nsider 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
subscription. It was proposed, for example, to substitute a profession
of belief in the Bible for a subscription 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,
L20,000 and L30,000 a year; while the smaller, Llandaff, Bangor,
Bristol, and Gloucester, were worth less than L2000. 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 1809 they were calculated to be worth L255, while nearly four
thousand livings were worth under L150; 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.