With such masters in the State, and such masters in the Church, the
island fell low in material welfare, and its poverty reacted on both.
Within fifty years the Bishopric was nineteen years vacant, though it
may be that at the beginning of the seventeenth century this was partly
due to religious disturbances. Then in 1697, with the monasteries and
nunneries dispersed, the abbeys in ruins, the cathedral church a wreck,
the clergy sunk in sloth and ignorance, there came to the Bishopric,
four years vacant, a true man whose name on the page of Manx Church
history is like a star on a dark night, when only one is shining--Bishop
Thomas Wilson. He was a strange and complex creature, half angel,
only half man, the serenest of saints, and yet almost the bitterest of
tyrants. Let me tell you about him.