n the list of her regular ministers.[1212] There had
been some advantage and some evil in this. It had enlarged to some
extent the action of the Church, and provided within its limits a field
of activity for men whose preaching was acceptable to a great number of
Churchmen, but who hovered upon the borders of Nonconformity. Only it
secured this advantage in a makeshift and scarcely authorised manner,
and at the risk of introducing into parishes a source of disunion which
was justly open to complaint. Lecturers were added to the Church system
in towns without being incorporated into it. Room should have been found
for them, without permanently attaching to a parish church a preacher
whose views might be continually discordant with those of the incumbent
and his curates. Under the circumstances, it was perhaps no more than a
prudent requirement of the Act of Uniformity, that Lecturers should duly
sign the Articles and before their first lecture read the Prayers, and
make the same declarations as were obligatory upon other clergymen. They
retained, however, something of the distinctive character which had
marked them hitherto. Generally, they were decided Low Churchmen; the
more so as lectureships were very commonly in the choice of the people,
and the bulk of the electors were just that class of tradesmen in whom
the Puritan, and afterwards the so-called Presbyterian, party in the
Church had found its strongest support. For a like reason they were
sometimes, no doubt, too much addicted to those arts by which the
popular ear is won and retained, and which were particularly offensive
to men whose most characteristic merits and faults were those of a
different system. Bishop Newton said that lectureships were often
disagreeable preferments, as subject to so many humours and
caprices.[1213] On the other hand, the principal Lecturers in London
held a position which able men might well be ambitious of holding. Nor
was the long list of eminent men who had held London lectureships
composed by any means exclusively of the leaders of one section of the
English Church. If it contained the names of Tillotson, and Burnet, and
Fleetwood, and Blackhall, and Willis, and Hoadly, and Herring, it
contained also those of Sharp and Atterbury, of Stanhope, Bennet, Moss,
and Marshall. The Lecture of St. Lawrence Jewry was conspicuously high
in repute. 'Though but moderately endowed in point of profit, it was
long considered as the post of honour.