10th.--The King would not go to Chapel, because Secker, Bishop of Oxford, was to preach before him. The Ministers did not insist upon his hearing the sermon, as they had lately upon his making him Dean of St. Paul’s. Character and popularity do not always depend upon the circumstances that ought to compose either. This Bishop, who had been bred a Presbyterian and Man-midwife, which sect and profession he had dropt for a season, while he was President of a very free thinking club,[63] had been converted by Bishop Talbot,[64] whose relation he married, and his faith settled in a Prebend of Durham: from thence he was transplanted, at the recommendation of Dr. Bland,[65] by the Queen, and advanced by her [who had no aversion to a medley of religions, which she always compounded into a scheme of heresy of her own], to the living of St. James’s, vacant by the death of her favourite Arian, Dr. Clarke, and afterwards to the Bishoprics of Bristol and Oxford.[66] It is incredible how popular he grew in his parish, and how much some of his former qualifications contributed to heighten his present doctrines. His discourses from the pulpit, which, by a fashion that he introduced, were a kind of moral essays, were as clear from quotations of Scripture, as when he presided in a less Christian society; but what they wanted of Gospel, was made up by a tone of fanaticism that he still retained. He had made a match between a daughter of the late Duke of Kent[67] and a Doctor Gregory, whose talents would have been extremely thrown away in any priesthood, where celibacy was one of the injunctions. He had been presented with a noble service of plate for procuring a marriage between the heiress[68] of the same Duke of Kent and the Chancellor’s son, and was now forced upon the King[69] by the gratitude of the same Minister, though he had long been in disgrace for having laid his plan for Canterbury in the interest he had cultivated at the Prince’s Court. But even the Church had its renegades in politics, and the King was obliged to fling open his asylum to all kind of deserters; content with not speaking to them at his levee, or listening to them in the pulpit!