The Trials of a Country Parson

by Augustus Jessopp

CONTENTS.

CHAP.		PAGE
I.	THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON	[1]
II.	THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON (continued)	[49]
III.	THE CHURCH AND THE VILLAGES	[97]
IV.	QUIS CUSTODIET	[143]
	Note	[176]
V.	CATHEDRAL SPACE FOR NEGLECTED RECORDS	[180]
VI.	SNOWED UP IN ARCADY	[223]
	Note	[264]
VII.	WHY I WISH TO VISIT AMERICA	[270]

[The first six essays have, in the main, appeared in the “Nineteenth Century:” the seventh first saw the light in the “North American Review.”]

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I.
THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON.

My friends from Babylon the great are very good to me in the summer-time. They come in a delightful stream from their thousand luxuries, their great social gatherings, their brilliant talk, and their cheering and stimulating surroundings; they come from all the excitement and the whirl of London or some other huge city where men live, and they make their friendly sojourn with us here in the wilderness even for a week at a time. They come in a generous and self-denying spirit to console and condole with the man whom they pity so gracefully—the poor country parson “relegated,” as Bishop Stubbs is pleased to express it, “to the comparative uselessness of literary (and clerical) retirement.” I observe that the first question my good friends ask is invariably this: “What shall we do and where shall we go—to-morrow?” It would be absurd to suppose that any man in his senses comes to the wilderness to stay there, or that there could be anything to do there. A man goes to a place to see, not the place itself, but some other place. When you find yourself in the wilderness you may use any spot in it as a point of departure, but as a dwelling-place, a resting-place, never!

Moreover, I observe that, by the help of such means of locomotion as we have at command, the days pass merrily enough with my visitors in fine weather. But as sure as ever the rain comes, so surely do my friends receive important letters calling them back, much to their distress and disappointment. If the weather be very bad—obstinately bad—or if a horse falls lame and cannot be replaced, or some equally crushing disaster keeps us all confined to the house and garden, my visitors invariably receive a telegram which summons them home instantly even at the cost of having to send for a fly to the nearest market town. Sometimes, by a rare coincidence, a kindly being drops in upon us even in the winter. He is always genial, cordial, and a great refreshment, but he never stays a second night. We keep him warm, we allow a liberal use of “the shameful,” we give him meat and drink of the best, we flatter him, we coddle him, we talk and draw him out, we “show him things,” but he never stays over that single night; and when he goes, as he shakes our hands and wraps himself up in his rugs and furs, I notice that he has a sort of conflate expression upon his countenance; his face is as a hybrid flower where two beauties blend. One eye says plainly, “I am a lucky dog, for I am going away at last,” and the other eye, beaming with kindliness, sometimes with affection, says just as plainly, “Poor old boy, how I do pity you!”

Well! this is a pitiful age; that is, it is an age very full of pity. The ingenuity shown by some good people in finding out new objects of commiseration is truly admirable. It is hardly to be expected that the country parson should escape the general appetite for shedding tears over real or supposed sufferers.

But it strikes some of us poor forlorn ones as not a little curious that our grand town friends never by any chance seem to see what there is in our lot that is really pathetic or trying. “How often do you give it meat?” said a blushing, mild-eyed, lank-haired young worthy in my hearing the other day. “Lawk! sir, that don’t have no meat,” answered the laughing mother, as she hugged her tiny baby closer to her bosom. “Never have meat? How dreadful!” Just so! But it is not only ludicrous, it is annoying, to be pitied for the wrong thing; and though I am not inclined to maintain the thesis that we, the soldiers of God’s army of occupation, who are doing outpost duty, pass our lives in a whirl of tumultuous and delicious joy, yet, if I am to be pitied, do let me be pitied intelligently. I cannot expect to be envied, but surely it is not such a very heavy calamity for a man never to catch a sight of Truth or The World, or to find that there is not such a thing as an oyster-knife in his parish.

Moreover, side by side with pity, there is a large amount of much more irritating and ignorant exaggeration of the good things we are supposed to enjoy. We do not, I admit, hear quite so often as formerly about “fat livings” and “valuable preferment,” nor about the “rectorial mansion with a thousand a year”; but we hear a great deal more about such fabulous lands of Goshen than we ought to hear. There is always a disposition to represent our neighbours as better off than ourselves, and whereas the salaried townsman knows that his income, whatever it may be, is his net income which he may count upon as his spending fund to use as he pleases, when he hears of others as receiving or entitled to receive so many pounds a year, he assumes that they do receive it and that they may spend it as they please. The townsman, again, who moves among the multitude and every hour is reminded of that multitude pressing, as all fluids do, “equally in all directions,” hears, and sometimes he knows, that the clergy in the towns have immense claims upon their time and are always on the move in the streets and courts. They are always about, always en évidence. If a man has only to minister to a paltry seven hundred, what can he have to do? He must be a drone.

Moreover, the aforesaid townsman has read all about those country parsons. You can hardly take up a novel without finding a sleek rector figuring in the volumes. These idealized rural clerics always remind me of Mr. Whistler’s Nocturnes. The figures roll at you through the mists that are gathering round them. The good people who try to introduce us to these reverend characters very rarely venture upon a firm and distinct outline. The truth is, that for the most part the novelists never slept in a country parsonage in their lives, never knew a country parson out of a book.

A year or two ago my friend X. was dining in a London mansion. “Who’s that?” said a lady opposite, as she ducked her head in his direction and looked at her partner. X. turned to speak to his partner, but could not help hearing the scarcely whispered dialogue: “A country parson, did you say? Why, he’s tall!”

And their voices low with fashion, not with feeling, softly freighted
All the air about the windows with elastic laughter sweet.

It was quite a surprise to that lady novelist that a country parson could be tall! Many men are tall—policemen, for instance. But only short men ought to be country parsons. Why! we shall hear of one of them being good-looking next!

When any class of men feel themselves to be the butt of others, they are apt to be a little cowed. They hold their peace and fret, and if they resent their hard treatment and speak out, they rarely do themselves justice. Very few men can come well out of a snub, and the countryman who is not used to it never knows what to reply to offensive language. Yet worms have been known to turn, not that I ever heard they got any good by it; they can’t bite, and they can’t sting, but I suppose it comforts them to deliver their own souls. Poor worms! Yes! you may pity them.

* * * * *

But if the country parson has his trials, how may he hope to be listened to when he desires to make it clear what they are? Where shall he begin? Where shall he begin if not by pointing to that delicate nerve-centre of draped humanity, exquisite in its sensitiveness, knowing no rest in its perpetual giving out of force, for ever hungering for renewal of its exhausted resources, feeling no pain in its plethora and dreading no death save from inanition—to wit, the Pocket? Touch a man’s pocket, and a shudder thrills through every fibre.

The country parson has a great deal to complain of at the hands of those who will persist in talking of him as an exceptionally thriving stipendiary. It is one thing to say that in all cases he gets more than he deserves; it is quite another to put forth unblushingly that his income is half as much again as in fact it is, and his outgoings only what the outgoings of other men are. Logicians class the suppressio veri among sophisms; but would it not be better to call that artful proceeding a fraud? “Drink fair, Betsy, whatever you do!” said Mrs. Gamp on a memorable occasion. Yes, if it is only out of the teapot.

i. With regard to the income of the country parson, it may be laid down as a fact not to be disputed, that hardly one per cent. of the country clergy ever touch the full amount which theoretically they are entitled to receive. In the case of parishes where the land is much subdivided, and where there are a number of small tithepayers, it would be almost impossible for the clergyman personally to collect his dues; he almost invariably employs an agent, who is not a likely man to do his work for love. Even the agent can rarely get in all the small sums that the small folk ought to pay. Even he has to submit to occasional defalcations, and to consider whether it is worth while to press the legal rights of his employer too far. Moreover, the small folk from time immemorial have expected something in the shape of a tithe dinner or a tithe tea, for which the diners or the tea-drinkers do not pay, you may be sure; this constitutes a not inconsiderable abatement on the sum-total of receipts which ought to come to hand at the tithe audit.

Taking one year with another, it may be accepted as a moderate estimate that the cost of collecting his tithe, plus bad debts in some shape or other, amounts to six per cent., and he who gets within seven per cent. of his clerical income gets more than most of us do. But the law allows of no abatement in respect of this initial charge; and because the law takes up this ground, the world at large assumes that the nominal gross income of the benefice does come into the pockets of the incumbent. The world at large is quite certain that nobody in his senses makes a return of a larger income than he enjoys, and if the parson pays on £500, people assume that he does not get less from his living than that. The world at large does not know that the parson is not asked to make a return. The surveyor makes up his books on the tithe commutation table for the parish, and on that the parson is assessed, whatever he may say.

ii. For be it known it is with the surveyor or rate-collector that the parson’s first and most important concern lies. Whatever he may receive from his cure, however numerous may be the defaulters among the tithe-payers, however large the expense of collecting his dues, the parson has to pay rates on his gross income. The barrister and the physician, the artist or the head of a government department, knows or need know nothing about rates. He may live in a garret if he likes; he may live in a boarding-house at so much a week; he may live in a flat at a rent which covers all extraneous charges. I suppose we most of us have known men of considerable fortune, men who live in chambers, men who live in lodgings, men who live in college rooms, who never directly paid a rate in their lives. Our lamented H., who dropped out recently, leaving £97,000 behind him, invested in first-class securities, was one of these languidly prosperous men. “I do detetht violent language on any thubject whatever,” he lisped out to me once. “I hope I thall never thee that man again who thtormed at rate collectorth tho. What ith a rate collector? Doth he wear a uniform?”

But a country parson and all that he has in the world, qua country parson, is rateable to his very last farthing, and beyond it: the fiction being that he is a landed proprietor, and as such in the enjoyment of an income from real property. It is in vain that he pleads that his nominal income is of all property the most unreal:—he is told that he has a claim upon the land, and the land cannot run away. It is in vain that he plaintively protests that he would gladly live in a smaller house if he were allowed—he does live in it, chained to it like a dangerous dog to his kennel. It is in vain that he urges that he cannot let his glebe, and may not cut down the trees upon it—that he is compelled to keep his house in tenantable repair, and maintain the fences as he found them. The impassive functionary expresses a well-feigned regret and some guarded commiseration; but he has his duty to perform, and the rates have to be paid—Poor rates, County rates, School Board rates, and all the rest of them; and paid upon that parson’s gross income—such an income as never comes, and which everybody knows never could be collected.

You may say in your graceful way that a parson does not pay a bit more than he ought to pay, and that he may be thankful if he be allowed to live at all. That may be quite true—I don’t think it is, but it may be—but there are some things that are not true, and one of them is, that the gross income awarded to the country parson on paper gives anything approaching to a fair notion of the amount of income that comes to his hands. And if you are going to pity the country parson, do begin at the right end, and consider how you would like to pay such rates as he pays on your gross income.

iii. But when the country parson’s rates have been duly paid, the next thing that he is answerable for is the Land-tax. The mysteries of the Land-tax are quite beyond me. If I could afford to give up three years of my life to the uninterrupted study of the history and incidence of the Land-tax, I think, by what people tell me, I might get to know something about it, and be in a position to enlighten mankind upon this abstruse subject; but as I really have not three years of my life to spare, I must needs acquiesce in my hopeless ignorance even to the end. Only this I do know, that, whereas the country parson is called upon to pay sixpence in the pound for Income-tax, he is called upon to pay nearly ninepence in the pound for Land-tax: at any rate, I know one country parson who has to do so.

Let the Land-tax pass—it is beyond me. But how about the Income-tax? As I have said above, in the case of all other professions except the clerical, a man makes his return of income upon the available income which comes to him after deducting all fair and reasonable office expenses. But for the crime of clericalism, the country parson is debarred from making any such deductions as are permitted to other human beings. Many of the “good livings” in East Anglia have two churches, each of which must be served. A man cannot be in two places at once; and the laws of nature and of the Church being in conflict, the laws of the Church carry it over the laws of nature, and the rector has to put in an appearance at his second church by deputy—in other words, the poor man has to keep a curate. If he were a country solicitor who was compelled to keep a clerk, he would deduct the salary of the clerk from the profits of his business; but being only a country parson, he can do nothing of the sort: he has to pay Income-tax all the same on his gross returns. A curate is a luxury, as a riding horse is a luxury; and the only wonder is that curates have not long ago been included among those superfluous animals chargeable to the assessed taxes.

iv. Perhaps the most irritating of all imposts that press upon the country parson is that to which he has to submit because the churchyard is technically part of his freehold. In many parts of the country a fee is charged for burying the dead. In the diocese of Norwich there are no burial fees. The right of burying his dead in the churchyard is a right which may be claimed by any inhabitant of the parish; the soil of the churchyard is said to belong to the parishioners; the surface of the soil belongs to the parson. This being so, the parson is assessed in the books of the parish for the assumed value of the herbage growing upon the soil, and on this assumed value he is accordingly compelled to pay rates, Income-tax, and Land-tax. Of course the parson could legally turn cattle or donkeys into the churchyard to disport themselves among the graves; but happily that man who should venture to do this nowadays would be thought guilty of an outrage upon all decency. Who of us is there who does not rejoice that this state of feeling has grown up among us? But the result is that the churchyard, so far from being a source of income to the parson, has become a source of expense to him in almost all cases. Somebody has to keep the grass mown, and see that God’s acre is not desecrated. Few of us grumble at that; and some who have large resources pride themselves on keeping their churchyards as a lawn is kept or a garden. But it surely is monstrous when everybody knows that the churchyard, so far from bringing the parson any pecuniary benefit, entails an annual expense upon him which is practically unavoidable—it is monstrous, I say, that the parson should be assessed upon the value of the crop which might be raised off dead men’s graves, and that he should be taxed for showing an example of decency and right feeling to those around him.

“Well! But why don’t you appeal?”

My excellent sir, do you suppose that nobody ever has appealed? Do you suppose that very original idea of yours has never occurred to any one else before? Or do you suppose that we the shepherds of Arcady, find appealing against an assessment, made by our neighbours to relieve themselves, before the magistrates at Quarter Sessions, is a process peculiarly pleasurable and particularly profitable when the costs are defrayed? We grumble or fret, we count it among our trials, but we say, “After all, it is only about five shillings a-year. Anything for a quiet life. Let it go!” So the wrong gets to be established as a right. But it is none the less a wrong because it continues to exist, or because in coin of the realm it amounts to a trifle. Was it Mr. Midshipman Easy’s nurse who urged in excuse of her moral turpitude in having an infant of her very own, “Please, ma’am, it was such a little one?”

The grievance of having to pay rates on the churchyard may be in one sense a little one. But when it comes to being charged rates upon the premiums you pay upon your insurance policies, some of them—the insurance of his church and other buildings—being compulsory payments, and upon the mortgage of your benefice effected in your predecessor’s time—even the sneerer at a sentimental grievance could hardly call such charges as these not worth making a fuss about. In many a needy country parson’s household the rates make all the difference whether his children can have butter to their bread or not.

* * * * *

It must be obvious to most people from what has been already said—and much more might be said—that, unless a country parson have some resources outside of any income derivable from his benefice, he must needs be a very poor man. Our people know this better than any one else, and it is often a very anxious question on the appointment of a new incumbent whether he will live in the same style as that which his predecessor maintained. Will he keep a carriage, or only a pony chaise? Will he employ two men in the garden? Will he “put out his washing?”[2] Will his house be a small local market for poultry and butter and eggs? Will he farm the glebe or let it? How many servants will he keep, and will the lady want a girl to train in the kitchen or the nursery from time to time? Such questions as these are sometimes very anxious ones in a remote country village where every pound spent among the inhabitants serves to build up a margin outside the ordinary income of the wage-earners, and which helps the small occupiers to tide over many a temporary embarrassment when money is scarce, and small payments have to be met and cannot any longer be deferred.

Let me, before going any further, deal with a question which I have had suggested to me again and again by certain peculiar people with dearly beloved theories of their own. It is often asked, Ought clergymen ever to be rich men? Is not a rich clergyman out of place in a country parsonage? Does not his wealth raise him too far above the level of his people? Does it not make him sit loosely to his duties? Does not the fact of a country parson being known to be a rich man tend to demoralize a parish?

Lest it should be supposed that the present writer is one of the fortunate ones rolling in riches, and therefore in a manner bound to stand up for his own class—let it be at once understood that the present writer is a man of straw, one of those men to whom the month of January is a month of deep anxiety, perplexity, and depression of soul. Yet he would disdain to join the band of whining grumblers only because one year after another he finds that he must content himself with the corned beef and carrots, and cannot by hook or by crook afford to indulge in some very desirable recreation or expense which the majority of his acquaintance habitually regard as absolutely necessary if existence is to be endured at all. No! I am very far indeed from being a rich man; but this I am bound to testify in common fairness to my wealthier brethren in the ministry of the Church of England, that if any impartial person, with adequate knowledge of the facts, were asked to point out the most devoted, zealous, unworldly, and practically efficient country parsons in the diocese of Norwich—for let me speak as I do know—he would without hesitation name first and foremost some of the richest of the clergy in the eastern counties.

Do you desire that your son should begin his ministerial life under a man of great ability, sound sense, courage, and religious earnestness, a man who never spares himself and will not suffer his subordinates to sink into slovenly frivolity and idleness, then make your approaches to Lucullus, and you will have cause to thank God if the young fellow serves his apprenticeship under a guide and teacher such as this. He will learn no nonsense there, and see no masquerading, only an undemonstrative but unflinching adherence to the path believed to be the path of duty, and a manliness of self-surrender such as can only arouse an enthusiasm of respect and esteem.

Does “our own correspondent” wish to see how a score of infamous hovels can be changed into a score of model cottages which pay interest on the cost of their erection, and which in half a dozen years have helped perceptibly to raise the tone and tastes and habits of the population till it really looks as if some barbarians could be civilized by a coup de main?—let him pay a visit to the parish of our Reverend Hercules, only one of whose many labours it has been to cleanse an Augean stable. It will do him good to see the mighty shoulders of that rugged philanthropist, him of the broad brow and the great heart and the deep purse, always at work and always at home, about the very last man in England to be suspected of belonging to the sickly sort of puling visionaries.

Do you want to meet with a type of the saintly parish priest, one after holy George Herbert’s heart, one with hardly a thought that does not turn upon the service of the sanctuary or the duties that he owes to his scattered flock? Come with me, and we will go together and look at one of the most beautiful village churches in the land, on which our devout Ambrose has spent his thousands only with deep gratitude that he has been permitted to spend them so—and with never a word of brag or publicity, never a paragraph foisted into the newspapers. And as we pass out of that quiet churchyard, trim as a queen’s parterre, I will show you the window of that little study which Ambrose has not thought it right to enlarge, and if he be not there, be sure we shall find him at his school or by the sick-bed of the poor, or inquiring into some case of sorrow or sin where a kindly hand or a wise word may peradventure solace the sad or go some way to raise the fallen.

What country parson among all the nine hundred and odd within this unwieldy diocese has lived a simpler or more devoted life than our Nestor—[Greek: γέρων ἱππηλάτα Νέστωρ]—he who for more than threescore years and ten has gone in and out among his people, and doing his pastoral work so naturally, so much as a matter of course, that no one thinks of his being a rich man, except when those towering horses of his stop at our lowly portals and have to be corkscrewed into our diminutive stables?

And who knows not of thee, Euerges, treasurer and secretary and general mainstay of every good work, the idol of thy people and their healer, the terror of the impostor, and the true friend of all that deserve thy helping hand and purse! or thee, too, Amomos, who after thirty years of work as an evangelist in the city, spending there thyself and thy substance all the while, hast now betaken thee to the poor villagers, if haply some little good may yet be done among the lowly ones before the night cometh when no man can work?

“But do not such well-meaning gentlemen as these demoralize the poor?” Oh dear yes! of course they do. It is so very demoralizing to help a lame dog over a stile. It does so pauperize a broken-down couple to whom the Poor Law Guardians allow three shillings a week and half a stone of flour, if you give them a sack of potatoes about Christmas time. It corrupts and degrades Biddy Bundle to bestow an old petticoat upon her when she is shivering with the cold, and it takes all self-respect and independence from the unruly bosom of Dick the fiddler to offer him your old hat or a shabby pair of trousers. The truest, wisest, most far-sighted and most magnanimous charity is to let Harry Dobbs have “an order for the house” when he is out of work and short of coals—Harry Dobbs, who set himself against all the laws of political economy, and married at eighteen, when he had not the wherewithal to buy the chairs and tables. So we country parsons are a demoralizing force in the body politic forsooth, because we cannot bear to see poor people starve at our gates. We have been known actually to give soup to a reckless couple guilty of twelve children; actually soup! And we have dropped corrupting shillings into trembling hands, only because they were trembling, and distributed ounces of tobacco to the inmates of the Union, and poisoned the souls of old beldames with gratuitous half-pounds of tea. And we counsel people to come to church, when they would much rather go to the public-house, and we coddle them and warm them now and then, and instead of leaving them to learn manliness and independence and self-reliance on twelve shillings a week, we step between them and the consequences of their own improvidence, and we disturb the action of the beautiful laws of the universe, and where we see the ponderous wheels of Juggernaut just going to roll over a helpless imbecile who has tripped and dropped, we must needs make a clutch at him and pull him out by the scruff of the neck, and tell him to get up and not do it again. And all this is demoralizing and pauperizing, is it?

