earned, and
that the rest might be very useful and well esteemed in their
profession.' To describe the work as 'a series of jocose caricatures--as
Churchill Babington in his animadversions on Macaulay's _History_
does--is absurd. Eachard was evidently a man of strong common sense, of
much shrewdness, a close observer, and one who had acquainted himself
exactly and extensively with the subject which he treats. But he was a
humorist, and, like Swift, sometimes gave the reins to his humour. It
must be remembered that his remarks apply only to the inferior clergy,
and there can be no doubt that since the Reformation they had, as a body,
sunk very low. Chamberlayne had no motive for exaggeration, but the
language he uses in describing them is stronger even than Eachard's.
Swift had no motive for exaggeration, and yet his pictures of Corusodes
and Eugenio in his _Essay on the Fates of Clergymen_, and what we gather
from his _Project for the Advancement of Religion_, his _Letter to a
Young Clergyman_, and what may be gathered generally from his writings,
very exactly corroborate Eachard's account. The lighter literature of the
later seventeenth and of the first half of the eighteenth century teems
with proofs of the contempt to which their ignorance and poverty exposed
them. To the testimonies of Oldham and Steele, and to the authorities
quoted by Macaulay and Mr. Lecky, may be added innumerable passages from
the _Observator_, from De Foe's _Review_, from Pepys,[5] from Baxter's
_Life_ of himself, from Archbishop Sharp's _Life_, from Burnet, and many
others.

It is remarkable that Eachard says nothing about two causes which
undoubtedly contributed to degrade the Church in the eyes of the laity:
its close association with party politics, and the spread of
latitudinarianism, a conspicuous epoch in which was marked some
twenty-six years later in the Bangorian controversy.

The appearance of the first volume of Macaulay's _History_ in 1848 again
brought Eachard's work into prominence. Macaulay's famous description of
the clergy of the seventeenth century in his third chapter was based
mainly on Eachard's account. The clergy and orthodox laity of our own day
were as angry with Eachard's interpreter as their predecessors, nearly two
centuries before, had been with Eachard himself. The controversy began
seriously, after some preliminary skirmishing in the newspapers and
lighter reviews, with Mr. Churchill Babington's _Mr. Macaulay's