Just after Mr. Bright had been admitted to the Cabinet, and when the more timid and more plausible members of his party hoped that he would begin to curb his adventurous tongue, he attended a banquet of the Fishmongers' Company at which the Archbishops and Bishops were entertained. The Archbishop of York (Dr. Thomson) said in an after-dinner speech that the Bishops were the most liberal element in the House of Lords, seeing that they were the only peers created for life. This statement Mr. Bright, speaking later in the evening, characterized as an excess of hilarity; "though," he added, "it is possible that, with a Bishop's income, I might have been as merry as any of them, with an inexhaustible source of rejoicing in the generosity, if not in the credulity, of my countrymen." To this outrageous sally the assembled prelates could, of course, only reply by looking as dignified (and as poor) as they could; and no doubt the general opinion of the Episcopal Bench is that they are an overworked and ill-remunerated set of men.
Yet there have been Apostles, and successors of the Apostles, who worked quite as hard and were paid considerably less, and yet succeeded in winning and retaining the affectionate reverence of their own and of succeeding generations. Bishop Wilson of Sodor and Man lived, we are told, on an income which "did not exceed £300 a year." By far the most dignified ecclesiastic with whom I was ever brought in contact—a true "Prince of the Church" if ever there was one—was Cardinal Manning, and his official income was bounded by a figure which even the reforming spirit of Dean Lefroy would reject as miserably insufficient. "It is pleasant," wrote Sydney Smith, "to loll and roll and accumulate—to be a purple-and-fine-linen man, and to be called by some of those nicknames which frail and ephemeral beings are so fond of heaping upon each other,—but the best thing of all is to live like honest men, and to add something to the cause of liberality, justice, and truth." It is no longer easy for a Bishop to "loll and roll"—the bicycle and the motor-car are enemies to tranquil ease—and, if Dean Lefroy's precept and Bishop Gore's example are heeded, he will find it equally difficult to "accumulate."
XL
PRELACY AND PALACES
That delicious prelate whom I have already quoted, but whose name and See are unkindly withheld from us by the Bishop of London, thus justified his expenditure on hospitality: "Palace, I am told, is from Palatium, 'the open house,' and there is almost daily entertainment of clergy and laity from a distance." I will not presume to question the episcopal etymology; for, whether it be sound or unsound, the practical result is equally good. We have apostolic authority for holding that Bishops should be given to hospitality, and it is satisfactory to know that the travel-worn clergy and laity of the anonymous diocese are not sent empty away. But would not the boiled beef and rice pudding be equally acceptable and equally sustaining if eaten in some apartment less majestic than the banqueting-hall of a Palace? Would not the Ecclesiastical Commissioners be doing a good stroke of business for the Church if they sold every Episcopal Palace in England and provided the evicted Bishops with moderate-sized and commodious houses?
These are questions which often present themselves to the lay mind, and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces—I hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce: "I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent, give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine, and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he turns to ways and means, Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "I do think that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops' Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."
The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commission has assigned them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and 100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed 1414 yards—a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching, independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What is true of Farnham is true, mutatis mutandis, of Bishopthorpe with its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order," ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground.