kely will
be thought strange in it will be that it did not fall a hundred years
sooner.'[865] Such an instance might well be exceptional, and no doubt
was so among cathedrals;[866] but a great number of parish churches had
fallen, by the middle of the century, into a deplorable state. Secker,
in a charge delivered in 1750, gives a grievous picture of what was to
be seen in many country churches. 'Some, I fear, have scarce been kept
in necessary present repair, and others by no means duly cleared from
annoyances, which must gradually bring them to decay: water undermining
and rotting the foundations, earth heaped up against the outside, weeds
and shrubs growing upon them ... too frequently the floors are meanly
paved, or the walls dirty or patched, or the windows ill glazed, and it
may be in part stopped up ... or they are damp, offensive, and
unwholesome. Why (he adds) should not the church of God, as well as
everything else, partake of the improvements of later times?'[867]
Bishop Fleetwood had observed forty years before,[868] that unless the
good public spirit of repairing churches should prevail a great deal
more, a hundred years would bring to the ground a huge number of our
churches. 'And no one, said Bishop Butler, will imagine that the good
spirit he has recommended prevails more at present than it did
then.'[869] As for cleanliness, Bishop Horne remarked that in England,
as in the sister kingdom, it was evidently a frequent maxim that
cleanliness was no essential to devotion. People seemed very commonly to
be of the same opinion with the Scotch minister, whose wife made answer
to a visitor's request--'The pew swept and lined! My husband would think
it downright popery!'[870] One can understand, without needing to
sympathise with it, the strong Protestantism of Hervey's admiration for
a church 'magnificently plain;'[871] but in the eighteenth century, the
excessive plainness, not to say the frequent dirtiness, of so many
churches was certainly owing to other causes than that of
ultra-Protestantism.

After speaking of the disrepair and squalor which, although far indeed
from being universal, were too frequently noticeable in the churches of
the last age, it might seem a natural transition to pass on to the
singularly incongruous uses to which the naves of some of our principal
ecclesiastical buildings were in a few instances perverted. In the minds
of modern Churchmen there would be the closest connection between