Out upon you! you miserable prigs with your chatter and babble! You to talk of the parson’s narrowness and his bigotry and his cant? You to sneer at him for being the slave of a superstition? You to pose as the only thinkers with all the logic of all the philosophers on your side, all the logic and never a crumb of common sense to back it? Bigotry and intolerance and cant and class jealousy and scorn—that refuge for the intellectually destitute and the blustering coward—where will you find them in all their most bitter and sour and hateful intensity, if not among the new lights, the self-styled economists? And we have to sit mum and let brainless pretenders superciliously put us out of court with a self-complacent wave of the hand, as they give utterance to perky platitudes about the clergy pauperizing the working man. No, Mr. Dandy Dryskull. No! this gospel of yours, a little trying to listen to, is being found out; ours will see the end of it.

You preach Sir Andrew and his love of law,
And we the Saviour and His law of love!

I, for one, hereby proclaim and declare that I intend to help the sick and aged and struggling poor whenever I have the chance, and as far as I have the means, and I hope the day will never come when I shall cease to think without shame of him who is said to have made it his boast that he had never given a beggar a penny in his life. I am free to confess that I draw the line somewhere. I do draw the line at the tramp—I do find it necessary to be uncompromising there. Indeed I keep a big dog for the tramp, and that dog, inasmuch as he passes his happy life in a country parsonage—that dog, I say, is not muzzled.

“But don’t you get imposed upon? Don’t you get asked to replace dead horses and cows and pigs and donkeys, that never walked on four legs and no mortal eye ever saw in the land of the living?”

Of course we do! Is it a prerogative of the country parson to be duped by a swindler? Oh, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, were you never taken in? Never! Then, sir, I could not have you for a son-in-law! As for us—we country parsons—we do occasionally get imposed upon in very absurd and contemptible fashion. Sometimes we submit to be bled with our eyes open. A bungling bumpkin has managed to get his horse’s leg broken by his own stupidity. We know that the fellow was jiggling the poor brute’s teeth out of his mouth at the time, or the animal would never have shown himself as great an idiot as his master. But there stands the master horseless, with the tears in his eyes, and we know all about him and the hard struggle he has had to keep things going, and we say to ourselves, “I wonder what would happen to me if my horse dropped down dead some fine morning. Who would help me to another? and what then?” So we pull out the sovereign, and give the fellow a note to somebody else, and that is how we demoralize him.

Or another comes at night-time and wants to speak to us on very particular business, and implores us to tide him over a real difficulty, and.... “What? do you mean to say, you lend fellows money?” Yes. I mean to say I have even done that and very very rarely repented of it, and I mean to say there are men, and women too, to whom I would lend money again if I had it; but it does not follow that I would lend it to everybody, least of all that I would lend it to you, Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Try it on, sir! Try it on! and see whether you would depart triumphant from the interview!

Moreover, the country parson has always to pay a little—just a very little—more than any one else for most things that come to his door. The market has always risen when he wants to buy, and has always suddenly fallen when he wants to sell. The small man’s oats are invariably superior to any one’s when he has a small parcel to dispose of to the parson. As to the price of hay, when the parson has to buy it, that is truly startling. I never see half a rood of carrots growing in a labourer’s allotment, but I feel sure I shall have to buy those carrots before Christmas, and sorry as I am to observe how rarely any fruit trees are ever planted in a poor man’s garden, I reflect that perhaps it is just as well, for already the damsons and the apples that besiege the rectory are almost overwhelming. I never ask what becomes of them, but it is morally and physically impossible that they should be eaten under this roof. “But, my dear, you must buy Widow Coe’s damsons; nobody else will, you know!” This is what I am told is “considering the poor people”; that is our way of putting it. You, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, you call it demoralizing them.

Then, too, the country parson is expected to “encourage the local industries.” I wonder whether they make pillow-lace in Bedfordshire as they did once. If they do, and especially if the demand for it in the outer world has waned, the country parsons’ wives in that part of England must have a very trying time of it.

Once, when I was in the merry twenties, a dirty old hag with an evil report, but no worse than other people, except that she was an old slut, knocked at my back door and asked to see “The Lady Shepherd.” Mrs. Triplet was a Mormonite, at any rate her husband was; and it was credibly believed that Mrs. Triplet herself had been baptized by immersion in a horsepond in the dead of night, dressed as Godiva was dressed during her famous ride, and seated, not upon a palfrey, but upon a jackass. How Triplet could ever have been converted to a belief in polygamy with his experience of the married state, I am entirely unable to explain. But Mrs. Triplet came to our door and asked for “The Lady Shepherd.” It was a delicate piece of flattery. She must have thought over it a long time. Was not the parson the shepherd? a bad one it might be, a hireling, a blind leader of the blind, but still a shepherd. Then his wife must needs be a shepherdess—and she did not look like it—or a sheep—No! that wouldn’t do at all—or the shepherd’s lady—and shepherds don’t have ladies; or—happy thought!—the Lady Shepherd.

Accordingly Mrs. Triplet asked for the Lady Shepherd. Mrs. Triplet in former times had been a tailor’s hand, and in that capacity had made a few shillings a week by odd jobs for the Cambridge tailors in term time; but she had married, and now she lived too far away in the wilds to be able to continue at her old employment, and being a bad manager, she soon had to cast about for some new source of income. In the more comfortable cottages in the eastern counties you may often see laid out before the fire a mat of peculiar construction which sometimes looks like a small mattress in difficulties. It is made from selvages and clippings, the refuse of the tailor’s workshop; these strips of cloth are cut into lengths of two or three inches long by half an inch wide, and are knitted or tightly tied together with string, the variously coloured scraps being arranged in patterns according to the genius and taste of the artist. The complex structure when completed is stuffed with the clippings too small to be worked up on the outside, and the mass is then subjected to a process of thumping and stamping and pulling and hammering till at last there exudes—yes! that is the correct term, whatever you may say—a lumpy bundle, which in its pillowy and billowy entirety is called a hearthrug. The thing will last for generations, it never wears out, and it takes years of continuous stamping upon it before you can anyhow get it flat. It was one of these triumphs of industry that Mrs. Triplet desired to turn an honest penny by. Would her ladyship come and look at it in situ?

Now the lady shepherd is a woman of business, which the shepherd, notoriously, is not, and if she had gone alone no great harm would have come of the interview; but on that unlucky day the shepherd and his lady resolved to go together. That is a course which no shepherd and shepherdess should ever be persuaded to follow. Two men will often help one another when associated in a difficult enterprise; two women will almost always do better together than single-handed, but a man and a woman working together will always get in one another’s way. On the occasion referred to the quick-witted old crone saw her chance in a moment, and commenced to play off one of her visitors against the other with consummate skill. From a hole beneath the narrow stairs she dragged the massive structure, and slowly unfolding it before our eyes commenced to stamp upon it in a kind of hideous demon dance, gazing at it fondly from time to time as if she could hardly bear to part with it.

In those days the fashion of wearing gay clothing had only just gone out among the male sex. For, less than forty years ago, we used to appear, on state occasions, in blue dress coats and brass buttons, and at great gatherings you might see green coats and brown ones, mulberry coats and chocolate ones, and there was a certain iridescence that gave a peculiarly sprightly look to an assembly even of males in those days, which has all passed away now. Hence when Mrs. Triplet displayed her exhibit we found ourselves gazing at a very gaudy spectacle. “There, lady! And I made the pattern all myself, I did. Many’s the night I’ve laid awake thinking of it. Ah! them bottle-greens was hard to get, they was; gentlefolks has give up wearing greens. But that yaller rose, lady. Ain’t that a yaller rose?” For once in her life the lady shepherd lost her nerve. Spasms of hysterical laughter wrestled within her, and her flushed face and contorted frame betrayed the conflict that was raging. How would it end? in the rupture of a vein or in shrieks of uncontrollable merriment? The shepherd was in terror; he stooped to the foolishest flattery; he went as near lying as a shepherd could without literally lying; but comedy changed to tragedy when from his lean purse he desperately plucked his very last sovereign, and giving it to that guileful old sorceress, ordered her to bring that hearth-rug to the parsonage without delay.

Next week—the very next week—came a pressing offer from another parishioner of another of these articles of home manufacture; next month came a third, though the price had dropped fifty per cent., which was accepted with exultant thankfulness. There was positively no stopping the activity of the new industry; until, before three months were over, six of these fearful contrivances had been all but forced upon us, one of them travelling to our door in a donkey-cart and one in a wheel-barrow—the lady shepherd being told she might have them at her own price, and pay for them at her own convenience—only have them she must: the makers could by no means take them away.

“Well, but you had nobody but yourselves to thank. How could you be so weak and silly?”

That may be very true. But do not our trials—our smaller trials—become so just because we have only ourselves to thank for them? We in the wilderness are exposed to temptations which go some way to make us silly and soft-hearted. Somehow, few of us are certain to keep our hearts as hard as the nether millstone. I do not pretend to be one of the seven sages: what I do say is that we country parsons have our trials.

It is, however, when the country parson has to buy a horse that he finds himself tried to the uttermost. Day after day, from all points of the compass, there appear at his gate the cunningest of the cunning and the sharpest of the sharp; and if at the end of a week the parson has not arrived at the settled conviction that he is three parts of a fool, it is impossible for him to dispute that the whole fraternity of horsey men feel no manner of doubt that he is so. Now, I don’t like to be thought a fool: not many men do, unless they hope to gain something by it. The instinct of self-preservation or the hope of a kingdom might induce me to play the part of Brutus; but in my secret heart I should be buoyed up by the proud consciousness of superior wisdom. When, however, it comes to a long line of rogues—one after another for days and days without any collusion—continuing to tell you to your face, almost in so many words, that you certainly are a fool—it really ceases to be monotonous and becomes, after a while, vexatious. The fellows are so clever, too; they have such an enviable fluency of speech; they are possessed of such a rich fund of anecdote, such an easy play of fancy, such a readiness of apt illustration, and such a magnificent command of facial contortion, expressive of the subtlest movements of the heart and brain, that you cannot but feel how immeasurably inferior you are to the dullest of them in dialectic. But why should a man, when he asks you to try his charger, bring it round to the door-step, tempting you to get up on the off side?—what does he gain by it? Why should he tell you that “this hoss was a twin with that as Captain Dixie drives in his dog-cart”? Why should he assure you, upon his sacred honour, “that Roman nose will come square when the horse gets to be six years old—they always do”? or that “you always find bay horses turn chestnut if they’re clipped badly”?

These men would not try these fictions upon any one else; why should I suffer for being a country parson by being told a long story—with the most religious seriousness—of “that there horse as Mr. Abel had, that stopped growing in his fore-quarters when he was two and went on growing with his hind-quarters till he was seven—that hoss that they called Kangaroo, ’cause he’d jump anything—anything under a church tower, only you had to give him his head”? I used to get much more irritated by this kind of thing when I was less mellowed by age than I am: and I have learnt to be more tolerant even of a horse-dealer than I once was. In an outburst of indignation one day, I turned angrily upon one of the fraternity, and said to him, “Man! how can you go on lying in this way; why won’t you deal fairly, instead of always trying to take people in?” The man was not a bit offended—indeed he smiled quite kindly upon me. “Lor,’ sir, do you suppose we never get took in?” I am fully persuaded that horse-dealer thought I was going to try the confidence trick with him.

* * * * *

I am often assured by my town friends that the loneliness of my country life must be very trying. I reply with perfect truth that I have never known what it is to feel lonely except in London. Some years ago one Sunday afternoon I was compelled to consult an eminent oculist. When the cab drove up to the great man’s door in Cardross Square, his eminence was at the window in a brown study, with his elbows leaning on the wire blind, the tip of his nose flattened against the pane, his eyes vacantly staring at nothing. When we were shown into his presence, the forlorn and desolate expression on that forsaken man’s face was quite shocking to the nerves. A painter who could have reproduced the look of aimless and despairing woe might have made a name for ever. When people talk to me of loneliness I always instinctively recall the image of that famous oculist in the heart of London on a Sunday afternoon. Ever since that day I have never been able to get over a horror of wire blinds. Happily, they are articles of furniture which have almost gone out now, but they used to be fearfully common. Even now the Londoner thinks it de rigueur to darken the windows of his sitting-room on the ground floor; and in furnished lodgings you must have wire blinds. Why is this? When I ask the question I am told that you must have wire blinds: if you didn’t, people would look in. In the country we never have wire blinds, and yet nobody looks in; therefore you call our life lonely. But loneliness is not the simple product of external circumstances—it is the outcome of a morbid temperament, creating for itself a sense of vacuity, whatever may be a man’s surroundings.

To sit on rocks, to muse on flood and fell,
To climb the trackless mountain, &c.

I suppose we all know that wishy-washy stuff, so there is no need to go on with the quotation.

What is trying in the country parson’s life is its isolation. That is a very different thing from saying that he lives a lonely life. The parson who is conscientiously trying to do his duty in a country parish occupies a unique position. He is a man, and yet he must be something more than man, and something less too. He must be more than man in that he must be free from human passions and human weaknesses, or the whole neighbourhood is shocked by his frailty; he must be something less than man in his tastes and amusements and way of life, or there will be those who will be sure to denounce him as a worldling who ought never to have taken orders. If he be a man of birth and refinement, he is sure to be reported of as proud and haughty; if he be not quite a gentleman, he will be snubbed and flouted outrageously. The average country parson and his family has often to bear an amount of patronizing impertinence which is sometimes very trying. Even the squire and the parson do not always get on well together, and when they do not, the parson is very much at the other’s mercy, and may be thwarted and worried and humiliated almost to any extent by a powerful, ill-conditioned, and unscrupulous landed proprietor. But it is from the come-and-go people who hire the country houses which their owners are compelled to let, that we suffer most. Not that this is always the case, for it not unfrequently happens that the change in the occupancy of a country mansion is a clear gain socially, morally, and intellectually to a whole neighbourhood—when, in the place of a necessitous Squire Western, and his cubs of sons and his half-educated daughters, drearily impecunious, but not the less self-asserting and supercilious, we get a family of gentle manners and culture and accomplishments, and lo! it is as sunshine after rain. But sometimes the new comers are a grievous infliction. Town-bred folk who emerge from the back streets and have amassed money by a new hair-wash or an improvement in sticking-plaster. Such as these are out of harmony with their temporary surroundings: they giggle in the faces of the farmers’ daughters, ridicule the speech and manners of the labourers and their wives, and grumble at everything. They cannot think of walking in the dirty lanes, they are afraid of cows, and call children nasty little things. These people’s hospitalities are very trying.

“Come, my boy. Have a cut at the venison. Don’t be afraid. You shall have a good dinner for once; sha’n’t he, my dear? and as much champagne as you like to put inside you?” It was a bottle-nosed Sir Gorgious Midas who spoke, and his lady at the other end of the table gave me a kindly wink as she caught my eye. But the wine was Gilby’s, and not his best. These are the people who demoralize our country villages. They introduce a vulgarity of tone quite indescribable, and the rapidity of the change wrought in the sentiments and language of the rustics is sometimes quite wonderful.

The rustics don’t like these come-and-go folk, but they get dazzled by them notwithstanding; they resent the airs which the footmen and ladies’ maids give themselves, but nevertheless they envy them and think, “There’s my gal Polly—she’d be a lady if she was to get into sich a house as that!” When they hear that up at the hall they play tennis on Sunday afternoons, the old people are perplexed, and wonder what the world is coming to; the boys and girls begin to think that their jolly time is near, when they too shall submit to no restraint, and join the revel rout of scoffers. The sour puritan snarls out, “Ah! there’s your gentlefolks, they don’t want no religion, they don’t—and we don’t want no gentlefolks!” For your sour puritan somehow has always a lurking sympathy with the Socialist programme, and it’s honey and nuts to him to find out some new occasion for venting his spleen at the things that are. But one and all look askance at the parson, and inwardly chuckle that he is not having a pleasant time of it. “Our Reverend’s been took down a bit, since that young gent at the Hall lit his pipe in the church porch. ‘That ain’t seemly,’ says parson. ‘Dunno about that,’ says the tother, ‘but it seems nice.’” Chorus, half-giggle, half-sniggle.

Do not the scientists teach that no two atoms are in absolute contact with each other; that some interval separates every molecule from its next of kin? Certainly this is inherent in the office and function of the country parson, that he is not quite in touch with any one in his parish if he be a really earnest and conscientious parson. He is too good for the average happy-go-lucky fellow who wants to be let alone. There is nothing to gain by insulting him. “He’s that pig-headed he don’t seem to mind nothing—only swearing at him!” You cannot get him to take a side in a quarrel. He speaks out very unpleasant truths in public and private. He occupies a social position that is sometimes anomalous. He has a provoking knack of taking things by the right handle. He does not believe in the almighty dollar, as men of sense ought to believe; and he is usually in the right when it comes to a dispute in a vestry meeting because he is the only man in the parish that thinks of preparing himself for the discussion beforehand. This isolation extends not merely to matters social and intellectual; it is much more observable in the domain of sentiment. A rustic cannot at all understand what motive a man can possibly have for being a bookworm; he suspects a student of being engaged in some impious researches. “To hear that there Reverend of ours in the pulpit you might think we was all right. But, bless you! he ain’t same as other folk. He do keep a horoscope top o’ his house to look at the stares and sich.”

Not one man in a hundred of the labourers reads a book, and only when a book is new with a gaudy outside does he seem to value it even as a chattel. That any one should ever have any conceivable use for a big book is to him incomprehensible.

“If I might be so bold, sir,” said Jabez, an intelligent father of a family with some very bright children who are “won’erful for’ard in their larning,” “If I might be so bold, might I ask if you’ve really read all these grit books?” “No, Jabez; and I should be a bigger dunce than I am if I ever tried to. I keep them to use; they’re my tools, like your spade and hoe. What’s that thing called that I saw in your hand the other day when you were working at the draining job? You don’t often use that tool I think, do you?” “Well, no. But then we don’t get a job o’ draining now same as we used. I mean to say as a man may go ten years at a stretch and never lay a drain-tile.” “Well, then how about the use of his tools all this time?” Jabez smiled, slowly put his hand to his head, saw the point, and yet didn’t see it. “But, lawk sir! that’s somehow different. I can’t see what yow can du wi’ a grit book like this here.” It was a massive volume of Littré’s great dictionary, which I had just taken down to consult; it certainly did look portentous. “Why, Jabez, that’s a dictionary—a French dictionary. If I want to know all about a French word, you know, I look it up here. Sometimes I don’t find exactly what I want; then I go to that book, which is another French dictionary; and if....” I saw by the blank look in honest Jabez’ face that it was all in vain. “Want to know ... all about ... words.... Why you ain’t agoing to fix no drain-tiles with them sort o’ things. Now that du wholly pet me aywt, that du.”

I think no one who has not tried painfully to lift and lead others can have the least notion of the difficulty which the country parson has to contend with in the extreme thinness of the stratum in which the rural intellect moves. Since the schools have given more attention to geography, and since emigration has brought us now and then some entertaining letters from those who have emigrated to “furren parts,” the people have slowly learnt to think of a wider area of space than heretofore they could imagine. Though even now their notions of geography are almost as vague as their notions of astronomy; I have never seen a map in an agricultural labourer’s cottage. But their absolute ignorance of history amounts to an incapacity of conceiving the reality of anything that may have happened in past time. What their grandfathers have told them, that is to them history—everything before that is not so much as fable; it is not romance, it is a formless void, it is chaos. The worst of it is that they have no curiosity about the past. The same is true of their knowledge of anything approaching to the rudiments of physical science; it simply does not exist. A belief in the Ptolemaic system is universal in Arcady. I suspect that they think less about these things than they did. “That there old Gladstone, lawk! he’s a deep un he is! He’s as deep as the Pole Star he is!” said Solomon Bunch to me one day. “Pole Star?” I asked in surprise, “Where is the Pole Star, Sol?” “Lawks! I dunno; I’ve heard tell o’ the Pole Star as the deep un ever sin’ I was a booy!”

It is this narrowness in their range of ideas that makes it so hard for the townsman to become an effective speaker to the labourers. You could not make a greater mistake than by assuming you have only to use plain language to our rustics. So far from it, they love nothing better than sonorous words, the longer the better. It is when he attempts to make his audience follow a chain of reasoning that the orator fails most hopelessly, or when he comes to his illustrations. The poor people know so little, they read nothing, their experience is so confined, that one is very hard put to it to find a simile that is intelligible.

“Young David stood before the monarch’s throne. With harp in hand he touched the chords, like some later Scald he sang his saga to King Saul!” It really was rather fine—plain and simple too, monosyllabic, terse, and with a musical sibillation. Unfortunately one of the worthy preacher’s hearers told me afterwards with some displeasure that “he didn’t hold wi’ David being all sing-songing and scolding, he’d no opinion o’ that.” The stories of the queer mistakes which our hearers make in interpreting our sermons are simply endless, sometimes almost incredible. Nevertheless, no invention of the most inveterate story-teller could equal the facts which are matters of weekly experience.

“As yow was a saying in your sarment, ’tarnal mowing won’t du wirout ’tarnal making—yow mind that! yer ses, an’ I did mind it tu, an’ we got up that hay surprising!” Mr. Perry had just a little misconceived my words. I had quoted from Philip Van Arteveldt. “He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. Eternity mourns that.”

