TWO RIVALS--CANTERBURY AND ROME.
METROPOLITAN Life has its religious phases, also. London contains about
410,000 dwelling-houses, places of business, and public buildings, and
in this vast agglomeration of brick, stone, and mortar--there are about
seven hundred edifices devoted to public worship. In this number are
comprised places of worship for all sects: Roman Catholics, Protestants
of the Established Church of England, Baptists, Presbyterians,
Independents, Jews, Greeks, Moravians, Quakers, Socinians,
Wesleyan-Methodists, and even Hindoos, who have a temple of their own.
There are two hundred and eighteen parishes in the Metropolis, under
the jurisdiction of vestries and parochial bodies who, in turn, are
subject to the Bishop of London, sitting as a temporal and spiritual
peer in the House of Lords. He is Provincial Dean of Canterbury, and
Dean of the Chapels Royal at Whitehall and the Savoy.
The Bishop of London ranks next to the Archbishop of York and
Canterbury, and has an income of £10,000, annually, and the free gift
of one hundred and nine livings, ranging in value from £2,000 to £30 a
year. As Dean of Canterbury his income amounts to £2,000 a year. The
clergymen of the Established Church receiving the largest salaries in
the City of London, whose livings are in the gift of the Bishop of
London, are those of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, £2,290, St. Olave's,
Hart street, Bloomsbury, £1,891, and St. Giles, Cripplegate, £1,580.
The smallest salary is that received by the pastor of St. Bartholomew
the Less, who only gets £30 a year, although his work is far harder
than that of the Dean of Westminster, who receives £4,000 a year. The
salary of the Archbishop of Canterbury is £20,000, and he has half a
dozen palaces throughout the country. The Archbishop of York receives
about £15,000 a year, and has two Episcopal and palatial residences.
[Sidenote: SPURGEON AND "APOCALYPSE" CUMMING.]
Spurgeon, the great Baptist divine, who ranks somewhat like Henry Ward
Beecher, receives a salary of $18,000 a year for his preaching, and his
congregation, in 1860, erected for him a grand tabernacle at Newington,
on the Surrey side of the Thames near the Elephant and Castle, and in
one of the roughest districts of London, at a cost of £25,000. The
design is simple; the dimensions 85 by 174 feet, and here, every Sunday
evening, nearly six thousand persons assemble to listen to the vehement
eloquence of Spurgeon, who has his congregation drilled like a company
of infantry, and can move them to tears or laughter, as he chooses.
[Illustration: SPURGEON.]
In Crown Court, Strand, is the Free Church of Scotland, a well-built
and commodious edifice, where the Scottish Presbyterians attend. The
pastor of this church is known all over the world by his writings and
his prophetic denunciations of the coming destruction of the world,
as "Apocalypse" Cumming. Thousands of pages have been written by this
eminent divine, and hundreds of sermons have been preached by him, in
which he has identified the Pope of Rome with the "Scarlet Woman" and
the "Beast," having the mark on her forehead, yet at the call of the
Ecumenical Council, he was the first Protestant divine in England, who,
in a manner acknowledged the Pope's jurisdiction by writing to him for
admission to the Council as a Priest or "Presbyter." Dr. Cumming is a
very energetic preacher, and his services are always well attended by
the disciples of his church, as well as by strangers, in London, who
manifest a great desire to hear the illustrious Scotch divine.
[Illustration: FATHER IGNATIUS.]
