eases.

But although anybody may serve God after his own fashion, their true
religion, the one in which fortunes are made, is the Episcopal sect,
called the Anglican Church, or, simply and pre-eminently, the Church. No
office can be held in England or Ireland except by faithful Anglicans; a
circumstance which has led to the conversion of many Noncomformists.

The Anglican clergy have retained many Catholic ceremonies, above all
that of receiving tithes with a most scrupulous attention. They have
also a pious ambition for religious ascendancy, and do what they can to
foment a holy zeal against Nonconformists. But a Whig ministry is just
now in power, and the Whigs are hostile to Episcopacy. They have
prohibited the lower clergy from meeting in convocation, a sort of
clerical house of commons; and the clergy are limited to the obscurity
of their parishes, and to the melancholy task of praying God for a
government that they would be only too happy to disturb. The bishops,
however, sit in the House of Lords in spite of the Whigs, because the
old abuse continues of counting them as barons.

As regards morals, the Anglican clergy are better regulated than those
of France, for these reasons:--they are all educated at Oxford or
Cambridge, far from the corruption of the capital; and they are only
called to high church office late in life, at an age when men have lost
every passion but avarice. They do not make bishops or colonels here of
young men fresh from college. Moreover, the clergy are nearly all
married, and the ill manners contracted at the universities, and the
slightness of the intercourse between men and women, oblige a bishop as
a rule to be content with his own wife. Priests sometimes frequent inns,
for custom permits it; and if they get drunk, they do so discreetly and
without scandal.

When English clergymen hear that in France young men, famous for their
dissipations, and elevated to bishoprics by the intrigues of women, make
love publicly, amuse themselves by writing amorous ballads, give
elaborate suppers every day, and, in addition, pray for the light of the
Holy Spirit, and boldly call themselves the successors of the Apostles;
the Englishmen thank God that they are Protestants. But they are vile
heretics, to be burnt by all the devils, as Rabelais puts it; which is
the reason why I have nothing to do with them.

The Anglican religion only embraces England and Ireland.
Presbyterianism, which is Calvanism