Not many months ago I was visiting a good simple old man who was death-stricken, and had been long lingering on the verge of the dark river. “I’ve been a thinking, sir, of that little hymn as you said about the old devil when he was took bad. I should like to hear that again.” I was equal to the occasion.

The devil was sick—the devil a saint would be;
The devil got well—not a bit of a saint was he!

[It was necessary to soften down the language of the original!]

“Is that what you mean?” Yes! it was that. “Well I’ve been a thinking, if the old devil had laid a bit longer and been afflicted same as some on ’em, as he’d a been the better for it. Ain’t there no more o’ that there little hymn, sir?”

The religious talk of our Arcadians is sometimes very trying—trying I mean to any man with only too keen a sense of the ludicrous, and who would not for the world betray himself if he could help it.

It is always better to let people welcome you as a friend and neighbour, rather than as a clergyman, even at the risk of being considered by the “unco guid” as an irreverent heathen. But you are often pulled up short by a reminder more or less reproachful, that if you have forgotten your vocation your host has not; as thus:—

“Ever been to Tombland fair, Mrs. Cawl?” Mrs. Cawl has a perennial flow of words, which come from her lips in a steady, unceasing, and deliberate monotone, a slow trickle of verbiage with never the semblance of a stop.

“Never been to no fairs sin’ I was a girl bless the Lord nor mean to ’xcept once when my Betsy went to place and father told me to take her to a show and there was a giant and a dwarf dressed in a green petticoat like a monkey on an organ an’ I ses to Betsy my dear theys the works of the Lord but they hadn’t ought to be shewed but as the works of the Lord to be had in remembrance and don’t you think sir as when they shows the works of the Lord they’d ought to begin with a little prayer?”

* * * * *

There is one salient defect in the East Anglian character which presents an almost insuperable obstacle to the country parson who is anxious to raise the tone of his people, and to awaken a response when he appeals to their consciences and affections. The East Anglian is, of all the inhabitants of these islands, most wanting in native courtesy, in delicacy of feeling, and in anything remotely resembling romantic sentiment. The result is that it is extremely difficult, almost impossible, to deal with a genuine Norfolk man when he is out of temper. How much of this coarseness of mental fibre is to be credited to their Danish ancestry I know not, but whenever I have noticed a gleam of enthusiasm, I think I have invariably found it among those who had French Huguenot blood in their veins. Always shrewd, the Norfolk peasant is never tender; a wrong, real or imagined, rankles within him through a lifetime. He stubbornly refuses to believe that hatred in his case is blameworthy. Refinement of feeling he is quite incapable of, and without in the least wishing to be rude, gross, or profane, he is often all three at once quite innocently during five minutes’ talk. I have had things said to me by really good and well-meaning men and women in Arcady that would make susceptible people swoon. It would have been quite idle to remonstrate. You might as well preach of duty to an antelope. If you want to make any impression or exercise any influence for good upon your neighbours, you must take them as you find them, and not expect too much of them. You must work in faith, and you must work upon the material that presents itself. “The sower soweth the word.” The mistake we commit so often is in assuming that because we sow—which is our duty—therefore we have a right to reap the crop and garner it. “It grows to guerdon after-days.”

Meanwhile we have such home truths as the following thrown at us in the most innocent manner.

“Tree score? Is that all you be? Why there’s some folk as ’ud take you for a hundred wi’ that hair o’ yourn!”

Mr. Snape spoke with an amount of irritation which would have made an outsider believe I was his deadliest foe; yet we are really very good friends, and the old man scolds me roundly if I am long without going to look at him. But he has quite a fierce repugnance to grey hair. “You must take me as I am, Snape,” I replied; “I began to get grey at thirty. Would you have me dye my hair?” “Doy! Why that hev doyd, an’ wuss than that—thet’s right rotten thet is!”

Or we get taken into confidence now and then, and get an insight into our Arcadians’ practical turn of mind. I was talking pleasantly to a good woman about her children. “Yes,” she said, “they’re all off my hands now, but I reckon I’ve had a expense-hive family. I don’t mean to say as it might not have been worse if they’d all lived, and we’d had to bring ’em all up, but my meaning is as they never seemed to die convenient. I had twins once, and they both died, you see, and we had the club money for both of ’em, but then one lived a fortnight after the other, and so that took two funerals, and that come expense-hive!”

It is very shocking to a sensitive person to hear the way in which the old people speak of their dead wives or husbands exactly as if they’d been horses or dogs. They are always proud of having been married more than once. “You didn’t think, Miss, as I’d had five wives, now did you? Ah! but I have though—leastways I buried five on ’em in the churchyard, that I did—and tree on ’em beewties!”[3] On another occasion I playfully suggested, “Don’t you mix up your husbands now and then, Mrs. Page, when you talk about them?” “Well, to tell you the truth, sir, I really du! But my third husband, he was a man! I don’t mix him up. He got killed, fighting—you’ve heerd tell o’ that I make no doubt. The others warn’t nothing to him. He’d ha’ mixed them up quick enough if they’d interfered wi’ him. Lawk ah! He’d ’a made nothing of ’em!”

Instances of this obtuseness to anything in the nature of poetic sentiment among our rustics might be multiplied indefinitely. Norfolk has never produced a single poet or romancer.[4] We have no local songs or ballads, no traditions of valour or nobleness, no legends of heroism or chivalry. In their place we have a frightfully long list of ferocious murderers: Thurtell, and Tawell, and Manning, and Greenacre, and Rush, and a dozen more whose names stand out pre-eminent in the horrible annals of crime. The temperament of the sons of Arcady is strangely callous to all the softer and gentler emotions.

* * * * *

There still remains something to say. In the minor difficulties with which the country parson has to deal, there is usually much that is grotesque, and this for the most part forces itself into prominence. When this is so, a wise man will not dwell too much upon the sad and depressing view of the situation; he will try and make the best of things as they are. There are trials that are, after all, bearable with a light heart. Unhappily there are others that make a man’s heart very heavy indeed, partly because he thinks they need not be, partly because he can see no hope of remedy. It is of these I hope to speak hereafter.

---

II.
THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON.

“Ther’s times the world does look so queer,
Odd fancies come afore I call ’em,
An’ then agin, for half a year,
No preacher ’thout a call’s more solemn.”

In speaking of the trials of the country parson’s life in my last essay, I left much unsaid that needed saying. I rather shrank from dealing with matters which are outside the range of my own experience, and confined myself to such illustrations of the positions maintained as my own personal knowledge could supply. There are, however, some phases of the country parson’s life which I am perhaps less competent to dwell on than others who have been all their lives rustics, and because I would not willingly wound the feelings of those whom I honour and respect, therefore I am inclined to hang back and hold my peace and say nothing.

Why does not somebody else step in and take up the thread where I dropped it, deliver his testimony, and give us the record of his larger experience? Or shall we ask another question? How is it that people who have much to tell, so often have no faculty of setting it down in words and sentences? We boast of our advance in education, and yet what has it done for us—what is it doing for us?

I mean my son to be really educated. I mean him to be able to sit down to an organ and satisfy his soul as he dreams his dreams or sends forth his wail of aspiration, or sobs out his grief and penitence, or laughs forth his ecstasy of rapture, now in a passion of melody, now in subtle tangle of mysterious fugue, now in awful billows of harmony, making full concert to the angelic symphony. I mean him to be able to catch the laugh of the child, or the scowl of the ruffian, or the smirk of the swindler, or the wonder and triumph and joy and pride of the maiden who has just listened to her lover’s tale, or the sombre beauty of the aged when the twilight deepens and they are thinking of the dawn. I mean my son to have the power to catch these things, and to hold them and show them to me, saying, “Look! there they are for you and me to dwell on when we will.” Then, and not till then, will that lad of promise have begun to be educated. But we—or such as I—what upstarts we are! We that talk badly, write worse, and fumble and bungle miserably with that beggarly vehicle of communication between man and man which we call language—that wretched calculus which serves just a very little way towards helping us to hold converse with men as foolish as ourselves, but leaves us helpless to make the throstle feel how much we love him, and which we fling aside as a mere burden when our hearts are dying in us with what we call our loneliness or our despair. Educated! Who is educated? Certainly not the man who, having his memory full of a vast assemblage of odds and ends, can no more bring them out and produce them in an intelligible shape than I can produce on canvas the face of yonder old beldame with the square jaw and the bushy brows and the blazing eyes, and that burlesque of a bonnet, square and round and oval at one and the same moment, and no more capable of being described in words than of being written out in musical notation.

Yet it is undeniable that the knack of Mr. Gigadibs is a convenient knack, and it is a pity that my friend Mr. Cadaverous has not got it; he is “of those who know.” Gigadibs is of those who can juggle with the parts of speech, and very pretty jugglery it is. I envy Gigadibs whenever I am compelled to relate things at second hand; for who can help lying when he tries to bear evidence upon what others have seen and heard and felt—and worst of all—have reasoned about?

* * * * *

It may have been observed that when I began upon the subject of the country parson’s trials, I dwelt first upon those annoyances and positive wrongs which he is compelled to submit to at the hands of the powers that be, and which may be classed under the head of Financial; and, secondly, upon such as are inherent in his position as a personage living a life apart from those among whom he has to discharge his peculiar duties.

As far as regards the mere peasant, this isolation is only what any one must expect who is brought into relations more or less intimate with a class socially and intellectually below or above his own. But there are villages and villages, and the differences between them are as great as between the East End of London and the West, between May Fair and Red Lion Square. The ideal village is a happy valley, where a simple people are living sweetly under the paternal care of a gracious landowner, benevolent, open-handed, large-hearted, devout, a man of wealth and culture, his wife a Lady Bountiful; his daughters the judicious dispensers of liberal charity; his house the home of all that is refining, cheering, elevating. There the happy parson always finds a cordial welcome, and all those social advantages which make life pleasant and serene for himself and his family. Parson and squire work together in perfect harmony, the rectory and the hall are but the greater and the lesser parts of a well-adjusted piece of machinery which moves on with no friction and never comes to a dead stop. This is the ideal village.

How different are the real villages, and how various! Take the case of my friend Burney’s parish. An oblong surface through which a high road runs straight as a ruler—wide ditches dividing the fields, with never a hedge and never a tree—nine square miles of land with a population of 900 human beings, here and there collected into an ugly hamlet, each with a central alehouse, and a few feeble poplars looking as if they were ashamed of themselves. There is not a farmer in the parish who occupies 300 acres of land. There is not a squire’s house within a radius of eleven miles from the rectory door. The nearest market town is six miles off, the nearest railway station five. Friend Burney has his house and garden and perhaps £350 a year to spend—that is quite the outside. Every morning he goes to his school a long mile off, every afternoon he has some one to “look after,” to visit in sickness or sorrow, to watch or advise or comfort. One year with another he calculates that he has to walk at least 1,500 miles in the way of duty. As to the mere Sunday work, that needs no dwelling on; take it all in all, it is about the least wearing and least troublesome part of the parson’s duties, always provided he puts his heart into it, and has some faculty for it. But in all that tract of country over which he is sometimes cruelly assumed to be no more than a spiritual overseer, among all those 900 people, there is not a single man, woman, or child that cares to talk to him, or ever does talk to him, about anything outside the parish and its concerns. Nay! I forgot the schoolmaster and his wife. They are young, intelligent, hopeful, and they came out of Yorkshire, and have something to say of their experience in the North. But they are just a little—undeniably a little sore, just a little touchy: they have a grievance. When they first came down to X., Mrs. Rector did not leave her card on Mrs. Petticogges. It was a slight. It was hoity-toity, it was airified. That is not all; the farmers are not, as you may say, cordial with the schoolmaster; and Farmer Gay, the big man who holds 700 acres in the next parish and gives lawn-tennis parties, never had the grace to take any notice of the Petticogges, does not in fact know the Petticogges. Meanwhile, friend Burney is manager of the school, and by far the largest contributor to the funds, and day by day he is in and out, he and his daughters. But there is no time to talk or confer. The Petticogges have their hands full; when their day’s work is over they have had enough of it. Round and round and round they go in the dreary mill; every now and then there is a new regulation of My Lords to worry them, a new book to get up, a new code to study. Then there are the pupil teachers to look after, and returns to make up, and all the dull routine which has to be got through.

How can an elementary schoolmaster in a remote country village be a reading-man, or what motive has he to get out of the narrow groove in which he has been brought up? The best teachers, as a rule, are they who know their work best and very little indeed outside it. “How is it that at Dumpfield they don’t get a larger grant?” I asked one day of an inspector noted for his shrewdness and good sense. “Surely Coxe is by far the ablest and most brilliant teacher for miles round; he is almost a man of genius?” “Precisely so,” was the reply, “the man’s out of place. These brilliant men with a touch of genius are a nuisance in an elementary school. My dear fellow, never let a man of views come into your school. Keep him out. Beware of the being who is for revolutionizing spelling and grammar!”

Mr. Petticogge is not a man of genius, only a better sort of elementary schoolmaster, and entirely absorbed in his work. He, too, as all the members of his fraternity do, occupies a position of isolation, and between him and the parson there is just so much in common as to make each hold aloof from the other without making either of them congenial to their other neighbours. As for the rest of friend Burney’s neighbours, take them in the gross, and you may say of them what the ticket-of-leave man said of the Ten Commandments; “They’re rather a poor lot and you can’t make much out of ’em.” I know no class of men who are less sociable than the smaller farmers, as we reckon smallness in the East. I mean the men who hold a couple of hundred acres and under. It has often been laid to the charge of the great occupiers in West Norfolk and elsewhere that in the good times they were lavish beyond all reason in their hospitalities. I believe there never has been anything of the sort among the smaller men; they are not unfriendly, they are not wanting in cordiality, but they are not companionable.

It is my privilege to know some who are notable exceptions to the all but universal rule. I have not far to go from my own door to find one whom I never pay a visit to without pleasure and profit, one who has for many years been a great reader of Lord Tennyson’s poems, has strong opinions on politics and the questions of the day, a thoughtful, resolute, and true-hearted woman, who farms a hundred acres of land without a bailiff, and, among other evidences of her good taste and intelligence, is a diligent reader of the Spectator. But such are few and far between.

It is one of the trials of the country parson that, as soon as he passes out of the stratum to which the labourer belongs, he finds himself in a stratum where there is nothing that has any of the interest of originality, picturesqueness, or even passion. The people who live and move in that stratum are dismally like the ticket-of-leave man’s ten commandments. My neighbours hardly believe me when I tell them I can see, even among the smaller farmers, much to admire, much to respect, and something to love; but I do not wonder that many a country parson “can’t make much out of ’em.” These men are having rather a hard life just now, but they have not to learn the most elementary lessons of thrift and frugality. As a class they have always practised these virtues, and as a class they are far less complaining than those who belong to the higher stratum; they bear their burdens silently, perhaps too silently, and they tell you that it’s no good grumbling—“that,” one of them said to me, “only makes things worse, ’cause it makes you worse!” Take them all in all, they whom I have elsewhere called the little ones are usually those of his parishioners with whom the parson seldom comes into unpleasant relations; they are usually very hard at work, very practical, very straightforward, and very seldom indeed prone to give themselves airs.

It is often very different with the large occupiers. In the good times the large farmers must have made very large profits, the percentage upon the actual capital embarked (unless my information has been strangely untrue, and the calculations that have been laid before me strangely inaccurate) being in many cases larger even than that which the shipowners earned in their good times. Is it to be wondered at that they became frequently intoxicated by their success, and got to believe that they were a superior order on whom the welfare of the nation depended? Or, again, can we be surprised that their awakening from their dream has not been pleasurable, and has somewhat soured them? Ten years ago a gentleman farmer—and every man who farmed 500 acres was a gentleman farmer—looked down upon the retail tradesman as quite beneath him in station, and regarded the parson as a respectable official whom it was the right thing to support, though he might care very little for him and his ways. In those days the farmer’s sons and the parson’s were frequently schoolfellows; the young people drew together, and the farmer’s pupils too were another link between the farmhouse and the rectory. The bad seasons and the fall in prices came together, and the collapse was very rapid. But in nine cases out of ten, whereas the farmer’s losses meant a disastrous abatement which extended over his whole income, the parson felt the pinch only in the fall of the tithe or in the rent of his glebe. His private fortune, being for the most part settled, remained as it was before. In East Anglia not 5 per cent. of the clergy are living upon the income of their benefices; but I should be very much surprised to find that 5 per cent. of the tenant-farmers have any considerable investments outside their working capital. The result is, that though the clergy have suffered quite severely enough, they have not suffered nearly so much as the farmers. The one has had to submit to a painful loss of professional income, and has had to fall back upon his private resources; the other has too often found himself with his credit balance approaching the vanishing point, the trade profit has been nil, and there have been no dividends from investments outside the going concern to keep up the old style or meet the old expenditure. When neighbours have been in the habit of meeting on equal terms, and one goes on pretty much as before, while the other has become a trifle shabby, and has to consider every shilling that he spends, it is almost inevitable that the poorer of the two should feel less cordial than before. He revenges himself upon the laws of the universe by proclaiming that there is wrong and injustice somewhere. Why is he on the brink of ruin while the parson has only knocked off his riding horse, or ceased to take his annual trip to the Continent, or lessened his establishment by a servant, or it may be two? He forgets that his neighbour is living upon the interest of realized property, and that he himself has to live upon what he can make, and upon that alone.

But what irritates the farmer most is that, at the worst, the parson is getting something out of the land while he is getting little or nothing; and though he knows as well as any one else that the tithe stands for a first mortgage upon the land, or for an annuity charged upon the land, which takes precedence of every other payment; and though he knows also that, in too many instances, he has himself to pay interest on the capital with which he has been pursuing his business, and that this interest has to be provided for whether that business is carried on at a profit or a loss, yet he persists in trying to convince himself that he was “let in” when he made himself liable for the tithes; he tells you he has “to pay the parson,” and he does not like it. The parson is always en évidence, the landlord is out of the way—almost an abstraction, as the Government is; the agent must be submitted to, so must the tax gatherer. But the parson, could he not be got rid of? Granted that it would all come to the same in the end, and that if you could eliminate the parson the tithe would be laid on to the rent sooner or later, yet it might be very much later, and the end might be a long way off, and in the meantime he, the farmer, would put the tithe into his own pocket and into that of no one else. Hence there smoulder in the minds of many the smoky embers of discontent, and there is a coldness between the former friends. We are conscious of it, but we see no cure at present. When the tithe comes to be paid by the landlord, there may be a return to the old friendliness; but the gratia male sarta always leaves traces of the rift. I forbear from dwelling any longer upon this branch of the subject. When men are sore and in danger of becoming soured, then is the time for exercising a wise and tender reserve.

So far I have dealt with those trials which the country parson is exposed to from without; that is, such as arise from his intercourse with the wicked world—the wicked world that puts its cruel claw into his pocket, or growls at him, or glares at him, or frightens him, or laughs at him, or tries to gobble him up. But his trials do not end there. He has relations with another world—that professional world to which he belongs in another sense than that by which he is regarded as a citizen. As a clergyman he is a member of a class, a profession, a clique if you will, which has a coherence and a homogeneity such as no other profession can lay claim to, not even the profession of the law. The lawyer may be half a dozen things at the same time—a trader, a politician, a practical agriculturist, a land agent, a coroner, a steeple-chase rider, a general Jack-pudding. Everything brings grist to his mill, and the more irons he has in the fire the larger will be the number and the more varied the character of his clients. But the parson must be a clergyman, and a clergyman only; he is, so to speak, confined within the four walls of his clerical associations, and if he steps beyond them he is always regarded with a certain measure of suspicion. Even literature, unless there be a distinctly theological flavour about it, he embarks in at his peril; a clergyman who writes books is looked askance at, as a person whose “heart isn’t in his work.” Of course we get “narrow-minded.” We all go about with an iron mask weighing upon us—hiding our handsome features, interfering with our respiration, stunting our growth.

That is not all, though that is bad enough; we are all ticketed and labelled in a way that no other class is. Of late years it appears that the rising generation of clerics has begun to insist more and more upon the necessity of this professional exclusiveness, and desires to claim for itself the privileges of a caste. It shaves off its nascent whiskers and glories in a stubby cheek; it dresses in a hideous garment, half petticoat, half frock, for the most part abominably ill made; above all, it rumples about its bullet head a slovenly abomination called a wide-awake, as if that would preserve it from all suspicion of being sleepy and stupid, and it adopts a tone and a vocabulary which shall be distinctive and as far as possible from the speech of ordinary Englishmen. “We must close up our ranks,” said one of them to me, “close up our ranks and present a united front, and show the world that we are prepared to hang together, act together, march together. We have been atoms too long; we want coherence, my dear sir—coherence. We are moving towards the general adoption of the Catholic cassock!” “Do you mean to say,” I answered, “that you will persist in sporting that emasculated felt turbanette till you arrive at the general adoption of the cassock? Then, in the name of all the lines of beauty, on with the cassock, but away with the wide-awake!” I’m afraid my young friend was hurt; suspected me of some covert profanity, and deplored my flagrant want of esprit de corps.

