Unhappily, among the evils resulting from the multiplication of a needy clergy, which may be in part attributed to the undue accumulation of Church property in a few hands, mere penury was not the worst.  Some clergy struggled manfully and honestly against its pressure, but others fell into disreputable courses.  These latter are not, of course, to be regarded as representative men of any class in the Church.  They were simply the Pariahs of ecclesiastical society; the black sheep which will be found, in one form or another, in every age of the Church.  But owing to the causes noted above, they formed an exceptionally large class at the close of the seventeenth and during the first half at least of the eighteenth century.

Some belonging to this class of clergy supported themselves as hangers-on to the families of the great.  Domestic chaplains in great houses became less common as the century advanced.  The admirable hits of Addison and Steele against the indignities to which domestic chaplains were subjected are more applicable to the early than to the latter part of the century.  Boswell adduced it as an instance that ’there was less religion in the nation than formerly,’ that ’there used to be a chaplain in every great family, which we do not find now;’ and was well answered by Dr. Johnson, ’Neither do you find any of the state servants in great families.  There is a change in customs.’  The change, however, was not wholly to the advantage of the Church.  Bad as was the relation between the chaplain and his patron, where the former was degraded to an inferior position in the household, there was still some sort of spiritual tie between them.[663] The parson who was simply the boon companion of the ignorant and sensual squire of the Hanoverian period was in a still worse position.  This class of clergyman is a constant subject of satire in the lighter literature and caricatures of the day.  Not that they were so numerous or so bad as they are often represented to have been.  There was a strong and growing tendency in the Georgian era to make the very worst of clerical delinquencies.  For it is a curious fact that while the Church as an establishment was most popular, her ministers were most unpopular.  Secker complained, not without reason, in 1738, that ’Christianity is now railed at and ridiculed with very little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all.  Against us our adversaries appear to have set themselves to be as bitter as they can—­not only beyond all truth, but beyond probability—­exaggerating without mercy,’ &c.[664] And nearly thirty years later he still makes the same complaint.  ‘You cannot but see,’ he warns candidates for Holy Orders, ’in what a profane and corrupt age this stewardship is committed to you; how grievously religion and its ministers are hated and despised.’[665] ‘Since the Lollards,’ writes Mr. Pattison, ’there had never been a time when the ministers of religion were held in so much contempt as in the