THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN JAMAICA—ITS DISESTABLISHMENT, ITS INCREASED
ACTIVITY AND DEVELOPMENT
In briefly reviewing the past history, and in contemplating the present
state of the Church of England in this colony, there are no words which
present themselves to my mind with greater significance than do those of
Ruskin. He says: “There are two oriflammes: which shall we plant on the
farthest islands?—the one that floats in heavenly fire, or that which
hangs heavy with foul tissue of terrestrial gold? We have been taught a
religion of pure mercy, which we must now either finally betray, or learn
to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour
bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history.” That we have
not betrayed that trust in this colony there is ample evidence, and that
the bright inheritance of honour remains untarnished, the very existence
of an active, flourishing, and self-supporting Church in Jamaica
testifies, in spite of the dark days and difficult times it has lived
through since its disestablishment in 1870.
To understand the somewhat complicated history of Anglicanism in these
parts, it will be profitable to revert to the time when Cromwell, in
fitting out the expedition commanded by Penn and Venables to crush the
Spanish power in the West Indies in 1655, despatched seven ministers
of religion at the same time. That stern Puritan and sound statesman
could not brook the overbearing pride of Spain, nor was he inclined
to submit to the Spanish pretensions with the tameness with which the
vacillating Stuart kings had viewed the policy of aggrandizement pursued
by that State. Its maritime power menaced his commerce on the high
seas; doubtlessly its very existence troubled his Puritan and mystical
conscience.
Whether the expedition which Carlyle speaks of as “the unsuccessfulest
enterprise Oliver Cromwell ever had concern with,” resulting in our
gaining possession of Jamaica, was the outcome of his foreign policy or
of religious motives, is not quite clear, but we know that the general
who succeeded Venables drew up a formal request, asking that “godly,
sober and learned ministers” should be sent out to them, prefacing his
request with the words, “Forasmuch as we conceive the propagation of the
Gospel was the thing principally aimed and intended in this expedition.”
Commending General Fortescue for his “faithfulness and constancy in the
midst of other’s miscarriages,” the Protector, alluding to the reproof of
God given them in their repulse at St Domingo, characteristically bewails
the reports he has received of their avarice, pride, and debauchery,
and hopes that a special regard may be so exercised, that virtue and
godliness may receive due encouragement, etc.
Whatever zeal for religion the conquerors possessed apparently exhausted
itself in iconoclastic outbursts similar to the manner in which the
Independents in England earned for themselves immortal obloquy in the
mutilation of sacred buildings. Here the victorious soldiers destroyed
every Roman Catholic place of worship in the island.
About this time heavy mortality thinned the troops; but the land became
repeopled by Cromwell’s coercive Irish campaigns. Two thousand men and
women were shipped to Jamaica, whilst in Scotland the sheriffs had orders
to “apprehend all known idle, masterless rogues and vagabonds, male and
female, and transport them to the island.” The Spaniards, noting the
ravages which sickness was making in the troops of their victors, made a
futile attempt to regain the island, but General D’Oyley defeated them in
1658 at Rio Nuevo.
In 1666, with the accession of the Merry Monarch, Lord Windsor took
measures for the encouragement of an orthodox ministry. Laws were passed
regulating ecclesiastical matters and providing liberally for clerical
support, all colonies and plantations being then within the episcopal
jurisdiction of the Bishop of London.
In 1681, and afterwards, instructions to successive governors declared
that “no minister be received in Jamaica without license from the Right
Rev. the Lord Bishop of London.” But the Jamaica Assembly, which sat two
hundred and two years, appreciating the security at which their distance
from Whitehall gave them, were by no means a mild and docile legislative
body. The absurdity of not being able to get rid of an undesirable
clergyman, without the permission of a bishop residing 4000 miles away,
caused the passing of an Act which questioned the right of the Bishop of
London to suspend either _ab officio_, or _a beneficio_, from the island.
Thus at the close of the seventeenth century the State Church in
Jamaica was firmly established on a legal basis. In a history dealing
with ecclesiastical matters of this period, it appears that the Church
was regarded by the Assembly who voted the necessary funds for its
maintenance as a respectable and ornamental adjunct of the State.
