The condition of the clergy is more clearly set forth in Fielding's novels
than in the pages of Echard, Oldham, Wood, Macaulay, or Churchill
Babington. So changed was their estate since the Reformation, that few
high-born youths, except the weak or lame, took holy orders. Many
clergymen worked during the week. One, says South, was a cobbler on
weekdays, and preached on Sundays. Wilmot says: "We are struck by the
phenomenon of a learned man sitting down to prove, with the help of logic,
that a priest or a chaplain in a family is not a servant,"--Jeremy
Collier: _Essays on Pride and the Office of a Chaplain_.
Fielding drew them and their condition from the life. Parson Adams is the
most excellent of men. His cassock is ten years old; over it he dons a
coarse white overcoat, and travels on foot to London to sell nine volumes
of sermons, wherewithal to buy food for his family. He engages the
innkeeper in serious talk; he does desperate battle to defend a young
woman who has fallen into the hands of ruffians on the highway; and when
he is arrested, his manuscript Eschylus is mistaken for a book of ciphers
unfolding a dreadful plot against the government.
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