Having brought our review down to the great revival of religion about the middle of the last century, let us now inquire what the Church has done since that time to make up for centuries of gross neglect or perfunctory service. It might have been thought that this stirring of spiritual life in the country, through other agencies than its own, would have roused it, were it from no better motive than that of jealous emulation, to make some effort to retain or recover its influence over the population. And this, indeed, has been the case to some extent within the last quarter of a century. But for nearly a hundred years after the appearance of Harris and Rowlands, during which all bodies of Dissenters were labouring incessantly for the evangelization of the Principality, the Church was settled on her lees. Her rulers not only winked at for their own profit, but actively maintained and promoted the existence of abuses as audacious and monstrous as ever dishonoured a Christian Church. Her clergy, wholly abandoned to themselves, with little or no episcopal supervision or stimulus, were content with enjoying their temporalities while they neglected their duties, leading lives of mere worldly ease, and sometimes much worse lives than that. If any reader should imagine we are indulging in exaggerations, we can refer him for exuberance of proof to Mr. Johnes' most able and admirable work, which we have already mentioned. It was published in 1832, and describes the state of things then in actual existence. The sole object of most of the alien bishops who had been and were in occupation of the Welsh sees, seemed to have been to provide for themselves and those of their own households. Never was episcopal nepotism carried to so daring an excess, with this peculiar and enormous aggravation, that 'in Wales every relation of a bishop is in language a foreigner; and his uncouth attempts to officiate in his church in a tongue unintelligible to himself, can be felt by his congregation as nothing better than a profanation of the worship of God.'[164] As a specimen of how the chief pastors of the Welsh Church acted in this matter, we subjoin an extract from a speech delivered in the House of Commons, in 1836, by Mr. Benjamin Hall, afterwards Lord Llanover, a gentleman whose name and memory ought to be held in grateful and honourable remembrance in the Principality, for the strenuous efforts he made in and out of Parliament to remedy many flagrant abuses in the educational and ecclesiastical institutions of the country, and to procure something like justice for Wales:--