And yet I have been almost a worshipper of Burke from my boyhood, and was early so impregnated with the fundamental positions of the Thoughts on the Causes of our present Discontents that, if I only could choose my party, I should follow my leader to prison or to death, and do his bidding, ἀνδρείως καὶ μύσαντα, never looking behind me. Unhappily in matters political the curse of a flabby amorphous eclecticism is upon too many of us; watching the conflict of principles or policies in a dazed and bewildered frame of mind, we persuade ourselves that we are philosophically impartial when we are only indolently indifferent. “Which train are you going by, sir—up or down?” “I’ll wait and see!” And both engines rush out and leave the unhappy vacillator to his reveries, till by-and-by the platform is cleared and the station is shut up for the night, and the gas lamps are turned down; and there is no moon and no stars and no shelter, and the wind is rising.

But ever since I have, so to speak, taken the shilling and entered the Church’s service and put myself under orders, I have loyally stood up for my cloth, and I am quite willing to bear the reproaches of that service where there are any to bear. We clergy get a good deal of stupid and very vulgar ridicule hurled at us, and we cannot very well retaliate. It is a case of Athanasius contra mundum. The “world” is very big and rather unassailable, and we of the minority are apt to assume that we can afford to hold our peace, that we gain by turning the right cheek to him who smites us on the left, and that we should lose by giving a foul-mouthed liar and coward a drubbing and tossing him into the horse-pond. We stand upon the defensive. We have hardly any other choice. But it is rather trying to have to answer for all the sins, negligences, and ignorances, the follies and the bad taste of all who wear the wide-awake.

As far as the instances of downright wickedness and immorality go, I think nobody will pretend that any class in the community can show such a clean bill of health as the clergy. As I look round me upon my clerical brethren of all ages and all opinions, I can honestly say I do not know one of them whose daily life is not free from reproach or suspicion. During all my life I have never myself known more than one beneficed clergyman who was a real black sheep. That there are such men of course I cannot doubt, but their aggregate number constitutes, I am sure, a very small percentage of the class which they disgrace by being included in it. Surely it is very trying and very irritating to have such instances brought up against you, not as rare exceptions, but as examples of the general rule.

Our Nonconformist neighbours know all about such cases, and cannot understand why they should exist. They know that a Wesleyan or a Congregational minister who should underlie any grave suspicion would infallibly disappear from the neighbourhood in a week. Why should the rector of Z——, whose intemperance has been clearly proved, be allowed to return to his parish after his term of suspension, and begin again to minister among the same people whose sense of decency he has outraged till it was past all bearing? You tell your Nonconformist friend that it cannot be helped because the reverend sot has got a freehold in his benefice. “Oh, it can’t be helped, can’t it?” he answers; “that’s it, is it? The law ain’t to blame, and the bishop ain’t to blame, and the churchwardens ain’t to blame, and, according to that, the parson ain’t to blame neither, except that the old fool’s been and got found out.” These people know that such scandals are impossible at the chapels; they are not impossible at the churches; they know that the deacons, and the elders, and the conference, or whatever the power may be that keeps up the discipline, comes down with swift severity in the one case, and the rural dean and archdeacons and the bishops are all but powerless in the other. In many cases the influence of a bad example, or the memory of a shameful reputation, is avoided by giving an incumbent indefinite leave of absence; but this is, after all, only a confession of weakness, and the fact that the parson still takes the income of the benefice, though his work is done by another, that itself is a scandal. Ecclesiastical reformers, lay or clerical, who stop short of dealing with the subject of the parson’s freehold, are merely hacking and lopping the branches in the vain hope of saving the tree. If the thing is rotten, let it die placidly, or let it be cut down bravely. Where you have not the pluck to do the one thing, why fidget about the other?

Happily, however, we are not much troubled with “criminous clerks,” we country parsons. The regular out-and-out bad ones usually retire into holes and corners, and they are but few and far between. We hear of them much more from our Meetingers than from any one else. The Meetinger keeps himself posted up with the last clerical escapade, and fires it off at us when he gets a chance, and the old argument has to be gone over again, and the parson goes home feeling that he was born to be badgered, and that he must expect it even to the end of the world.

It may seem strange to the inexperienced, but it is none the less true, that we suffer a great deal more from the best of our brethren than we do from the worst. They are the over-zealous, who are determined to change the face of the world and revolutionize society and reform everything, and improve everybody, and who cannot leave things alone to develop and grow, who make their fellow-creatures’ lives a burden to them. When we are young we have such unbounded faith in ourselves, and such unbounded ignorance and inexperience. The world is all before us, and all to conquer and remodel; our seniors are sad fogeys, so slow, so stiff, so cautious. There is so much dust everywhere and upon everything. Our brooms are so new, so swishy, and our arms so strong. We have our wits about us, and our senses all keen and sharp. We find it hard to believe that we have not been called into being to do a great deal of sweeping and getting rid of cobwebs. I love to see the young fellows all bubbling over with energy, and all aflame with fiery zeal; I would not have it otherwise. God bless them! say I, but they do rout us about very uncomfortably, and they are very foolish.

It was only the other day that I was asked to go and visit a church to which a very hurricane of a man had been recently appointed, and which he had already set himself to restore. He knew no more about church architecture than I do about Sanskrit, and less about history than I do about chemistry. He had a small army of bricklayers picking and slopping about the sacred edifice, tearing down this and digging up that and smalming over the other. And this reverend worthy had not even consulted the parish clerk! “Of course you have had a faculty for all this?” I suggested.

“Not I! Faculty indeed! I have to save all the expense I can. I have made up my mind to have nothing whatever to do with any officials or professionals of any sort or kind; I’m my own architect!”

Now, if a man chooses to be his own tailor, nobody will be much the worse and nobody will much care; but when a man sets himself to “restore” a church by the light of nature, it is a much more serious matter, and it is almost beyond belief what a brisk and bouncing young fellow, with the best intentions, and an immeasurable fund of ignorance to fall back upon, can do without any one interfering with him. You tell him he’ll get into a scrape—that the bishop will be down upon him—that there are such things as law courts. He smiles the benevolent smile of superior wisdom, and dashes on with heroic valour. If he calls himself a Ritualist, he gets rid of the Jacobean pulpit, or the royal arms, or the ten commandments, and sets up a construction which he calls a reredos, all tinsel and putty and papier mâché; hurls away the old pews before you know where you are, nails the brasses to the walls, sets up a lectern, and intones the service, keeping well within the chancel, from which he firmly banishes all worshippers who are not males. As for that gallery at the west end where the singers used to sit for a couple of centuries, and never failed to take their part with conscious pride in their own performances, that is abomination in his eyes—that must go of course, “to throw out the belfry arch, you see, and to bring the ringers into closer connection with the worship of the sanctuary.” “I love to see the bell ropes,” said one of these dear well-meaning young clergymen to me. “They are a constant lesson and reminder to us, my friend. Did you ever read Durandus on Symbolism? That is a very precious observation of his, that a bell rope symbolises humility—it always hangs down.”

But if an energetic young reformer calls himself an Evangelical, he is, if possible, a more dangerous innovator than the other. Then the axes and hammers come in with a vengeance. None of your pagan inscriptions for him, teaching false doctrine and popery. None of your Orate pro anima, none of your crosses and remains of frescoes on his walls; St. Christopher with the Child upon his shoulder wading through the stream, St. Sebastian stuck all over with arrows, or St. Peter with those very objectionable keys. As for the rood screen, away with it! Are we not all kings and priests? If you must have a division between the chancel and the nave, set up the pulpit there, tall, prominent, significant; and if the preacher can’t be heard, then learn the lesson which our grandfathers taught us, and let there be a sounding-board.

The serious part of all this passionate meddling with the status quo ante is that any young incumbent can come in and play the wildest havoc with our old churches without any one interfering with him. The beneficed cleric is master of the situation, and is frightfully more so now that Church rates have been abolished than he was before. It is no one’s interest to open his mouth; is he not inducted into possession of the sacred building, and is he not therefore tenant for life of the freehold? As long as he makes himself liable for all the expense, it is surely better to let him have his way. “I ain’t a going to interfere,” says one after another; and in six weeks a church which had upon its walls and floors, upon its tower and its roof, upon its windows and its doors, upon its every stone and timber, the marks and evidences which constituted a continuous chronicle, picturing—not telling—a tale of the faith and hope, and folly and errors, and devotion and sorrow, and striving after a higher ideal and painful groping for more light in the gloom—a tale that goes back a thousand years, a tale of the rude forefathers of the village world which still regards the house of God as somehow its own—in six weeks, I say, all this is as effectually obliterated as if a ton of dynamite had been exploded in one of the vaults, and the genius of smugness had claimed the comminuted fragments as her own.

Then there is the mania for decorations too. I like to see them; I am sure the new fashion has been the occasion for awakening a great deal of interest in, and something approaching proud affection for, our old churches; but here again people, with every desire to be reverential and to do the right thing, succeed amazingly in doing just the wrong one. Have I not seen a most beautiful fourteenth-century rood screen literally riddled with tin tacks and covered with various coloured paper roses, festooned in fluffy frills of some cheap material on which languid dandelions and succulent bluebells lolled damply at the Eastertide? Next time I saw that exquisite work of art, lo! there was a St. Lawrence with his eye put out and two holes in his forehead, and between the lips of a St. Barbara, who for her loveliness might have been painted by Carlo Crivelli, there protruded a bent nail which looked for all the world like an old tobacco pipe. Who can “restore” that precious rood screen or repair the damage wrought in an hour by the decorators turned loose into that meek little church a year ago?

I think the average laymen who live in the towns can have very little notion of what the parson suffers when he finds himself turned into a church in which he has to officiate for the rest of his life, and which his predecessor has mauled and mangled and murdered, leaving no more life in it than there is among the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s.

“But do not these rash and furious young zealots of whom you have spoken burn their fingers sometimes, and does not the bishop sometimes come down upon them?” Yes! very often, after the mischief has been done. I knew one monster who upon his glebe had some seven of the noblest oak trees in the county of Norfolk. Lucus ligna was his view of the case, and he sold them all. Down they came every tree of them. Some said he wanted to see how the landscape would look without them, some that he wanted to go to Norway, and there are plenty of trees there. The patron of the living called that man to account, and I am told made him disgorge the proceeds of his ill-gotten gains; and the bishop is generally believed to have sent him a mandate to put back those trees in their former position. But that clerical monster, though he plays the fiddle to put Amphion to shame, has never learnt Amphion’s tune or cared to charm back the giant vegetables that were once the pride and glory of the countryside. In the days when the wicked received their reward in this world a thousand evil-doers have been hanged for crimes incomparably less injurious to the community at large than that which lies to the charge of this reverend sinner; but he enjoys the income of his benefice to this day, and grows willows instead of oaks, not to turn to the use which Timon recommended to one of his visitors, but to turn into cash; for they grow fast, and the manufacturers of cricket bats are hard put to it to supply the demand for their wares.

What we want is to make it at least a misdemeanour punishable by imprisonment for the parson to touch the fabric of the church under any circumstances whatever, except with the consent and under the license of some external authority. But that implies that the ownership of the church should no longer be vested in a corporation sole. It brings us again face to face with the whole question of the parson’s freehold, and how long is that mischievous legal fiction—which is, however, a very stubborn legal fact—to be endured?

If I were to go on in this vein, and dwell upon all the parson has to suffer from his predecessors—the man who built the house two miles from the parish church; the man who added to it to find room for a score of pupils; the man who loved air, or the man who loved water, or the man who loved society, or the man who bred horses, or the man who turned the rectory into a very lucrative lunatic asylum—I should tire out my reader’s patience, and the more so that there are other trials about which it is advisable that I should utter my querulous wail.

I know one clergyman who, though ordained some forty years ago, has never written or preached a sermon in his life; but I only know one. His is perhaps a unique case. As a rule, we all begin by being curates—that is, we begin by learning our business as subordinates. It would be truer to say we used to begin that way; but subordination is dying out all over the world, and in the ministry of the Church of England subordination is a virtue which is in articulo mortis. Nowadays a young fellow at twenty-three, who has become a reverend gentleman for just a week, poses at once as the guide, philosopher, and friend of the whole human race. He poses as a great teacher. It is not only that he delivers the oracles with authoritative sententiousness from the tripod, but he has no doubts and no hesitation about anything in earth or heaven. He fortifies himself with a small collection of brand-new words which you, poor ignorant creature, don’t know the meaning of. You feel rather “out of it” when he gravely calls your gloves Mannaries (he does not wear them), and your dressing-gown a Poderis; expresses his mournful regret that there is no Scuophylacium in the Presbytery, nor any Bankers on the walls; gently admonishes you for standing bareheaded by the grave at your time of life, when prudence would suggest, and ecclesiastical precedent would recommend, the use of the Anabata; tells you he always goes about with a Totum under his arm, and a Virge in his right hand. When he vanishes you slyly peep into your Du Cange, but the Bankers are quite too much for you.

I am not much more ignorant than other men of my age, but I never did pretend to omniscience, and when I don’t know a thing I am not ashamed of asking questions. But our modern curates never ask questions. “Inquire within upon everything,” seems to be stamped upon every line of their placid faces. When I was a young curate I was very shy and timid, and held my dear rector in some awe. It might have been hoped that as the years went by I should have grown out of this weakness—but no! I am horribly afraid of the curates now. I dare hardly open my mouth before my superiors, and that they are my superiors I should not for a moment presume to question. I know my place, and I tremble lest I should betray my silliness by speaking unadvisedly with my lips. All this is very trying to a man who will never see sixty again. The hoary head is no crown at all to the eyes of the young and learned. They don’t yet cry out at me, “Go up, thou baldhead,” but I can’t help suspecting that they’re only waiting to do it sooner or later. For myself I have, unfortunately, never been able to afford to engage the services of a clergyman who should assist me in my ministrations. So much the worse for me, and so much the worse for my parish. When I am no longer able to do my own pastoral work, I shall feel the pinch of poverty; but I am resolved to be very meek to my curate when he shall vouchsafe to take me under his protection. I will do as I am told.

It is a very serious fact, however, which we cannot but think of with anxiety, that since the Curate Market rose, as it did some fifteen or twenty years ago, there has been a large incursion of young men into the ministry of the Church of England who are not gentlemen by birth, education, sentiment, or manners, and who bring into the profession (regarded as a mere profession) no capital of any sort—no capital I mean of money, brains, culture, enthusiasm, or force of character. This is bad enough, but there is a worse behind it. These young curates almost invariably marry, and the last state of that man is worse than the first. My friends assure me, and my observation confirms it, that the domestic career of these young people is sometimes very pathetic. Sanguine, affectionate, simple-minded and childlike, they learn the hard lessons of life all too late, and their experience comes to them, as Coleridge said, “like the stern lights of a ship, throwing a glare only upon the path behind.” When their children come upon them with the usual rapidity, it is but rarely that we country parsons keep these married curates among us. They emigrate into the towns for the sake of educating their progeny, or because they soon find out that there is no hope of preferment for them among the villages. When there is no family, or when the bride has brought her spouse some small accession of income, the couple stay where they are for years till somebody gives them a small living, and there they do as others do. But in the first exuberance of youth, and when the youthful pair are highly delighted with the position that has been acquired, he is profoundly impressed with the sense of his importance, and she exalted at the notion of having married a “clergyman and a gentleman;” he is apt to be stuck up, and she is very apt to be huffy. It’s bad enough to be associated officially with an underbred man, but it’s a great deal worse to find yourself brought into social relations, which cannot be avoided, with an underbred woman. The curate’s wife is sometimes a very dreadful personage, but then most dreadful when she is a “young person” of your own parish who has angled for the clerical stickleback and landed him.

The Rev. Percy De la Pole was a courtly gentleman, sensitive, fastidious, and just a trifle, a little trifle, distant in his demeanour. His curate, the Rev. Giles Goggs, was a worthy young fellow enough, painstaking and assiduous, anxious to do his duty, and not at all airified. We all liked him till Rebecca Busk overcame him. Mr. De la Pole was cautious and reserved by temperament; but who has never committed a mistake? In an evil hour—how could he have been so imprudent?—he gently warned the curate against the wiles of Miss Busk and her family, telling him that she was far from being a desirable match, and going to the length of saying plainly that she was making very indelicate advances. “All that may be quite true,” replied Mr. Goggs, “but I am sure you will soon change your opinion. I come in now to let you know that I am engaged to be married to Miss Busk.” From that day our reverend neighbour had so bad a time of it that it is commonly believed his valuable life was shortened by his sufferings. I am afraid some people behaved very cruelly, for they could not help laughing. Mrs. Goggs took her revenge in the most vicious way. On all public occasions she clasped the rector’s arm and looked up in his face with the tenderest interest. She tripped across lawns at garden parties to pluck him by the sleeve, screamed out with shrill delight when he appeared, called him her dear old father confessor, giggled and smirked and patted him, and fairly drove him out of the place at last by finding that he had twice preached borrowed sermons, and keeping the discovery back till the opportune moment arrived, when, at a large wedding party, she shook her greasy little ringlets at him with a wicked laugh, exclaiming, “Ah! you dear old sly-boots, when you can speak like that why do you preach the Penny Pulpit to us?” The wretched victim could not hold up his head after that, and when a kind neighbour strongly advised him to dismiss the curate whose wife was unbearable, the broken-down old gentleman feebly objected. “My dear friend, I may have an opportunity of getting preferment for Mr. Goggs some day, but in the meantime I have no power to send away my curate because his wife—well, because his wife is not nice.”

It often happens that the parson has to go away from his parish for some months, and he finds considerable difficulty in getting any one to take charge of it during his absence. At the eleventh hour he is compelled to take the last chance applicant. And behold, he and his parishioners are given over to a locum tenens. This is nothing more than saying that he has put himself into the power of a man with a loose end.

When the worthy rector of Corton-in-the-Brake had reached his fiftieth year, he obtained an accession of fortune and gave out that he intended to marry. He furnished his house anew at a great expense, and found no difficulty in getting a wife. Then he vowed that he would go to the south of France for the winter, and get a curate. He was a prim and punctilious personage, and he did not mean to deal shabbily with his substitute. But two things he insisted on: first, that this locum tenens should be married, and secondly that he should be childless. He got exactly the right man at last, a scholarly, well-dressed, and evidently accomplished gentleman, who spoke of Mrs. Connor with respectful confidence and affection, who had been married ten years, and had no family, who made no difficulties except that the stables were, he feared, inconveniently too small, but he would make shift. With a mind relieved and a blissful honeymoon before him, the Rev. John Morris set out for Nice—in the days when the railway system was not as complete as now—and the Rev. Mr. Connor arrived at the rectory the next Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Connor came too, with fourteen brindled bulldogs—young and old. That was her speciality, and she gave her whole mind to keeping the breed pure and making large sums by every litter. During the following week appeared seven pupils, the rejected of several public schools, who were committed to the care of Mr. Connor to be kept out of their parents’ sight and to “prepare for the University.” Mrs. Connor kept no female servants. Not a woman or a girl dared pass the rectory gate. The Connors had a man cook and men housemaids. The bulldogs would prowl about the neighbourhood in threes and fours with a slow shuffling trot, sniffing, growling, turning their hideous blood-shot eyes at you, undecided whether or not to tear you limb from limb; and then passing on with menacing contempt. Sometimes there were rumours of horrible fights; no one dared to separate the brutes except Mrs. Connor. Once the two mightiest of the bulldogs got “locked,” as the head man expressed it. “What did you do?” “Do? Why I shrook out to Billy to hang on, and I called the Missus, and she gave ’em the hot un, and they give in!” The hot un turned out to be a thin bar of steel with a wooden handle which was always kept ready for use in the kitchen fire, and which Mrs. Connor had her own method of applying red hot so as to paralyze the canine culprit without blemishing him. But imagine the condition of that newly furnished parsonage when the poor rector came back to his home.

It is easy for everybody else to look only at the ludicrous side, but the clerical sufferer has to bear the real bitterness of such an experience, and to him the mere damage to his property is the least part of the business. Everybody says sulkily, “Why were we left to such a man as that?” For the country parson has to answer for all the sins and short-comings of those whom he leaves to represent himself; all their indiscretions, their untidiness, their careless reading, their bad preaching, their irreverence or their foolery, their timidity or their violence, their ignorance or their escapades. One man is horribly afraid of catching the measles; another “has never been accustomed to cows” and will not go where they are; a third is a woman-hater, and week by week bawls out strong language against the other sex, beginning with Eden and ending with Babylon. The absentee returns to find everything has been turned topsy-turvy. The locum tenens has set every one by the ears, altered the times of service, broken your pony’s knees, had your dog poisoned for howling at the moon, or kept a monkey in your drawing-room. People outside laugh, but when you are the sufferer, and the conviction is forced upon you that harm has been done which you cannot hope to see repaired, you are not so likely to laugh as to do the other thing.

Shall I go on to dwell upon the aggrieved parishioner, the amenities of the School Board, the anxieties of the school treat, the scenes at the meetings of the Poor-law guardians, the faithful laity who come to expostulate, to ask your views and to set you right? Shall I? Shall I dwell upon the occasional sermons which some delegate from some society comes and fulminates against you and your people? Nay! Silence on some parts of our experience is golden.

* * * * *

When we have said all that need be said about the minor vexations and worries which are incident to the country parson’s life, and which, like all men who live in isolation, he is apt to exaggerate, there is something still behind it all which only a few feel to be an evil at all, and which those who do feel, for many good reasons, are shy of speaking about; partly because they know it to be incurable, partly because if they do touch upon it they are likely to be tabulated among the dissatisfied, or are credited with unworthy motives which they know in their hearts that they are not swayed by.

