Nonconformity was not by itself punishable though it exposed a man to certain disqualifications.The state,therefore,recognised that many of its members might legally belong to other churches,although it had,as Warburton argued,formed an 'alliance'with the dominant church.The spirit of toleration was spreading throughout the century.The old penal laws,due to the struggles of the seventeenth century,were becoming obsolete in practice and were gradually being repealed.The Gordon riots of 1780showed that a fanatical spirit might still be aroused in a mob which wanted an excuse for plunder;but the laws were not explicitly defended by reasonable persons and were being gradually removed by legislation towards the end of the century.Although,therefore,parliament was kept free from papists,it could hardly regard church and state as identical,or consider itself as entitled to act as the representative body of the church.No other body,indeed,could change the laws of the church;but parliament recognised its own incompetence to deal with them.Towards the end of the century,various attempts were made to relax the terms of subion.It was proposed,for example,to substitute a profession of belief in the Bible for a subion to the Thirty-Nine Articles.But the House of Commons sensibly refused to expose itself by venturing upon any theological innovations.A body more ludicrously incompetent could hardly have been invented.
Hence we must say that the church had either no supreme body which could speak in its name and modify its creed,its ritual,its discipline,or the details of its organisation;or else,that the only body which had in theory a right to interfere was doomed,by sufficient considerations,to absolute inaction.The church,from a secular point of view,was not so much a department of the state as an aggregate of offices,the functions of which were prescribed by unalterable tradition.It consisted of a number of bishops,deans and chapters,rectors,vicars,curates,and so forth,many of whom had certain proprietary rights in their position,and who were bound by law to discharge certain functions.But the church,considered as a whole,could hardly be called an organism at all,or,if an organism,it was an organism with its central organ in a permanent state of paralysis.The church,again,in this state was essentially dependent upon the ruling classes.A glance at the position of the clergy shows their professional position.At their head were the bishops,some of them enjoying princely revenues,while others were so poor as to require that their incomes should be eked out by deaneries or livings held in commendam.The great sees,such as Canterbury,Durham,Ely,and Winchester,were valued at between ?20,000and ?30,000a year;while the smaller,Llandaff,Bangor,Bristol,and Gloucester,were worth less than ?2000.The bishops had patronage which enabled them to provide for relatives or for deserving clergymen.The average incomes of the parochial clergy,meanwhile,were small.In 1809they were calculated to be worth ?255,while nearly four thousand livings were worth under ?150;and there were four or five thousand curates with very small pay.The profession,therefore,offered a great many blanks with a few enormous prizes.How were those prizes generally obtained?When the reformers published the Black Book in 1820,they gave a list of the bishops holding sees in the last year of George III;and,as most of these gentlemen were on their promotion at the end of the previous century.I give the list in a note.(18)There were twenty-seven bishoprics including Sodor and Man.Of these eleven were held by members of noble families;fourteen were held by men who had been tutors in,or in other ways personally connected with the royal family or the families of ministers and great men;and of the remaining two,one rested his claim upon political writing in defence of Pitt,while the other seems to have had the support of a great city company.The system of translation enabled the government to keep a hand upon the bishops.Their elevation to the more valuable places or leave to hold subsidiary preferments depended upon their votes in the House of Lords.So far,then,as secular motives operated,the tendency of the system was clear.If Providence had assigned to you a duke for a father or an uncle,preferment would fall to you as of right.A man of rank who takes orders should be rewarded for his condescension.
If that qualification be not secured,You should aim at being tutor in a great family,accompany a lad on the grand tour,or write some pamphlet on a great man's behalf.Paley gained credit for independence at Cambridge,and spoke with contempt of the practice of 'rooting,'the cant phrase for patronage hunting.The text which he facetiously suggested for a sermon when Pitt visited Cambridge,'There is a young man here who has six loaves and two fishes,but what are they among so many?'hit off the spirit in which a minister was regarded at the universities.The memoirs of Bishop Watson illustrate the same sentiment.He lived in his pleasant country house at Windermere,never visiting his diocese,and according to De Quincey,talking Socinianism at his table.He felt himself to be a deeply injured man,because ministers had never found an opportunity for translating him to a richer diocese,although he had written against Paine and Gibbon.If they would not reward their friends,he argued,why should he take up their cause by defending Christianity?