A Wesleyan minister I met recently criticised the work of his Baptist brother in Jamaica as “shoddy.” One can conscientiously maintain there is no shoddiness in the work of the Church of England in this island to-day.
True, its energies are cramped, its charitable works stunted for lack of funds, but the spirit of growth, expansion, and adaptability is latent within it, waiting only for the necessary means to press on towards its high calling.
To show the position of the Church of England from a numerical standpoint, in comparison with other religious bodies in 1865, at the time when Crown Government under Sir J. P. Grant superseded the old Legislative Assembly, I have copied a statistical table from the Rev J. P. Ellis’ “Sketch of the History of the English Church in Jamaica,” which shows that a little more than one quarter of the religious world in this colony belonged to the State-paid Church, supported as it was by £7,100 yearly from a British Government Consolidated Fund and £37,284 from the Inland Government.
| Accommodation. | Average Attendance. | |
|---|---|---|
| Church of England | 48,824 | 36,300 |
| Wesleyan | 41,775 | 37,570 |
| Baptist | 31,640 | 26,483 |
| Presbyterian | 12,575 | 7,955 |
| Moravian | 11,850 | 9,650 |
| London Missionary Society | 8,050 | 6,780 |
| Roman Catholics | 4,110 | 1,870 |
| American Mission | 1,550 | 775 |
| Hebrew | 1,000 | 500 |
| Church of Scotland | 1,000 | 450 |
| TOTAL | 192,374 | 128,333 |
The census of 1901 placed the population at 745,104. The number of registered church members is 33,000; and if in 1891, when Mr Ellis published his sketch, Archbishop Nuttall calculated the probable total number of persons actually, or nominally attached to the Church of England in Jamaica at 205,941, we may be sure that would, in 1903, be a considerable under-statement of the correct number benefited, or attending the ministrations of her churches. In 1879, when Bishop Courtenay retired from the see of Jamaica the staff of clergy numbered seventy-five, of whom forty-four were maintained by voluntary contributions. To-day there are ninety-three, all of whom are supported by the voluntary system, excepting three, who still receive payments from the old régime before 1865.
The income of the Church is now almost exclusively derived from the weekly collections and from the contributions of the registered members, the minimum fixed by the synod being threepence a week. Each church sends all such monies thus collected to a central office at Kingston, from which they are administered.
I have already referred to the able manner in which His Grace, the Archbishop of the West Indies, has, since 1880, not only guided the Church of England in Jamaica through times of great depression, but has also expanded its activities, notwithstanding the changed state of its exchequer. Now that Jamaica’s prosperous star is, we hope, once more in the ascendency, let us hope that those successful merchants whose money is got from its soil will not forget to treat their Church liberally and generously. Here I can but repeat what I have said on a previous page, one must have a personal acquaintance with the colonies, and the colonists themselves, to appreciate the way they look to Mother Church to supply their spiritual needs.
If I have digressed too much on these matters for the liking of some of my readers, let me appeal to that spirit of patriotic fraternity called imperialism which recent events in South Africa has set throbbing at the heart of English life, wherever the British flag flies, and ask them how they can fail to be concerned or interested in that which here represents the greatest good to the greatest number of King Edward’s subjects.
If we are fascinated by the study of racial problems—and I confess my own liking for such books as Professor Tylor’s “Primitive Culture” and W. S. Laing’s “Human Origins”—our anthropological studies and ethnological leanings will lead us to perceive that that agency which has already, in so short a time, produced promising results out of such unpromising material in the raw, as the West African devil-worshipping black, claims our sympathy.