The Restoration brought with it much irreverence in religion. The worship at Lichfield was performed “with more harmony and less huddle” than in any church in England, except in St. Paul’s at a later period;[271] a laudable exception proving a disgraceful rule. Complaints were officially made, by a circular letter in the name of Archbishop Sheldon, respecting the slovenly performance of sacred duties by Deans, Canons, and other dignitaries. Reading the service and administering the sacraments had been neglected by such persons, as if they had been offices beneath their importance, to be performed only by Vicars or petty Canons.[272] Croft, Bishop of Hereford, complains that “such dirty nasty surplices as most of them wear, and especially the singers in cathedrals (where they should be most decent), is rather an imitation of their dirty lives,” and had given his “stomach such a surfeit of them” as that he had almost an aversion to them all; and he adds, “I am confident, had not this decent habit been so indecently abused, it had never been so generally loathed.”[273] And Trelawny, of Bristol, laments, in reference to the united parishes of Elberton and Littleton, “I never saw so ill churches, or such ill parishioners. In one the sacrament has not been administered since the Restoration, in the other very seldom; and all the plate is but a small silver bowl, and that is kept at a Quaker’s house, with my late orders to the contrary.”[274] In Articles of Visitation by the Bishop of Lincoln, it is asked whether churchwardens took care that people should not stand idle, or talk together in the church-porch, or walk in the church-yard during the time of sacred offices, or lean or lay their hats on the communion-table; and whether no minstrels, morrice-dancers, dogs, hawks, or hounds were brought into the church to the disturbance of the congregation.[275] [Sidenote: WORSHIP.]