CHAPTER XX
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN JAMAICA—ITS DISESTABLISHMENT, ITS INCREASED ACTIVITY AND DEVELOPMENT
In briefly reviewing the past history, and in contemplating the present state of the Church of England in this colony, there are no words which present themselves to my mind with greater significance than do those of Ruskin. He says: “There are two oriflammes: which shall we plant on the farthest islands?—the one that floats in heavenly fire, or that which hangs heavy with foul tissue of terrestrial gold? We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must now either finally betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history.” That we have not betrayed that trust in this colony there is ample evidence, and that the bright inheritance of honour remains untarnished, the very existence of an active, flourishing, and self-supporting Church in Jamaica testifies, in spite of the dark days and difficult times it has lived through since its disestablishment in 1870.
To understand the somewhat complicated history of Anglicanism in these parts, it will be profitable to revert to the time when Cromwell, in fitting out the expedition commanded by Penn and Venables to crush the Spanish power in the West Indies in 1655, despatched seven ministers of religion at the same time. That stern Puritan and sound statesman could not brook the overbearing pride of Spain, nor was he inclined to submit to the Spanish pretensions with the tameness with which the vacillating Stuart kings had viewed the policy of aggrandizement pursued by that State. Its maritime power menaced his commerce on the high seas; doubtlessly its very existence troubled his Puritan and mystical conscience.
Whether the expedition which Carlyle speaks of as “the unsuccessfulest enterprise Oliver Cromwell ever had concern with,” resulting in our gaining possession of Jamaica, was the outcome of his foreign policy or of religious motives, is not quite clear, but we know that the general who succeeded Venables drew up a formal request, asking that “godly, sober and learned ministers” should be sent out to them, prefacing his request with the words, “Forasmuch as we conceive the propagation of the Gospel was the thing principally aimed and intended in this expedition.” Commending General Fortescue for his “faithfulness and constancy in the midst of other’s miscarriages,” the Protector, alluding to the reproof of God given them in their repulse at St Domingo, characteristically bewails the reports he has received of their avarice, pride, and debauchery, and hopes that a special regard may be so exercised, that virtue and godliness may receive due encouragement, etc.
Whatever zeal for religion the conquerors possessed apparently exhausted itself in iconoclastic outbursts similar to the manner in which the Independents in England earned for themselves immortal obloquy in the mutilation of sacred buildings. Here the victorious soldiers destroyed every Roman Catholic place of worship in the island.
About this time heavy mortality thinned the troops; but the land became repeopled by Cromwell’s coercive Irish campaigns. Two thousand men and women were shipped to Jamaica, whilst in Scotland the sheriffs had orders to “apprehend all known idle, masterless rogues and vagabonds, male and female, and transport them to the island.” The Spaniards, noting the ravages which sickness was making in the troops of their victors, made a futile attempt to regain the island, but General D’Oyley defeated them in 1658 at Rio Nuevo.
In 1666, with the accession of the Merry Monarch, Lord Windsor took measures for the encouragement of an orthodox ministry. Laws were passed regulating ecclesiastical matters and providing liberally for clerical support, all colonies and plantations being then within the episcopal jurisdiction of the Bishop of London.
In 1681, and afterwards, instructions to successive governors declared that “no minister be received in Jamaica without license from the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of London.” But the Jamaica Assembly, which sat two hundred and two years, appreciating the security at which their distance from Whitehall gave them, were by no means a mild and docile legislative body. The absurdity of not being able to get rid of an undesirable clergyman, without the permission of a bishop residing 4000 miles away, caused the passing of an Act which questioned the right of the Bishop of London to suspend either ab officio, or a beneficio, from the island.
