Jamaica as it is, 1903

by B. Pullen-Burry

Successive floods and earthquakes half ruined the agricultural industries. Cholera carried away 32,000 souls, free trade had thrown half the sugar estates out of cultivation. Thus the depleted revenues of the colony, and the fact that nonconformist bodies were doing useful work without costing the State a halfpenny, whilst the Establishment cost the island treasury £37,284 a year, were considerations which induced the Jamaican Assembly to agree to measures of retrenchment, financially affecting the clergy, since it was evident that the State subsidies were, in view of the reduced revenues, utterly disproportionate.

Later in 1867 Sir J. P. Grant’s first act was to direct the discontinuance from general revenue of all “charges for organists, beadles, and other church servants,” which meant that congregations were in future to pay church expenses, which seems fair enough; but more ominous from a financial point of view was that Governor’s statement that “no vacancy occurring in the ecclesiastical establishment would be filled up, until a new scheme for supplying the religious wants of the island should be determined on by Her Majesty’s Government.” Thus from 1866 until 1870 no new men replaced the vacancies left by those who died during those years. Here it is necessary to refer briefly to the risings at Morant Bay occasioned by the excited patriotism and fervid oratory of a man called Gordon, who inflamed the blacks by his democratic ravings. Froude says: “The crime for which he was arrested and hung was that he had dreamt of regenerating the negro race by baptising them in the Jordan of English Radicalism.” Whether or not General Eyre was to be blamed in the prompt and vigorous measures he took for the protection of the island, at this time, may be open to question, but the direct consequence of his action was the surrender in 1865 of the old Legislative Assembly and the creation of the present Constitution, which is that of an ordinary Crown colony, of which Sir J. P. Grant was the first Governor.

It was about this time in England that Mr Gladstone introduced and carried his famous bill for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. Under the impulse of that feeling, disestablishment and disendowment being in the air, the movement to place the colonial churches on the same footing as the Irish was suggested and proposed to most of the British dependencies. Some, like Demerara, disapproved of the proposals.

In the case of Jamaica from the standpoint of economic reform, apparently, there were good reasons for Disestablishment. Prior to 1825 all acts dealing with ecclesiastical affairs were permanent, but the clergy act of that date had definite terms of duration attached to it. Subsequent acts affecting the Church were also of a temporary character. At the Disestablishment in 1870 these durational clauses had lapsed. Six months after they had been in abeyance no attempt was made by the newly-constituted government to renew them, then the English Church in Jamaica knew it was disestablished.

In June 1870 a law was passed regulating the gradual disendowment of the Church of England in Jamaica. It also enabled Her late Majesty in due time to incorporate by charter the properly appointed representatives of the Church, after which incorporation the Governor had power to vest in that body all church property belonging to any rectory or curacy becoming vacant either by death or resignation, etc. It also secured the continuance of their stipends to those of the clergy who should continue in the due discharge of their ecclesiastical duties as members of the Voluntary Communion.

This year the thirty-fourth Synod was held according to Law 30 of 1870. In 1890 the results of its deliberations were summarised in a volume containing forty-five canons. I need scarcely refer to the times of commercial depression the West Indies have experienced to indicate the difficult and uphill work which lay before Bishop Courtenay and his successors in reorganising a recently disendowed and disestablished church, with State subsidies withdrawn, as well as grants from home societies. It was evident that if she were to exist at all the Church had only to look to herself for support. The question was, “To be or not to be?” Appeals to friends in England, however, met with liberal response. The laity in Jamaica came forward nobly at this juncture, and gave unstintedly their time, advice, and service; whilst heroic men in distant mountain huts and in isolated country mission-rooms, living on the merest pittance, devoted their lives to the work of the Church. The growing numbers, the increasing influence of the clergy, testify to her inherent vitality in no less degree than does the successful way in which she battled with a sea of troubles. Her Communion represents probably the largest number of worshippers, including the best educated people in the island.

To my mind, the history of the Church in Jamaica, during the last thirty years, is an object-lesson for a study on natural selection, and of that expression which applies so variously—the survival of the fittest. At the present day there are 109 churches, 122 licensed buildings and mission-rooms, 93 clergy licensed by the bishops, 115 honorary lay-readers, 165 catechists, and there are 261 church schools in the island earning from the Government £10,000 per annum.

No one can go through the length and breadth of the island as I have been, without being impressed by the fact that the life of a country parson out here is only to be lived by a man possessed with the missionary spirit. Poverty, isolation, bodily fatigue, and countless irritations are his lot. In towns it is better; but the long distances which churches and mission-stations lie apart in some districts means practically living on the roads. One lady, whose husband holds a country living, and who had come to Jamaica directly after her marriage, told me she had not spent £10 in the intervening six years on her own personal clothing. She was very happy notwithstanding, and amused me immensely by telling me that generally the loudest singer in church was invariably the Obeah man or woman in the district. One poor ecclesiastic, with a somewhat weak chin on an otherwise benevolent countenance, uttered the hardest criticism on Archbishop Nuttall I have heard since I have been in the island:

“The Archbishop,” said he, in a tone of asperity, “was Kitchener in the Church.” I laughed and said he “had Kitchenered to some purpose,” but a semi-articulate growl came from a corner of the room, wishing there were a “few more Kitcheners about.”

If in England we are inclined to associate Anglicanism in a setting of refined æstheticism, or with a scholastic environment, the Church of England in Jamaica, figuratively speaking, stares us in the face with its broad adaptability to the needs of semi-civilised negroes, as well as to those of the British settler. Its claim that we should sympathise with its aims, which in the face of discouraging and continued poverty it steadily pursues, in uplifting a once down-trodden and sinned-against race as well as in strengthening and supporting the more favoured, is one we must admit, if we possess a vestige of the spirit of justice.