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.

Jack, you have absolutely no knowledge of me, or my opinions of the Oxford movement, so how can you make a statement like this? I don't discuss the Oxford movement in here- our timeline stops at 1817, and so their values, ideas and actions are largely irrelevant, as I keep reminding posters on this board. Also, we have a policy in Pemberley of not making personal comments about other posters- as such I find your assumptions about what I think not only unjstifiable, but discourteous as well. I have not made any assumptions about what you, Jack Cerf, know, have I?

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. ;-)

You insulted Thomas Gisborne and Archbishop Paley first, don't forget ! ;-) let's not use words like 'insult' , please. You know well that I didn't intend any, any more than you did. We don't discuss religion in Pemberley because it's inflmamtory, andthis conversation is getting perilously close to inflaming.

***Reminder to all Readers****
We only discuss jane Austen's religion- not anyone else's. Ansd when we do, we make sure that we don't make value judgements on what is right or wrong about it.

] Because, by all accounts of the era (snip)18th century that presents it as something else, I'd like to see it.

I have already suggested two that you could read.

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.

Let's not. Trollope is a different world form Jane Austen -the other end of the 19th century- and we are not concerned with him. I'll discuss Trollope,and the parson who was the real-life inspiriation for The Warden in e-mail if you wish, but not on this board.

(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).

These rights continued to exist in some places, because they were not always eradicable. I posessed them myself unitl 1988. But I digress.

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.

Yes, the reaction of the populace to his teachings (mass faintings, near-riots accidents caused by overcrowding of buildings and the secession of congregations from their normal parishes (and all that that implied for poitical power, parish income and social structures) did put the wind up a great many people, bot within the church and outside it. However, he wasn't squeezed out- he died within the Cof E,and it was his successors who opted out of the Church. Nobody pushed them out.

] I think it was Macaulay who said

Macaulay was a very good writer, but he was also a Victorian, a supporter of the Victorianised church (Post-Oxford movement, Post Ritualism movement) and joined with his contemporaries in denigrating the eighteenth century in general. He's also very dead (a century, now?) and not everyone agrees with him any more. On fact, most modern historians don't. He does have lovely prose, and was a master of rhetoric- in the oldest and most complimentary sense of that word. Have you read The Isles by Norman Davies, Jack? It's a nice counterpoint to Macaulay, Trevelyan and all the other Whig Historians.

] 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.

Wise move. Assuming that JA implies something else can only be purely speculative.

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.

I didn't draw any averages! I refused to draw any averages! And continue to refuse to do so! Jane Austen isn't 'average', and neither are her characters.

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.

I misread you. I thought you were assuming that that they were all tarred with the same brush-a bad one. Jane Austen's creations included.

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.

On that we agree completely. I think where we disagree is whether this was a satisfactory state of affairs or not. And that can only be an opinon.