,[691] and when, therefore, any evil reports against them would be eagerly caught up and circulated, we find singularly few charges of gross immorality brought against them. Excessive love of preferment, and culpable inactivity in performing the duties of their office, are the worst accusations that are brought against them as a body. Even men like Lord Hervey, and Horace Walpole and Lord Chesterfield rarely bring, and still more rarely substantiate, any charges against them on this head. Speaking of the shortcomings of the clergy in the early part of the century, Bishop Burnet, who does not spare his order, carefully guards against the supposition that he accuses them of leading immoral lives. ‘When,’ he writes, ’I say live better, I mean not only to live without scandal, which I have found the greatest part of them to do, but to lead exemplary lives.’[692] Some years later, Bentley could boldly assert of ‘the whole clergy of England’ that they were ’the light and glory of Christianity,’[693] an assertion which he would scarcely have dared to make had they been sunk into such a slough of iniquity as they are sometimes represented to have been. Writing to Courayer in 1726, Archbishop Wake laments the infidelity and iniquity which abounded, but is of opinion that ’no care is wanting in our clergy to defend the Christian faith.’[694] John Wesley, while decrying the notion that the unworthiness of the minister vitiates the worth of his ministry, admits that ’in the present century the behaviour of the clergy in general is greatly altered for the better,’ although he thinks them deficient both in piety and knowledge. Or if clerical testimony be suspected of partiality, we have abundance of lay evidence all tending to the same conclusion. Smollett, a contemporary, declares that in the reign of George II. ’the clergy were generally pious and exemplary.’[695] When a Presbyterian clergyman talked before Dr. Johnson of fat bishops and drowsy deans, he replied, ’Sir, you know no more of our Church than a Hottentot.’[696] One of the most impartial historians of our own day and country, in dwelling upon the immoralities of the age and upon the clerical shortcomings, adds that ’the lives of the clergy were, as a rule, pure.’[697]
It is necessary to bring into prominence such testimony as this because there has been a tendency to insinuate what has never been proved—that the clergy were, as a body, living immoral lives. At the same time it is not desired to palliate their real defects. It is admitted that a more active and earnest performance of their proper duties might have done much more than was done by the clergy to stem the torrent of iniquity.