Possibly if the clergy had shown great signs of missionary zeal, its
very existence would not have been tolerated. Apparently at this date
they ministered almost solely to the whites. The legislators who voted
supplies were almost all of them planters, therefore slave-owners. They
were, one would imagine, sufficiently intelligent to perceive that
Christian teaching, if spread amongst the blacks, would inevitably tend
to produce discontent and a sense of ill-treatment. Probably they would
have sympathised with Lord Melbourne, who, at a later date, accidentally
found himself listening to an evangelical sermon, in which sin and its
consequences were sternly depicted, when he expressed his disgust in
these words: “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed
to invade the sphere of private life.” That the condition of the Church
in Jamaica was deplorable during the eighteenth century is undoubtedly
true, although there were here and there bright examples of a higher
standard of life than ordinarily prevailed. In Long’s “History,” written
in 1774, we read that there were seldom wanting some who “were equally
respectable for their learning, piety, and exemplary good behaviour,
others have been detestable for their drinking, gambling, and iniquity.”
He further declares that “some labourers of the Lord’s vineyard have
at times been sent who were much better qualified to be retailers of
salt-fish, or boatswains to privateers, than ministers of the Gospel.”
Another writer, speaking of the clergy, says they were “of a character so
vile that I do not care to mention it.” Without enlarging further on the
wickedness prevailing in Jamaica, it will be but fair to remember what
was the tone of society in England at this epoch, and we assuredly do
not err when we say that in Georgian times religion had reached its low
water-mark.
In the days of Erastianism when a bishop was enthroned by proxy, chosen
because he could play a good hand at cards, or because he was bear-leader
to some scion of aristocracy, or, like Blomfield or Marsh, good
controversialists who could toss a Calvinist, or gore an Evangelical,
one could scarcely imagine such worthy successors of the Apostles, as
they drove to Court functions (even the most impecunious of them) in
their carriages with four horses, or discussed the latest scandal over
the port that stocked the episcopal cellars, taking great trouble to
select fitting men for curacies in a remote island they were never likely
to set foot on.
The low state of morals amongst both clergy and laity in England in
the eighteenth century is notorious. The poor were left in a state of
ignorance and degradation which, in these days, it is difficult to
credit. Decency was scarcely known. Profligacy reigned in the highest
circles of society. In Lord Holland’s “Memoirs of the Whig Party” we
read that at the wedding of the heir-apparent he was so drunk that his
attendant dukes could scarcely support him from falling. In Georgian
times the conversation and jokes of the first gentlemen in Europe were
such that would disgrace a self-respecting stableman in these days,
whilst the drinking bouts of the age exceeded anything known in English
history previously. Sir George Trevelyan’s lines describe the situation
so aptly that I cannot refrain from quoting them:
“We much revere our sires; they were a famous race of men.
For every glass of port we drink, they nothing thought of ten.
They lived above the foulest drains, they breathed the closest air,
They had their yearly twinge of gout, but little seemed to care.
But though they burned their coals at home, nor fetched their ice
from Wenham,
They played the man before Quebec and stormed the lines at Blenheim.
When sailors lived on mouldy bread and lumps of rusty pork,
No Frenchman dared to show his nose between the Downs and Cork.”
The conscience of the British nation slumbered peacefully until at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, “in the teeth of clenched
antagonisms,” the revivalistic preaching of the Evangelicals produced a
marked change on religious thought and life: decency once more became
fashionable. Extravagance in dress, and in the mode of living, was put
down in many of the houses of the great nobles. Clerical iniquities, such
as the holding of pluralities, leaving secluded country spots practically
heathen, were enquired into and abuses remedied. That the change which
had come over the face of things was due to the ghastly tragedies which
took place on the other side of the channel, the wholesale slaughter
of the French royalty and aristocracy, the tearing up by the roots of
all religion and order culminating in the storming of the Bastille
by a ferocious mob, is the verdict of no less an authority than Mr
Gladstone, who wrote as follows: “I have heard persons of great weight
and authority, such as Mr Grenville and also, I think, Archbishop Howley,
ascribe the beginnings of a reviving seriousness in the upper classes of
lay society to a reaction against the horrors and impieties of the first
French Revolution in its later stages.” In another passage taken from
“The Dinner-bell of the House of Commons,” we can feel even to-day how
intense the shock must have been throughout the civilised world, and how
great the impetus given to mend their ways by the demoniacal proceedings
in France: “A voice like the Apocalypse sounded over Europe, and even
echoed in all the courts of Europe. Burke poured the vials of his hoarded
vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom, and stimulated the
panic of a world by the wild pictures of his inspired imagination.”
