than this. The poor minister must keep his house, buy his books, relieve the poor, and live, God knoweth how, and so do you, too. Oh, good my lords and brethren, I come not hither to be a patron for money matters. God seeth my heart, before whom I speak

it; but I see God's temple by this means is forsaken. Young men, such as are of most towardness, turn themselves to be physicians, or men of law, yea, clerks and apothecaries. The matter is so used that they are ashamed to be ministers in God's church. They should not do so, say you: no, neither yet you, as your doings are, can be angry with them. They are not angels, but your own children, your brethren, your cousins, of your own affections, of your own flesh and blood, and they think themselves too good to become your slaves."

A passage in his sermon on Psalm lix. 9, on the same subject, is perhaps a still finer specimen of sober reason and indignant eloquence:

"But there be many which can say, Such as be ministers of the church should teach freely, without hope of recompence or hire for their labour. Our preachers are no better than Peter and Paul, and the other apostles; they are no better than the holy apostles, who lived poorly. Poverty is a commendable estate. So say some in like devotion as did Judas, What needed this waste? this might have been sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor; not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare that which was given. I doubt not there are many which teach Christ for Christ's sake-which say in their soul, The Lord is my portion-who in that heavy time from which God delivered them, if they might have received their life only for a recompence, would have been glad to take the pains-who seek you, and not yours, which have

forsaken all they had to follow Christ. I doubt not there are such. But for the hope of posterity, I report me to all you which are fathers, and have children, for whom you are careful, although you yourselves have a zeal and care for the house of God, yet will you breed them up, keep them at school until four and twenty years old, to your charges, that in the end they may live in glorious poverty-that they may live poor and naked, like prophets and apostles? Our posterity shall rue that ever such fathers went before them, and chronicles shall report this contempt of learning among the punishments, and murrains, and other plagues of God; they shall leave it written in what time and under whose reign this was done; or if we grow so barbarous that we consider not this, nor be able to draw it into chronicle, yet foreign nations will not spare to write this, and publish it to our everlasting reproach and shame."

VIII. Jewel was gathered to his fathers, and no one following him was likely to improve upon his standard of episcopal duty. Meanwhile similar complaints continued to arise from every district of the island. Buckley denounces, in no measured terms, at the Cross in 1571, the giving of livings "as rewards to serving men," or to maintain "gentlemen at the inns of court," or purchasing them with "such a dish of apples as M. Latimer speaketh of."* But his testimony to the fact that able and conscientious clergymen might go and starve is of more consequence :"I know myself good and godly men, learned men of long continuance in the University, and able to do much good in the church of God, and yet not called in any charge, or placed over any flock. Yea, some have told me that they have been offered many benefices, (as they be called,) and yet could they not have taken one un* See Appendix.

*

less they had taken part with Judas Iscariot or Simon Magus." Keltridge carries this disgraceful statement considerably further. "The sickle," he says, "hath now been twice six times in the reaper's hands since I gave my first full entry into Cambridge, and many a time hath the sun turned back again his course since I began my study. Yet did I never hear of twice six persons which were called by the Patronists into any one benefice throughout England; either known any, if he sued not for it, to have got ought; and then if Master Simon and he juggled not together or went aside into some corner, he went without it too." †

Of course these men did not belong to the same class as the patrons. One preacher ‡ even says that gentlemen thought "their whole family disgraced if there be any of their name a priest, for so they odiously term us; otherwise the name is too good for them or us." Another § repeats the remonstrance of Jewel and contrasts it whimsically with the past: "This high office of preaching and ministry of the word of God is so contemned that all the nobility doth shun it, and all the gentry of this land utterly refuse it, leaving it to the meaner and poorer sort? Had they not a great deal rather that Justinian and Galen, nay, any

profession, should have the service of their sons than dedicate them to the service of the Lord? And yet we see in the popedom how men of countenance and estimation are not ashamed to let their children be evil favouredly-polled, hotched, and for the pope's service so nearly shaven, that they have scarce one hair of an honest man left them. Shall not these, trow ye, stand up in the day of judgement against us?" A third ||

* Serm. on Tim. ii. 3. 16. under the initials E. B. attributed to Buckley by a MS. note in the copy at Lambeth.

Keltridge, Tim. i. p. 239.
Stockwood, 1579.

Topsell, p. 354.

| Simon Haywarde, 1582.

too.

preaching at an ordination, states broadly, that not only were the aristocracy of wealth and blood denied to the service of God, but the aristocracy of talent "The scornful keeping back of the worthy, and the careless and impudent thrusting in of the unworthy," he looked upon as a crime to be denounced on that occasion, and took care to let the candidates know he meant some of them.

A fourth, adverting no doubt to those colleges at Oxford in which it was impossible to prevail on the fellows to take orders as the statutes required, combats their hypocritical excuse that "whilst they would seem to think reverendly of the ministry, defraud the church of their gifts. The earth is cursed," he tells them, "that rendereth not crop according to the seed sowed."

Stockwood states the result, and puts forward the only apology which could be made for the bishops who connived at all this. Many of them had sacrificed much for conscience sake, and had not spirits to undergo a second martyrdom at the hands of their own familiar friends whom they trusted. "The churches are full of Jeroboam priests-I mean the very refuse of the people, in whom is no manner of worthiness, but such as their greedy LATRONES, PATRONES I would say, allow of-I mean their worthy paying for it; and then a quare impedit against the bishop that shall deny him institution." There was not one Becket on the bench, and but one Grindal.

* Gervase Babington, 1590.

And here I cannot but make this remark upon the Incumbent of the said St. Nicholas, whose name was parson Chicken, that he sold his wife to a Butcher, and was carted about London.-Strype.

IF

I.

F the reformed clergyman of the sixteenth century was unpleasantly situated in his public capacity, the glimpses caught of him now and then in his domestic circumstances do not seem to intimate that he found solace in his home. The superior class was undoubtedly that of the preachers, the inferior, the resident ministers; but as Lever well observed, "Whosoever listeth to mark throughout all England, he shall see that a mean learned man keeping house in his parish, and being of godly conversation, shall persuade and teach more of his parishioners with communication, at one meal, than the best learned Doctor of Divinity, keeping no house, can persuade or teach in his parish by preaching a dozen solemn sermons.'

Doubtless the value of a resident clergy is great. And whether the priest meets his parishioners on the ascetic or the social plan, so long as he maintains their * Lever, 1550.