As in the reign of Charles II., so in the reign of William III., the office of chaplain in the families of the great was not enviable. The salary was small, the position undignified, the treatment often disrespectful, and the means of usefulness limited and questionable. In the _Athenian Oracle_, the chaplain of a family not very regular or religious--forced to see Misses drinking and gaming, and afraid to open his mouth on the subject--complains of the miseries of his situation; he inquires what he ought to do, so as neither to betray religion nor give offence. He could not believe that to say grace and read prayers, when his patron was at leisure, constituted his duty, yet he found his brethren thought they had done enough when they had done no more than that.[420] Thomas Wilson, afterwards Bishop of Sodor and Man, certainly took a different view, for when chaplain and tutor to Lord Derby, he, with commendable faithfulness, rebuked his pupil’s extravagance, so as to restore his reputation and relieve his creditors. Once, as the young nobleman was about to sign his name, he felt some melted sealing-wax dropped on his finger by this eccentric mentor, who remarked, that the pain ought to impress him with a resolution never to sign what he had never examined.[421] Clerical costume is a trifle worth only a passing sentence, and it may be observed that it remained the same after the Revolution as before. But Archbishop Tillotson introduced a novelty. He is the first Prelate represented in a wig. The wig is of moderate dimensions, and not much unlike a head of natural hair. It is curious to find him remarking upon this innovation in one of his sermons. “I can remember, since the wearing the hair below the ears was looked upon as a sin of the first magnitude; and when ministers generally, whatever their text was, did either find or make occasion to reprove the great sin of long hair; and if they saw anyone in the congregation guilty in that kind, they would point him out particularly, and _let fly at him_ with great zeal.”[422] Partly as the result of causes at work ever since the Restoration--such as the poverty, the imperfect education, and the unexemplary character of many incumbents and curates--the Clergy, as a class, were in low esteem. What has been related of the profession in the reign of Charles II. produced effects which lasted long, and the conduct of a number of Constitutionalists, as well as of Jacobites, contributed to deepen the unpopularity of the order. Good men, lamenting the evils of the age, traced to them this state of feeling, and Robert Nelson speaks of the great contempt of the Clergy, than which he thought nothing could be a greater evidence of the decayed state of religion.[423] [Sidenote: STATE OF SOCIETY.]