What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the aged.
It means old men in the seats of authority, not merely in the
church, but in the law-courts and in Parliament, even in the army
and navy. For a test I look up the list of bishops of the Church
of England in Whitaker's Almanac; it appears that there are 40 of
these functionaries, including the archbishops, but not the
suffragans; and that the total salary paid to them amounts to
more than nine hundred thousand dollars a year. This, it should
be understood, does not include the pay of their assistants, nor
the cost of maintaining their religious establishments; it does
not include any private incomes which they or their wives may
possess, as members of the privileged classes of the Empire. I
look up their ages in Who's Who, and I find that there is only
one below fifty-three; the oldest of them is ninety-one, while
the average age of the goodly company is seventy. There have been
men in history who have retained their flexibility of mind, their
ability to adjust themselves to new circumstances at the age of
seventy, but it will always be found that these men were trained
in science and practical affairs, never in dead languages and
theology. One of the oldest of the English prelates, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporter
that he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no time to form an
opinion on the labor question.
And now--here is the crux of the argument--do these aged
gentlemen rule of their own power? They do not! They do literally
nothing of their own power; they could not make their own
episcopal robes, they could not even cook their own episcopal
dinners. They have to be maintained in all their comings and
goings. Who supports them, and to what end?
The roots of the English Church are in the English land system,
which is one of the infamies of the modern world. It dates from
the days of William the Norman, who took possession of Britain
with his sword, and in order to keep possession for himself and
his heirs, distributed the land among his nobles and prelates. In
those days, you understand, a high ecclesiastic was a man of war,
who did not stoop to veil his predatory nature under pretense of
philanthropy; the abbots and archbishops, of William wore armor
and had their troops of knights like the barons and the dukes.
William gave them vast tracts, and at the same time he gave them
orders which they obeyed. Says the English chronicler, "Stark he
was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots of their
abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependencie of the church on
the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from
bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt
before William, bareheaded and without arms, and swore: "Hear my
lord, I become liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly
regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and
death, God help me."
The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has
held, and always on the same condition--that she shall be "liege
man for life and limb and earthly regard". In this you have the
whole story of the church of England, in the twentieth century as
in the eleventh. The balance of power has shifted from time to
time; old families have lost the land and new families have
gotten it; but the loyalty and homage of the church have been
held by the land, as the needle of the compass is held by a mass
of metal. Some two hundred and fifty years ago a popular song
gave the general impression--
For this is law that I'll maintain
Until my dying day, sir:
That whatsoever king shall reign
I'll still be vicar of Bray, sir!
So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories and
Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every
injustice that profits the owning class. And always among
themselves you find them intriguing and squabbling over the
dividing of the spoils; always you find them enjoying leisure and
ease, while the people suffer and the rebels complain. One can
pass down the corridor of English history and prove this
statement by the words of Englishmen from every single
generation. Take the fourteenth century; the "Good Parliament"
declares that
Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs are appointed to benefices of a
thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of
twenty. God gave the sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and
shorn.