Just as two widely different accounts, supported by the statements of contemporary writers, may be given of clerical morals in the fourteenth century, so may two altogether opposite pictures be painted of the intellectual attainments of the parish-priests of that period. Whilst, on the one hand, Chaucer extols his poor parson as a learned man, a clerk,' and commemorates the zeal in study and thirst for learning which distinguished his clerk of Oxenforde-a character who, though 'he hadde geten him yet no benefice,' may be regarded as a representative of the erudition frequently found amongst the more cultivated seculars; Wycliffe, on the other hand, exclaims indignantly at the intellectual incompetence of the parish-priests, of whom, by the way, the Oxford Theological Professor was himself one.*

given for the same service before the plague.-Vide 'The Life and Opinions of John De Wycliffe, D.D. Illustrated principally from his unpublished Manuscripts. By Robert Vaughan.

For though they know not one point of the gospel, nor what they read, they will take a benefice, with cure of men's souls, and neither knowing how to rule their own soul nor other men's, nor will learn, nor suffer other men to teach their parishioners the gospel and God's commands truly and freely.'- WYCLIFFE'S Office of Curates. This scornful language points to the existence of much ignorance in the clerical order; but against its know not one point of the gospel '— an expression which, of course, is not to be construed literally-must be set the Oxford clerk, of whom Chaucer says:

By the light of this piece of evidence, no impartial reader will construe literally the words of the Ploughman :

'Such that cannot say her Crede,

With praier shall be made prelates;

Nother can the gospel rede,

Such shall now welde high estates.'

Whatever may be its claims to respect on the score of enlightenment and learning, a profession, consisting of many thousands of persons, and requiring simultaneous service from the majority of its members, must necessarily comprise and employ a considerable number of individuals, whose natural capacities and attainments are of a very humble order. Notwithstanding its high repute for culture, which it owes to the mental characteristics of the generality of its less important members, even more than to the intellectual pre-eminence of exceptionally learned ecclesiastics, the clerical order of our existing Church numbers several hundreds, indeed some thousands, of highly useful and respectable gentlemen, whose information and natural ability to acquire information are universally allowed to be slight, and whose intellectual condition is sometimes mentioned with misdirected contempt by persons too apt to forget that zeal, sincerity, and sound common sense, are of more value than much scholarship to ministers, appointed to discharge routine duty in rural parishes, where they seldom come in contact with persons of any great knowledge apart from their special worldly avocations. And, since this is true of our own clergy in the nineteenth century, and is, moreover, no matter for regret, we can easily believe that the same state of things was even more noticeable, and less productive of occasional inconvenience, in the clergy of such a comparatively unenlightened period as the fourteenth century. That a considerable proportion of the parish-priests of Wycliffe's England could not say a Latin mass without making false quantities, which would provoke a smile of disdain from any Oxford graduate of our own time, is more than probable. That the learning of the most erudite amongst them was pedantic and narrow we cannot doubt, when we remember that it was chiefly acquired during a few years of youthful study, at universities, whose system, though very serviceable, was not distinguished by breadth, and under difficulties of which the university-men of the present epoch, abounding in books and various sources of instruction, can only form a faint and inadequate conception. If Chaucer's studious clerk, who spent on literature every farthing he could procure beyond his few material wants, possessed no more than some twenty manuscript volumes, we can imagine that the dwelling of

an ordinary curate contained but few appliances for mental exercise. It would, however, be most unjust to regard the general body of the parochial clergy as intellectually lethargic, or despicably ignorant; for whilst participating, to a degree that appeared reprehensible to many observers, in the action of generations conspicuous for mental activity, they had, for the most part, been trained in the same seminaries as the few bishops who encouraged art and fostered letters.

Like many other of our remarks on the state of clerical society in Wycliffe's England, the foregoing observations, with respect to sacerdotal culture and ignorance, are applicable to the generations that intervened between the suppression of political Lollardy, and the successive struggles which resulted in the establishment of the Reformed Church-struggles prolific of controversies that so quickened the wits, expanded the intellect, and raised the condition of the clergy, that, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, the learning and polemical skill of the English ecclesiastics became a proverb throughout the Latin Church.

