Another defect imputed to the Reformation is the inadequate support it provided for the lower orders of the clergy. Four thousand livings, and upwards, of less than one hundred and fifty pounds a year each, many very far less, with no parsonage houses whatever, or with such as the most Sabine economist would pronounce unfit for a clergyman to occupy;--this is the forlorn condition, as to temporals, in which the church has stood for a long season; a condition to which it could not have been reduced, had even a portion of the vast revenues dispersed at the Reformation been husbanded, and applied to the legitimate purpose of bettering the situation of the inferior clergy. This, Cranmer most earnestly desired; but his entreaties and regrets were alike unavailing. The evil continued, and Jewel took up the subject in his turn; and pressed the redress of it upon Elizabeth and her nobles, in his sermons at Paul’s Cross (very curious pictures of the times); but the spoil was then divided, and restitution was looked for in vain.[488] Laud made another effort; one of whose projects it was to move Charles for a grant to buy in impropriations, two of which he hoped thus to redeem every year; but his chance of success best appears from the very intention (of which the record was found in his diary) being made matter of charge against him at his trial. Had the exertions of these prelates been effective, the very great, but, as things at present stand, the necessary evil of pluralities and non-residence would have been prevented, or left without cause or excuse. As it is, to proscribe the pluralist altogether, would in many cases, be to visit with utter poverty the meritorious labourer in the vineyard, him and his little ones; and to insist, in all cases, upon residence, would be, in some, to say that the village handi-craftsman more lettered than his fellows, should be again the officiating minister, as he once was in Edward’s days, and as he was forbidden to be, from the mischief it occasioned, under Elizabeth. The evil of which we speak is grievous; but it has been and is decreasing. By help of Queen Anne’s bounty, of which the origin and history has been briefly told already, a sum of money advanced for the augmentation of a small living is met with an equal sum, when the whole is invested in land, so soon as land can be found; and thus is the income of the poor incumbent improved. And, by a modern and excellent act of the legislature, empowering him to mortgage his benefice to the amount of two years’ income, and to bind his successors as well as himself for the gradual liquidation of the debt, he is enabled to build a new house, or make an old one habitable; and thus is his residence encouraged. The beneficial operation of these two instruments of gradual church reform is more and more manifest every day. By virtue of them the modest but not mean parsonage is beginning to appear in many rude and secluded hamlets where before