This was a transitional time in English national life; that it was
bloodless may be ascribed to the solid sense and law-abiding temperament
of the Anglo-Saxon race. Men like George Eliot’s immortal creation,
“Edgar Tryan of Milby,” battled with the quiescent worldliness of an
unenthusiastic episcopate. In the ardour of their convictions they
depicted in glowing language the consequences of unrepented sin. Their
enthusiasm and uncompromising devotion to their principles brought home
to the awakening nation the horrors of the traffic in human flesh. Their
very narrowness gave intensity and concentration to their work, the
crowning glory of which was the passing of the Emancipation Bill, when
the country paid twenty millions in cash to quiet the newly-awakened
conscience, at the same time unconsciously throwing into the bargain the
commercial prosperity of the West Indian colonies.
To return to Jamaica, we must not omit to mention that during the
century we have been reviewing various dissenting bodies had sent
out missionaries to Christianise the blacks. No churchman, however
bigoted, would refuse to acknowledge the worth of their self-sacrificing
and devoted labours, knowing well that much theological learning and
zeal had been diverted from the Established Church on account of its
unsympathetic attitude and inefficiency to cope with such ardent souls
as the Wesleys and Whitfields of those days. Nor were the great Home
Missionary Societies callous as to the religious condition of our
plantations. The Church Missionary Society was in the field before that
for the Propagation of the Gospel. Space forbids one to do more than to
say that many men who were sent out died at their posts, doing their
best, and making the way easier for those who followed. The first Bishop
of Jamaica was Dr Lipscombe. He arrived in the island in 1824, a time
when the agitation of anticipated emancipation was at its height, many
of the planters threatening to transfer their allegiance to the United
States, or even to assert their independence, for they foresaw the havoc
which the measure would play with the sugar industry. Serious outbreaks
occurred frequently amongst the blacks; lives were lost, property to the
amount of £666,977 was destroyed on one occasion. In a statement of 1832
we find that during the eight years of the bishop’s residence in the
island thirteen churches had been built, nine were in course of erection.
The diocese numbered forty-five clergy and thirty-two catechists,
religious instruction being given on two hundred and eighty estates.
At this time the Church was straggling hard to teach the liberated
slaves how to use their freedom; and it is noteworthy that during the
festivities with which the emancipation was celebrated, extending over
three days, no riot, or trouble of any kind, is recorded.
It was during the episcopate of the second Bishop of Jamaica, Dr Spencer,
that the Church Missionary Societies practically withdrew help from
this colony. The S.P.G. missionary connection ceased in 1865, urging in
explanation the more pressing needs of other mission-fields. In these
years the Church suffered materially from the withdrawal of financial
support. We read of closed chapels, dilapidated school-houses, scattered
congregations; but there were more troublous days in store for it, and
indeed for the whole island.
Successive floods and earthquakes half ruined the agricultural
industries. Cholera carried away 32,000 souls, free trade had thrown half
the sugar estates out of cultivation. Thus the depleted revenues of the
colony, and the fact that nonconformist bodies were doing useful work
without costing the State a halfpenny, whilst the Establishment cost
the island treasury £37,284 a year, were considerations which induced
the Jamaican Assembly to agree to measures of retrenchment, financially
affecting the clergy, since it was evident that the State subsidies were,
in view of the reduced revenues, utterly disproportionate.
Later in 1867 Sir J. P. Grant’s first act was to direct the
discontinuance from general revenue of all “charges for organists,
beadles, and other church servants,” which meant that congregations were
in future to pay church expenses, which seems fair enough; but more
ominous from a financial point of view was that Governor’s statement
that “no vacancy occurring in the ecclesiastical establishment would be
filled up, until a new scheme for supplying the religious wants of the
island should be determined on by Her Majesty’s Government.” Thus from
1866 until 1870 no new men replaced the vacancies left by those who died
during those years. Here it is necessary to refer briefly to the risings
at Morant Bay occasioned by the excited patriotism and fervid oratory of
a man called Gordon, who inflamed the blacks by his democratic ravings.
Froude says: “The crime for which he was arrested and hung was that he
had dreamt of regenerating the negro race by baptising them in the Jordan
of English Radicalism.” Whether or not General Eyre was to be blamed
in the prompt and vigorous measures he took for the protection of the
island, at this time, may be open to question, but the direct consequence
of his action was the surrender in 1865 of the old Legislative Assembly
and the creation of the present Constitution, which is that of an
ordinary Crown colony, of which Sir J. P. Grant was the first Governor.
It was about this time in England that Mr Gladstone introduced and
carried his famous bill for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church.
Under the impulse of that feeling, disestablishment and disendowment
being in the air, the movement to place the colonial churches on the same
footing as the Irish was suggested and proposed to most of the British
dependencies. Some, like Demerara, disapproved of the proposals.
