“To open the state of my soul to you, or any of our clergy, is what I have no inclination to at present; and, I believe, I never shall. I shall not put my conscience under the direction of mortal man, frail as myself. To my own Master I stand or fall. Nay, I scruple not to say, that all such desire in you, or any other ecclesiastic, seems to me like church tyranny, and assuming to yourselves a dominion over your fellow-creatures, which was never designed you by God.... I farther own, that, I do not hold frequent communion necessary to salvation, nor a means of Christian perfection. But do not mistake my meaning: I only think communing every Sunday, or very frequently, lessens our veneration for that sacred ordinance; and, consequently, our profiting by it.” This was a sensible rebuke of priestly pretensions. Clayton was young, only twenty-four; but, besides his scholarship, he was evidently a man of extensive reading. As the son of a bookseller, he had had the opportunity of gratifying literary cravings from his earliest days. He was a man of energy; and, though he reproaches himself for his sluggishness in not rising earlier than at five o’clock, he was exemplary for his diligence. All this had already made him a man of mark. In this very year, 1733, he was appointed to preach the ordination sermon in Manchester cathedral; and was so ardent in the enforcement of the rubrics of the Church, and so successful in his ministerial and pastoral office as to bring seventy old people, all of them above sixty years of age, to be confirmed by the bishop in Salford church.[37]