STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

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feeling. For there was one institution, and one only, which c [*| p 'they prized even more than hereditary monarchy; and thatinstitution was the Church of England. Their love of theChurch was not, indeed, the effect of study or meditation.

Few among them could have given any reason, drawn fromScripture or ecclesiastical history, for adhering to her doc-trines,, her ritual, and her polity; nor were they, as a class, byany means strict observers of that code of morality which iscommon to all Christian sects. But the experience of manyages proves that men may be ready to fight to the death, andto persecute without pity, for a religion whose creed theydo not understand, and whose precepts they habitually dis-obey. *

The rural clergy were even more vehement in Toryism Thethan the rural gentry, and were a class scarcely less important.

It is to be observed, however, that the individual clergyman, ascompared with the individual gentleman, then ranked muchlower than in our days. The main support of the Church wasderived from the tithe; and the tithe bore to the rent a muchsmaller ratio than at present. King estimated the whole in-come of the parochial and collegiate clergy at only four hun-dred and eighty thousand pounds a year; Davenant at onlyfive hundred and forty-four thousand a year. It is certainlynow more than seven times as great as the larger of these twosums. The average rent of the land has not, according to anyestimate, increased proportionally. It follows that rectors andvicars must have been, as compared with the neighbouringknights and squires, much poorer in the seventeenth than inthe nineteenth century.

The place of the clergyman in so ciety had been completelychanged by the Reformation. Before that event, ecclesiastics

* My notion of the country gentleman of the seventeenth century hasbeen derived from sources too numerous to be recapitulated. I.mustleave my description to the judgment of those who have studied thehistory and the lighter literature of that age.