ithin the Church was one of indifference.

The suffering among the wives of the inferior clergy, who were
impoverished and suffered under the defeat of the endeavor to make
their scanty resources meet the demands of household expenses, the
lack of opportunity for educating their children, and their own loss
of self-respect, must have made their lives more miserable in some
ways than those of the wives of the potters, whose sphere of existence
and needs were much more limited. One of the clergymen of this order
plaintively sets forth his pecuniary distress as follows: "Oh,
my Lord, how prettily and temperately may a wife and half a dozen
children be maintained with almost L30 per annum! What an handsome
shift will an ingenious and frugal divine make, to take by turns and
wear a cassock and a pair of breeches another! What a primitive sight
it will be to see a man of God with his shoes out at the toes, and
his stockings out at heels, wandering about in an old russet coat and
tatter'd gown for apprentices to point at and wags to break jest on!
And what a notable figure will he make in the pulpit on Sundays
who has sent his _Hooker_ and _Stillingfleet_, his _Pearson_ and
_Saunderson_, his _Barrow_ and _Tillotson_, with many more fathers of
the English Church, into limbo long since to keep his wife's pensive
petticoat company, and her much lamented wedding ring!" Such a picture
belongs rather to the latter part of the eighteenth century than to
its beginning, for in its earlier days the Church was prolific of
quiet scholars and antiquaries, in both parsonage and manse, living
peaceful, comfortable, and cultured existences.

The attitude of the Church of the eighteenth century toward women is
hardly one of record, as there was not enough animation or interest
displayed in social conditions--or, indeed, during a part of the
century, enough of intellectual comprehension--to serve the Church for
any discrimination as to women's status. When the change of attitude
of the Church in respect to its indifference toward that element of
its body which before the Reformation, and continuously since then,
has been so serviceably employed by the Roman Catholic Church did
occur, it was the High Church party which brought it about, and so
preserved for English Protestantism the work of women.

Although the Church was indifferent to the great mission that lay
before it in the eighteenth century,--a mission that had to be met by
the raisin