Thirty or forty years ago, the popular estimate of what was called the Established Religion was as low as can well be conceived. The laity, for the most part, regarded Churchmanship as a mere empty tradition, or at best as a political symbol, and an excuse for lusty choruses in praise of “a jolly full bottle.” The Clergy, unless they were grievously maligned, had but two objects in life—the acquirement of “fat livings,” and the enjoyment of amusements not now considered clerical. Of course, there never was a time when there were not hundreds of exemplary persons in holy orders; but that the prevailing impression was wholly without foundation it would take a bold man to affirm. The worldliness of the Clergy of the eighteenth century has even left its mark on the language. The word “curate” literally means a “curé”—a person charged with the cure of souls, one that has the spiritual care of a parish. Such is its meaning in the Prayer Book, and such was its signification down to the last “Review”; but now it has come to mean only a hireling, or an assistant. In like manner, “Parson” was the most honourable title a parochial clergyman could possess; and that, no doubt, continued to be the case so late as the time of George Herbert. The beneficed Clergy under the Hanoverian dynasty, however, so conducted themselves, that the term is now never used, except by those who wish to speak disrespectfully of the profession, or of some individual belonging to it. It would be wrong, perhaps, to hold the Clergy entirely responsible for the sad phase through which we have lately passed. That they were what they were was “more their misfortune than their fault.” At the worst, they were probably better than the rest of the community, and, save when by a persecution to the death the Church is forced into a position of direct antagonism to the world, it would be idle to expect it to be much in advance of the age. The short reign of the Puritans so confounded religion with cant that at the Restoration it had come to be thought a sort of virtue to be ungodly. The Church set itself manfully to resist the evil, and no doubt it would soon have been successful; but, unfortunately, the Nonjuring difficulty supervened. Now, it is the misery of a crisis of that description, that the community in which it occurs suffers every way. The men whose labours it actually loses are necessarily amongst the most conscientious, and, therefore, the most valuable, of its ministers; and those who stay behind have their usefulness impaired by the stigma which is cast upon their motives. For, if there are two men under precisely the same obligations, and one of them feels compelled for conscience’ sake to surrender all his worldly prospects, people will never be persuaded that the other, who does not follow the same example, has not sacrificed his convictions to his material interests. We have seen many instances in our own time in which this has occurred.