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,