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.
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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.