That which really makes the country parson’s position a cheerless and trying one is its absolute finality. Dante’s famous line ought to be carved upon the lintel of every country parsonage in England. When the new rector on his induction takes the key of the church, locks himself in, and tolls the bell, it is his own passing bell that he is ringing. He is shutting himself out from any hope of a further career upon earth. He is a man transported for life, to whom there will come no reprieve. Whether he be the sprightly and sanguine young bachelor of twenty-four who takes the family living; or the podgy plebeian whose uncle the butcher has bought the advowson for a song; or the college tutor, fastidious, highly cultured, even profoundly learned, who has accepted university preferment; or the objectionable and quarrelsome man, whom it was necessary to provide for by “sending into the country”;—be he who he may, gifted or very much the reverse, careless or earnest, slothful or zealous, genial, eloquent, wise, and notoriously successful in his ministrations, or the veriest stick and humdrum that ever snivelled through a homily—from the day that he accepts a country benefice he is a shelved man, and is put upon the retired list as surely as the commander in the navy who disappears on half-pay. I do not mean only that the country parson is never promoted to the higher dignities in the Church, or that cathedral preferment is very rarely bestowed upon him; but I do mean that he is never moved from the benefice in which he has once been planted. You may ply me with instances to the contrary here and there, but they are instances only numerous enough to illustrate the universality of the law which prevails—Once a country parson always a country parson; where he finds himself there he has to stay.

As long as the patronage of ecclesiastical preferment in the Church of England remains in the hands it has remained in for a thousand years and more, and as long as the tenure of the benefice continues to be as it is and as it has been since feudal times, I can see no remedy and no prospect that things should go on otherwise than they do now. Give a man some future in whatever position you put him, and he will be content to give you all his best energies, his time, his strength, his fortune, in return for the chance of recognition that he may sooner or later reasonably look forward to; but there is no surer way of making the ablest man a fainéant at the best, a soured and angry revolutionist at the second best, and something even more odious and degraded at the worst, than to shut him up in a cage like Sterne’s starling, and bid him sing gaily and hop briskly from perch to perch till the end of his days, with a due supply of sopped bread crumbs and hemp seed found for him from hour to hour, and a sight of the outer world granted him—only through the bars.

There is a something which appeals to our pity in every carrière manqué. The statesman who made one false step, the soldier who at the crisis of his life was out-generalled, the lawyer who began so well but who proved not quite strong enough for the strain he had to bear—we meet them now and then where we should least have expected to find them, the obliterated heroes of the hour, and we say with a kindly sigh, “This man might have had another chance.” But each of these has had his chance; they have worked up to a position and have forfeited it when it has been proved they were in the wrong place; they have gone into the battle of life, and the fortune of war has gone against them; tried by the judgment of that world which is so “cold to all that might have been,” they have been found wanting; they have had to step aside, and make way for abler men than themselves. But up and down the land in remote country parsonages—counting by the hundreds—there are to be found those who have never had, and never will have, any chance at all of showing what stuff is in them—sometimes men of real genius shrivelled, men of noble intellect, its expansion arrested, men fitted to lead and rule, men of force of character and power of mind, who from the day that they entered upon the charge of a rural parish have had never a chance of deliverance from

The dull mechanic pacing to and fro,
The set grey life and apathetic end.

You might as well expect from such as these that they should be able to break away from their surroundings, or fail to be dwarfed and cramped by them, as expect that Robinson Crusoe should develop into a sagacious politician.

“Pathos,” did I say? How often have I heard the casual visitor to our wilds exclaim with half-incredulous wonder, “What, that Parkins? Why, he used to walk the streets of Camford like a god! He carried all before him. The younger dons used to say the world was at his feet—a ball that he might kick over what goal he might please to choose. And was that other really the great Dawkins, whose lectures we used to hear of with such envy, we of St. Chad’s College, who had to content ourselves with little Smug’s platitudes? Dawkins! How St. Mary’s used to be crowded when he preached! Old Dr. Stokes used to say Dawkins had too much fire and enthusiasm for Oxbridge. He called him Savonarola, and he meant it for a sneer. And that’s Dawkins! How are the mighty fallen!”

I lay innocent traps for my casuals now and then, when I can persuade some of the effaced ones to come and dine with us, but it is often just a little too sad. They are like the ghosts of the heroic dead. Men of sixty, old before their time; the broad massive brow, with the bar of Michael Angelo, is there, but—the eyes that used to flash and kindle have grown dim and sleepy, those lips that curled with such fierce scorn, or quivered with such glad playfulness or subtle drollery—it seems as if it were yesterday—have become stiff and starched. Poverty has come and hope has gone. Dawkins knew so little about the matter that he actually believed he only required to get a pied à terre such as a college living would afford him, and a (nominal) income of £700 a year, and there would be a fresh world to conquer as easy to subdue as the old Academic world which was under his feet. Poor Dawkins! Poor Parkins! Poor any one who finds himself high and dry some fine morning on his island home, while between him and the comrades who helped him to his fate the distance widens; for him there is no escape, no sailing back. There are the fruits of the earth, and the shade of the trees, and the wreckage of other barks that have stranded there; but there is no to-morrow with a different promise from to-day’s, nor even another islet to look to when this one has been made the most of and explored, only the resource of acquiescence as he muses on the things that were,

Gazing far out foamward.

Such men as these I have in my mind were never meant to be straitened and poor. They never calculated upon six or eight children who have to be educated; the real dreariness of the prospect, its crushing unchangeableness only gradually reveals itself to them; they shut their eyes not so much because they will not as because they cannot believe that such as they have no future. Their first experience of life led up to the full conviction that character and brain-power must sooner or later bring a man to the first rank—what did it matter where a man cast anchor for a time? So they burnt their ships bravely, “hope like a fiery column before them, the dark side not yet turned.” But suppose there was no scope for the brains and consequently no demand for them? We in the wilderness have abundance of butter and eggs, but keep these commodities long enough, and they infallibly grow a trifle stale.

People say with some indignation, “What a pity, what a shame, that Parkins and Dawkins should be buried as they are!” No, that is not the shame nor the pity; the shame is that, being buried, they should have no hope of being dug up again. Yonder splendid larva may potentially be a much more splendid imago; let it bury itself by all means, but do not keep it for ever below ground. Do not say to it, “Once there, you must stop there, there and there only. For such as you there shall be no change, your resting place shall inevitably be your grave.”

But if it be a melancholy spectacle to see the wreck of a man of great intellect and noble nature, whom banishment in his prime and poverty in his old age have blighted; scarcely less saddening is the sight of the active and energetic young man of merely ordinary abilities to whom a country living has come in his youth and vigour, and once for all has stunted his growth and extinguished his ambition. There is no man more out of place, and who takes longer to fit into his place, than the worthy young clergyman who has been ordained to a town curacy, kept for four or five years at all the routine work of a large town parish, worked and admirably organized as—thank God!—most large town parishes are, and who, at eight or nine and twenty, is dropped down suddenly into a small village, and told that there he is to live and die. He does not know a horse from a cow. He has had his regular work mapped out for him by his superior officer as clearly as if he were a policeman. He has been part of a very complex machinery, religious, educational, eleemosynary. Every hour has been fully occupied, so occupied that he has lost all the habits of reading and study which he ever possessed. He has to preach at least one hundred sermons in the course of the year, and there is not a single one in his very small repertory that is in the least suitable for the new congregation; and for the first time in his life he finds himself called upon to stand alone with no one to consult, no one to lean on, no one to help him, and in so much a worse condition than the aforesaid Robinson Crusoe that the indigenous sons of the soil come and stare at him with an eye to their chances of getting a meal out of him, or making a meal off him, in the meantime doing, as the wicked always have done since the Psalmist’s days, making mouths at him and ceasing not!

Talk of college dons being thrown away upon a handful of bumpkins! You forget that the cultured Academic has almost always some resources within himself, some tastes, some pursuits; and if he spends too many hours in his library, at any rate his time does not hang so very heavily upon his hands. When he goes among his people he will always have something to tell them which they did not know before, and something to inquire of them which they will be glad to tell him about. But your young city curate pitchforked into a rural benefice when all his sympathies and habits and training are of the streets streety, is the most forlorn, melancholy, and dazed of all human creatures. An omnibus driver compelled to keep a lighthouse could scarcely be more deserving of our commiseration. Ask him in his moments of candour and depression, when he realizes that he has reached the limit of his earthly hopes, when he has been in his parsonage long enough to know that he will never leave it for any other cure, when he realizes that he must (by the nature of the case, and by the unalterable law which prevails for such as he) wax poorer and poorer year by year, and that men may come and men may go, but he will stay where he is till he drops—ask him what he thinks of the bliss of a country living, its independence, its calm, its sweetness, its security, above all, ask him whether he does not think the great charm of his position is that he can never be turned out of it, and I think you will find some of these young fellows impatiently giving you just the answer you did not expect. I am sure you will find some among them who will reply: “It is a useful life for a time. It is a happy life for a time. For a time there is a joy in the country parson’s life which no other life can offer; but we have come to see that this boasted fixity of tenure is the weak point, not the strong one; it is movement we want among us, not stagnation; the Parson’s Freehold is a fraud.”

Our vehement young friends in the first warmth of their conversion to new ideas are apt to express themselves with more force than elegance, and to push their elders somewhat rudely from behind. But they mean what they say, and I am glad they are coming to think as they do. As for us, the veterans who have lived through sixty summers and more, there is no cloud of promise for us in the horizon. We are not the men who have anything to gain by any change; we know the corner of the churchyards where our bones will lie. We do not delude ourselves; some of us never looked for any career when we retired into the wilderness. We asked for a refuge only, and that we have found.

Oh, Hope of all the ends of the earth, is it a small thing that for the remainder of our days we are permitted to witness for Thee among the poor and sad and lowly ones?

But you, the strong and young and fervid, take heed how you leave the life of the camp, its stir and throb and discipline, too soon. Take heed how before the time you join the reserve, only to discover too late that you are out of harmony with your surroundings, that you are fretting against the narrowness of the inclosure within which you are confined, that there is for you no outlook—none—only a bare subsistence and a safe berth, as there is for other hulks laid up to rot at ease. If that discovery comes upon you soon enough, break away! Make the change that will not come, and leave others to chuckle over their fixity of tenure, and their security, and their trumpery boast that “no one can turn them out.” But let us have your testimony before we part—you and we. Bear witness Yes or No! Has the consciousness of occupying a position from which you could never be removed raised you in your own estimation, or helped you for one single moment to do your duty? Has it never kept you down? Frauds are for the weak, not for the strong—for the coward, not for the brave; they are for those who only live to rust at ease, as if to breathe were life; they are not for such as make the ventures of Faith, and help their brethren to overcome the world.

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III.
THE CHURCH AND THE VILLAGES.

Few men can have watched the movements of opinion during the last few years without being impressed by the change of attitude observable in the two contending parties engaged upon the assault and defence of the possessions of that mysterious entity which goes by the name of the Church of England.

This entity it must be premised, so far as it has a collective existence, exists in the person of certain officials who are supposed to be devoting their lives to certain duties, and are in the possession of funds which, after every deduction from the grossly exaggerated estimates of the rhetoricians, are certainly large, and yet are being added to every week by the lavish offerings of the English people. We must go back to a remote past if we desire to trace the origin of that reserve fund for the maintenance of our clergy on which they now live; a fund which has gone on growing, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, for considerably more than a thousand years.

When people talk of disendowing the Church of England, they mean that this accumulated fund shall be confiscated by the nation for whose benefit it exists, and that it shall no longer be used for the purpose to which it has been so long devoted.

But what is this Church that it is to be despoiled and beggared, to be disestablished and disendowed? We cannot call it a corporation, for it has no corporate existence as a chartered company or a college has. It has no representatives in the Lower House of Parliament, as the universities have. It has no common council with disciplinary powers, as the Incorporated Society of Law or the Inns of Court have. It has no voice speaking with authority, no homogeneity deserving the name. It cannot pass ordinances for the regulation of its minutest affairs, or impose rules of conduct upon any one, or levy the smallest contribution from man, woman, or child by its own decrees. You may call it an army if you please; but it is an army in which the commissioned officers have no control over the rank and file, no power of enforcing attendance at drill, no articles of war which any one heeds, and no generals whom any one fears. This mysterious entity, which is the sum-total of a multitude of more or less isolated units, we say is the owner of lands and buildings and rent-charge, and this property it is said is the property of the Church—the Church? Nos numerus sumus!

Without any very great misuse of language, it may be said that among us there is another mysterious entity; this, too, the sum-total of a number of isolated units. These units, too, were only the other day in possession of houses and lands, and buildings considered to be public buildings; the units were almost in the same position as the clergy are at this moment, freeholders and practically irremovable; they were expected to perform certain duties which, as a rule, they performed with zeal and fidelity. In many cases, when sickness or old age came upon them, they discharged their functions by deputy; they had practically little or no discipline of control over them; “visitors” who never visited, feoffees who never interfered, governors who never governed. Each of these functionaries was called a Schoolmaster, and the building in which he officiated was called a school. The sum-total of these many units had no name; but if the public buildings were rightly called schools, the aggregate of them might for convenience be called The School. A noun of multitude, standing in the same relation to its units as the current term “the Church” does to its units—the Churches.

To whom did the property from which the schools were kept in efficiency, and their masters furnished with a maintenance—sometimes with much more than a mere maintenance—to whom did this property belong? I can find but one answer. It was the property of the nation; a reserve fund which the nation had permitted certain individuals to set apart from time to time for the furtherance of the education of the people, the object aimed at being considered so excellent that the conditions imposed upon posterity by the founders were allowed to remain in force, these founders being supposed to have entered into a contract with the nation that, in consideration of the value of the surrender made, the reserve of property should be sanctioned, and the conditions imposed be held to be binding upon posterity. The land or the rent-charges which yesterday were private possessions ceased to be so to-day: they were private property, they became public property, and constituted the Educational Reserve.

I can no longer resist the conviction that, as in the one case so in the other, the nation may reconsider its treaty with School or Church; may determine that the reserve hitherto set apart for the education of a class, or a district, or the founder’s kin, should no longer be applied according to the compact sanctioned in previous ages, and may in the same way reconsider its compact with the alienation of property now known as Church property, and deal with that far larger reserve hitherto applied for the promotion of the moral and spiritual welfare of the people. The nation has the right to do this, as it undoubtedly has the power. Whether in this case summum jus would not be found to be summa injuria is quite another question.

But it is one thing to say this large reserve shall be administered otherwise than it is, and quite another thing to say that it shall cease to exist as a reserve at all. It is one thing to deal with our ecclesiastical endowments on the lines that school endowments have been dealt with, and quite another to deal with them as Henry the Eighth dealt with the property of the religious houses. To adopt the one course would be readjustment, to adopt the other would be confiscation. Nevertheless, if the majority of the new electorate should decidedly and unequivocally pronounce that such is its pleasure, assuredly the property now held in reserve in the shape of religious endowments will be confiscated. Religion will be the luxury of the rich and well-to-do; the proletariate and the agricultural labourer will have to supply themselves with an inferior article, or to do without it altogether.

If a revolution so tremendous, if a calamity so overwhelming, is to befall this nation, and is to take effect by the deliberate choice of its people, at least let a great nation address itself to the task with the semblance of dignity; at least let it be clearly explained and firmly adhered to that the clergy reserve is not to be given over to general pillage. Do not be guilty of the baseness of bidding for the votes of the proletariate by holding out hopes of a general scramble. Do not corrupt the poor dwellers in the villages by inviting them to embark in a filibustering raid upon their friends and neighbours.

* * * * *

It is a question which a philosopher might worthily employ himself in answering—how it has come to pass that during the last fifty years the struggle for supremacy between political parties has tended to become less and less a regular warfare and to assume more and more the character of a game. Nay! It is rapidly developing into a game rather more of chance than of skill, and one in which the most daring and reckless adventurer is just as likely to sweep off the stakes as the most gifted and sagacious player. It is one of the most unhappy results of this condition of affairs that there has grown up in our midst a class of touts and hangers-on who do the dirty work of either side and bring discredit upon both. They are the swell-mob of politics. Such creatures live by inventing grievances and fomenting discontent, their doctrine being that whatever is is wrong; their artillery is always charged with explosive promises. These men are going up and down the land loudly proclaiming that the parsons have robbed the poor of their own, and are holding out to their dupes the wildest hopes that when the spoliation comes the poor shall be the first to benefit by the great change.

We shall never be able to silence the voice of charlatans. The sausage-seller in Aristophanes is the type of a class of men who have found no scope for their talents in any honest calling, and who because they must live have been forced into the trade of lying vociferously. I do not write for these—to these I have no word to say. It is with the men whose hearts are throbbing with some patriotism, and who have not lost all loyalty to truth and honour, that I desire to have my dealings. It is with such that I would humbly and earnestly expostulate, whatever their philosophical or political opinions, and whatever may be their creed. Even if it were as easy to prove, as it is demonstrably the reverse, that there ever did exist in England at any time or in any place a right on the part of the poor to any portion of the tithes of a parish or to the glebe, who, it may be asked, are the poor? The receivers of parochial relief, whether in the work-house or outside it? Or every able-bodied peasant who claims to belong to the needy classes? Are you going to ask the agricultural labourer to cry for spoliation, and to bribe him to raise the cry by the promise of converting him into what our fathers called a “sturdy beggar”? And then are there no poor artisans? Are the millions of our towns to be left out in the cold while Hodge disports himself with his new possessions? Are Liverpool and East London to go on as they are, while Little Mudborough is to enjoy a feast of fat things?

But the demagogues who live to corrupt the people have promises to make to others than the labourers. They are telling the tenant-farmers, too, that they will be gainers by the great confiscation, and endeavouring to persuade them, too, that when it comes they will be relieved from the burden of the tithes. Would they be so? If the payment of tithe were abolished to-morrow, can any sane man believe that the tenant-farmer would be allowed to put the tithe into his pocket or to keep it there? Can any sane man believe that rents would not rise exactly in proportion to the amount of charges from which the tenant was relieved? Rent is nothing more than the money payment supposed to represent the just return which the owner claims from the occupier for the privilege of cultivating his land. The occupier makes his account and calculates how much he can gain by the compact. The landlord’s share is his rent. He is the sleeping partner. Relieve the expenses of the going concern from the payment of the tithe, or, which is the same thing, add it to the profits, and what power on earth will prevent the landlord, directly or indirectly, sooner or later, absorbing the proceeds of the newly-created bonus?

Moreover, if you begin to “do away with the tithes,” are you going to do away with them only in the case where the parson receives them and does something—at any rate something—in return for the income he derives from them? Are you going to let the tithes be levied as before where they are paid to laymen, to corporations, or colleges? Are those tithes which are necessarily spent in the parish by the resident parson to be “done away with,” but all such tithes as are necessarily carried out of the parish and paid to a London company, an alien, or a college at Oxford or Cambridge, to be levied as before? Is it a gravamen against the parson that he spends his tithe where it is paid him, and among the people who pay it, and that he is bound in return for it to do the payers some services which they may exact on demand? Are you going to confiscate the tithe where the receiver does something for it, and to let the man who does nothing for it collect it as before? Imagine the amazement and disgust of a farmer who should be told that his neighbour on the other side of the hedge is never to pay tithe again because in that parish there has been a parson to pillage; but that he, on this side of the hedge, is to pay it as before, because Mr. Tomkins, or Mrs. John Smith, or the Saddlers’ Company is the lay impropriator, and the rights of property are to be respected. It would not be long, I imagine, before our friend the farmer would go for the lay impropriator, and with a will too.

But, if the labourer and the tenant-farmer are not to be cajoled by promises that must needs be illusory, least of all are the landlords to be gained over by the inducement held out to them that they, of all men, are to benefit by the change. They more than any other class are responsible for the loud outcry that has been raised. The tithe-rent-charge is a first charge upon the produce of the land. They are the landlords who, as a class, have done their best to make people forget this fact. How often have we heard of a landlord or his agent declaring loudly, “I have nothing to do with the tithe—that is a matter between the tenant and the parson!” A more monstrous assertion it would be difficult to invent! Far more true would be the direct opposite, if the parson, or the impropriator, should say, “I, as receiver of tithe, have nothing to do with you, the tenant—the tithe is no concern of yours; my claim is upon the owner of the soil!” In point of fact, it is in the last resort upon the landlord, and the landlord alone, that the tithe-owner, lay or clerical, has his claim.

* * * * *

But, if we should only aggravate the incidence of the immense calamity which would ensue from the confiscation of the clergy reserve by handing over the spoils to the labourers, or the proletariate, or the farmers, or the landlords, and yet the electorate should resolve to carry out this great spoliation, and call upon the executive to sweep away the clerical incomes, and lay its hand upon the property from which these incomes are derived; what is to be done with this huge fund so confiscated, and how are we to prevent the landlords being in some form or other the only gainers by the change?

If confiscation comes, let it come, say I, as no half-measure. Let there be no bargaining, no tinkering, no compromise—in fact, no mercy! No—no mercy! Let this thing be done in root-and-branch fashion. Let the nation set its face like a flint; let the Church—it would be the Church then—begin its new life naked and bare. Both sides will have a bad time of it. It takes little to decide which will have the worst time of it, the starved Church or the starved people.

