Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day

by Alfred Farthing Robbins

I claim, therefore, that the State has a right to dispose of such property of the Church as was not given to it in recent times by private donors, knowing it would be appropriated to the purposes of a sect; and I claim it because the tithes were law-created, because the bulk of the possessions passed from one communion to another by force of law, and because the State has continued to pecuniarily aid the Church throughout the centuries during which she has existed. And, if constitutional precedent be demanded, they are to be found in abundance upon the statute book, notably in the measures affecting the monasteries, the Tithe Commutation Act, and the Act putting an end to the Established Church in Ireland.

If it be urged, as it sometimes is, that, because the original royal ordinance enforcing tithes was granted before our regular parliamentary system was in existence, Parliament has no power to deal with it, it must be answered that in all matters within these realms, touching either life or property, Parliament is supreme. And, as bearing even more directly upon the point raised, it may be added that rights of toll and market, granted to boroughs by royal charter before Parliaments were chosen as at present, have been altered and abolished by Parliaments since; and that Magna Charta itself, signed many years before Simon de Montfort called the first House of Commons into being, has been modified, and often modified, since that event.

If further proof be wanted, not only of the power but of the will of Parliament to interfere directly in the monetary affairs of an Established Church, the Act disendowing the Irish Establishment eighteen years ago, and another passed fifty years since, chopping and changing the salaries of the English bishops, may be referred to. And, regarding a further measure of the last half-century, the words of such a sturdy Conservative as Lord Brabourne, used in a letter written in 1887, are eminently satisfactory:—“The Tithe Commutation Act was nothing more nor less than the assertion by the State of its right to deal with tithes as national property.”

But, it may be said, the property, whether contributed by private benefaction or royal grant, was distinctly given to the Church, and ought not, therefore, to be taken away. I dispute both points of the contention. The property was allotted to a Church which acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope, and it is used by one which abjures it; to a Church possessed of seven sacraments, and used by one with only two; to a Church believing in transubstantiation, and used by one holding that doctrine to be a dangerous heresy; to a Church with an unmarried clergy, and used by one in which the large families of the poorer parsons are their stumbling-block and reproach; to a Church which performed its most sacred mysteries in the Latin tongue, and used by one whose ceremonies are delivered in a language understanded of the people. If it be true that the Church to-day is the Church as it has always been, why, in the name of common reason, was Cranmer, the Protestant, burned by Mary, and Campion, the Jesuit, hanged by Elizabeth?

From the fact that the Church of England is not a corporation—that is, it has not property in its own right, and what is possessed by its members is vested in them not as proprietors but as trustees—there flows the consequence that it is mainly the life interests of those engaged in clerical work which have to be considered. And those life interests will be considered and generously dealt with when the time for disendowment arrives.

And then comes a question which many will deem of all-importance—“How is the Church to exist afterwards?” or, to put the point in the extremest fashion, and in the words addressed to the clergy in the very first of the “Tracts for the Times,” “Should the Government of the country so far forget their God as to cut off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claims to respect and attention which you make upon your flock?” And the answer is that, if the Church be worthy to exist, it will be able, like other religious bodies, to stand upon the open and constant manifestation of its own excellences.

Look around and see what the voluntary system has done. In England it has planted a place of worship in every corner of the kingdom; in Wales it has saved from spiritual starvation a populace neglected by the Establishment; in Scotland it has founded a Free Church by sacrifices which were the marvel and the pride of a preceding generation; and in Ireland it has secured to the mass of the people the ministrations of their own religion, despite every bribe, persecution, and lure. Is it in England, where the Episcopalian system has most that is wealthy and all that is socially influential on its side, that a State endowment is needed to provide for its professors what the miners of Cornwall and the labourers of Carmarthen, the hardy toilers in the Highlands, and the poverty-stricken peasants of Connemara provide for themselves? If this be so, then no greater indictment could be levelled against the process of Establishment, no more certain proof could be afforded of the evils which follow in its train, than that it produced such a mean coldness of soul. But the supposition is so dishonouring to the great body of church-goers that its use proves the straits in which the defenders of the existing system find themselves.

Disendowment would undoubtedly reduce the larger salaries allotted to the clergy, and probably increase the smaller. A parson would then be paid according to his value to the parish, whether as preacher or administrator, and he would not draw a thousand a year for doing nothing, while his curate received eighty or a hundred for performing the work. The Church would no longer be a rich man’s preserve, wherein younger sons could obtain comfortable family livings, while their duty was done by ill-paid deputies. We should no longer see an Archbishop of Canterbury, with a salary of £15,000 a year, begging upon a public platform for worn-out garments for the poorer working clergy. A primate is conceivable at a third the cost, and the money thus saved to the Church alone would prevent the necessity for such a humiliating proceeding as openly asking for old clothes for toiling clergymen. With disendowment, in short, men would be paid according to their merits and not their family connections—according to their work and not their birth. And, further, the scandal of the sale of livings—the shame of the public advertisement of cures of souls as eligible according as they are in a hunting country, or near a fishing river, or close to “good society”—would be done away with. Would all these gains count as nothing to the Church, considered as a religious body?

The process of disendowment, then, is the necessary accompaniment of disestablishment; it is possible; it is just; and its effects would make for good. It is necessary, because if the Church is to be severed from the State on the ground that it has failed in its mission, it would be obviously out of the question to leave it possessed of the property given to it to secure that mission’s due performance. It is possible, because Parliament is not merely supreme in all such matters, but has shown within the past few years its capacity for disendowing a Church having precisely the same rights and privileges as the English Establishment. It is just, because no one sect has the right to property granted it on the ground that it represented the religious sentiment of the whole nation. And it would make for good in giving a more distinctively religious character to the clergy, in paying them according to their deserts and not according to the length of the purse that purchased them their livings, and in freeing a religious system from the ignoble associations of the auction mart.