The Census report on Education offers a tempting subject for remark; but the writer has not thought it necessary to go further into the matter than he has done in the note on page [27]. For the reasons there stated, it will appear that there are no grounds whatever for asserting that the parents of this country neglect to provide their children with the means of instruction any more than they neglect to provide them with food or clothing. In every class which by any stretch of the term can be called “respectable,” parents do supply their children with what they consider a sufficient education; and their idea of what is sufficient is, after all, not much lower, everything considered, than prevails amongst the middle classes, who, in a country like this, must always fix the standard. The result of the Census goes to show that the Legislature has adopted the right course—that the way to obtain as large a number of attendants at school as possible is to subsidise, not to supersede, private exertion; and that it is even possible to fix the rate of subsidy too high; for all experience proves that parents will not enforce regular attendance, unless they feel that if their children stay away from school they will not receive something for which they have paid. Whether the Government ought to hold its hand until children of a certain class are brought to the prison schoolmaster is quite another and a different question; for it is clear that under any circumstances those unfortunates must be treated in an exceptional manner. Even if we had a national system, children belonging to “the dangerous classes” would not be admitted to the common schools; for no respectable person, however humble, would allow his sons or his daughters to associate with the offspring of habitual thieves or beggars.
It is proper to add, in order to account for certain local illustrations, which it has been thought advisable to retain, that the substance of the following pages first appeared in a somewhat different form in the Nottingham Journal.
December, 1856.
THE TRUTH, &c.
Among the many changes which the present age has witnessed, none are more remarkable than those we have seen take place in the public mind with regard to the Church of this country.
Thirty or forty years ago, the popular estimate of what was called the Established Religion was as low as can well be conceived. The laity, for the most part, regarded Churchmanship as a mere empty tradition, or at best as a political symbol, and an excuse for lusty choruses in praise of “a jolly full bottle.” The Clergy, unless they were grievously maligned, had but two objects in life—the acquirement of “fat livings,” and the enjoyment of amusements not now considered clerical. Of course, there never was a time when there were not hundreds of exemplary persons in holy orders; but that the prevailing impression was wholly without foundation it would take a bold man to affirm. The worldliness of the Clergy of the eighteenth century has even left its mark on the language. The word “curate” literally means a “curé”—a person charged with the cure of souls, one that has the spiritual care of a parish. Such is its meaning in the Prayer Book, and such was its signification down to the last “Review”; but now it has come to mean only a hireling, or an assistant. In like manner, “Parson” was the most honourable title a parochial clergyman could possess; and that, no doubt, continued to be the case so late as the time of George Herbert. The beneficed Clergy under the Hanoverian dynasty, however, so conducted themselves, that the term is now never used, except by those who wish to speak disrespectfully of the profession, or of some individual belonging to it.
It would be wrong, perhaps, to hold the Clergy entirely responsible for the sad phase through which we have lately passed. That they were what they were was “more their misfortune than their fault.” At the worst, they were probably better than the rest of the community, and, save when by a persecution to the death the Church is forced into a position of direct antagonism to the world, it would be idle to expect it to be much in advance of the age. The short reign of the Puritans so confounded religion with cant that at the Restoration it had come to be thought a sort of virtue to be ungodly. The Church set itself manfully to resist the evil, and no doubt it would soon have been successful; but, unfortunately, the Nonjuring difficulty supervened. Now, it is the misery of a crisis of that description, that the community in which it occurs suffers every way. The men whose labours it actually loses are necessarily amongst the most conscientious, and, therefore, the most valuable, of its ministers; and those who stay behind have their usefulness impaired by the stigma which is cast upon their motives. For, if there are two men under precisely the same obligations, and one of them feels compelled for conscience’ sake to surrender all his worldly prospects, people will never be persuaded that the other, who does not follow the same example, has not sacrificed his convictions to his material interests. We have seen many instances in our own time in which this has occurred. Even at this moment many good Churchmen are reproached with a love of filthy lucre because they do not follow a few who once thought with them, but who have apostatized from the faith of their fathers; whereas, if there be a man in the world to whom secession under any pretext is impossible it is the consistent Anglican—the distinguishing tenet of