Set the two forces foot to foot,
And every man knows who’ll be winner,
Whose faith in God has e’er a root
That goes down deeper than his dinner.

Therefore, if indeed this nation decides that it can do without religious teachers, and that these shall live of those who want them, let us put up our parish churches to auction, and dispose of the glebes to the highest bidder, and flood the market with comfortable parsonage-houses, sold without reserve, and let the tithe be levied by the tax-gatherer, and let it be levied from the owner of the soil, as the land-tax is. Furthermore, let us have no assignment of any share of the plunder to any class or any special fund. Let us hand over the proceeds of the sale of churches and houses and lands to the Commissioners for the Extinguishing of the National Debt, and not to the ratepayers, not to the Education Commissioners, nor to the Commissioners in Lunacy for building madhouses, or any other cheerful and heroic object. Let us have a measure which shall be simple and thorough, with the fewest possible details to vex and embarrass us all. As the parsons die, sell their houses, their glebes and their churches, and let the State at once appropriate the tithe. Let us be brought face to face with the real meaning of a revolution, the tremendous magnitude of which few men can have the faintest conception of. In less than a year after the measure had become law, we should begin to know in what an experiment we had embarked. The sooner our eyes were opened the better for us all. The logic of facts is better than gabble.

Nevertheless, firmly convinced as I am that such a revolution would be an immeasurable calamity to the people of this country, and especially so to the agricultural districts, I am quite as firmly convinced that the present condition of affairs as regards the tenure and administration of the property now constituting the clergy reserves cannot possibly go on much longer; that the mere mockery and pretence of discipline among the clergy themselves must be replaced by something much more real and effective; that, in short, some large and radical measures of Church reform are being called for, such as the nation feels must and shall be carried out, though the great body of the people do not yet see, and cannot yet be expected to see, on what fundamental principles such reform should be advocated, or on what lines such reform should travel.

As a preliminary, as a sine quâ non of all really effective Church reform, it seems to me that, first and foremost, you must begin, not by disestablishing, but by establishing, the Church. As things are among us, it seems to me that the very word establishment is a confession on the part of those who use it that they have failed to discover the right word for that which they would fain obliterate.

We say the Church is a great landlord and wealthy owner of property. Ought not such an owner to have some control over its own and some voice in the disposition of that property. Every railroad company in the land, every joint-stock bank or co-operative association for the providing of milk and butter, every society for the protection of cats and dogs, has a constitution. It has its directors or governors, its recognized officers, its power to make or to alter at least its own bye-laws, its liberty to dispose of its own funds within certain limits, the privilege of meeting and of discussing its own affairs when and where it pleases, and the right of applying to the Legislature of the country for larger powers if such shall appear necessary for the carrying out of objects not dreamt of at its first start.

The Church is absolutely lacking in all these respects, for the very simple reason that the Church, viewed as a going concern in possession of property, has nothing that can be called a constitution.

* * * * *

If the glaring anomalies and the wholly unjustifiable grotesqueness which startle us at every turn when we begin to discuss “Church questions” are to be removed, where are we to begin, and what should be the lines on which any scheme of readjustment should proceed?

First and foremost, let all obsolete and antiquated privileges, which are survivals of a long extinct condition of affairs, be swept away, and with the privileges let the disabilities go also. Let no man be made either more or less than a citizen of the Empire by reason of his being in any sense a member of the Church—not a peer of the realm on the one hand, not disqualified from entering the House of Commons on the other.

As a preliminary to giving the Church a working constitution, it is my conviction that the bishops should no longer have seats in the House of Lords. I cannot see how any director or overseer of any corporation, or indeed of any department of the State, should be made a peer of the realm by virtue of his holding office. I am not wholly ignorant of our constitutional history, although into the historical aspect of the question I decline to enter now. The facts are what we have to face; and as things are, however much we may deplore it, there seems just as little reason why bishops should be raised to the peerage as why the naval lords of the Admiralty should be created barons. But, if you dismiss the bishops from the Upper House, you certainly cannot exclude the inferior clergy from the lower one. Whether in the one case the Church or the House of Lords would be much the loser may very reasonably be doubted, notwithstanding the conspicuous ability which is and has for long been characteristic of the Episcopal Bench. In the other case, the Church and the House of Commons are just as little likely to be much the gainers by letting clergymen represent the constituencies in Parliament. As in France, so would it be in England; the clerical candidates would be very few, the clerical members fewer. That, however, does not affect the question whether or not clerical disabilities should be abolished.

But by far the most necessary and radical reform that is imperatively called for is the abolition of that preposterous antiquarian curiosity, the Parson’s Freehold.

The philosopher of the future who “with larger, other eyes than ours,” shall survey the history of our institutions and tell of their origin, their growth or their decay, will, I believe, be amazed and perplexed by nothing so much as by the strange vitality of this legal phenomenon—the Parson’s Freehold. That any man who is in any sense a public servant should, by virtue of being nominated to hold an office, be made tenant for life of a real estate from which only by an act of his own can he be removed—that would seem to most of us so entirely startling and outrageous in the abstract as to be absolutely intolerable in the concrete reality. Let us look this thing in the face.

Imagine a postman or a prime minister, a clerk in the Custom House or the captain of a man-of-war, an assistant in a draper’s shop or your own gardener, having an estate for life in his office, and being able to draw his pay to his dying day, though he might be for years blind and deaf and paralyzed and imbecile—so incapable, in fact, that he could not even appoint his own deputy, or so indifferent that he cared not whether there was any deputy to discharge the duties which he himself was paid to perform. Imagine any public servant being thrown into prison for a flagrant misdemeanour, or worse than a misdemeanour, and coming back to his work when the term of his imprisonment was over, receiving the arrears of pay which had accrued during the time he was in gaol, and quietly settling down into the old groove as if nothing had happened. Imagine any public servant being suspended from his office for habitual drunkenness, suspended say for two years, and not even requiring to be reinstated when the two years were over, but gaily taking his old seat and returning to his desk and his bottle, as irremovable from the emoluments of the first as he was inseparable from his devotion to the last.

Yet all this, and much more than this, is possible for us beneficed clergymen. I am myself the patron of a benefice from which the late rector was nonresident for fifty-three years. Is it at all conceivable that we should continue to keep up this condition of affairs under which we have been living so long? The last thing that any other public servant would dare to confess would be that he was physically or intellectually or morally unfit for his office. The retort in his case would be obvious enough—then leave it, and make way for a better man. But the holder of the Parson’s Freehold smilingly replies, “Certainly I will retain my hold upon the income after paying my deputy. Am I not a landlord? and as tenant for life I will assuredly cling to my own.”

Being such as we are, men of flesh and blood as others, and occupying the frightfully impregnable position which we do; fenced about with all sorts of legal safeguards which put us above our parishioners on the one hand, and out of the reach of our bishops on the other; having, as we have, an almost unlimited power of turning our benefices into sinecures while we reside upon them, or of leaving them to the veriest hireling to serve while we are disporting ourselves in foreign travel almost as long as we should choose to stay away;—I know no more splendid testimony to the high and honourable character of the English clergy than that which would be wrung from their worst enemies who should fairly consider what the law of the land would allow of their being if they were so disposed—and what, in fact, they are. It is because as a class they are so animated by a high ideal; because as a class their conscience is their law; it is, therefore, that, in spite of legal safeguards which in their tendency are corrupting and demoralizing, as a class they are incomparably better than they need be. The clergy of the Church of England constitute the one protected interest in the universe that does not languish. Nevertheless, C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. These things ought not so to be.

* * * * *

How then are the evils inseparable from the present state of things to be remedied? They are evils which do not appear on the surface where the clergy themselves are conscientious, high-minded, and zealous, throwing themselves into their duties with self-denying earnestness, and hardly aware of how much they might abuse their powers if they were so disposed. They are very real and scandalous evils in the case of the careless, the worthless, and the immoral; that is, exactly in the case of those whom we can least afford to leave as they are.

I can see no other plan for utilizing to the utmost the resources already at our disposal than by sweeping away altogether this archaic anomaly of the parson’s freehold. We are all a great deal too tenacious of vested rights, a great deal too reluctant to deal harshly with those who have accepted any office under certain conditions expressed or implied, to allow of our disturbing the present occupants of the benefices, or to bring them under any new régime. As long as the existing beneficed clergy choose to retain their hold upon their benefices, obviously they must be left undisturbed; as they are freeholders, so they must continue to be, and practically irremovable; but, as they drop off either by death or voluntary resignation, let the freehold be vested in other hands. Let us follow the main lines upon which the Endowed School Commissioners pursued their revolution in the case of the educational reserve fund, learning experience by their blunders, their failures or their fads.

And when we do so, where shall we find ourselves?

1. The freehold of every church, churchyard, glebe-house and lands, together with the tithes and any other invested funds now constituting the endowment of a benefice, would be vested in a body of trustees or governors exactly as the estates and buildings of the endowed schools are at this moment. These governors would have the administration of this estate entrusted to them, and be personally and collectively responsible for its management—responsible, that is, to a duly constituted authority with a power of enforcing its precepts.

2. All liability to keep house and chancel in repair, together with all powers of mortgaging the lands of a benefice, would be transferred from the incumbent to the governing body of trustees.

3. The patronage of every benefice would, as a matter of course, pass out of the hands of the present patrons, and would be vested in the trustees of the benefice; exactly as the patronage of Shrewsbury and Sedbergh schools passed out of the hands of St. John’s College, Cambridge, or as the patronage of Thame school passed out of the hands of New College, Oxford, or as the patronage of Brentwood, Kirkleatham, and Bosworth schools has passed out of the hands of private patrons into those of the newly-constituted governing bodies.

4. The governors in presenting to a benefice would in each case be expected to consider the financial position in which it happened to be at the time of the vacancy, and would be empowered to determine what amount of net income could be assigned to the incumbent according to the circumstances of the estate in their hands; in all cases guaranteeing a minimum stipend and, in cases where a house was provided, a house free of all rates, taxes, and repairs.

5. The governing body would be required to render an account of all moneys received and expended to the constituted authority, to which they would be answerable.

6. Any clergyman presented to a benefice by the governing body would be liable to be dismissed for inefficiency or misconduct; such dismissal to be subject to an appeal as against caprice, malevolence, or tyranny.

* * * * *

Before proceeding further, it will be as well at this point to consider an objection that may be offered, and then to see how such a reform as that proposed would work.

First, with regard to handing over the property of a benefice, together with the patronage, to a body of trustees. Such a course will certainly be denounced as revolutionary, and of course that word has a very alarming sound. But I venture to remind objectors that we have already embarked upon this revolutionary course, and on a very large scale too. We have already taken vast estates out of the hands of ecclesiastical corporations, and vested them in the hands of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. We have already made our bishops stipendiaries, receiving their salaries from the holders of their estates; and happy are those deans and canons who are in such a case, and not in the pitiable condition of landlords with their farms upon their hands, or let to tenants who, just now, can make their own terms with the panic-stricken lifeholders of the freehold. But this is not all. There are at least a thousand benefices in England at this moment, the patronage of which is already in the hands of trustees; and in many of these cases—in many more cases than people suspect—the very freehold of the church itself is vested in those trustees, who have almost entire control over the funds, and almost entire control over the fabric of the church. At this moment, as I write, there is lying on my table an application from the Trustees of St. Excellent’s Church, at Jericho, asking me to subscribe for the erection of a tower, and pleading that the Trustees have done all that was possible, and have been loyally seconded by their devoted vicar.

Ask those who know anything of what has been going on in the second city in England during the last forty years what condition the masses at Liverpool would be in at this moment but for the church-building on the Trustee system which has been in operation there so long. Ask them whether that system has worked well or ill, and whether there is any reason to regret that the patronage of the Trustee churches is not in other hands.

* * * * *

And now with regard to the working of the scheme proposed.

The rectory of Claylump finds itself vacant by the promotion of its rector to the bishopric of Loo Choo. The governors forthwith proceed to take a survey of the property they hold in trust, and to look about for a new parson. The character and qualification of the various candidates for the vacant benefice are carefully inquired into, and, the choice being made, the new incumbent is presented to the bishop of the see and instituted with all fitting and necessary solemnity.

But before he enters upon his charge the new rector has been informed that, in view of the governors being responsible for certain outgoings, they can for the present guarantee the parson only a minimum income of x pounds per annum, to be increased according as the funds at their disposal shall allow of the augmentation.

Observe that we already find ourselves face to face with the problem which has been found so difficult of solution—viz., how to deal with Ecclesiastical Dilapidations. A beneficed clergyman at present may, if he pleases, let his house tumble about his ears—may let his barn be tenanted by the rats, turn his stable into a pigsty, and, keeping his glebe in his own hands, render it valueless for his successor for the next five years. At his death he may be absolutely insolvent. The next incumbent is, however, called upon to put all into tenantable repair at his own cost, and by the very fact of accepting the living is liable for these substantial repairs.

Or a beneficed clergyman may do exactly the reverse. Being tenant for life of a living of less than three hundred a year, he may convert the parsonage-house into a noble mansion—erect hot-houses and conservatories ad libitum, build stables for a dozen horses, and lay out acres of the glebe in ornamental gardens; and he too may die in difficulties. At the avoidance of the living the bishop may give orders for pulling down half the house and more than half the appurtenances; but the question of who is to pay for the expenses of the alteration will present a serious difficulty, and may be settled in the strangest way at last. As long as the living is in a good neighbourhood, with certain advantages which it is unnecessary to particularise, it will not be hard to find another man of fortune who for the sake of the house will consent to accept the cure. But, if it chance that a neighbourhood has “changed,” and the parish has become otherwise than a desirable place of residence, that parish may find it very hard indeed to get any who will face the terrible prospect of having to keep up a palace on £300 a year. In either case—that of finding himself with a tumble-down rectory, or that of finding himself with an entirely unsuitable one—the incoming parson will assuredly have to make his account to submit to a serious abatement from the nominal revenue of his preferment, and will assuredly be in no better position than he would be if, not he, but the trustees, were the owners of the parson’s freehold.

But once more. Let us suppose that the new rector under the new régime finds it desirable to add to his parsonage-house for any reason or for none. What follows? Is he to be allowed to do as he pleases? Certainly not. If he can get the consent of his governors, well and good; without that consent he would have no more right to build up than to pull down. He would be living in an official residence provided for him. Clearly, he could not be permitted to deal with it as if it were his own.

Again, let us suppose that the parsonage should sorely need repair, and that the parson, being poor or otherwise unwilling to be meddled with, should declare it was good enough for him. Would it be reasonable to let an obstructive eccentric continue living in a house which was seriously lessening in value from the want of structural repairs? It is obvious that the governors who were liable for these repairs being duly executed, and whose interest was to maintain the buildings in good and tenantable condition, would interpose. The official residence having to be kept up by the income of the benefice in their view would clearly not be regarded as something to be handed over in its entirety to the present holder of the living, as if his personal interest were the only thing to consider.

As it would not be allowable for a Plutus to over-build, so it would not be permitted to a niggard to let the parsonage fall into disrepair. In either case the governing body would have a voice, and over the buildings of the benefice they would exercise a general supervision and control.

What, however, will startle most people, and especially clergymen, is the proposal to give to any body at all or any person or any officer the power to dismiss a parson from his cure. Yet, as an abstract question, why should the parson be the only functionary to enjoy the immunity he does? Is it because it does not matter much to his parishioners whether he is fit or unfit, moral or immoral, active or indolent, whether he is exhibiting an example of holiness or is a mere helot whose daily walk is an abominable scandal? As things are, the more conscientious a clergyman is, the more easily you may hunt him out of his preferment; such men cannot bear to stay where—as they put it in all earnestness and devout sincerity—they are “doing no good.” Such men are ready enough to go out into the wilderness if you tell them they are not wanted or are hindering Christ’s work by staying where they are. But tell the bad man that he is not wanted in his parish, and his ministrations are hateful to the people among whom he lives, and he will laugh in your face with the grim joke that, if the people don’t like to come to church, they may stay away, and if they don’t want him at the font or the altar or the grave, so much the better; he will have less work to do for his money. The thick-skinned with a seared conscience defies you; safe in the possession of the parson’s freehold, he holds his own.

How is it that we are always so ready to conjure up the worst imaginable evils when any new proposal is offered to us, and always draw some picture of abuses and horrors when we begin to think of any great change, as if there were no abuses and horrors which called for the change? “A body of governors with a power of dismissal,” it is said; “why, no man’s position would be safe!” To begin with, I do not see why the first thing to be aimed at should be that any one’s position should be safe. The first thing that is needed, imperatively needed, is that the duties of any office, from that of the Prime Minister downwards, should be effectively discharged. It may be very desirable that the driver of an express train should be safe of getting his wages as long as he lives. It is infinitely more desirable that the train itself should not run off the metals from the aforesaid driver going to sleep.

But whose position in the case before us would be unsafe? As a rule, only his whose position ought to be unsafe. The Endowed Schools Commissioners have been at work for more than twenty years. Every one of their schemes gives to the governing body a power of dismissal, and that too with usually no appeal. During these twenty years, I have never heard of more than two cases in which this power has been exercised; so slow are we Englishmen to be hard on an old servant, or to use to the utmost the powers which we have in our hand.

* * * * *

Our next point to consider is, what should be the constitution of the governing body?

Let it be premised that, in embarking upon a reform so radical as this that is contemplated, I for one at the outset shrink from committing ourselves to any details until we have first laid down the grand principles on which we are going to proceed. Moreover, it must never be forgotten that the circumstances of every parish or district in England vary to an extent which they who have never thought much upon the subject could hardly bring themselves to believe. In a matter of so much intricacy and complexity we must not be afraid to feel our way, and at any rate let us have at the outset as few hard-and-fast lines as may be.

With this caution and proviso, I yet venture to suggest that the main lines to be laid down should be as follows:—

1. The governing body should not be too large, nor should it ever be chosen from the inhabitants of the parish exclusively.

2. It should be a representative body.

3. Its meetings should not be held too frequently.

4. Its proceedings should be duly chronicled, and a record kept which might be produced and referred to when necessary.

* * * * *

1. Not too large, because experience proves that any administrative body is in danger of becoming a speechifying body, and liable to be influenced by pressure from without, almost exactly in proportion to the increase of its numbers. Nor should this body be chosen exclusively from the inhabitants of the parish. In the case of small parishes, it would be quite impossible to find persons qualified to exercise the powers to be conferred, or fitted by education and intelligence to occupy the independent and important position of governor.

2. It will be necessary that the governing body should in all cases be a representative body. In such a body what interests should be represented?

(i) First the owners of the land on which tithes are paid. Observe, I do not say the tithe-payers; for, of all the objectionable practices which have sprung up among us affecting the tenure of the land, and the burdens it has to bear, none appears to me more mischievous or indefensible, none has done more to make the tillers of the soil discontented, or led them more passionately to set themselves against their best friends, than the practice sanctioned by the Legislature of calling upon the tenant to pay the tithe in addition to the rent of his land. As long as this goes on, so long will both tenant and landlord be tempted to make common cause with one another in hopes of getting rid of the tithe. You might just as well call upon the tenant to pay the landlord’s mortgage interest, or the jointures and annuities with which the estate is charged, or the premiums upon his policies of insurance, as call upon him to pay the tithe. A landlord holds his lands subject to certain charges, which are antecedent to any profits that may remain to him after they are discharged.

The land-tax, the county-rates, the tithe, are all on the same level; so are the jointures, annuities, and interest of money borrowed. Of course the landlord would gladly throw them all upon the tenant if he could, and does throw upon him all he can. In permitting him to follow this course, you tempt the tenant to cry out, “Away with this payment, and away with that!” and you tempt the landlord to cry, “Amen! So be it, as long as my rent is assured me!” Worried by the annual recurrence of extra payments, for which he has to provide at all sorts of inconvenient times, the tenant is ready enough to demand relief from these burdens, never reflecting that he is playing the landlord’s game, directly or indirectly robbing somebody else to enrich the owner of the soil. “Down with the rates!” means “Throw them upon the Consolidated Fund and let the taxpayer relieve the landlord.” “Down with the jointures!” would mean “Rob the dowagers and let the landlord be the richer for the pillage.” “Down with the mortgage interest!” would mean “Up with the debtor at the expense of the creditor;” and “Down with the tithe!” would mean the extinction of the parson, but with the gain of not a shilling ultimately to the tenant, though with a very considerable gain to the owner of the land. It must be, and it is, demoralizing to allow the payment of the tithe to be regarded as an extra with which the tenant is chargeable. The obligation to pay the tithe is a condition antecedent to the owner of the soil enjoying the very possession of his land. The tithe is a rent-charge upon the land, exactly as an annuity or jointure is—or, if you choose to call it a tax because the term tax is an odious word, and therefore serviceable when you want to make those you hate odious—it is a landlord’s tax, and no tenant should be allowed to pay it without having the right under all circumstances of deducting it from his rent.

Moreover, without yielding to the temptation of straying into an historical argument, yet remembering that in the past there was a very close connection between the landlord whose estate supplied the tithe from which the parson was supported and the patron of the living to which the parson was instituted, I think there are good reasons why the owners of the soil liable to pay tithe should be represented in the proposed governing body of a benefice. Where the parish was a close parish—i.e., owned by a single landlord—he would naturally and very properly be the only person eligible, or at any rate capable of nominating the tithe-owner’s representative. Where there were many landlords, they could elect their representatives—one or more, as the case might be—in the ordinary way.

