condition of these shepherds of the people:--“How many commandments? Where written? Can you say them by heart? What are the articles of the Christian faith? Can you repeat them? Can you recite the Lord’s Prayer? How do you know it to be the Lord’s Prayer?”[297] Were these the men to uphold church and state, and in critical times too? or rather were they not the men to render both contemptible in any times? The rising party of the Puritans, an active minority, busy rather than powerful in the Scriptures, given to subtle and unprofitable questions, would scoff at such preachers, and teach their hearers to scoff at them too, and this they not only could do, but did; and with the more mischievous effect, because (as it has been already said) the districts best peopled and most intelligent, the towns, were precisely the very poorest livings in the kingdom, and were, therefore, the very worst supplied with ministers;[298] if, indeed, they were supplied at all, and not rather abandoned to whatever wolf might feel disposed to make the fold his prey, the laity themselves actually left to bury their own dead.[299] The deep lasting wound which such a clergy inflicted upon the character and credit of the church is scarcely to be described. It had not recovered itself in the days of Herbert, who was thought by his worldly-minded friends “to have lost himself in an humble way” when he took orders; and who himself (which is more to the purpose), unambitious of distinction as he was become, casually speaks of his profession in his “Country Parson” as one of general ignominy.[300] It required the Augustan age of our divines--the age of a Hall, an Andrews, a Hammond, a Sanderson, a Taylor, a Barrow a South--to interpose itself, in order that public opinion, viewing the Church of England through such a medium, might be compelled to do it tardy justice, and at length to reverence an establishment which had given birth to so much piety, so much learning, so much genius, so much wisdom, and so much wit.