One of the most talked-about people in London is the famous "Father
Ignatius," whose design is to bring over English Episcopalians to the
Roman Catholic Church, although he does not say so ostensibly. This
man is evidently sincere in his efforts to bring back the English
Church to the place of its departure, for the Reformation--as far as
the ceremonial goes. It is very little different, that old-fashioned
church of St. Mary-le-Strand--where I saw Father Ignatius officiating
one Sunday afternoon, in the midst of incense, ringing of silver
bells, and kneeling worshippers, who went through all the most devout
genuflections of Roman Catholicism--from the Mother Church, in its
ceremonial. Father Ignatius wore a vestment, with a huge cross down
the back, his head was shaved on the top like that of a monk, and
his face and eyes, as he descended the steps of the altar, which was
surmounted with a Gothic cross, covered with flowers, and blazing
with lights, had an ascetic aspect, which is not commonly seen in
the features or eyes of a clergyman of the State Church. At every
motion of the body he made a low reverence to the Crucifix over the
altar. This Father Ignatius does not believe in a married Clergy, or
in Lay or Congregational administration of a Church--in fact he does
everything that a Roman Catholic Priest does, including the hearing of
confessions, yet he dares not acknowledge the Supremacy of the Bishop
of Rome, excepting in a negative sense. He is an advanced soldier of a
large and growing party in the Church of England, who gravitate with
tremendous strides daily towards the Church of Rome, but do not know
that they are thus gravitating, or knowing, will not acknowledge the
fact. This puny, slab-faced, and livid-looking Priest, has suffered,
too, with steadiness, has been stoned and mobbed by angry crowds, yet
he perseveres in his work, and has many thousand followers, male and
female, among the brightest, best, bravest, and most cultivated of
England's aristocracy.
[Sidenote: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.]
It is a strange, old-fashioned, and conservative Church, this State
Church of Great Britain. It has lasted three hundred years, with its
feasts and fasts, its liturgy, its prelates, spiritual peers, and
Thirty-Nine Articles.
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
And now for the social status and influence of the Romanists in
England.
There are, in the first place, 33 Catholic peers, 48 Catholic baronets,
and 36 Catholic members of Parliament. There are lords and lords,
and one lord differeth from another in glory as one star differeth
from another. It is unquestionably true that the Roman Catholic peers
and baronets are the representatives of the oldest, most noble, and
most influential families in the kingdom. The reigns of Edward VI,
Elizabeth, James I, and William and Mary, were marked by the extinction
of the greater part of the Roman Catholic houses. The nobles, who clung
to the ancient faith, were slain by the axe of the executioner, driven
into exile, or beggared by the confiscation of their estates, which
passed into the hands of the comparatively mushroom aristocracy that
sprang up upon the ruins of these illustrious families. But a few of
the old nobility contrived to escape the fate of the majority.
There are in the United Kingdom 27 dukes, 32 marquises, 194 earls,
55 viscounts, and 220 barons--in all, 528 noblemen. But as I have
ascertained by dint of patiently reading through Burke's peerage, 228
of these are the holders of titles which are the "creations" of the
present century; 163 date back only to the eighteenth century; 89
to the seventeenth century; 17 to the sixteenth century; 20 to the
fifteenth century; 3 to the fourteenth century; 4 to the thirteenth
century; and 1 to the twelfth century. This last is Baron Kingsale,
whose title dates from 1181, and who is the twenty-ninth of his name.
The most ancient dukedom is that of the Duke of Norfolk, created in
1483. The Norfolks, throughout all their history, remained faithful to
the Roman Catholic church. The present Duke is the fifteenth of the
name, and is "Earl Marshal, Premier Duke, and Earl of England." Of the
three nobles whose creation dates back to the fourteenth century, two
are Roman Catholics; of the twenty who date from the fifteenth century,
six are of that religion; and of the seventeen who date from the
sixteenth century, three are of the old faith. Out of the four hundred
and eighty whose titles are less than 270 years old, only twenty-two
are Catholics. And of the forty-eight Roman Catholic baronets, about
half of the number are the descendants of gentlemen to whom this
hereditary rank was given in the early part of the seventeenth century.
The ancient Roman Catholic hierarchy in England ended in 1584, with
the death of Thomas Watson, Bishop of Lincoln, who died in prison in
that year. The hierarchy was not restored until Sept. 9, 1850, when the
present Pope erected it by establishing all England as the "Province
of Westminster," embracing thirteen dioceses, and presided over by
an Archbishop. During this interval of 266 years, the Roman Catholic
Clergy in England were at first under the direction of an Archpriest.
In Scotland the hierarchy has not yet been restored. It ended with the
death of the last Archbishop of Glasgow, who died in exile at Paris in
1603. Since then the Catholic Church in Scotland has been under the
charge of Vicars-apostolic.
