A history of tithes

by Henry William Clarke

The monks in their cells had sufficient leisure to concoct these Constitutions, and palm them on the credulous as the genuine production of the Apostles. The concocted Constitutions were copied and handed down from century to century without any attempt being made to test their genuineness and authenticity. It seems exceedingly strange that African divines and laymen should refer to the Apostolical Constitutions as an authority for the payment of tithes in apostolic times, although Cardinal Bellarmine, a great champion of “Holy Church,” ignored them.[7]

Churchmen like Archdeacon Tillesley, many of whom are in the receipt of tithes or tithe-rent charges, will naturally act like drowning men, and snatch even at passing straws to save the tithes. Could anything, for example, be more childish and absurd than the story of tracing the payment of tithes to Adam? And what makes the case worse is to distort Scripture so as to deceive the people who could neither read nor write, and even those who could read had no open Bible to consult to see for themselves whether these things were so.

Members of the Anglican Church forget when using such weapons as the “Constitutions” in support of tithes, that the very cause of the English Reformation in the sixteenth century was the adoption into the English Church of the traditions and errors of the Church of Rome, which were said to have been handed down by the Apostles in the so-called Apostolical Constitutions, although many of them can be shown to be contrary to the Scriptures. Archdeacon Tillesley does not defend the whole volume of the so-called Constitutions of Clement I., but he does that part which deals with the payment of tithes. He evidently had forgotten the mechanical axiom, that nothing is stronger than its weakest part. “Because the early Christians,” he says, “were liberal to the Church, therefore it was reasonable that tithes in the ‘Constitutional Apostolical’ were true.” Nothing of the sort, because it does not follow as a logical sequence.

After apostolical times, monthly offerings and oblations, we are informed, were made in all the churches, and were used for three purposes. (1) In maintaining the clergy; (2) in supporting the sick and needy; and (3) in repairing the church fabric. These monthly contributions were in the third century augmented by grants of lands, which were annexed to churches, the revenues derived from which were appropriated to the same three purposes. In A.D. 322 Constantine, the first Christian emperor, published an edict which gave full liberty to his subjects to bestow as large a proportion of their property to the clergy as they should think proper. From all these sources of revenue the Christian Church was rapidly increasing in wealth. But for more than four hundred years after the Christian era there was no authoritative Church canon made for the payment of tithes; and then such canon was founded upon the Mosaic Law. The question then is, are Christians justified in adopting the Mosaic Law for the payment of tithes? This law had no force outside Jewish territory. There is no order in the New Testament for their payment. Among the Jews we fail to find such anomalies, rather scandals and misappropriations, in respect to the distribution of tithes, as are found in England and Wales. The gross amount of tithe-rent charge is slightly over four millions per annum. Add to this the extraordinary rent charges on hops, the corn rents and extensive lands awarded in lieu of tithes by the large number of Inclosure Acts. Among the Jews we find no record of lay impropriators, schools, colleges, charities and hospitals receiving tithes. Granted, for argument’s sake, that the Christian priesthood as succeeding the Mosaic priesthood, claimed the tithes according to the Mosaic Law, then it is a misappropriation of tithes to give them to those outside the priesthood, and who perform no spiritual functions. We must therefore go back to very early times, to the history of tithes in the Christian Church, for the beginning of the scandalous misappropriations of tithe endowment for spiritual purposes. In England the scandal commenced after the Norman Conquest with the Norman monks who were in English monasteries.

About one-fourth of the whole tithe rent charge is appropriated or rather misappropriated to lay purposes by laymen, many of whom are quite unconnected with the religious duties of those parishes from which the tithes arise. Then, again, we have a large extent of land—formerly monastic—which is tithe free. There are also lands in the vicinity of large cities and towns built upon, for which the landlords receive enormous ground rents, and when the leases expire they take possession of the house property. But they pay nothing to the Church for the increased value of their land, which may be one hundred times the yearly value per acre before it was built upon.

