I seem to have struck a nerve, for which I apologize. You and II will simply have to differ on a number of points.

.....the unquestioned, indeed unconscious assumption is that any ordained man the patron wishes to present will be installed.

Who has this unconscious assumption? Yourself, or the writers of the tracts against the system? The patron's right of advowson wasn't a priviliege, it was a responsibility. He was supposed to find the right man. Nevertheless he didn't have a free hand- he had to have the bishop's permission. Now one can assume that some patrons, and some bishops were more lax in their duties than one might like, but to assume that they were all like that isn't justifiable, is it?

Neither. The writers of history, and the writers of contemporaneous fiction. If you can give me an instance of an 18th century bishop rejecting a candidate for a living for any reason, I would be glad to see it. Until then, I think you are anachronistically imputing 19th century Oxford Movement views of the independence and integrity of the Anglican Church to the 18th century.

The 18th century bench of bishops, moreover, were very much men of their class, appointed for patronage reasons, and well integrated into it culturally and socially......not noted in retrospect either for zeal or for sanctity.

I think that describes just about every group of bishops in every age and every strand of the Christian Church since it began, doesn't it?

That is an insult (certainly unintended as one) to a group of men as disparite in time and temperment as St. Ambrose, St. Charles Borromeo, Hugh Latimer, John Henry Newman and George Bell. ;-)

;-)Is Zeal and Sanctitiy in all bishops always to be praised? Bishoprics are by their very nature political appointments. Why single out 18th century ones in particular for censure?

Because, by all accounts of the era that I have read, the ordinary temptations of office and worldly wisdom were not counterbalanced by very much in the way of strong religious feeling. If you know of a history of the Anglican Church in the 18th century that presents it as something else, I'd like to see it.

All appointive office in 18th century England tended to be regarded as property.

Agreed- office in the public service, in the miltary, in trade- they all had a financial value. So did marriage, houshold servitude, and the right to pannage, turbery and estover. That was the eighteenth century mindset- the Church was no different than the rest of society in this.

It wasn't simply financial value. It was the idea of tenure -- that the right to draw the income was irrevocable and protected by law regardless of how one performed the duties. The attitude persisted well into the 19th century and was rooted out only with difficulty in the Church as well as elsewhere -- see Trollope's The Warden. (Btw, it was a lot easier to abolish pennage, turbery and estover through the enclosure acts, since those were the property rights of poor people with neither votes nor influence).

As for the rise of Evangelicalsim and Methodism, I'll agree that they answered a spiriutal need that the Cof E did not, although at this distance it's hard to say whether it's Wesley's and Whitfield's differing ideas on what to belive that are more important than dissatisfaction with the social and hierarchical nature of the organised church. Certainly, Wesley approved of both hierarchy and bishops, in theory.

How to behave, more than what to believe. Wesley certainly approved of hierarchy and authority. He wanted it to do what he saw as its proper job of bringing Christ to the hearts of the people, and he was squeezed out of the Anglican Church in spite of himself by men who resented him both for stirring up popular feeling and for criticizing their own performance of their duties.

I think it was Macaulay who said that the stultification of the Anglican Church in the period we are talking about was best illustrated by comparing it with the Catholic Church during the Counter-Reformation. Specifically, Wesley and Joanna Southcott were analogous to Loyola and Teresa d'Avila -- one zealous reformer, and one mystic. The Catholic Church knew how to absorb and turn to its own purposes the two Spaniards. Their English counterparts ended as an involuntary sectarian and a near-lunatic outcast.

From the viewpoint of Wilberforce or Wesley (which I do not share), there was something quite wrong with a culture where no one thought it improper or unusual for a modest, retiring young man of good family like Edward Ferrars to take orders simply because the Church was a quiet, respectable alternative to the Bar, the Army or the Navy.

Did Edward decide this "simply" because the the Church was quiet an respectable, or did Jane Austen intend him to have a real calling, but did not feel necessary to explicitly state this?

I'm taking EF at his own word when he explains to Elinor why he would prefer the Church to the other "occupation" available to him. Compare him to Edmund Bertram.

That the Evangelicals had to fight hard for a generation, against widespread opposition, to infuse their views throughout the Church tells me that the conventional picture of the 18th century Anglican Church as a compound of the official, the tolerant and the torpid has a lot of truth to it.

] Personally, I can't see the Church as one three-word phrase. I can only see 5,000 livings, 6,000 clergy and a half century of time as being far more complex than that. I'm not saying it has no truth at all, but I think you are being far too sweeping in your asessment of it.

That's precisely the point. Over 50 years, 5,000 livings and 6,000 clergy you can draw an average, which has the strengths and weaknesses of all statistics. Nor am I asserting that the run of the Anglican mill in the 18th century were not basically good, if by good you mean observing conventional Christian morality in their private conduct. "Official, tolerant and torpid" is not the same thing as "wicked," although it does tend towards "corrupt and complacent." I am asserting that on the whole, the C of E in that era was predominantly an annex to the landowning classes for the safe and seemly propagation of the Christian religion, and that it suffered from the complacency to be expected in a de facto monopoly. Both the Evangelicals and the 19th Century High Church eventually recoiled against that position and pursued their very different routes to reinvigorate the Anglican Church.