The bishops were eminently respectable.They did not lead immoral lives,and if they gave a large share of preferment to their families,that at least was a domestic virtue.Some of them,Bishop Barrington of Durham,for example,took a lead in philanthropic movements;and,if considered simply as prosperous country gentlemen,little fault could be found with them.While,however,every commonplace motive pointed so directly towards a career of subserviency to the ruling class among the laity,it could not be expected that they should take a lofty view of their profession.The Anglican clergy were not like the Irish priesthood,in close sympathy with the peasantry,or like the Scottish ministers,the organs of strong convictions spreading through the great mass of the middle and lower classes.A man of energy,who took his faith seriously,was,like the Evangelical clergy,out of the road to preferment,or,like Wesley,might find no room within the church at all.His colleagues called him an 'enthusiast,'and disliked him as a busybody if not a fanatic.They were by birth and adoption themselves members of the ruling class;many of them were the younger sons of squires,and held their livings in virtue of their birth.Advowsons are the last offices to retain a proprietary character.
The church of that day owed such a representative as Horne Tooke to the system which enabled his father to provide for him by buying a living.From the highest to the lowest ranks of clergy,the church was as Matthew Arnold could still call it,an 'appendage of the barbarians.'The clergy,that is,as a whole,were an integral but a subsidiary part of the aristocracy or the great landed interest.Their admirers urged that the system planted a cultivated gentleman in every parish in the country.Their opponents replied,like John Sterling,that he was a 'black dragoon with horse meat and man's meat'--part of the garrison distributed through the country to support the cause of property and order.In any case the instinctive prepossessions,the tastes and favourite pursuits of the profession were essentially those of the class with which it was so intimately connected.Arthur Young,(19)speaking of the French clergy,observes that at least they are not poachers and foxhunters,who divide their time between hunting,drinking,and preaching.You do not in France find such advertisements as he had heard of in England,'Wanted a curacy in a good sporting country,where the duty is light and the neighbourhood convivial.'The proper exercise for a country clergyman,he rather quaintly observes,is agriculture.The ideal parson,that is,should be a squire in canonical dress.The clergy of the eighteenth century probably varied between the extremes represented by Trulliber and the Vicar of Wakefield.Many of them were excellent people,with a mild taste for literature,contributing to the Gentleman's Magazine,investigating the antiquities of their county,occasionally confuting a deist,exerting a sound judgment in cultivating their glebes or improving the breed of cattle,and respected both by squire and farmers.The 'Squarson,'in Sydney Smith's facetious phrase,was the ideal clergyman.The purely sacerdotal qualities,good or bad,were at a minimum.Crabbe,himself a type of the class,has left admirable portraits of his fellows.Profound veneration for his noble patrons and hearty dislike for intrusive dissenters were combined in his own case with a pure domestic life,a keen insight into the uglier realities of country life and a good sound working morality.Miss Austen,who said that she could have been Crabbe's wife,has given more delicate pictures of the clergyman as he appeared at the tea-tables of the time.He varies according to her from the squire's excellent younger brother,who is simply a squire in a white neckcloth,to the silly but still respectable sycophant,who firmly believes his lady patroness to be a kind of local deity.Many of the real memoirs of the day give pleasant examples of the quiet and amiable lives of the less ambitious clergy.There is the charming Gilbert White (1720-1793)placidly studying the ways of tortoises,and unconsciously composing a book which breathes an undying charm from its atmosphere of peaceful repose;William Gilpin (1724-1804)founding and endowing parish schools,teaching the catechism,and describing his vacation tours in narratives which helped to spread a love of natural scenery;and thomas Gisborne (1758-1846),squire and clergyman,a famous preacher among the evangelicals and a poet after the fashion of Cowper,who loved his native Needwood Forest as White loved Selborne and Gilpin loved the woods of Boldre;and Cowper himself (1731-1800)who,though not a clergyman,lived in a clerical atmosphere,and whose gentle and playful enjoyment of quiet country life relieves the painfully deep pathos of his disordered imagination;and the excellent W.L.Bowles (1762-1850),whose sonnets first woke Coleridge's imagination,who spent eighty-eight years in an amiable and blameless life,and was country-gentleman,magistrate,antiquary,clergyman,and poet.(20)Such names are enough to recall a type which has not quite vanished,and which has gathered a new charm in more stirring and fretful times.These most excellent people,however,were not likely to be prominent in movements destined to break up the placid environment of their lives nor,in truth,to be sources of any great intellectual stir.