Thus at the close of the seventeenth century the State Church in Jamaica was firmly established on a legal basis. In a history dealing with ecclesiastical matters of this period, it appears that the Church was regarded by the Assembly who voted the necessary funds for its maintenance as a respectable and ornamental adjunct of the State. Possibly if the clergy had shown great signs of missionary zeal, its very existence would not have been tolerated. Apparently at this date they ministered almost solely to the whites. The legislators who voted supplies were almost all of them planters, therefore slave-owners. They were, one would imagine, sufficiently intelligent to perceive that Christian teaching, if spread amongst the blacks, would inevitably tend to produce discontent and a sense of ill-treatment. Probably they would have sympathised with Lord Melbourne, who, at a later date, accidentally found himself listening to an evangelical sermon, in which sin and its consequences were sternly depicted, when he expressed his disgust in these words: “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.” That the condition of the Church in Jamaica was deplorable during the eighteenth century is undoubtedly true, although there were here and there bright examples of a higher standard of life than ordinarily prevailed. In Long’s “History,” written in 1774, we read that there were seldom wanting some who “were equally respectable for their learning, piety, and exemplary good behaviour, others have been detestable for their drinking, gambling, and iniquity.” He further declares that “some labourers of the Lord’s vineyard have at times been sent who were much better qualified to be retailers of salt-fish, or boatswains to privateers, than ministers of the Gospel.” Another writer, speaking of the clergy, says they were “of a character so vile that I do not care to mention it.” Without enlarging further on the wickedness prevailing in Jamaica, it will be but fair to remember what was the tone of society in England at this epoch, and we assuredly do not err when we say that in Georgian times religion had reached its low water-mark.
In the days of Erastianism when a bishop was enthroned by proxy, chosen because he could play a good hand at cards, or because he was bear-leader to some scion of aristocracy, or, like Blomfield or Marsh, good controversialists who could toss a Calvinist, or gore an Evangelical, one could scarcely imagine such worthy successors of the Apostles, as they drove to Court functions (even the most impecunious of them) in their carriages with four horses, or discussed the latest scandal over the port that stocked the episcopal cellars, taking great trouble to select fitting men for curacies in a remote island they were never likely to set foot on.
The low state of morals amongst both clergy and laity in England in the eighteenth century is notorious. The poor were left in a state of ignorance and degradation which, in these days, it is difficult to credit. Decency was scarcely known. Profligacy reigned in the highest circles of society. In Lord Holland’s “Memoirs of the Whig Party” we read that at the wedding of the heir-apparent he was so drunk that his attendant dukes could scarcely support him from falling. In Georgian times the conversation and jokes of the first gentlemen in Europe were such that would disgrace a self-respecting stableman in these days, whilst the drinking bouts of the age exceeded anything known in English history previously. Sir George Trevelyan’s lines describe the situation so aptly that I cannot refrain from quoting them:
“We much revere our sires; they were a famous race of men.
For every glass of port we drink, they nothing thought of ten.
They lived above the foulest drains, they breathed the closest air,
They had their yearly twinge of gout, but little seemed to care.
But though they burned their coals at home, nor fetched their ice from Wenham,
They played the man before Quebec and stormed the lines at Blenheim.
When sailors lived on mouldy bread and lumps of rusty pork,
No Frenchman dared to show his nose between the Downs and Cork.”
The conscience of the British nation slumbered peacefully until at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “in the teeth of clenched antagonisms,” the revivalistic preaching of the Evangelicals produced a marked change on religious thought and life: decency once more became fashionable. Extravagance in dress, and in the mode of living, was put down in many of the houses of the great nobles. Clerical iniquities, such as the holding of pluralities, leaving secluded country spots practically heathen, were enquired into and abuses remedied. That the change which had come over the face of things was due to the ghastly tragedies which took place on the other side of the channel, the wholesale slaughter of the French royalty and aristocracy, the tearing up by the roots of all religion and order culminating in the storming of the Bastille by a ferocious mob, is the verdict of no less an authority than Mr Gladstone, who wrote as follows: “I have heard persons of great weight and authority, such as Mr Grenville and also, I think, Archbishop Howley, ascribe the beginnings of a reviving seriousness in the upper classes of lay society to a reaction against the horrors and impieties of the first French Revolution in its later stages.” In another passage taken from “The Dinner-bell of the House of Commons,” we can feel even to-day how intense the shock must have been throughout the civilised world, and how great the impetus given to mend their ways by the demoniacal proceedings in France: “A voice like the Apocalypse sounded over Europe, and even echoed in all the courts of Europe. Burke poured the vials of his hoarded vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom, and stimulated the panic of a world by the wild pictures of his inspired imagination.”
