Many clergymen in those days had no fixed opinions on the question of church government, not believing that any particular ecclesiastical system is taught in the New Testament. Any one who held Bishops to be of Divine appointment, or who maintained the Divine right of Congregationalism, were of course chargeable with a dereliction of principle if they adopted the Presbyterian polity; but the case was far otherwise with men who did not believe that there is Divine authority for one kind of church order more than another. Such persons, too, as would have preferred, or would have been satisfied with moderate Episcopacy, and yet believed that Bishops and Presbyters were originally identical, might with good faith submit to the Presbyterianism of the Church of England. Of this class was Thomas Gataker the younger, a man eminently learned in an age of abundant erudition[190]--the friend and correspondent of Archbishop Ussher, and the author of Latin treatises filled with rare and curious knowledge. First Lecturer at Lincoln's Inn, and then Rector of Rotherhithe, he manifested throughout the political and ecclesiastical changes of the times a singular pecuniary disinterestedness; and has, in a very peculiar book, written for his own vindication, given a full account of his preferments--thus throwing much light upon the incomes and upon the cares of Commonwealth clergymen.[191] At Rotherhithe he came to a dwelling-house much mangled and defaced by the late Incumbent's widow, through spite and spleen against some of the parishioners with whom her husband had been in prolonged contention. The wharf by the river opposite to the parsonage-house was ready to drop into ruins, for the repair of which--although two or three persons contributed something--the main expense came out of Gataker's own purse. The fabric of the church, which was supported with "chalky pillars," of such a bulk as filled up no small part of the edifice, being found faulty, and "threatening a fail if not a fall, unless speedily prevented;"--the minister had to contribute largely to remove these incumbrances, and to place strong timber columns in their place. A ship catching fire on the Thames, close by the Rectory, endangered the thatched roof, which the Rector had to exchange for tiles. He also relates in his copious narrative how, in the earlier period of his incumbency, he let out the whole tithe and glebe for one hundred pounds a year, subject to several deductions. At length ten pounds a quarter more was promised, to be assessed upon the wealthier sort of inhabitants--the poorer people being spared--and to be gathered by the churchwardens for the time being, and by them quarterly paid. "Which yet," he says--for we had better leave him to tell the rest of his story in his own way--"the most part came short more or less every quarter, as by my receipts may appear. And I may truly and boldly avow it, that during all the