Dashwood, the most profane of that blasphemous crew, acted as a sort of high priest, and used a communion cup to pour out libations to heathen deities. He had not even the excuse of comparative youth to palliate his conduct; he was approaching fifty, and thus ten years older than Thomas Potter whom Almon describes as the worst of the set and the corrupter of Wilkes; he was nearly twenty years older than Wilkes, and two years older than "the aged Paul" (Whitehead), who acted as secretary and steward of the order of ill-fame, and was branded by Charles Churchill as "a disgrace to manhood". As a contrast to Medmenham Abbey, Dashwood erected a church on a neighbouring hill, which, as Churchill put it in "The Ghost", might "serve for show, if not for prayer", and Wilkes was equally caustic in his references to Dashwood's church "built on the top of a hill for the convenience and devotion of the town at the bottom of it".