A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 



1 599, the bishop told Cecil that the most part of the gentlemen of the 

 country gave good tokens of soundness in religion, and the poorer sort 

 were generally willing to hear, but withal they were pitifully ignorant 

 of the foundations of Christianity, of the corrupt state of man, of the 

 justice of God against sin, the grace of Christ and the resurrection of 

 the dead. As they were without knowledge, so many of them were 

 without all fear of God, adulterers, thieves, murderers. The chief 

 spring of all this wofulness came principally of the weakness and care- 

 lessness of the ministry. In divers places of the Borders, the bishop 

 continued, the churches had walls without covering, and they had none 

 to celebrate divine service, save only certain beggarly runners, who came 

 out of Scotland, neither could men of worth be induced to live there, 

 because their maintenance was withholden and their lives were in con- 

 tinual danger. In the more peaceable parts of the diocese there were 

 some clergymen of very commendable parts both for knowledge and 

 conscience, but their number was very small. Others there were that 

 might do much good if they had half that delight in discharging their 

 function which they had in idleness, vain pleasures and worldly cares. 

 The far greatest number is utterly unlearned, unable to read English 

 truly and distinctly. One great occasion thereof was the great facility 

 of his predecessor in committing the charge of souls to such as were 

 presented by those who cared not how silly the clerk was, so long as 

 they themselves enjoyed the fat of the living. But that was not all, for 

 there were divers churches appropriated and served only with stipendiary 

 curates, divers chapels of ease served at the charges of poor people, be- 

 cause the parish churches were too far from them. These places must 

 be wholly unserved, and so let the people grow from ignorance to 

 brutishness, or else such must be tolerated as will be entertained for five 

 marks or four pounds ; the greatest annual stipend that any of the clergy 

 had was twenty nobles towards all charges. It was a heavy but too 

 true description of these poor churches, for redress whereof the bishop 

 submitted himself and his service to Cecil's direction. 1 This was not 

 the peevish complaint of a partizan like Bishop Best when he called 

 the Marian clergy of his diocese ' wicked imps of Antichrist,' but the 

 sober judgment of an earnest prelate taking a dispassionate survey of his 

 charge, and estimating the results of what forty years of the new 

 church policy had wrought upon the manners and sentiments of the 

 people. 



A new force was about to be introduced which was destined to 

 upset the calculations of those who were working steadily for uni- 

 formity throughout the church. The political action of the papacy in 

 denouncing O^ueen Elizabeth marked a turning point in the history of 

 conformity to the established doctrine and worship. A body of foreign 

 theologians, sitting at Trent, declared unanimously that it was a grievous 

 sin for Englishmen to attend the prayers and sermons of the English 

 church, and the pope, acting on the decision, published his well-known 



S.P. Dom. Eliz. cclxxiii. 56. 

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