“Church-ladders are not always mounted best By learned clerks and Latinists professed. The exalted prize demands an upward look, Not to be found by poring on a book. Small skill in Latin, and still less in Greek, Is more than adequate to all I seek. Let erudition grace him or not grace, I give the bauble but the second place; His wealth, fame, honours, all that I intend Subsist and centre in one point—a friend. A friend whate’er he studies or neglects, Shall give him consequence, heal all defects. His intercourse with peers and sons of peers— There dawns the splendour of his future years; In that bright quarter his propitious skies Shall blush betimes, and there his glory rise. ‘Your lordship’ and ‘Your Grace,’ what school can teach A rhetoric equal to those parts of speech? What need of Homer’s verse or Tully’s prose, Sweet interjections! if he learn but those? Let reverend churls his ignorance rebuke, Who starve upon a dog-eared pentateuch, The parson knows enough who knows a duke.” At the end of the eighteenth century the Church was at its deadest, enthusiasm there was none. Torpid is the only word that fitly describes the spiritual condition of the majority of the clergy. Secker says, “An open and professed disregard of religion is become, through a variety of unhappy causes, the distinguishing character of the present age”; and the clergy, as the salt of the earth, had certainly lost their savour, and did little or nothing to resist an apathy which, too commonly, extended to themselves. The duties of clergymen were therefore almost as light as they chose to make them. One service on Sunday, and the Holy Communion three times yearly, at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, was considered enough. “A sacrament might easily be interposed in the long interval between Christmas and Whitsuntide, and the usual season for it, the Feast of St. Michael, is a very proper time, and if afterwards you can advance from a quarterly communion to a monthly one, I make no doubt you will.” (Secker.) Baptisms, marriages, and funerals were looked on as nuisances; the clergyman ran them together as much as possible, and often arrived at the last minute, flinging himself off his smoking horse to gabble through the service with the greatest possible speed; children were frequently buried without any service at all. The churches were for the most part damp and mouldy; there were, of course, none of the present conveniences for heating and lighting. Heavy galleries cut off the little light that struggled through the cobwebby windows. There were mouse-eaten hassocks, curtains on rods thick with dust, a general smell of mouldiness and disuse, and a cold, but ill-ventilated, atmosphere.