whose school is the spiritual equality of bishops, and the consequent indefeasible authority of that episcopal line which has from time immemorial been in possession of a given country. In England, the existing Romanist succession was avowedly created by a Papal bull in the year 1850; and it is, therefore, on the face of it, an intrusion, and a usurpation of the rights which are inherent in the representatives of St. Austin and St. Anselm. Yet, because a few Anglicans have become Ultramontanists—a step which involved to them as distinct a giving up of all their former principles as it would have been for a Catholic to become a Socinian—the “High Church” clergy are reviled for retaining their benefices, and declining to follow the footsteps of a Faber and a Newman! In like manner, we may be sure that those Clergymen who conscientiously felt that they might withdraw their allegiance from King James, reaped a loss of influence for good, even among the partisans of King William. Close upon the Nonjuring troubles followed the scandalous attempt of the Hanoverian Government to undermine the faith of the Church by means of improper episcopal appointments, its resistance by the inferior clergy, and the consequent suppression of Convocation. The mischief to which this most unconstitutional step has given rise can hardly be overrated. We can scarcely conceive the confusion and corruption which would creep into the body politic if Parliament were forcibly silenced for a whole century; and there is no reason why the English Church should prosper without representative institutions and free speech any more than the English nation. Under any circumstances, the Church, deprived of her parliament, must have greatly suffered; much more so in the face of those vast changes which have come about in the extent and distribution of the population. The machinery of the existing Church Establishment was designed for a population of five or six million souls. By 1821 the inhabitants of this country had increased to twelve millions. A new population exceeding the old one had thus been introduced, for which the Church as a body had no means of providing a single additional bishop or a single new sitting. Had the increase been evenly spread over the country the mischief would not have been so great; but, unfortunately, the new population chose all kinds of out-of-the-way places in which to settle. A rural parish suddenly found itself a metropolis; and a district, once traversed only by the shepherd or the ploughboy, became the teeming hive of manufacturing industry. In such a state of things the parochial system—perfect as it is where the Church has wholly subdued a country—miserably broke down. A signal failure was in fact inevitable; for what were the solitary parish priests of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, St. Pancras, St. Marylebone, Islington, or Lambeth, amongst so many! For all practical purposes it may be asserted that at least half of the new population were as much beyond the reach of the Church of England as if they had settled in the woods of Canada or on the plains of Hindostan. Year after year the evil went on increasing, until at last the number of Englishmen who did not belong to the Established Church became so great that a Parliament of Churchmen were obliged to surrender their exclusive right of legislation and government. The prospects of the Church were at this time truly deplorable. Its very existence as an establishment was doubtful. The Whig Premier actually bade the bishops “set their house in order;” and the experiment of confiscation was begun. Humanly speaking it was only the difficulty of disposing of the plunder that saved the Church of these realms.
The hour of danger, however, was not of long duration. A new school of theologians arose, who boldly asserted that the Church was not a creature of the State, to be dealt with at the pleasure or convenience of politicians, but a Divine institution, with laws, privileges, and a polity of its own; and that the duty of extending its usefulness belonged to individual exertions not less than to the Legislature. The effect of this new teaching, as it then appeared, was electric. Churchmen no longer sat with hands folded in blank despair, or amused themselves with irrefutable demonstrations that Parliament ought to do something. They set to work themselves. Sometimes it was the clergy who stimulated the laity; sometimes it was the laity who applied a gentle compulsion to the clergy. Churches, parsonages, and schools began to spring up in every direction, with a rapidity that would have borne comparison with the palmiest days of the mediæval builders. The ancient indigenous architecture of the country, and its cognate arts, were in a manner rediscovered, and were brought to a perfection scarcely less than that attained by the greatest masters of antiquity. Indeed, the spread of this new science of ecclesiology has been not the least marvel of the present century. It has pervaded every part of the community; it has slain outright the bastard classicalism of the Age of Pigtail; and it has reproduced itself in the Puginism of the Romanists, and the Ruskinism of Dissent. It has even crossed the Channel, and appeared in the very centre of European taste—in Paris itself—the fount and origin of the whole vast movement being the work of church-building and restoration in this country, which has proved a school of art more effective, because on an infinitely larger scale, than any which modern times have witnessed.
