Introduction
It can hardly have escaped the notice of men of a righteous and upstanding persuasion that we live in an age of moral decrepitude. Life has now acquired the habit of mimicking the fictions conjured from lewd minds, like those of the malcontent Cleland, while the mere existence of such a publication as Harris’s List must in all right-thinking Englishmen inspire nothing but revulsion—such laxity may be de rigueur, among the French, but should we not be made of sterner purpose?
An ill-informed reader might object that such fashions for degeneracy are confined to certain social circles. The majority of people, such a reader might suggest, are inclined to preserve the proprieties and shun fleshly deeds. Yet one need not penetrate far beneath the surface for this hopeful view to be dashed to lifelessness on the rock of reality. How can one expect everyman to abjure the work of idle hands when some of our clergy pay closer attention to the overflowing bodices of the ladies of the parish than they do to the words of the Good Book.
It is with a disconsolate heart that one draws the inevitable conclusion that this incontinence is now a widespread spiritual malaise, to be found among highborn and lowborn alike. The present volume presents just one such example of how these loose morals have come to infest even those whose foremost calling should be the promotion of virtue in their Xtian flock.
Herein, the reader is confronted with the wayward habits of a clerical member who would sooner secure a firm grip on a fair maiden’s curvaceous portions than labor ceaselessly to secure the virtue of any one of his parishioners, the Reverend Tobias Whitmore, of the parish of St Margaret’s in Stratton-over-Wye. One would think that a man versed in Divinity would comprehend the necessity of, at the earliest opportunity, procuring a wife who might serve as an example to the parish of modesty, austerity, and the ability to perform her wifely and procreative duties while distracting herself with meditations on 1 Timothy.
Instead the wretched clergyman is not only incapable of controlling his baser urges, he has no inclination to do so. The volume chronicles in great detail the fornications of this errant clergyman, following his debaucheries with a fine eye for the kinds of deviations that can only originate in some deep corruption of the soul. The disreputable Reverend’s breeches are removed with such regularity the reader might wonder why he concerns himself to button them at all.
If the reader feels that the fair authoress brings excessive descriptive powers to bear in the narration, it must be said in her defense that delicate euphemisms would be insufficiently expressive of the full scale of the obscene activities under discussion, activities which contradict the pristine rectitude one expects of clergymen. Tobias Whitmore may be just one Reverend among many, but there is good reason to assume that the ecclesiastical rot goes much further than just this one bad apple. The authoress is to be fully commended for alerting the public to the lewd hearts hiding in plain sight in pulpits the length and breadth of the land.
—Richard Longnob, Gentleman
The Society for the Propagation of Moral Uplift in Public and Ecclesiastical Affairs, the Godly Parish of St Wilmot-without-Sheath, Lower Clittering.
