In the South the clergy were addicted to horse racing, gambling, and drunken revels. One of them was for many years president of a Jockey Club. They encouraged among the people the celebration of the sacrament of baptism with music and dancing in which the clergymen took part, a custom which shows signs of returning in England. One fought a duel in a churchyard, another thrashed his vestry. One parson preached in his stocking feet, one in his study coat, and one ran a distillery. Many of them were appointed by the British government and by the Bishop of London and they were affected by the irreligious listlessness and low moral tone of the English church in the eighteenth century. Alexander Graydon tells us that in his early days any jockeying, fiddling, wine-bibbing clergyman not over-scrupulous about stealing sermons was currently known as "a Maryland Parson." The Maryland clergy are said to have been more vicious than those of Virginia. They raced horses, hunted foxes, drank, gambled, joined in every amusement of the planters and would extort marriage fees from the poor by breaking off in the middle of the service and refusing to go on until paid. One Dr. Beatty was acting as chaplain to an army of five hundred men led by Franklin to defend the frontier against the French and Indians after the burning of the Moravian mission at Gnadenhutten, Pennsylvania. "Dr. Beatty complained to me," says Franklin, "that the men did not generally attend his prayers and exhortations. When they were enlisted, they were promised, besides hay and provisions, a gill of rum a day, which was punctually served out to them, half in the morning, and the other half in the evening; and I observed they were as punctual in attending to receiving it; upon which I said to Mr. Beatty, 'It is perhaps below the dignity of your profession to act as steward of the rum, but if you were to deal it out, and only just after prayers you would have them all about you.'" The shrewd suggestion was adopted by Dr. Beatty, and the philosophic Franklin says "Never were prayers more generally and punctually attended; so that I thought this method preferable to the punishment inflicted by some military laws for non-attendance at divine service." This chapter may well be concluded with the famous and oft quoted letter of Cotton Mather to John Higginson: "September ye 15, 1682. "To ye Aged and Beloved Mr. John Higginson: "There is now at sea a ship called the Welcome, which has on board an hundred or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief scamp, at the head of them.