temporaries, inasmuch as one was the son of
the all-powerful minister, and the other was the intimate friend and
confidential adviser of the chief dispenser of ecclesiastical patronage,
the sycophancy and worldliness of the clergy about the Court in the
middle of the eighteenth century must have been flagrant indeed. The
writers referred to are, of course, Horace Walpole and John, Lord
Hervey. Both of them, however, are so evidently actuated by a bitter
animus against the Church that their statements can by no means be
relied upon as authentic history.

Let us take another kind of evidence. Several of the Church dignitaries
of the eighteenth century have been obliging enough to leave
autobiographies to posterity, so that we can judge of their characters
as drawn, not by the prejudiced or imperfect information of others, but
by those who ought to know them best--themselves. One of the most
popular of these autobiographies is that of Bishop Newton. A great part
of his amusing memoirs is taken up with descriptions of the methods
which he and his friends adopted to secure preferment. There is very
little, if anything, in them of the duties and responsibilities of the
episcopal office. Where will they be most comfortable? What are their
chances of further preferment? How shall they best please the Court and
the ministers in office? These are the questions which Bishop Newton and
his brother prelates, to whom he makes frequent but never ill-natured
allusions, are represented as constantly asking in effect. Curious
indeed are the glimpses which the Bishop gives us into the system of
Church patronage and the race for preferment which were prevalent in his
day. But more curious still is the impression which the memoirs convey
that the writer himself had not the faintest conception that there was
anything in the least degree unseemly in what he relates. There appears
to be a sort of moral obtuseness in him in reference to these subjects,
but to these subjects only.[676] The memoir closes with a beautiful
expression of resignation to the Divine will, and of hopeful confidence
about the future, in which he was no doubt perfectly sincere. And yet he
openly avows a laxity of principle in the matter of preferment-seeking
and Court-subservience which taken by itself would argue a very worldly
mind. How are we to reconcile the apparent discrepancy? The most
charitable as well as the most reasonable explanation is that the good
Bishop's