Chapter Coffee-house door, in St. Paul's, for any professional job for which they were eligible. Now and then, one of these "Tatter Crapes" got a Welsh living, and therewith sold ale every day, Sunday included. After all, a poor incumbent selling ale in a house near his church, is less startling than a layman selling the same liquor in the church itself. This, nevertheless, was once done at Thorp, in Nottinghamshire. Thurston, in his history of that county, says of Thorp : Inclosing the lordship (as it doth in all places where the soil is anything good in this county, for certain) hath so ruined and depopulated the town, that in my time there was not a house left of this notable lordship (except some part of the Hall, Mr. Armstrong's house), but a shepherd only kept ale to sell in the church!" At the end of the last century, the general condition in the Isle of Man was not much more flourishing than at the carlier period already named. The Island, after the Reformation, had an ill-paid church and an impoverished people. The rents of the old Abbey lands were not spent in the island; farmers and clergy suffered alike. The latter starved on their poor glebes, but kept life within themselves by being exacting in the matter of corpse presents, and by enforcing payment of tithes for milk, butter, cheese, wood, and fish. The livings ceased to merit the name. In 1696, Governor Sacheverell wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the effect that three of the most hopeful In the Last Century. 261 students of the academy, finding that they had the magnificent prospect of being presented to three of the old Abbey vicarages, had suddenly disappeared from the Island. The prospective fortune was more than they could bear. Each vicar would have been in the enjoyment of three pounds sterling per annum! A few years subsequently, the question of stipends in England had not a much more brilliant aspect. Kennett, in his Cases of Impropriations, alludes to the acknowledgment made by several parliaments that 1007. a year was a 'competent provision' for a parochial minister. In 1704, when the church had Queen Anne for its nursing-mother, and this "case" was before the public, it was said that of nine thousand benefices nearly seven thousand were below that measure of "competency." It is little marvel that the poorer clergy were anxious to increase their means by "jobbing." They were not all like the "Tatter Crapes." Some turned up their noses at the "Threepennies," claimed and obtained higher honorarium, and even then grumbled at its inadequacy. One of these hirelings, mounted on a cob, was trotting briskly on a Sunday morning to the country church where he had engaged to preach. overtook Howell Davis, Whitfield's coadjutor, who was walking with similar purpose in view. As Howell looked clerical, the equestrian clergyman entered into conversation with him. He spoke of their calling as unprofitable; "I can never get more than half a He Howell mildly remarked guinea for preaching!" that he was glad to preach for a crown. exalted priest did not refrain from expressing his contempt for a fellow who so disgraced his cloth. "You'll perhaps despise me more," said Davis, "when I tell you that I am going eighteen miles, in and out, to preach, and that I have only sevenpence in my pocket for all expenses." Why," cried the other, “you said you were glad to preach for a crown!" 66 "So I am," replied Howell, "for a crown of glory!" Whereat Presbyter put his one spur to the flank of his cob, and rode away with a psha ! Half a century ago, there were certain advertisements in the papers which illustrated the style in which some parsons lived, or would like to live. Such illustration has not disappeared even now; as (for instance) when a curate is required to do three months duty for an incumbent who wants to go to Homburg, and who offers his locum tenens the potatoes in his garden in lieu of filthy lucre. ducements in our fathers' days. There were other in Thus, in the Oxford Journal (April 11, 1811), there is advertised for sale the next presentation to a most valuable living. The good man who may be able and willing to purchase, is told that the living lies in a magnificent sporting country, with the very best of coursing, hunting, fishing, and shooting, wholesome air, and jolly company. Should he require a little variety, since "health, for want of change, becomes disease," a gay city is near, and "several most fashionable watering places not far distant." St. Paul, among the Galatians, or among pleasanter people, never dreamed of such a Christian workman and work-place as are here indicated. Profaneness, poverty, earnestness, carelessness,there is hardly a condition that has not had flung at it some of the verba ad summam caveam spectantia, which may be called slang in reference here to clerical subjects. My readers will find abundant samples in the next chapter. SLANG IN HIGH PLACES. IT T may be a consolation or a reproach to the frank and angry Christian, to feel that if he be a little given to call things by their right names when he has to deal with a brother who does not altogether agree with him, the pagan, and particularly the pagan Egyptians, were very much addicted to the same candid, if unpleasant practice. There are no more comforting lines in Juvenal than those in which, showing how heartily one sect of Egyptians hated another, he also shows that those grave and splendid dunces were no better than ourselves. Speaking of the two parties in the Egyptian pagan church, if I may so call it, whose head quarters were at Ombi and Tentyra, and who loved each other like Exeter Hall and Maynooth, Juvenal says: "Summus utrique Inde furor vulgo, quod numina vicinorum Odit uterque locus, quum solos credat habendos After all, it is a credit to the early Christians that they not only did not begin by calling their heathen |