] To say that "curates were as well educated as the rest of them" is to damn with faint praise indeed.

I made that statement to counter Geraldine's assertion that curates were uneducated. They were not- they had the same education as any other clergy. It was also the same education as the men who appointed them. (see link below) Please don't consider my words as damning with faint praise. They were certainly not meant that way.

To quote Halevy's England in 1815 : The descriptions of Gibbon, Bentham and Jeffrey have rendered the intellectual torpor of Oxford a byword. . . . Nor did the University impose upon candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts any examination worhty of the name.

If you follow the career of Theophilus Leigh, Jane's maternal grandfather and master of Balliol, he doesn't seem to have been intellectually torpid. Whilst I have a certain respect for Gibbon, and for Jeremy Bentham (whose intellectual efforts eventually resulted in me getting educated), it does seem to me that too many of the subsequent writings on the subject tend just to parrot them and not look at them critically. As Irene Collins points out in her book, precious little has actually been written at all about the CofE at this time, and almost all that comes down to us is from the susequent generation of Victorians who tried hard to justify their own system of values by denigrating those of former generations. Please don't consider my words as damning with faint praise. They were certainly not meant that way.

Three questions made public in advance in theology,

More on the subject of education in the link below.

But the grat mass of undergraduates were deliberately idle.

I doubt that Collins would agree with you. Some were idle,and made names for themselves in the process.It was certainly possible to be idle, as it can be today. How many clergymen were among this group?

In sum, a man could get his degree at Oxbridge in the 18th century along with an education or not,..(snip)to pursue their intellectual interests. Where else could they go?

He could go into the Army, The Navy, Public Affairs, The East India Company, Trade, and Politics, all but the last of which had their own systems of training, and all of which did not necessitate a university education. In short, the clergy were as well educated as their patrons, if not more so, and better than many others too.