In the case of Jamaica from the standpoint of economic reform,
apparently, there were good reasons for Disestablishment. Prior to 1825
all acts dealing with ecclesiastical affairs were permanent, but the
clergy act of that date had definite terms of duration attached to it.
Subsequent acts affecting the Church were also of a temporary character.
At the Disestablishment in 1870 these durational clauses had lapsed.
Six months after they had been in abeyance no attempt was made by the
newly-constituted government to renew them, then the English Church in
Jamaica knew it was disestablished.
In June 1870 a law was passed regulating the gradual disendowment of the
Church of England in Jamaica. It also enabled Her late Majesty in due
time to incorporate by charter the properly appointed representatives
of the Church, after which incorporation the Governor had power to vest
in that body all church property belonging to any rectory or curacy
becoming vacant either by death or resignation, etc. It also secured the
continuance of their stipends to those of the clergy who should continue
in the due discharge of their ecclesiastical duties as members of the
Voluntary Communion.
This year the thirty-fourth Synod was held according to Law 30 of 1870.
In 1890 the results of its deliberations were summarised in a volume
containing forty-five canons. I need scarcely refer to the times of
commercial depression the West Indies have experienced to indicate the
difficult and uphill work which lay before Bishop Courtenay and his
successors in reorganising a recently disendowed and disestablished
church, with State subsidies withdrawn, as well as grants from home
societies. It was evident that if she were to exist at all the Church
had only to look to herself for support. The question was, “To be or
not to be?” Appeals to friends in England, however, met with liberal
response. The laity in Jamaica came forward nobly at this juncture, and
gave unstintedly their time, advice, and service; whilst heroic men in
distant mountain huts and in isolated country mission-rooms, living on
the merest pittance, devoted their lives to the work of the Church. The
growing numbers, the increasing influence of the clergy, testify to her
inherent vitality in no less degree than does the successful way in which
she battled with a sea of troubles. Her Communion represents probably the
largest number of worshippers, including the best educated people in the
island.
To my mind, the history of the Church in Jamaica, during the last thirty
years, is an object-lesson for a study on natural selection, and of
that expression which applies so variously—the survival of the fittest.
At the present day there are 109 churches, 122 licensed buildings
and mission-rooms, 93 clergy licensed by the bishops, 115 honorary
lay-readers, 165 catechists, and there are 261 church schools in the
island earning from the Government £10,000 per annum.
No one can go through the length and breadth of the island as I have
been, without being impressed by the fact that the life of a country
parson out here is only to be lived by a man possessed with the
missionary spirit. Poverty, isolation, bodily fatigue, and countless
irritations are his lot. In towns it is better; but the long distances
which churches and mission-stations lie apart in some districts means
practically living on the roads. One lady, whose husband holds a country
living, and who had come to Jamaica directly after her marriage, told me
she had not spent £10 in the intervening six years on her own personal
clothing. She was very happy notwithstanding, and amused me immensely by
telling me that generally the loudest singer in church was invariably
the Obeah man or woman in the district. One poor ecclesiastic, with a
somewhat weak chin on an otherwise benevolent countenance, uttered the
hardest criticism on Archbishop Nuttall I have heard since I have been in
the island:
“The Archbishop,” said he, in a tone of asperity, “was Kitchener in the
Church.” I laughed and said he “had Kitchenered to some purpose,” but a
semi-articulate growl came from a corner of the room, wishing there were
a “few more Kitcheners about.”
If in England we are inclined to associate Anglicanism in a setting of
refined æstheticism, or with a scholastic environment, the Church of
England in Jamaica, figuratively speaking, stares us in the face with
its broad adaptability to the needs of semi-civilised negroes, as well
as to those of the British settler. Its claim that we should sympathise
with its aims, which in the face of discouraging and continued poverty
it steadily pursues, in uplifting a once down-trodden and sinned-against
race as well as in strengthening and supporting the more favoured, is one
we must admit, if we possess a vestige of the spirit of justice.
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.
Average
Accommodation. 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.
Finally, those to whom the “heavenly vision” is not a momentary and
fleeting phantom, but an abiding reality, will not hesitate to extend by
money and by influence, if they have either or both, the consolations
of a Spiritual Kingdom to their less enlightened, or less privileged
brethren in the British colonies and dependencies.
In connection with this great subject, I know no finer lines than those
written by James Russell Lowell, the great American nature-loving poet.
Believing that divinity, more or less, lies concealed in the commonplace
garb of our humanity, he says:
“Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.”