It is easy to raise a cry against any one who dares to ask such a question as this by denouncing him as an Erastian. But our clerical incomes are one thing, our sacred functions and office are another. All the Parliaments in the world can never admit me or any one else to Holy Orders: but there is nothing to prevent a rich man from endowing any church or chapel with an income to be enjoyed by the parson of that church only under certain conditions or for a certain limited time. People seem to think that it is of the very essence of an endowment that the income derived from it should belong to the man who is once admitted to enjoy it as long as he lives and chooses to draw the pay. If by anything I have written, or could write, I could exercise any influence in the direction of leading thoughtful men to give their serious attention to this subject and to discuss it earnestly, I should have very little doubt about the result, and I should feel that I had not lived in vain.

Very closely allied with this question is another which is forcing itself upon us all with increasing urgency every month. When we begin to ask ourselves and one another to whom do our Village Churches belong? Who is bound to keep them from falling into ruin? Who has the right to sell the lead off the roof, or the books in the ancient Parish Library, or the bells in the steeple, or the very brasses in the pavement?—and all these things have been done and nobody been called to account—when, I say, we begin to ask these things and press for an answer, we may well be dismayed by the suspicion of how anomalous our position is. The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings has been doing good work for us; it deserves more support than it has received, and needs many more subscribers before its influence can be brought to bear upon the ignorance and Vandalism, and right down rascality too, with which it so often finds itself in conflict. But the work of this society, as things are, can never be anything but palliative at the utmost. A local Philistine with a long purse and no more conscience or sentiment than a gorilla, may do almost what he pleases. It is dreadful to think what might be perpetrated in our country churches with impunity, and what would be perpetrated too, if only the true state of the case were known. Here, too, there is need for the reform of the law. Who do the churches belong to? Who are responsible for their protection from outrage and destruction? There are some country parishes where with a very little manipulation the inhabitants in Vestry assembled might be induced to vote anything; even to the using superfluous seats for boarding up all the windows on the north side to make themselves snug withal. What is to prevent their doing it? Who is to bell the cat?

The Fifth Paper in this volume may not at first sight appear to have anything to do with a Country Parson’s “trials”; and yet it has. There are some people who are never tired of declaiming against the uselessness of our Cathedral buildings. More than once I have been put upon the defensive when railers have lifted up their voices especially against the waste of space which might be turned to good account in our own glorious East Anglian Cathedral. When they whose chief amusement in life it is to find fault are on the look out for something to rail at, they will never be without an excuse for indulging in their amiable pastime. That there are many spaces which might, with great advantage, be made available for worthy purposes in most of our cathedrals, must be apparent to any one who thinks about the matter. The question is, what are worthy purposes, and how may those vacant spaces be best turned to account without sacrificing the dignity of those majestic buildings and their surroundings, and without vulgarising them by introducing associations out of harmony with the traditions that belong to them and, the sentiment of reverence that they arouse? Who that has seen the Cathedral Library at Ely, could doubt whether it is in the right place or no? Or who that knows anything of what has been doing of late among the Archives of Canterbury or Lincoln, can help wishing that such work were doing elsewhere? But why should not our cathedrals become the great storehouses for all our ancient muniments, in which they might find the protection they deserve and the intelligent supervision which might render them accessible to students of our history?

Little need be said to justify the appearance of the Sixth Paper in a volume which professes to treat of a Country Parson’s “trials.” I hope I have made it appear that even such a trial as this is bearable—nay! that it is one of those which may even become a very delightful trial indeed to those who have some resources in themselves, and whose occupations and tastes are such as to make them habitually regret that the winter days are so short, and sometimes even half complain because the summer sunshine brings such irresistible temptations to be idle.

Is it true that we poor country parsons have our trials? Then do not grudge us such comfort as we can find in being snowed up in Arcady.

The last Essay in the volume may be taken as a hint that among other trials which a Country Parson has to bear is the necessity of acquiescing in certain unsatisfied yearnings. That sounds so very heroic now that I have written it, that I am inclined to be rather proud of my own resignation. All my life I have had a hankering to pay a visit to the United States of America. There was a time when I could have afforded the expense of such a trip, but I could not then afford to give the time. Now with an annually decreasing income the way is open, but the means are not forthcoming. But as I think of too many of my brethren who every day of their lives are sadly put to it to keep the wolf from the door and find it difficult to provide even the bare necessaries of life, not to speak of those comforts and simple indulgences which it is so hard to miss when old age and its infirmities have set in—the contrast between their lot and my own comes home to me almost with a sense of self-reproach. Let them whose sterner trials are so much more hard to bear than mine, forgive the irony of one who grumbles that he is too poor to cross the Atlantic on a new voyage of discovery—as though that were a serious deprivation and a proof of his being only one step from indigence. Let them do him the justice to believe that he himself is not insensible to the pathos that lurks in the background of his own lament.

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE
I.THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON[1]
II.THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON (continued)[49]
III.THE CHURCH AND THE VILLAGES[97]
IV.QUIS CUSTODIET[143]
Note[176]
V.CATHEDRAL SPACE FOR NEGLECTED RECORDS[180]
VI.SNOWED UP IN ARCADY[223]
Note[264]
VII.WHY I WISH TO VISIT AMERICA[270]

[The first six essays have, in the main, appeared in the “Nineteenth Century:” the seventh first saw the light in the “North American Review.”]