This was a transitional time in English national life; that it was bloodless may be ascribed to the solid sense and law-abiding temperament of the Anglo-Saxon race. Men like George Eliot’s immortal creation, “Edgar Tryan of Milby,” battled with the quiescent worldliness of an unenthusiastic episcopate. In the ardour of their convictions they depicted in glowing language the consequences of unrepented sin. Their enthusiasm and uncompromising devotion to their principles brought home to the awakening nation the horrors of the traffic in human flesh. Their very narrowness gave intensity and concentration to their work, the crowning glory of which was the passing of the Emancipation Bill, when the country paid twenty millions in cash to quiet the newly-awakened conscience, at the same time unconsciously throwing into the bargain the commercial prosperity of the West Indian colonies.
To return to Jamaica, we must not omit to mention that during the century we have been reviewing various dissenting bodies had sent out missionaries to Christianise the blacks. No churchman, however bigoted, would refuse to acknowledge the worth of their self-sacrificing and devoted labours, knowing well that much theological learning and zeal had been diverted from the Established Church on account of its unsympathetic attitude and inefficiency to cope with such ardent souls as the Wesleys and Whitfields of those days. Nor were the great Home Missionary Societies callous as to the religious condition of our plantations. The Church Missionary Society was in the field before that for the Propagation of the Gospel. Space forbids one to do more than to say that many men who were sent out died at their posts, doing their best, and making the way easier for those who followed. The first Bishop of Jamaica was Dr Lipscombe. He arrived in the island in 1824, a time when the agitation of anticipated emancipation was at its height, many of the planters threatening to transfer their allegiance to the United States, or even to assert their independence, for they foresaw the havoc which the measure would play with the sugar industry. Serious outbreaks occurred frequently amongst the blacks; lives were lost, property to the amount of £666,977 was destroyed on one occasion. In a statement of 1832 we find that during the eight years of the bishop’s residence in the island thirteen churches had been built, nine were in course of erection. The diocese numbered forty-five clergy and thirty-two catechists, religious instruction being given on two hundred and eighty estates. At this time the Church was straggling hard to teach the liberated slaves how to use their freedom; and it is noteworthy that during the festivities with which the emancipation was celebrated, extending over three days, no riot, or trouble of any kind, is recorded.
It was during the episcopate of the second Bishop of Jamaica, Dr Spencer, that the Church Missionary Societies practically withdrew help from this colony. The S.P.G. missionary connection ceased in 1865, urging in explanation the more pressing needs of other mission-fields. In these years the Church suffered materially from the withdrawal of financial support. We read of closed chapels, dilapidated school-houses, scattered congregations; but there were more troublous days in store for it, and indeed for the whole island.
Successive floods and earthquakes half ruined the agricultural industries. Cholera carried away 32,000 souls, free trade had thrown half the sugar estates out of cultivation. Thus the depleted revenues of the colony, and the fact that nonconformist bodies were doing useful work without costing the State a halfpenny, whilst the Establishment cost the island treasury £37,284 a year, were considerations which induced the Jamaican Assembly to agree to measures of retrenchment, financially affecting the clergy, since it was evident that the State subsidies were, in view of the reduced revenues, utterly disproportionate.
Later in 1867 Sir J. P. Grant’s first act was to direct the discontinuance from general revenue of all “charges for organists, beadles, and other church servants,” which meant that congregations were in future to pay church expenses, which seems fair enough; but more ominous from a financial point of view was that Governor’s statement that “no vacancy occurring in the ecclesiastical establishment would be filled up, until a new scheme for supplying the religious wants of the island should be determined on by Her Majesty’s Government.” Thus from 1866 until 1870 no new men replaced the vacancies left by those who died during those years. Here it is necessary to refer briefly to the risings at Morant Bay occasioned by the excited patriotism and fervid oratory of a man called Gordon, who inflamed the blacks by his democratic ravings. Froude says: “The crime for which he was arrested and hung was that he had dreamt of regenerating the negro race by baptising them in the Jordan of English Radicalism.” Whether or not General Eyre was to be blamed in the prompt and vigorous measures he took for the protection of the island, at this time, may be open to question, but the direct consequence of his action was the surrender in 1865 of the old Legislative Assembly and the creation of the present Constitution, which is that of an ordinary Crown colony, of which Sir J. P. Grant was the first Governor.
