It will thus be seen that there were many general causes at work which tended to debase the Church during the period which comes under our consideration.  No doubt some that have been mentioned were symptoms as well as causes of the disease; but, in so far as they were causes, they must be fully taken into account before we condemn indiscriminately the clergy whose lot it was to live in an age when circumstances were so little conducive to the development of the higher spiritual life, or to the carrying out of the Church’s proper mission to the nation.  It is extremely difficult for any man to rise above the spirit of his age.  He who can do so is a spiritual hero.  But it is not given to everyone to reach the heroic standard; and it surely does not follow that because a man cannot be a hero he must therefore be a bad man.

Bearing these cautions in mind, we may now proceed to consider some of the more flagrant abuses, the existence of which has affixed a stigma, not altogether undeserved, upon the English Church of the eighteenth century.

One of the worst of these abuses—­worst both in itself and also as the fruitful source of many others—­was the glaring evil of pluralities and non-residence, an evil which was inherited from an earlier generation.  It is perfectly astonishing to observe the lax views which even really good men seem to have held on this subject in the middle part of the century.  Bishop Newton, the amiable and learned author of the ‘Dissertation on the Prophecies,’ mentions it as an act of almost Quixotic disinterestedness that ’when he obtained the deanery of St. Paul’s (that is, in addition to his bishopric) he resigned his living in the City, having held it for twenty-five years.’  In another passage he plaintively enumerates the various preferments he had to resign on taking the bishopric of Bristol.  ’He was obliged to give up the prebend of Westminster, the precentorship of York, the lectureship of St. George’s, Hanover Square, and the genteel office of sub-almoner.’  On another occasion we find him conjuring his friend Bishop Pearce, of Rochester, not to resign the deanery of Westminster.  ’He offered and urged all the arguments he could to dissuade the Bishop from his purpose of separating the two preferments, which had been united for near a century, and lay so convenient to each other that neither of them would be of the same value without the other; and if once separated they might perhaps never be united again, and his successors would have reason to reproach and condemn his memory.’  In another passage he complains of the diocese of Lincoln being ’so very large and laborious, so very extensive and expensive;’ but the moral he draws is not that it should be subdivided, so that its bishop might be able to perform his duties, but ’that it really requires and deserves a good commendam to support it with any dignity.’