(ii) As the owners of land subject to the payment of tithes should be represented, so should the ratepayers of the parish have their representative upon the board of governors. And here I confess I cannot see that you could introduce any religious test whereby any one should be disqualified by reason of his creed. I do not believe that in ordinary cases any real inconveniences would arise. That under no circumstances conceivable evils should emerge is too much to hope for; but whether or not, we must, I repeat, face the facts, and what reasonable man, who watches the signs of the times, will be sanguine enough to expect that, in our days, we have any chance of extorting from the Legislature anything in the shape of a conscience clause? But, when I speak of ratepayers, I mean bonâ fide payers of rates. I exclude from this category the compound householder: I by no means exclude unmarried women who pay their own rates and taxes, who are often among the most sagacious, high-minded, and exemplary inhabitants of a country parish, or of a town one too, for that matter. If any should have a voice in the choice of a representative governor, clearly they should.

(iii) But, if the owners of the soil and the ratepayers should be represented, it would be more than unreasonable—it would be a monstrous injustice—that the regular worshippers in the church should be left without their representative governors. I am quite aware that some people are ready with all sorts of difficulties and all sorts of objections when we come to deal with the qualification of church membership, and quite aware, too, that at this point one is sorely tempted to do that which I protested against above—viz., go into details; but I resist the temptation, simply expressing my conviction that there can be and there is no real and insuperable difficulty in defining what is meant by “regular worshippers,” and that such difficulty would vanish at once if we were really in earnest in grappling with it. I am not hinting at a compromise. Here as elsewhere what we want is—common sense!

(iv) Again, I conceive that on any board of governors there should be a representative appointed by the bishop of the diocese, and that he should be a resident in the archdeaconry in which the benefice was situated. In every board of directors, be it of a railway or bank or insurance company, it is held to be essential to effectiveness that one or more of such directors should have some pretension to technical or professional knowledge of the business carried on. Is it too much to ask that at least one expert should be found upon every body of church governors? Such a representative would, if discreet and able, be always listened to with respectful attention; if inclined to be domineering or impracticable, he would assuredly be outvoted when it came to a contest. He would be a voice, but he would be no more.

(v) It is conceivable, nay it is probable, that in addition to these representative governors it might in some cases be advisable that other members should be added to the governing body. Thus it might be contended by the present patrons of benefices, whether lay or clerical, that they should be represented, and I can see no particular objection to such a claim being allowed. It is also conceivable and probable that, after due consideration and discussion, it might be thought advisable to group two or more benefices together and vest their funds in the same body of governors. Indeed, in many country districts, where the endowments are very small and the population very sparse, it might prove extremely difficult and sometimes extremely undesirable to have a board of governors for each of these tiny units, let alone the absurd waste of power which in such cases would be inevitable. But, such as I have sketched it out, such in the main would be the constitution of the governing body of every benefice in the country, and to that governing body the freehold of that benefice and its appurtenances, together with the patronage thereof, should be handed over.

(vi) With regard to the qualification of those eligible for a seat upon the governing body, I am not prepared to discuss that question at the present stage. This, however, I know—viz., that there is only one subject of the Queen who is now disqualified from presenting a clergyman to any benefice in England. A Jew or a Mormonite, a Mohammedan or a Parsee, Mr. Bradlaugh or Mr. Congreve, may be, and for ought I know is, patron of the richest or the poorest living in England; but if any of these worthy persons should suddenly become influenced by Cardinal Manning and be received as a member of the Church of Rome, then and then only would he become incapable by law from exercising his patronage—then and then only would it pass out of his hands. If we have come to this pass, that in anything like a large majority of cases Churchmen should find themselves outvoted by Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics in the governing bodies, would it not be pretty clear that something was wrong?

But would the functions of the governing body be confined to the management of the estate of a benefice and to the appointing and, where necessary, to the dismissal of the incumbent? Yes. It seems to me that the functions of a governing body should go no further. That was a golden rule which Lord Palmerston laid down for the governing bodies of our endowed schools, and which these bodies have generally had the wisdom to carry out in practice—“Get the best man you can find and—get out of his way!” It should be no part of the duties of the governing body to interfere with what may be called the internal affairs of the church and the ministrations of the parson. These should be matters of arrangement between the congregation and their minister. Let the powers and the duties of churchwardens be defined as clearly as may be—let the number of the churchwardens be increased if you will, or let the old sidesman be revived; but let it be clearly understood that the parish is one thing and the congregation is another. Let it be understood that the rector of the parish as a parish officer should be accountable to the governors in so far as they are trustees for the parish reserve fund; but in matters with which only the congregation worshipping habitually in the church are concerned, let no outsider have any locus standi. If in his administrations a clergyman insists on doing or leaving undone certain practices which are hateful to the congregation to which he ministers; if between priest and people things should come to a deadlock; by all means let it be allowable, as it ought to be, for the people to demand redress, and let them ask for that redress with authority and a claim to have their grievances considered. In such cases there would be no need of rushing into the law courts, no spiteful resort to costly legislation to crush or ruin a foolish, obstinate, and ignorantly conscientious clergyman. The congregation—speaking through their representatives, the churchwardens, sidesmen, or whatever other name you might choose to call them by—would lay their complaint before the bishop first, and as an ultimate resort would go to the governing body, and claim that their parson should be dismissed, on grounds which should be, of course, properly formulated.

And this brings us to another matter—viz., the prominence (I do not say pre-eminence) to be given to the congregational element in any readjustment of church regimen at the present time. It is idle to talk as if the Church were co-extensive with the nation, or as if the inhabitants of a parish were all worshippers in the church fabric. If a man now does not like the ritual or the doctrine offered to him in his parish church, he leaves it, and goes where he finds what he wants. It will always be so. There was a good deal of nonconformity in the Apostolic times, and there will be nonconformity as long as men love to have things their own way. If an apostle were to find himself rector of any parish in England, with an angel to play the organ, and a multitude of the heavenly host to chant the psalms and “render” the anthems, would Jannes and Jambres be satisfied? On the other hand, though it is impossible but that offences should arise (which means that offence should be taken), it is our duty and our interest to minimise the occasion of offence; and it is clearly neither right nor politic that any man should occupy such a position as that he may, if he please, go very far towards making himself a “lord over God’s heritage,” and by adopting such a course not only lessen his own influence, but commit a serious wrong to the assembly of worshippers to whom, after all, it must be remembered, he is appointed to minister, not to be an irresponsible dictator.

Wherever there is a “congregation of faithful men” regularly worshipping together in any church, the very sign and evidence of life among them is that there is a great deal of mere business to be got through. There are large sums of money raised for various purposes, there are organizations great and small to be looked to, there are meetings to be held, arrangements of very different kinds to be made, and work of all sorts to be done. It must be done, and it can only be done by the incumbent in conjunction and co-operation with the congregation; as long as the two work together all goes on smoothly, if they are at variance friction ensues. It would be preposterous that all the money collected by and through the voluntary contributions and the voluntary exertions of the congregation should be handed over to an outside body such as the governing body we have been dealing with above. Indeed, such a proposal scarcely deserves to be seriously considered; the congregation as a congregation must in all reason be allowed to manage its own affairs. But, inasmuch as no institution in the world can hope to flourish if its manager prove himself incompetent, quarrelsome, and fractious, and when it becomes apparent that the well-being of the institution is being sacrificed only to keep the wrong man in the wrong place, then you get rid of that wrong man, sometimes with joy, sometimes with sorrow. So should it be with our churches. To give the congregations the appointment of their parsons or to arm them with a veto would be to follow a course which all our experience warns us against, and to which—I cannot explain why—all our national habits of thought, convictions, and prejudices are opposed. But, under any circumstances, cases might occur where a reluctant congregation might find itself saddled with a minister who, after a fair trial, should prove himself altogether unsuited to deal with the peculiar conditions, social, financial, or religious—which presented themselves; and where such cases did occur the congregation in its own interests—to go no further—ought to have the opportunity of making its wishes or its objections known. As to graver matters, where a parson’s moral character was in question, I do not think it worth while to deal with them. As to the proposal of setting up parochial councils in our country villages, I find it very hard to believe that this can have ever been put forward seriously by any sane man of the world. Surely, surely it can only be the clumsy joke of a dreamer which suggests that we should establish village parliaments for the discussion of matters of ritual and theology among the representatives of a population which sometimes counts by tens, usually by a few hundreds, and very rarely by thousands. In the single diocese of Norwich there are actually one hundred and two parishes in each of which the population is less than a hundred, including the last baby. Think of a parochial council in the parish of Bittering Parva, where I was once told “there are between fourteen and fifteen inhabitants!”

* * * * *

I am quite aware that the questions which still remain to be dealt with in considering any comprehensive measure of what is known as Church Reform are many and difficult, and some of them are of the highest importance. They will come on for discussion, we may be sure, and abler men than I am, and men better qualified to handle such questions, will doubtless engage in them.

In the hands of such men I would gladly leave the serious and difficult problems which are calling so loudly for solution. The power of dismissal of a parson from his cure, for other than moral offences, at once brings us face to face with the question, “How are we to provide for aged and broken-down clergy in their time of need?” It also suggests the question, “In what relations will the governing body stand to the congregation on the one side and the bishop on the other?” The throwing open the benefices to what is sure to be stigmatized as open competition will be distasteful to some, but will result in changes which I am convinced will be, on the whole, of immense benefit to clergy and people, and especially they will tend towards the promotion of the best men to the most valuable cures. Yet here too, when we come to details, it will be necessary to open our eyes to some difficulties, from which, however, we need not shrink, nor will they, I believe, be found so insuperable as may be imagined.

The training, too, of the younger clergy during their term of apprenticeship, if I may use the expression, and the general supervision and periodical inspection of the benefices which has now become the emptiest of forms, will assuredly be called for by all who desire a coherent scheme for the readjustment of matters ecclesiastical. It is hardly to be expected that we should be allowed to go on much longer in the rambling way we do.

If it were only the supremacy of this or that form of doctrine or worship, however dear to us, however sacred, that was at stake, I for one would not willingly embark in the conflict that is before us, or step out from the limits of the humble sphere in which I find myself. I would hold my peace except among my people, and try my best to till the little plot in the heritage of God which His good providence has assigned to me for my daily work. But there is much more at stake than any merely sectarian view of the case would have us believe. It is no mere fight between religious factions and sects and creeds. The question now is whether or not that machinery whereby the schooling of our moral sentiments has been carried on for ages shall be cast from us as a thing of nought, while we surrender ourselves to the private-venture teachers to provide a new machinery by-and-by. Are we to have no functionaries whose remonstrances any one need attend to? Is there to be no voice speaking with the semblance of authority, bidding the people do the right and avoid the evil? Is there to be no national worship, no national religion, and of course no national creed? How long can Christian ethics be supposed to last?

For ages the vessel of the State has gone on its way riding through a thousand storms, and buffeted by a million billows; its rudder has been at times unskilfully handled; at times the course has been set with evil consequences; at times the steersmen have been rash or blind. But shall we now, in an outbreak of passion or panic, unship that rudder and cut ourselves adrift, with never a helm to trust to, in the open sea?

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IV.
QUIS CUSTODIET?

There are very few Societies started in our time which have done so much with such slender resources and with so very little adventitious aid as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

It was only the other day, so to speak, that a handful of men, whose hearts were in the right place, banded themselves together to raise the voice of warning against a fashion which had become a rage, and which was threatening to make a clean sweep of all that was most venerable, most precious, most unapproachably inimitable in the architectural remains of our country.

Undeterred by the clamour of incompetent impostors, undismayed by the ridicule of people of importance, undiscouraged by the difficulties which must be expected by all gallant crusaders, the little band went forth—a real Salvation Army without drums and without any flourish of trumpets—to save what remained from the devastation that had been going on, not despising the day of small things. They were an audacious band; they proclaimed that the taste and the sentiment of the world had got into an utterly vicious groove—that the taste and the sentiment of the world needed to be corrected, set aright—educated in fact—and that they were going to educate it whether the world liked being educated or not.

Astonishing presumption! “Who are ye?” said the perplexed world,—“who are ye; the apostles of a new toryism, ye that preach the keeping up of the old, which time and tide, the storms and the elements, have pronounced to be moribund? Who are ye that would watch over the homes of the bats and the owls in this our age of advance, with the works of the men of mind rising up to heaven to rebuke you? Ruin-mongers that ye be, prating about the loveliness of mild decay, while we live in the days of carving by machinery, and ashlar smoothed to the likeness of the loveliest stucco by the help of the modern stone plough, and windows that no age ever saw the like of till now, and the smuggest of pulpits and the slipperiest of tiles, and the tallest of walls built of, if not daubed with, the most untempered of mortar? Who are ye? Are ye to be your brothers’ keepers?”

Well! all this was very terrible, especially that last thrust! But even that last thrust seemed to read very like a leaf from the book of the first murderer; seemed, too, as if some modern confederates of Cain were afflicted with that same irritable temperament, that same jealousy of being called to account for their misdeeds, which would even go the length of justifying the slaughter of Abel if it should be made to appear that the dead could not be restored to life again.

But the new Reformers, whatever they may have thought, were content to hold their peace. They went peeping and prying about and protesting; they exposed the gross ignorance of an adventurer here; they issued a serious warning to a well-meaning gentleman there; they did as other apostles have done before now—they were instant in season and out of season; they reproved, rebuked, exhorted; and almost before they knew where they were, they discovered that they had many more supporters than at first they had suspected, that the world had been waiting for them this long time back, and that they had started upon their mission not a day too soon.

As soon as people begin to succeed in any mission, they are pretty sure to get into bad odour by the excesses of their more impassioned supporters. Then follow disclaimers, explanations, recriminations, and they are comforted by the reminder that “when fools fall out wise men get their due.” When this point has been reached, the other side begins to take heart, and mis-statement is apt to be accepted as the explanation of over-statement, just as now it is beginning to be believed that Antirestoration is a full and sufficient summing up of what is meant by the word Protection, and that doing nothing is all that this Society aims at.

If there are some crazy fanatics who have injured the cause which they have at heart by advocating in a furious way that all we have to do with an ancient building is to let it alone, and leave it to fall down, rather than do anything to preserve it, I for one hereby declare that I hold such fanatics to be heathen men and heretics of the worst kind. I look upon such people much as I look upon those peculiar people who denounce the whole medical profession as interferers with the laws of Providence, and who forbid the members of their sect from ever setting a broken bone or taking a prescription when sickness or infirmity has attacked them. To talk of letting an ancient building take its chance, and doing nothing to prolong its life, is to my mind to talk pestiferous nonsense with which I have no manner of sympathy. But unhappily there has been another view which has been put forward in a very specious and ingenious and captivating manner by another set of people, and which unhappily has met with immense favour at the hands of the moneyed public, and which seems to me to find its exact parallel in the proposal of a certain unfortunate lady who suffered martyrdom for her faith, or at any rate her profession, some years ago. That poor lady proclaimed to the world that she was so profoundly versed in all the virtues of certain mysterious herbs and salves and potions and mixtures, that she was prepared to guarantee the perfect restoration of youth and loveliness to the most aged and most battered of her sex; in fact, she asserted that she had discovered the grand secret of making them “beautiful for ever.” She was, I take it, the high priestess and prophetess of restoration.

Now between the criminal and indolent neglect of those who would sit down with folded hands and never stretch out a finger to avert the death of the stricken, and the pretentious puffery of quacks who assure us that they have discovered the secret of rejuvenescence, there is a whole world of difference, and between the stupid do-nothingism of the one and the rash do-everythingism of the other there is—there must be—a middle course. This is what we have to complain of, that when well-meaning people have set themselves to “restore” a church (for I shall keep myself to that branch of the subject for the present), some of us have found the greatest difficulty in learning what they were going to restore.

When these good and well-meaning people take it into their heads that an ancient ecclesiastical building is to be replaced by a modern structure in which “all the characteristic features of the original are to be reproduced and for the most part retained,” we ask ourselves with wide-open eyes of amazement and perplexity what is going to be reproduced? There is a sumptuous Norman doorway, there are abundant indications of the existences of a Norman church having existed on this spot—there are clear proofs that the Norman pillars have been recklessly cut away here to make room for a splendid thirteenth-century tomb, that the north aisle is an addition raised up at the sacrifice of the original north wall—that a chapel of no great artistic merit was added at another time, that the pitch of the roof was altered when the clerestory was added, that the chancel was rebuilt, flimsily, faultily, fantastically, just before the final rupture with Rome,—and yet that the remains of the superb sedilia which the seventeenth-century mob smashed to pieces were evidently removed from the earlier chancel by the fifteenth-century architects. There are signs, in fact, of the church never having been left undisturbed—that from generation to generation the rude forefathers of the hamlet were always doing something to their church, taking a pride in adding to or altering it, according to their notions. They never thought of reproducing anything, but rightly or wrongly they were always aiming at improving everything. You are going to restore, are you? What are you going to restore? The Norman, the Early English, the Decorated, or the Perpendicular church? What are the characteristic features of the original? What is your notion of the original which you pretend to be about to restore? The problem that presents itself becomes more difficult, more complex, the longer you look at it—the problem, namely, what you are going to restore.

If my dear old grandmother should wish to be made “beautiful for ever”—i.e. to be restored—what condition of former loveliness shall we call back? There are some who paid homage to her beauty at eighteen, some who loved her at thirty, and some who almost adored her at threescore years and ten. Look at her portraits! Which shall we take? Nay! I love her as she is, say I, with the smile that plays about her venerable lips and the soft light in the gentle eyes. I love every furrow on her broad brow and would not have the thin grey hairs turned to masses of auburn. I would keep her for ever if I might, but I would no more dream of restoring her to what she was before I was born than I would replace her by something that she is not and never was.

Now up and down this land of England there are, say, 5,000 churches that at this moment stand upon the same foundations that they stood upon 500 years ago, some few of them standing in the main as they were left eight centuries ago. If for 5,000 any one should suggest not 5,000, but 10,000, I should find no fault with the correction.

If we could go back in imagination to the condition of these churches as they were left when the Reformation began, it may safely be affirmed that there was not at that time, there never had been, and there is never likely to be again, anything in the world that could at all compare with our English churches. There never has been an area of anything like equal extent so immeasurably rich in works of art such as were then to be found within the four seas. The prodigious and incalculable wealth stored up in the churches of this country in the shape of sculpture, glass, needlework, sepulchral monuments in marble, alabaster, and metal—the jewelled shrines, the precious MSS. and their bindings, the frescoes and carved work, the vestments and exquisite vessels in silver and gold, and all the quaint and dainty and splendid productions of an exuberant artistic appetite and an artistic passion for display which were to be found not only in the great religious houses, but dispersed about more or less in every parish church in England, constituted such an enormous aggregate of precious forms of beauty as fairly baffles the imagination when we attempt to conceive it. There are the lists of the church goods—i.e. of the contents of churches—by the thousand, not only in the sixteenth century but in the fourteenth: there they are for any one to read; and, considering the smallness of the area and the poverty of the people, I say again that the history of the world has nothing to show which can for one moment be compared with our English churches as they were to be found when the spoilers were let loose upon them.[5] Well! We all know that a clean sweep was made of the contents of those churches. The locusts devoured all. But the fabrics remained—the fabrics have remained down to our own time—they are as it were the glorious framework of the religious life of the past. There is no need for me to dwell upon the claim which these survivals of a frightful conflagration have upon us for safe custody. I presume we all acknowledge that claim, and the only question is how best to exhibit our loyalty. But when we have got so far we are suddenly met by a wholly unexpected and anomalous difficulty before we can make a single step in advance.

Now I am free to confess that hardly a day of my life passes in which I am not oppressed by the conviction that there are few men of my age within the four seas who are as deplorably ignorant of things in general as I feel myself to be;—but there is one branch of ignorance, if I may use the expression, which I am convinced that the enormous majority of my most gifted acquaintances are sharing with myself—I really do not know to whom these thousands of churches belong.

There was a time when the church belonged to the parish as a sort of corporation, and when by virtue of their proprietary right in their church the parishioners were bound to keep the fabric in tenantable repair. But when that obligation was removed by the abolition of Church rates (so far as I can understand the matter), the church practically ceased to belong to any one. Tell the most devoted church people in my parish that because they are church people therefore they are bound to keep the fabric in repair, and they would to a man become conscientious nonconformists in twenty-four hours. Tell my most conscientious nonconformists that next Monday there is to be a meeting in the vestry and an opportunity of badgering the parson, and not a man of them but would claim his right to be there:—because, under circumstances which are favourable to his own interests and inclinations, every inhabitant of a certain geographical area protests that he is a shareholder in his parish church. It is true that on a memorable occasion I was presented with the key of my church, and was directed to lock myself in and ring the bell, and then was solemnly informed that I had taken possession of my freehold. I daresay it was quite true, only I am quite certain nobody did believe it at the time and nobody does believe it now. From that day to this I never have been able to understand to whom my church does belong.

