ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



earnest reformers, to err on the side of pessimism. It is very painful 

 to read that the Bibles were torn or wanted binding, or were of the old 

 translation ; the altars were rotten or crazy, or placed irregularly ; the 

 seats were mean, or too high, or scurvily low ; the fonts were ill-placed, 

 broken, or shallow and lumpish ; the parsons were bad managers, lazy, 

 non-resident, melancholic, a little loose, pluralists, irregular, or read too 

 fast. Such are some of the musings of a supercilious young prelate who 

 had been a canon of the cathedral at the age of twenty-six, archdeacon 

 of Carlisle at twenty-seven, and bishop of the diocese at forty-seven. 

 If the church was in the deplorable condition described in the journal 

 of his visitation tour, it must have been in some measure due to his 

 own negligence during the twenty years of his archidiaconate. On the 

 other hand, when we think of the conditions under which parish priests 

 exercised their vocation, it is little wonder that the internal fittings and 

 arrangement of the parish churches and mountain chapels were not up 

 to the canonical standard. In very many places the church was the 

 parish school, and the incumbent or curate was the schoolmaster. 

 These clergymen, so severely handled by their young diocesan, were the 

 pioneers of modern education, and if for no other reason we may look 

 with sympathy rather than condemnation on the methods they were 

 forced to employ. What was lost in the sacrifice of external ceremonial 

 and orderly service was gained in the systematic religious instruction of 

 the young. Perhaps it was only in the diocese of Carlisle where 

 Wordsworth l could find in a parish register the memorable entry ' that 

 a youth who had quitted the valley (of Borrowdale), and died in one of 

 the towns on the coast of Cumberland, had requested that his body 

 should be brought and interred at the foot of the pillar by which he 

 had been accustomed to sit while a schoolboy.' The bishop has given 

 it as his own experience, while rector of Great Salkeld, that it was not 

 till he had built a school and removed the children thereto that anything 

 like the decencies of public worship could be maintained in that church. 

 But the condition of the church in Cumberland should not be 

 estimated solely from the hasty judgments formed by Bishop Nicolson 

 on his first perambulation of the diocese. We have from his own pen 

 a more trustworthy test by which a more accurate opinion can be formed 

 of the church's supremacy over the agricultural population. The order 

 of confirmation is a distinctive rite which differentiates the doctrinal 

 observance of the church from every class of protestant nonconformity. 

 Neglect of this rite is a sure sign of leakage or paralysis. What do we 

 find ? When the bishop ' ended ye work of Confirmation ' on his first 

 circuit of visitation in 1702, he had conferred the gift on 5,537 persons, 

 a number which throws into the shade, when population and area are 

 considered, the best efforts of any of his successors in our own day. On 

 28 August at Kirkbystephen he ' confirmed 799 without a pause and 

 singly,' the throng being so great that one of the candidates was ' almost 

 killed,' and at Penrith on 30 August, ' 889 in ye forenoon and 102 in 



1 Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (London, 1823), p. 54. 



103 



