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?
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?”