It was about this time in England that Mr Gladstone introduced and carried his famous bill for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. Under the impulse of that feeling, disestablishment and disendowment being in the air, the movement to place the colonial churches on the same footing as the Irish was suggested and proposed to most of the British dependencies. Some, like Demerara, disapproved of the proposals.
In the case of Jamaica from the standpoint of economic reform, apparently, there were good reasons for Disestablishment. Prior to 1825 all acts dealing with ecclesiastical affairs were permanent, but the clergy act of that date had definite terms of duration attached to it. Subsequent acts affecting the Church were also of a temporary character. At the Disestablishment in 1870 these durational clauses had lapsed. Six months after they had been in abeyance no attempt was made by the newly-constituted government to renew them, then the English Church in Jamaica knew it was disestablished.
In June 1870 a law was passed regulating the gradual disendowment of the Church of England in Jamaica. It also enabled Her late Majesty in due time to incorporate by charter the properly appointed representatives of the Church, after which incorporation the Governor had power to vest in that body all church property belonging to any rectory or curacy becoming vacant either by death or resignation, etc. It also secured the continuance of their stipends to those of the clergy who should continue in the due discharge of their ecclesiastical duties as members of the Voluntary Communion.
This year the thirty-fourth Synod was held according to Law 30 of 1870. In 1890 the results of its deliberations were summarised in a volume containing forty-five canons. I need scarcely refer to the times of commercial depression the West Indies have experienced to indicate the difficult and uphill work which lay before Bishop Courtenay and his successors in reorganising a recently disendowed and disestablished church, with State subsidies withdrawn, as well as grants from home societies. It was evident that if she were to exist at all the Church had only to look to herself for support. The question was, “To be or not to be?” Appeals to friends in England, however, met with liberal response. The laity in Jamaica came forward nobly at this juncture, and gave unstintedly their time, advice, and service; whilst heroic men in distant mountain huts and in isolated country mission-rooms, living on the merest pittance, devoted their lives to the work of the Church. The growing numbers, the increasing influence of the clergy, testify to her inherent vitality in no less degree than does the successful way in which she battled with a sea of troubles. Her Communion represents probably the largest number of worshippers, including the best educated people in the island.
To my mind, the history of the Church in Jamaica, during the last thirty years, is an object-lesson for a study on natural selection, and of that expression which applies so variously—the survival of the fittest. At the present day there are 109 churches, 122 licensed buildings and mission-rooms, 93 clergy licensed by the bishops, 115 honorary lay-readers, 165 catechists, and there are 261 church schools in the island earning from the Government £10,000 per annum.
No one can go through the length and breadth of the island as I have been, without being impressed by the fact that the life of a country parson out here is only to be lived by a man possessed with the missionary spirit. Poverty, isolation, bodily fatigue, and countless irritations are his lot. In towns it is better; but the long distances which churches and mission-stations lie apart in some districts means practically living on the roads. One lady, whose husband holds a country living, and who had come to Jamaica directly after her marriage, told me she had not spent £10 in the intervening six years on her own personal clothing. She was very happy notwithstanding, and amused me immensely by telling me that generally the loudest singer in church was invariably the Obeah man or woman in the district. One poor ecclesiastic, with a somewhat weak chin on an otherwise benevolent countenance, uttered the hardest criticism on Archbishop Nuttall I have heard since I have been in the island:
“The Archbishop,” said he, in a tone of asperity, “was Kitchener in the Church.” I laughed and said he “had Kitchenered to some purpose,” but a semi-articulate growl came from a corner of the room, wishing there were a “few more Kitcheners about.”
If in England we are inclined to associate Anglicanism in a setting of refined æstheticism, or with a scholastic environment, the Church of England in Jamaica, figuratively speaking, stares us in the face with its broad adaptability to the needs of semi-civilised negroes, as well as to those of the British settler. Its claim that we should sympathise with its aims, which in the face of discouraging and continued poverty it steadily pursues, in uplifting a once down-trodden and sinned-against race as well as in strengthening and supporting the more favoured, is one we must admit, if we possess a vestige of the spirit of justice.
