e their
biographers in later times have been too apt to bring out in stronger
relief the brightness of their heroes' portraits by making the
background as dark as possible.

Thus various causes have contributed to bring into prominence the abuses
of the Church of the eighteenth century, and to throw its merits into
the shade.

Still, after making full allowance for the distorting influence of
prejudice on many sides, there remains a wide margin which no amount of
prejudice can account for. 'Church abuses' must still form a painfully
conspicuous feature in any sketch of the ecclesiastical history of the
period.

Before entering into the details of these abuses it will be well to
specify some of the general causes which tended to paralyse the energies
and lower the tone of the Church.

Foremost among these must be placed that very outward prosperity which
would seem at the first glance to augur for the Church a useful and
prosperous career. But that 'which should have been for her wealth'
proved to her 'an occasion of falling.' The peace which she enjoyed made
her careless and inactive. The absence of the wholesome stimulus of
competition was far from being an unmixed advantage to her. Very soon
after the accession of George I., when the voice of Convocation was
hushed, a dead calm set in, so far as the internal affairs of the
Church were concerned--a calm which was really more perilous to her than
the stormy weather in which she had long been sailing. The discussion of
great questions has always a tendency to call forth latent greatness of
mind where any exists. But after the second decade of the eighteenth
century there was hardly any question _within_ the Church to agitate
men's minds. There was abundance of controversy with those without, but
within all was still. There was nothing to encourage self-sacrifice, and
self-sacrifice is essential to promote a healthy spiritual life. The
Church partook of the general sordidness of the age; it was an age of
great material prosperity, but of moral and spiritual poverty, such as
hardly finds a parallel in our history. Mercenary motives were too
predominant everywhere, in the Church as well as in the State.

The characteristic fault of the period was greatly intensified by the
influence of one man. The reigns of the first two Georges might not
inaptly be termed the Walpolian period. For though Walpole's fall took
place before the period closed, yet the principles he had i