Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London Life

by Daniel Joseph Kirwan

Englishmen have always, until of late days, been conservative, and this old-fashioned Church, with its grave ceremonial, its Canons, and Deaneries, with its Westminster Abbey, its St. Paul's Cathedral, and its Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, has, in every way, satisfied the English people—at any rate, it has served the purposes of the ruling classes.

But the Church of England, like all other things in this world, has received some heavy blows in the course of its existence.

First came the Great Civil War, in which Charles I lost his head, and with him the Church of England lost its revenues, and its great prestige departed when Laud ascended the scaffold.

Then came the Restoration, which brought with it a dissolute King, a dissolute nobility, and worst of all a dissolute clergy. The horse-riding, beer-drinking, and gambling parsons of the reigns of Queen Anne, William, and the Georges, such as Thackeray has so well described, in his Parson Sampson, were morally unfit to join issue, in a spiritual encounter, with such earnest, plucky, and aggressive Christians as Wesley, Whitfield, and Bunyan, proved themselves, and consequently the Established Church lost its hold on half of the working men and the agricultural classes of England toward the first decade of the Nineteenth century. In particular, the manufacturing towns lost all respect for the faith of the King and court, and such places as Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Birmingham, became strongholds of Dissent, while the pews of the rural churches, where the poor of the parishes had never been welcome, since the days of the dissolution of the monasteries, by Henry VIII, were left untenanted, and a brutal ignorance took the place of implicit faith among the English masses.

And to cap the climax, a year ago a bill was brought into Parliament for the destruction of the Established Church of Ireland, a church which never had been accepted by the Irish people, and though the English Churchmen, the Ministers, and the Tory party, rallied to save the doomed edifice, yet it was swept away in a night, despite the maneuvers of the leaders of the House of Lords, who wisely fought the bill as long as they could, believing it to be the first great blow delivered at the Established Church and the English aristocracy since Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

At present there is a terrific struggle going on in the Established Church. One half of the clergy, among whom are the best educated and most scholarly divines, secretly lean to the Catholic Church, and belong to the "Ritualistic" party, with its incense, flowers, banners, and Protestant Sisters of Mercy and Nuns; and the other half are again divided into those who doubt the inspiration of the Scriptures, and openly denounce the entire books of the Bible as a tissue of fables, with Colenso, and a third party, who having sprung from the people, and having no connection with any of the great beneficed Church families, and being incumbents of £100 livings, or less, cannot support their families or educate their children properly. This last faction is a growing one, and though less educated than the other two parties, they are equally earnest, and eagerly await the day when they can join the ranks of the Baptists, Independents, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, or Methodists, for the purpose of forming a "Liberal" or "Broad" English Church, such as Dean Stanley is supposed to represent in his theories.

ROMAN CATHOLIC STATISTICS.

In the mean time the Roman Catholic Clergy are sleepless, indefatigable, and aggressive in their movements, and as they do not hope to convert the middle classes of the English people, who are all staunch Protestants, they have laid siege to the souls of the two extreme bodies, the aristocracy and the very poor and destitute, as well as the working classes. And they are making great progress—in fact alarming progress, as I will show here.

In 1380, when England and Wales had been Catholic countries for more than seven hundred and fifty years, there were more than 14,000 parish churches, and 2,000 religious houses in the kingdom; there was one parish church to every four square miles throughout the kingdom, and one religious house to every thirty square miles; and there were 40,000 priests, monks, and friars. The whole of these churches and convents were taken away or destroyed during the Reformation; and, as I have said, when the church was at last again set free, she had to commence her work anew. In the half century since her hands were fully untied, she has built more than 1,000 churches and chapels, and something like 300 monasteries and convents, and she has over 1,700 priests ministering at her altars. If this be the work of fifty years, how much less is it, proportionately, than the work accomplished by the same church in the first seven hundred and fifty years of her life.

Therefore, the Roman Catholics, while they held supreme sway in England, built 14,000 churches, which is less than twenty in each year, while during the last fifty years they have built 1,000 churches, which is also twenty in each year; but during this period, it must be remembered that the public sentiment of Great Britain had been overwhelmingly Protestant, while in the previous period referred to, a Protestant was unknown.