This statement is made in no forgetfulness of the many stories that might be told of ludicrous blunders, in theology and history, perpetrated by conspicuous ecclesiastics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When Archbishop Chicheley, in the former of those centuries, taught that the Lord's day was the seventh of the week, and kept in commemoration of the Almighty's cessation from creative labour, he was not the only great ecclesiastic of the time and country who held the same scarcely accurate view. That a vast amount of utterly scandalous ignorance existed within the ranks of the clergy in the earlier stages of the Reform Epoch no one is likely to deny, after perusing Strype's pungent anecdotes of the clerical incapacity of that period, and the successive injunctions which Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth published for the better teaching of those priests whose lack of knowledge, in the language of one of King Edward's sets of injunctions, is described as causing them to be much disdained and evil spoken of by some of the laity.' Nor am I unmindful of the suggestive circumstance, that in Jewell's time the mere fact of studying Greek was regarded by the more bigoted Oxonians as a sign of heresy, or of the vivid and

comically doleful accounts which such authorities as William Tyndale* and Bishop Bale have given us of clerical ignorance. But, just as Wycliffe was not the only learned priest amongst the parochial clergy, whose inefficiency he denounced, we must remember that Oxford- which was the nurse of Lollardy in the fourteenth century-at a subsequent period was the school from which Tyndale derived much of his enthusiasm for learning and many of his attainments. And, as the social ways of the world-loving clergy of Chaucer's England cannot be rightly estimated until it is compared with the general usages of the period, so also it is necessary to regard the clerical ignorance of that and the two following centuries side by side with the intellectual condition of the well-to-do and respectable laity, if we would ascertain its true significance.

This learned and glorious martyr speaks of priests who have seen no more Latin than that only which they read in their portueses and missals (which yet many of them scarcely read), except it be "Albertus, De Secretis Mulierum;" in which yet, though they be never so sorrily learned, they pore day and night, and make notes therein, and all to teach the midwives, as they say; and also another, called "Lindwood," a book of constitutions to gather tithes, mortuaries, offerings, customs, and other pillage, which they call not theirs, but God's part, the duty of holy church, to discharge their consciences withal. For they are bound that they shall not diminish, but increase all things, unto the uttermost of their powers, which pertain to holy church.' Still, priests so unlearned as many persons imagine the old clergy to have been, could have found neither amusement in Albertus' nor instruction in 'Lindwood.' And it is of the most ignorant priests that Tyndale is speaking.

CHAPTER IX.

THE POOR AND THE RICH.

HOW

OW to create and preserve from every kind of deterioration a clergy, which shall at the same time be so opulent and highly cultivated that it may possess due influence and respect in the higher sections of society, and yet be in perfect sympathy with the poor and illiterate, has been one of the difficult problems which the Church cannot be said to have perfectly solved, even in the most felicitous periods of her history. Unless it possesses, either in its corporate character or through the material endowments of its members, a liberal share of the riches of the community, a priesthood is without proper power amongst the aristocracy; and when deprived of the sympathy and cordial co-operation of the aristocratic classes, it is prone to experience opposition and contempt from those divisions of the community that occupy the space between the aristocracy and humblest order of citizens. Sydney Smith spoke a truth familiar to all social observers when he urged, that it was not in the nature of the average tradesman of an English town to cherish hearty respect for a rector who was distinctly his inferior in regard to worldly means. But it would be unfair to the lower middle classes to represent them as greatly differing in this particular from their social betters. The disesteem in which they hold a poverty-stricken priesthood corresponds to, if it be not altogether identical with, the disdainful indifference which aristocracy almost invariably exhibits to a clergy that is uniformly oppressed by indigence.

Wealth begets in every class, which enjoys it with security, the tone of thought, the refinement of person, the dignity of carriage, which, even more than the political influence and material advantages pertaining to opulence, command the re