When among the higher
clergy were found such men as Butler, and Hare, and Sherlock, and
Warburton, and South, and Conybeare, and Waterland, and Bentley, men who
were more than a match for the assailants of Christianity, formidable as
these antagonists undoubtedly were--when within her fold were found men
of such distinguished piety as Law and Wilson, Berkeley and Benson, the
state of the Church could not be wholly corrupt.

And, finally, it should be remembered that if England was morally and
spiritually in low estate at this period, she was, at any rate, in a
better plight than her neighbours. If there were Church abuses in
England, there were still worse in France. If there was too wide an
interval here between the higher and the lower clergy, the inequality
was not so great as there, where, 'while the prelates of the Church
lived with a pomp and state falling little short of the magnificence of
royalty, not a few of the poorer clergy had scarcely the wherewithal to
live at all,' where 'the superior clergy regarded the cures as hired
servitors, whom in order to dominate it was prudent to keep in poverty
and ignorance.' If the distribution of patronage on false principles and
the inordinate love of preferment were abuses in England, matters were
worse in France, where 'there was an open traffic in benefices; the
Episcopate was nothing but a secular dignity; it was necessary to be
count or marquis in order to become a successor of the apostles, unless
some extraordinary event snatched some little bishopric for a parvenu
from the hands of the minister;' and where 'the bishops squandered the
revenues of their provinces at the court.'[706] If the lower classes
were neglected here, they were not, as in France, dying from misery and
hunger at the rate of a million a year. Neither, sordid as the age was
in England, was it so sordid as in Germany, where a coarse eudaemonism
and a miscalled illuminism were sapping the foundations of Christianity.

Moreover, England, unlike her next-door neighbour, improved as the years
rolled on. A gradual but distinct alteration for the better may be
traced in the later part of the century. Many causes contributed to
effect this. After the accession of George III. a growing sense of
security began to pervade the country. An unsettled state is always
prejudicial to national morals, and there were henceforward no serious
thoughts of deranging the established order of things. Influences, too,
we