All this has been, moreover, but the symbol of a greater and yet more gratifying change—the gradual rehabilitation of the Church’s character. Never since the Reformation did it occupy so high a position as that to which it had attained two or three years ago. Old scandals, and old epithets of abuse founded upon them, had alike disappeared. We read of Parson Trulliber with much the same feeling of incredulous amazement as we perused the accounts of Professor Owen’s extinct monsters; and we should have looked upon the person who indulged in the sort of Billingsgate which was common half a century ago as if another Rip Van Winkle had stood before us. The ingenious calculations in which demagogues of the last generation used to indulge, with regard to what might be done with the ecclesiastical revenues, seemed like prospectuses of the South Sea Company. The very Horsmans, like their Puritan prototypes who made war on the King in the King’s name, had begun to profess a desire only to increase the Church’s efficiency. The Anti-State-Church Society itself, borne away by the spirit of the times, adopted a clumsy euphemism for its old out-spoken title. It no longer sought to destroy “the State Church”—its object was the “Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control.”
Once more, alas! the sky has changed. What the public now think of the Church, it would be difficult exactly to say; but that a strong re-action has set in, it would be vain to deny. There seems to be an impression abroad that the Church has been taking credit for far more than she was entitled to; that she has had a last trial allowed her, whether she would regain her place as the Church of the people; that her day of grace has passed, and that she has been found wanting. Political Dissent, which had fallen into a state of such ludicrous obscurity, has suddenly revived, and in a Parliament elected under Lord Derby has achieved what it could never do even in the worst times which followed the passing of the Reform Bill—it has effected a lodgment in the Universities. It has several times carried resolutions adverse to Churchrates. The demands of Mr. Pellatt are now granted almost as a matter of course; and not only so, but the very Government goes out of its way to flatter the prejudices of the Nonconformist. Thus, the Solicitor-General brings in a Testamentary Jurisdiction Bill, which would saddle the country with an enormous annual charge in the shape of compensations; the sole object being to afford Dissenters the gratification of reading at the commencement of their probates the words “Victoria, by the Grace of God, Queen,” instead of “John Bird, by Divine Providence, Archbishop.” Some of the concessions which have been made to “the rights of conscience” are absolutely ludicrous. For example, young ladies and gentlemen of the different denominations complain that ill-natured people call their weddings “workhouse marriages.” A remedy is instantly found, at the risk of establishing a Gretna Green in every Dissenting place of worship. In a word, the Legislature seems to say to Dissent “Ask and have.” Very different is the tone both of Parliament and of the Executive, towards the Church. The prayer of the Convocation for permission to reform its constitution is, notwithstanding the plighted faith of the Crown, peremptorily refused. The Royal Letters on behalf of the Church Societies are stopped; the bill drawn up by the bishops to enfranchise the Colonial Church is rejected. It is perhaps hardly worth while to speak of various shabby acts with regard to money votes, such as the withdrawal of the grants to the Bishop of New Zealand and to the Scottish Church; but the animus which dictated them is only too obvious. After all, however, the saddest evidence that the public feeling has undergone a great change is to be found in the Education Bill of Sir John Pakington. Every one knows how fast the Church was becoming, in fact, what she is in theory, the instructress of the people; and till lately no Churchman could have been found to suggest any material alteration in a system which was bringing forth such gratifying fruits. Suddenly, however, Sir John is seized with a panic. The task appears in his eyes to be utterly hopeless, and he brings in a bill which would have destroyed the distinctive character of Church schools, and would have deprived Churchmen of all share (save that of paying school taxes) in the education of every district in which they could not command an absolute majority!