In the Christian Church tithes were at first given by the faithful as spontaneous offerings, at the urgent solicitations of the clergy. “Nam nemo compellitur,” says Tertullian, “sed sponte confert.” These spontaneous tithe free-will offerings were not given in cash but in kind. Some gave a tithe of sheep, others of wool, or of corn, etc., just according to the free-will of the donor. This was the germ of tithes in the Christian Church, which commenced in the fourth century, and were ordered to be paid by canon law about the beginning of the fifth century. These canons were framed and passed by ecclesiastics. The people who paid had no voice in the matter. The canons which were framed afterwards had ordered them to be paid as a right, as a divine law of the Old Testament, and were not to be considered as free-will offerings. Here is just that specimen of arbitrary conduct on the part of the ecclesiastics which would only be tolerated in the dark and middle ages. Tithes were too profitable a source of revenue to be ignored in the Christian Church. A book entitled, “The Englishman’s Brief on behalf of his National Church,” has been published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. A good cause needs no fiction to bolster it up. In that book there is quite twice as much fiction as fact. The extensive circulation of this mixture has embarrassed many in gaining a correct knowledge of the tithe question from the earliest period to the present time. It is written in the style adopted by special pleaders. It gives a one-sided account of the subject. It asks questions and then furnishes the answers. The answers are most misleading and also erroneous, and it carefully omits a great deal which could be said on the other side. I strongly object to this way in dealing with so important a subject as the history of tithes in this country. To be appreciated, the “Brief” should be impartial, which it is not. It is not my object to review the book here seriatim, and to point out what is fiction and what is fact. In my statements a good deal of the fiction is refuted indirectly without reference to the “Brief.” But I may just indicate one remarkable feat of fiction which appears in it. When the Christian religion was first propagated, the writer of the “Brief” would have us to believe that the converted Jews transferred the payment of their tithes from the Jewish to the Christian ministers, just as easily and as quietly as one could transfer the payment of a cheque from one bank to another. Here is the statement, “So that when the Jews and heathen became Christian, throwing off their old religion and adopting the new religion of Christianity, they never dreamt of being less liberal to that form of religion which they loved the more and had adopted, than they had been towards that which they had loved the less and had discarded. Hence the transfer of tithes from the old religion to the new religion.”[8] We are not informed upon what authority this statement is made. There is nothing about it in Josephus. There is no order in the New Testament for the payment of tithes. No order of a general or provincial council. We read nothing of this in the writings of the first and second centuries. We read of exhortations to pay tithes in the writings of the third and fourth centuries. We read of canons having been made for their payment in the fifth century. But I have failed to find any evidence to support the statement quoted above from the “Brief.”

The Provincial Council of French bishops, held at Masçon in A.D. 586, is commonly considered to have been the earliest council which ordained the payment of tithes. It ordained, “Ut decimas ecclesiasticas omnis populus inferat, quibus sacerdotes aut in pauperum usum, aut in captivorum redemptionem erogatis, suis orationibus pacem populo ac salutem impetrent.” Isidore, in his compilation of decrees of councils, makes no reference to this council. Friar Crab is the first to have mentioned it in his edition of the councils under Charles V.

Lord Selborne considers the canon of this council as spurious, because it proves too much, for it wanted to prove that the Mosaic Law, as regards the payments of tithes, was regarded in A.D. 586 not only as binding from the first upon Christians, but also as having been for centuries universally observed. This was going too far, in his lordship’s opinion, and therefore he stamped it as spurious. Selden was the first to throw considerable doubt upon the genuineness of this canon at the Council at Masçon.[9] The mistake originated in calling the offerings and oblations tithes. The same mistake is repeated by writers at the present time. For instance, Dr. J. S. Brewer, in his “Endowments and Establishment of the Church of England,” 2nd Edition, 1885, translates “portiones” (quoted from Bede), tithes. Pope Gregory says in his reply to Archbishop Augustine’s question, “Communi autem vita viventibus jam de faciendis portionibus, vel exhibenda hospitalite et adimplenda misericordia, nobis quid erit loquendum.” “But as for those who live in common, why should we say anything now of making portions?” etc. Brewer translates the passage thus, “As for those who are living in common, I need give no advice about dividing tithes,” etc. Now, the Latin word for tithe is decima, and is so used in all the monastic charters. The same writer states, and he is followed by writers of leaflets for the Church Defence Institution, that the scriptural precept, “To live of the Gospel” (1 Cor. ix. 14), refers to the payment of tithes. I am certain that St. Paul never intended anything of the sort. I fully admit that the passage may cover a tithe free-will offering, as it would any other free-will offering, but I cannot admit that it implies a compulsory payment of tithes, that is, to carry it to its logical sequence, a distraint on the goods of a person who is unable or unwilling to pay tithe. Such compulsion would be contrary to the spirit of the Gospel of Christ.

I hold strongly to the view that free-will offerings are the only scriptural mode for the maintenance of the Christian ministry, and these are the same kind of offerings to which Pope Gregory referred in his answers to Augustine’s questions.