A Wesleyan minister I met recently criticised the work of his Baptist brother in Jamaica as “shoddy.” One can conscientiously maintain there is no shoddiness in the work of the Church of England in this island to-day.
True, its energies are cramped, its charitable works stunted for lack of funds, but the spirit of growth, expansion, and adaptability is latent within it, waiting only for the necessary means to press on towards its high calling.
To show the position of the Church of England from a numerical standpoint, in comparison with other religious bodies in 1865, at the time when Crown Government under Sir J. P. Grant superseded the old Legislative Assembly, I have copied a statistical table from the Rev J. P. Ellis’ “Sketch of the History of the English Church in Jamaica,” which shows that a little more than one quarter of the religious world in this colony belonged to the State-paid Church, supported as it was by £7,100 yearly from a British Government Consolidated Fund and £37,284 from the Inland Government.
| Accommodation. | Average Attendance. | |
|---|---|---|
| Church of England | 48,824 | 36,300 |
| Wesleyan | 41,775 | 37,570 |
| Baptist | 31,640 | 26,483 |
| Presbyterian | 12,575 | 7,955 |
| Moravian | 11,850 | 9,650 |
| London Missionary Society | 8,050 | 6,780 |
| Roman Catholics | 4,110 | 1,870 |
| American Mission | 1,550 | 775 |
| Hebrew | 1,000 | 500 |
| Church of Scotland | 1,000 | 450 |
| TOTAL | 192,374 | 128,333 |
The census of 1901 placed the population at 745,104. The number of registered church members is 33,000; and if in 1891, when Mr Ellis published his sketch, Archbishop Nuttall calculated the probable total number of persons actually, or nominally attached to the Church of England in Jamaica at 205,941, we may be sure that would, in 1903, be a considerable under-statement of the correct number benefited, or attending the ministrations of her churches. In 1879, when Bishop Courtenay retired from the see of Jamaica the staff of clergy numbered seventy-five, of whom forty-four were maintained by voluntary contributions. To-day there are ninety-three, all of whom are supported by the voluntary system, excepting three, who still receive payments from the old régime before 1865.
The income of the Church is now almost exclusively derived from the weekly collections and from the contributions of the registered members, the minimum fixed by the synod being threepence a week. Each church sends all such monies thus collected to a central office at Kingston, from which they are administered.
I have already referred to the able manner in which His Grace, the Archbishop of the West Indies, has, since 1880, not only guided the Church of England in Jamaica through times of great depression, but has also expanded its activities, notwithstanding the changed state of its exchequer. Now that Jamaica’s prosperous star is, we hope, once more in the ascendency, let us hope that those successful merchants whose money is got from its soil will not forget to treat their Church liberally and generously. Here I can but repeat what I have said on a previous page, one must have a personal acquaintance with the colonies, and the colonists themselves, to appreciate the way they look to Mother Church to supply their spiritual needs.
If I have digressed too much on these matters for the liking of some of my readers, let me appeal to that spirit of patriotic fraternity called imperialism which recent events in South Africa has set throbbing at the heart of English life, wherever the British flag flies, and ask them how they can fail to be concerned or interested in that which here represents the greatest good to the greatest number of King Edward’s subjects.
If we are fascinated by the study of racial problems—and I confess my own liking for such books as Professor Tylor’s “Primitive Culture” and W. S. Laing’s “Human Origins”—our anthropological studies and ethnological leanings will lead us to perceive that that agency which has already, in so short a time, produced promising results out of such unpromising material in the raw, as the West African devil-worshipping black, claims our sympathy.
Finally, those to whom the “heavenly vision” is not a momentary and fleeting phantom, but an abiding reality, will not hesitate to extend by money and by influence, if they have either or both, the consolations of a Spiritual Kingdom to their less enlightened, or less privileged brethren in the British colonies and dependencies.
In connection with this great subject, I know no finer lines than those written by James Russell Lowell, the great American nature-loving poet. Believing that divinity, more or less, lies concealed in the commonplace garb of our humanity, he says:
“Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.”