Characters of the Clergy in the Latter Part of the Seventeenth Century
Considered_, published shortly after the appearance of the _History_.
What Mr. Babington and those whom he represented forgot was precisely
what Eachard's opponents had forgotten, that it was not the clergy
universally who had been described, for Macaulay, like Eachard, had
distinguished, but the clergy as represented by its proletariat.

If Eachard had occasionally given the reins to humour, Macaulay had
occasionally perhaps given them to rhetoric. But of the substantial
accuracy of both there can be no doubt at all.

On the intelligent, discriminating friends of the Church, Eachard's work
had something of the same effect, as Jeremy Collier's _Short View of the
Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage_ had in another sphere.
It directed serious attention to what all thoughtful and right-feeling
people must have felt to be a national scandal. It was an appeal to
sentiment and reason on matters with respect to which, in this country at
least, such appeals are seldom made in vain. It did not, indeed, lead
immediately to practical reform, but it advanced the cause of reform by
inspiring and bringing other initiators into the field. And pre-eminent
among these was Swift. Swift was evidently well acquainted with Eachard's
work. In the apology prefixed to the fourth edition of the _Tale of a Tub_
in 1710, he speaks of Eachard with great respect. Contemptuously
explaining that he has no intention of answering the attacks which had
been made on the _Tale_, he observes: 'When Dr. Eachard wrote his book
about the _Contempt of the Clergy_, numbers of these answerers
immediately started up, whose memory, if he had not kept alive by his
replies, it would now be utterly unknown that he were ever answered at
all.' No one who is familiar with Swift's tracts on Church reform can
doubt that he had read Eachard's work with minute attention, and was
greatly influenced by it. In his _Project for the Advancement of
Religion_, he largely attributed the scandalous immorality everywhere
prevalent to the insufficiency of religious instruction, and to the low
character of the clergy, the result mainly of their ignorance and
poverty. His _Letter to a Young Clergyman_ is little more than a didactic
adaptation of that portion of Eachard's work which deals with the
character and education of the clergy. The _Essay on the Fates of
Clergymen_ is another study from the _Cont