age of the Church. But owing
to the causes noted above, they formed an exceptionally large class at
the close of the seventeenth and during the first half at least of the
eighteenth century.

Some belonging to this class of clergy supported themselves as
hangers-on to the families of the great. Domestic chaplains in great
houses became less common as the century advanced. The admirable hits of
Addison and Steele against the indignities to which domestic chaplains
were subjected are more applicable to the early than to the latter part
of the century. Boswell adduced it as an instance that 'there was less
religion in the nation than formerly,' that 'there used to be a chaplain
in every great family, which we do not find now;' and was well answered
by Dr. Johnson, 'Neither do you find any of the state servants in great
families. There is a change in customs.' The change, however, was not
wholly to the advantage of the Church. Bad as was the relation between
the chaplain and his patron, where the former was degraded to an
inferior position in the household, there was still some sort of
spiritual tie between them.[663] The parson who was simply the boon
companion of the ignorant and sensual squire of the Hanoverian period
was in a still worse position. This class of clergyman is a constant
subject of satire in the lighter literature and caricatures of the day.
Not that they were so numerous or so bad as they are often represented
to have been. There was a strong and growing tendency in the Georgian
era to make the very worst of clerical delinquencies. For it is a
curious fact that while the Church as an establishment was most popular,
her ministers were most unpopular. Secker complained, not without
reason, in 1738, that 'Christianity is now railed at and ridiculed with
very little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all. Against
us our adversaries appear to have set themselves to be as bitter as they
can--not only beyond all truth, but beyond probability--exaggerating
without mercy,' &c.[664] And nearly thirty years later he still makes
the same complaint. 'You cannot but see,' he warns candidates for Holy
Orders, 'in what a profane and corrupt age this stewardship is committed
to you; how grievously religion and its ministers are hated and
despised.'[665] 'Since the Lollards,' writes Mr. Pattison, 'there had
never been a time when the ministers of religion were held in so much
contempt as in the Hanoverian perio