Now as long as it is only a question of letting things drift the question of ownership never troubles anybody. I am in the habit of telling my people that if the Church of our parish were to be swallowed up by an earthquake some fine morning, there would be only one man who would be a gainer by the catastrophe, and that man would be the rector. For his benefice would at once become a sinecure, and there would be nothing to prevent his removing to the metropolis and living there during some months of the year, and living in the Riviera during the other months, and leaving his people to shift for themselves—nothing to prevent this except those trifling considerations of duty and conscience which of course need not be taken into account. But when it comes to a question of preventing the church from tumbling down, or when it comes to a question of pulling it about—when it comes to restoring it—then practically the ownership is surrendered to the parson in the frankest and the freest and the most generous way by the whole body of the parishioners. Then the parson is allowed to be the only responsible owner of the fabric. It is remembered that he rang the bell when he came into his freehold: therefore it must be his; and if he does not take the whole burden of collecting the money and seeing the work through and making himself personally responsible for the cost, in nine cases out of ten it will not be done at all.

Now I am not the man to speak with disrespect of my brethren of the clergy. I do not believe that in any country or in any age there was ever a body of men so heartily and loyally trying to do their duty, and so generously sacrificing themselves to what they believe to be their duty, as the clergy of the Church of England are at this moment. But, whether it is their misfortune or their fault—and we are none of us faultless, not even the parsons—I am bound to express my belief that ninety-nine out of every hundred of the clergy of the Church of England know no more about the technical history of their churches than they know about law—in fact, as a body, the clergy know as little about the history of Church Architecture as lawyers know about Theology, and I could not put the case more strongly than that.

Unhappily, however, the parallel between the amiable weakness of the two professions and their relative attitude towards the two sciences in which each of them delights to dabble may be carried out only too closely. For it is painfully observable in both cases that the members of the two professions are profoundly convinced—the lawyers that a knowledge of theology, the divines that a knowledge of architecture, comes to them severally by a kind of legal or clerical instinct. If a lawyer chooses to plunge into scientific theology, and to write a book on the two Decalogues, or give us his obiter dicta on the errors of the Greek Church, though nobody is much the wiser nobody is much the worse, except the man who reads the pamphlet or the volume. But when it has been decided that a church requires a thorough overhauling, then the resigning the absolute control over and disposal of the sacred building to the parson to be dealt with as he in his wisdom or his ignorance may judge to be best becomes a very much more serious matter.

It would be easy to look at that matter from the ludicrous point of view, but it is a great deal too serious for handling as though it were anything to laugh at. Unhappily, we most of us know a great deal too much about it. The parson in some cases jauntily determines to be his own architect, and the village bricklayer highly approves of his decision, and assures him in strict confidence that architects are a pack of thieves, just as, in fact, jockeys are. The builder begins to “clear away,” then the parson gets frightened. Then he thinks he’d better have an architect—“only a consulting architect you know!” Then the bricklayer recommends his nephew brought up at the board school who has “done a deal of measurement and that like,” and then.... No! no! we really cannot follow it out to the bitter end. But in many cases where the good man, distrusting his own power, does call in the help of one supposed to be an expert, the process and the result are hardly less deplorable. There is nothing to prevent the most ignorant pretender from starting as an architect to-morrow morning; nothing to prevent his touting up and down the country for orders, though he is no more qualified to advise and report upon an ancient building than he is to construct the Channel tunnel. And we all know this very significant fact, that there never was a church that ever was reported upon by one of these solemn and aspiring young gentlemen without antecedents and without any misgivings, which was not at once pronounced to be in a most dangerous condition from weathercock to pavement. The roof is always in a most hopeless condition, the walls are frightfully out of the perpendicular and have been so for many generations, the bells jiggle alarmingly in their frames, the jackdaws have been pecking away at the mortar of the tower, fifty rectors lie buried in the chancel, and a hole was dug for every one of them, and all these holes imperatively demand to be filled up with concrete. But mercifully, most mercifully and providentially, a professional gentleman has been called in at the critical moment, exactly in the very nick of time, and now the dear old church may be saved, saved for our children’s children by being promptly restored. Thereupon the worthy parson—he, too, glad of a job—sets to work and the thing is done.

But what is done? The men that started this Society, this union for the protection of the noble structures that are a proud inheritance come down to us from our ancestors, they answered with an indignant protest: “An immense and irreparable wrong is done, and the state of things which makes it perfectly easy for a wrong like this to be repeated every week is a shameful national scandal, which we will not cease from lifting up our voices against till some means shall have been devised for preventing the periodical recurrence of these abominable mutilations, these cruel obliterations, these fraudulent substitutions up and down the land of new lamps for old ones.”

At starting this was all that our pioneers ventured to proclaim. I have often heard people object, “These gentlemen are so vague, they don’t know what they would be at!” Now, I know that with some folk it is quite sufficient to condemn any men or any opinions to pronounce them vague. Why! Since the beginning of the world no great forward movement, no great social religious or political reform, has ever achieved its object and gone on its victorious course conquering and to conquer which did not pass through its early stage of vagueness—that stage when the leaders were profoundly conscious of the existence of an evil or an injustice or a falsehood which needed to be swept away, though they did not yet see what the proper manner of setting to work was, or where the broom was to be found to do the sweeping with.

Oh ye merciful heavens! save us from cut-and-dried schemes, at least at starting! All honour to the men, say I, who did not pledge us all to a scheme, to a paper constitution, but who had the courage to say no more than this: “Here in the body politic there is a horrible mischief at work; the symptoms are very bad, very alarming. Do let us see if some remedy cannot be found. Do help us to see our way out of our perplexity.”

Eleven years have now gone by since the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded, and I venture to think that the time has come when we must pass out of this stage whose characteristic is said to be vagueness of statement and uncertainty in the plan of operations, and when it behoves some one to speak out and propose that we should take a step in advance. I have no right to compromise my betters by pledging them to any crude proposition, or any course which may seem to myself to be the right one. But, as a mere private person, I hereby declare it to be my strong opinion that no time ought to be lost in settling the very important question to whom the churches of England do belong, and who have the right of defacing, degrading, debasing the temples of God in the land, turning them into blotchy caricatures, or into lying mummies smalmed over with tawdry pigments, like the ghastly thing in Mr. Long’s picture in the Academy this year, with an effeminate young pretender in the foreground making a languid oration over the disguised remains of the dead.

There are some things (and they are the most precious of all things) which no man has any moral right to treat as his own. They are the things which came to us from an immemorial past, and which belong to our children’s children as much as to ourselves. In the county of Norfolk we have one aged oak that has stood where it stands now for at least a thousand years. Under its shadow twenty generations of a noble race have passed their childhood and early youth, left it with a fond regret when the call came to them to engage in the battle of life, and returned at last to find it still there, hale and vigorous as it was centuries before the earliest of their ancestors settled in the land where its mighty roots are anchored. The story of that race is full of romance not untinged by pathos. If that oak were a talking oak, what moving tales it could tell! If ’Arry ’Opkins of ’Ounslow should cast his fishy eyes upon that monster vegetable, his first impulse would be to carve upon its gnarled bark his own hideous name or at least those two unhappy initials which he cannot pronounce. His next would be to suggest that the tree should be trimmed up—restored in fact. I should not like to be the man to make that proposition. And why? Because I think the noble gentleman who calls that oak his heirloom looks upon it as a sacred trust which he holds from his forefathers, and holds for his posterity too—a trust which it would be dishonour to neglect, to mutilate, or to destroy.

But within a pistol-shot of that venerable and magnificent tree stands the little village church. There lie the bones of twenty generations of De Greys; there they were baptized, wedded, buried. There they knelt in worship, lifted up their voices in prayer and praise; from father to son they bowed their heads at the altar, gazed at the effigies of their ancestors—sometimes bitterly lamenting that the times were evil and poverty had come upon them, sometimes silently resolving that they would carve out for themselves a career—sometimes returning to thank God who had enabled them so fully to perform their vow—sometimes glad at the sound of their own marriage bells, sometimes sad when the tolling of those bells announced that another generation had passed away. There stands that little church. The old Norman tower was standing as it stands to-day when, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the first De Grey came to Merton; and I have not a doubt that if a self-styled professional gentleman, young enough and presumptuous enough and ignorant enough, were to appear upon the scene, he would solemnly and emphatically advise that Merton Church should at the earliest possible moment be restored. The horrible thought is that under quite conceivable circumstances the thing might be done with very little difficulty and before you knew where you were.

Think of the feelings of that old oak then!

I know I shall be told that a tree is one thing and a church is another, that the one you cannot restore but you can restore the other. You can restore neither; you can murder both if you are a heartless assassin. Was it in the 1851 Exhibition that they built up the bark of a giant of the Californian forests and told us it was a restoration of a wonder of the world that had reared up its lofty top to heaven even from the days of the Pharaohs? A restoration! Nay! a colossal fraud. But such a fraud as is perpetrated in our midst every month, and which, when men have committed, they are actually proud of.

I am often asked, When was this or that church built? And my answer is ready at hand. It was not built at all! It grew! For every church in the land that has a real history is a living organism. Do you tell me that yonder doorway is of the twelfth century; that yonder tower may have stood where it does when the Conqueror came to sweep away “pot-bellied Saxondom;” that the chancel was rebuilt in the time of the Edwards—the rood screen crowded into a place never meant for it during the Wars of the Roses, the pulpit supplied by a village carpenter in the sixteenth century, the carvings of the roof destroyed in the seventeenth, the royal arms supplied in the eighteenth, and therefore that nothing but a clean sweep is to be made of it all, as a preliminary to building it all up from the ground in the nineteenth century? Do you call that restoration? You assure me that you will faithfully and religiously copy the old. Why that is exactly what you can’t do! You can’t copy the marks of the axe on early Norman masonry. You can’t copy Roman brickwork; you daren’t copy Saxon windows that let the light in through oiled canvas in the days when sacredness, and mystery, and a holy fear were somehow associated with the presence of dimness and darkness and gloom. You can’t restore ancient glass: the very secret of its transcendent glories lies in the imperfection of the material employed. Nay, you can’t even copy a thirteenth-century moulding or capital: you can’t reproduce the carvings you are going to remove—you have no eye for the delicate and simple curves: your chisels are so highly tempered that they are your masters, not your servants: they run away with you when you set to work and insist on turning out sharply cut cusps, all of the same size, all of them smitten with the blight of sameness, all of them straddling, shallow, sprawling, vulgar, meaningless; melancholy witnesses against you that you have lost touch with the living past. You can make the loveliest drawings of all that is left, but the craftsmen are gone. There’s where you fail; you say this and that ought to be done, and this or that is what I mean; but when you expect your ideas carried out then you utterly fail.

I know it is often said that the men of bygone times—say of the fifteenth century—were at least as great restorers as we are. If it were true, that would not excuse us. But is it true? Why, so far from it, it is exactly because the architects of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not aim at restoring that our modern visionaries so often ask to be allowed to destroy their work and to reproduce what they destroyed. I am no great admirer of those perpendicular gentlemen, with their ugly flattened arches and their huge gaping west windows and their trickery and their pretence and their insincere display, but they did know their own minds. They did retain some architectural traditions, and they had some architectural instincts. But what have we to represent even their instincts? Have our craftsmen anything in the shape of historic enthusiasm? or any sympathy with the religious feeling or ritual of the past? Emphatically, No! Have they the old spirit of humility and reverence, of generous regard for their masters, teachers, and pastors in religion or in art? Have we among us the self-distrust which kept in check the hankering of our forefathers to alter or improve? Or have we only the fidgetty and utterly reckless impatience of belonging to the majority of dismal beings, who never make a great hit and leave no monument behind them except of the things they destroyed?

A few weeks ago I was engaged in examining the muniments of the Diocese of Ely, and I came upon an agreement drawn up in strictly legal form between the Prior of the convent of Ely on the one part and Thomas Peynton, master mason of Ely, on the other part—the convent agreeing to allow Peynton an annuity for life of twelve marks of lawful money of England—i.e. £8 sterling—without board and lodging, and a suit of clothes such as gentlemen wore, he to do such masonry and stone-cutting as the Sacrist of the convent should lay upon him, and further to teach three apprentices, to be nominated, fed, and boarded at the cost of the convent, which in return was to benefit by all the profits of their labour. If the convent should at any time send their master mason to work at any of their outlying possessions, then and only then was the good man to receive an allowance for his maintenance. If his health broke down or he became incapacitated by old age, he was to receive a pension of six marks a year, and his clothes, but nothing more. Who has not stood before some of our cathedrals and found himself asking, “How was this temple piled up to heaven? How could men build it in those rude old times.” How? Because in those rude old times, as we are pleased to call them, there were men like simple old Thomas Peynton of Ely, who, having food and raiment, were therewith content; men who lived for the joy and glory of their work and did not regard their art as a means of livelihood, so much as an end to live for; men who were so stupid, so far astray, that to sacrifice the joy of living for a mountain of coin seemed to them propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

You will be able to restore the churches which these men built when you can revive among the humblest workmen the spirit which animated the benighted, deluded, Quixotic enthusiasts of the days gone by, and not till then.

Meanwhile, we do know how to build better houses to live in—immeasurably grander hotels, magnificent clubhouses, and sumptuous restaurants. Our bridges and our railway stations, our barracks and our shops, are structures of which we have a right to be proud; but as for our churches, let us be humble, let us forbear from meddling with what we do not understand. Let us pause before we set ourselves to restore, let us be thankful if we are permitted to preserve.

But preserve? How are we going to begin? As a preliminary, as a sine quâ non, what is wanted is to stop all unlicensed meddling with all ancient buildings throughout the land. This can only be done by making it quite plain to whom those buildings belong. The ownership of the Houses of God must no longer be left, as it is, an open question. It is absolutely necessary that the present anomalous condition of affairs should be got rid of, and without delay, and I see only one way out of the difficulty. The old churches are a heritage belonging to the nation at large, and now, more than ever before, it is true that the public at large have a claim to be heard before these venerable monuments of past magnificence should be dealt with as if they were the private property of individuals, or of a handful of worthy people inhabiting a minute geographical area. There are cases not a few where the whole population of a parish could be completely accommodated in a single aisle of the village church. In one case that I forbear from naming lest some incompetent and restless aspirant for notoriety should fly upon the spoil and tear it limb from limb—one case of a certain parish where the population is under 200 all told—where there still exists one of the most magnificent churches in England, capable of accommodating at least 1,200 worshippers on the floor, and that church untouched by profane hands for centuries, its very vastness has frightened the most audacious adventurers, and it still stands in its majesty as the wonder and pride of the county in which it is situated.

To restore it according to the notions only too much in vogue would absorb a considerable fortune; to preserve it for future generations, unmutilated, undefaced, and in a condition to defy the elements for centuries, would require a few hundreds; and yet it would probably be easier to find a Crœsus who to gratify his own vanity or whim would be ready to lavish thousands upon that glorious structure and turn it into a gaudy exhibition for nineteenth-century sightseers to come and stare at; easier to find that than to find the hundreds for putting the church into substantial repair. Yet I for one am inclined to think that to do the last is a duty, to do the first would probably end in committing an outrage. When we contemplate such churches as this (and it is by no means a solitary instance), what forces itself upon some of us is that they need first and foremost to be protected before we begin to speak even of repairing them. We talk with pride of our National Church. Is it not time that we should begin to talk of our National Churches, and time to ask ourselves whether the ecclesiastical buildings of this country should not be vested in some body of trustees or guardians or commissioners who should be responsible at least for their preservation? Is it not time that we should all be protected from the random experiments of ’prentice hands and the rioting of architectural buffoonery?

All honour to the generous enthusiasm which has urged so many large-hearted men and women in our time to make sacrifices of their substance, not only ungrudgingly but joyfully and thankfully, to make the Houses of God in the land incomparably more splendid and attractive than they were. But even enthusiasm, the purest and noblest and loftiest enthusiasm, if misdirected and uninstructed, has often proved, and will prove again, a very dangerous passion. Before now there have been violent outbreaks of enthusiastic iconoclasm when the frenzy of destroyers has been in the ascendant and when those who would fain preserve the monuments of the past have been persecuted to the death. Is there enthusiasm abroad—enthusiasm to strengthen the things which remain that are ready to die? By all means let it have scope; give it opportunity of action; let it have vent, but beware how you allow it to burst forth into wild excesses; let it be at least kept under control. Build your new churches as sumptuously as you please. Ours is the age of brick and iron, of mechanical contrivances, of comfort and warmth and light. Put all these into your new temples as lavishly as you will, and then peradventure the Church architecture of our own time may take a new departure; but for the old Houses of God in the land, aim at preserving them and do not aim at more!

Let it be enacted that, whosoever he may be, parson or clerk, warden or sidesman, architect or bricklayer, man or woman, who shall be convicted of driving a nail into a rood-screen or removing a sepulchral slab, of digging up the bones of the dead to make a hole for a heating apparatus, bricking up an ancient doorway or hacking out an aperture for a new organ or scraping off the ancient plaster from walls that were plastered five hundred years ago—any one, I say, who shall do any of these acts, even with the very best motives, if he have committed such an offence without the license of a duly constituted authority, shall be adjudged guilty of a misdemeanour and sent to prison without the option of paying a fine. Would you do less in the case of a student at the National Gallery who should presume to restore Gainsborough’s “Parish Clerk” or Francia’s “Entombment”?

Having made unlicensed meddling with our churches penal, the next thing to be done is to carry out a survey of our churches, and to obtain an exhaustive report upon the condition of all the ancient ecclesiastical buildings in the country which up to this moment have escaped the ravages of the prevailing epidemic. I am afraid the list of such favoured edifices would stagger and horrify us all by its smallness.

The report to be drawn up and published of such a survey as I have ventured to propose would set out to the world an authoritative presentment of the actual condition of each church visited, drawn up by duly qualified and certificated professional men according to instructions laid down for them. The reports should include accurate ground-plans made according to one uniform scale, elaborate copies of mouldings, window-tracery, doorways, capitals, roofs—not merely pretty little sketches suitable for the readers of the Graphic, but working drawings, the results of careful measurement; and to this should be added lists of monumental brasses, fonts, remains of mural paintings or ancient glass, a complete register, in fact, of whatever remains the churches contained of ancient work in wood or stone or metal at the time the building was examined and reported on. Of course I shall be met by the objection that the expense of such a survey would be enormous, and that any such scheme is therefore for that one reason impracticable. I am not prepared to go into the estimates. But of this I feel very certain, that, so far from the cost of such a survey and such a publication of reports as those contemplated deserving to be called enormous, it would be much more truly described as insignificant.

The great bulk of the ancient churches which have not been violently tampered with during the last thirty years or so belong to two classes: the very small ones, which have seemed not worth meddling with, and the very large ones which have frightened even the restorers. The cost of drawing up reports upon the small churches would be very trifling and would bring down the average expense considerably, and as to the time required for carrying out such a survey, it need not, I believe, occupy more than three years, though I dare say it might profitably be spread over five. As to any other difficulty standing in the way, it is ridiculous to suggest it. A preliminary survey of all the churches in England was actually begun under the sanction of the Archæological Institute thirty years ago, and a brief report upon the condition of every church in seven counties was published, and may be purchased now for a song. Each church was personally visited by some competent antiquary or architect, and a slight but instructive notice of every edifice was supplied. The survey of the county of Suffolk alone dealt with no less than 541 ecclesiastical buildings of one sort or another. Will it be said that what was so effectively carried out on a small scale by private enterprise thirty years ago could not be done on a large scale now, or that there is less need to do it now than there was in the past generation?

And consider the collateral advantages that would ensue. Consider the immense gain of keeping a band of young architects out of mischief for five years; of inducing them during that time to confine themselves to the severe study of an important branch of their art; of compelling them to become acquainted with the history of its growth and development, and familiarizing them with the minutest detail of Gothic architecture, not in books but in situ; and above all of giving them a direct interest in keeping up and preserving some hundreds of ancient buildings which, as things are now, they have actually a pecuniary interest in tempting people to pull down.

But, desirable as it would be—nay, necessary though it be—that some such undertaking as this should be carried through, the other question must come first. Again and again we find ourselves driven back upon that when we attempt to stem the current of vandalism that may happen to be setting in this direction or in that. The ownership of our ecclesiastical edifices must be placed upon a different footing from that which we have acquiesced in too long. Sooner or later this must come; the sooner it comes the better for the interests we have at heart.

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At this point prudence suggests that I should pause. The time has not come for putting forward more than an outline of a proposal which is sure to be denounced as revolutionary. It will be a great point gained if we can find acceptance for the principle advocated. We all do dearly love our own old ways of looking at things; we all do cling tenaciously to the prejudices which we inherited or which were stamped upon our minds in the nursery; we all do honestly detest being worried into changes which interfere with our habits of thought and action and compel us to enter upon some new course. Yet if it be once brought home to us that a great national heritage is being rapidly sacrificed, allowed to perish, or, worse, being wantonly destroyed for lack of that small measure of protection which life and property have a right to expect in every civilized community, I believe that the sense of a common danger will unite men in a generous forgetfulness of their favourite maxims and a shame at their own supineness, and awaken them to see the necessity for concerted action; and then the thing that needs doing will be done.

There was a time in our history when the cry of “the Church in danger” provoked a strange frenzy among the people. The panic did not last very long, and not much came of it. But if another cry should be raised by gentle and simple and men of all creeds and parties, the cry of “the churches in danger!” I do not think little or nothing would come of that. That would be not the mere expression of a passing sentiment, but it would be a call to action; and when that cry does come to be raised, the public at large will not be satisfied with anything less than drastic measures, because the nation will have been roused to a consciousness of the value of their heritage; and when a great people begins to assert itself, it is not often that it is content with demanding only what it is morally justified in claiming.

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