[Sidenote: A SKETCH OF "LOTHAIR."]
The greatest conquest made by the Roman Catholic clergy, of late years,
is that of the young Marquis of Bute, the original of Mr. Disraeli's
"Lothair," in his social and politico-religious novel of that name.
This young and noble lord was born on the 12th of September, 1847,
and is now in his twenty-third year. His father, the second Marquis
of Bute, married Lady Maria North, eldest daughter and co-heir of
George Augustus, third Earl of Guilford. This estimable lady died
childless, in 1841, and the old Marquis married again in 1845, Lady
Sophia-Frederica-Christina Hastings, second daughter of the first
Marquis of Hastings. The young Marquis was unfortunate in losing his
mother when he was in his twelfth year. Lord Bute has been a great
traveler for a man of his age, and being an only child he has had the
best of tutors that Europe could afford.
[Illustration: "LOTHAIR," (MARQUIS OF BUTE.)]
Nearly every young lady of wealth and rank in England set her cap for
the young Marquis when he attained his majority; but this nobleman is
very unlike the Marquis of Waterford or the Duke of Hamilton, who by
the way are distant relatives of his. He is not fond of dissipation,
and since his boyish days he has been of a reflective turn of mind,
with deep religious yearnings--yet withal he is not guilty of cant, and
does not bore one with his religious views. He is good looking, but
is not showy in his dress, and just now he is the lion of fashionable
Europe from the fame which attends him everywhere as the hero of
Disraeli's novel. The Marquis was reared a Presbyterian with decided
Church of England leanings, and was converted one year ago, to the
Roman Catholic faith through the efforts of Monsigneur Capel, who has
also a niche in "Lothair," under the title of Monsigneur Catesby. He
is a most accomplished ecclesiastic, who unites with a fascinating
exterior the greatest ability and perseverance.
[Sidenote: BUTE, MANNING, AND NEWMAN.]
The income of the Marquis is about £380,000 annually, and he has
decided to give one year's income, which is nearly two millions of
dollars, toward the construction of a Catholic Cathedral at Oxford, in
which all the glories of the Medieval Gothic shall be renewed. The roll
of this young nobleman's titles is enough to startle an American. They
are as follows: John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, Marquis of Bute, Earl of
Windsor, Viscount Mountjoy in the Isle of Wight, Baron Mount-Stuart of
Wortley and Baron of Cardiff Castle, Wales, in the Peerage of Great
Britain. He is also Earl of Dumfries and Bute, Viscount of Ayr and
Kingarth, Baron Crichton, Lord Crichton of Sanquhar, Lord Mount-Stuart
of Cumbrae and Inchmarnock, and Hereditary Keeper of Rothesay Castle
(formerly a Royal residence). Besides, he is a Baronet of Nova Scotia
among the Blue-Noses.
Through his mother he is a Crichton, which is a royal House, and by his
father he comes of the equally royal House of Stuart, and he holds the
title of "Lord of the Isles." The motto of his family is "_Avito viret
honore_." (He flourishes in an honorable ancestry.) The motto of the
Hastings family, with which Lord Bute is connected, is "Trust warrants
troth."
The most beautiful woman of the English nobility is Lady Victoria-Maria
Louisa Hastings, who is now in her thirty-third year. This lady was
a great pet of Queen Victoria, and when a child Her Royal Highness,
the Duchess of Kent, the mother of the Queen, held the pretty baby
in her arms as sponsor at the baptismal font, for the sake of a dear
friend, Lady Victoria's mother, who was Stephanie, Duchess of Baden,
and a relation of the Emperor Napoleon. The young girl grew up, and is
now the wife of John Forbes-Stratford Kirwan, Esq., of Moyne, County
Galway, Ireland.
The Marquis of Bute is a relation of the late Baron Stuart de Rothesay,
for many years English Ambassador at Paris.
It has been variously hinted and rumored that the Marquis of
Bute was at one time engaged to the Lady Albertina Hamilton, a
daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, and also to a young lady of the
Sutherland-Leveson-Gower family, which has for its head the Duke of
Sutherland. It is said that the "Lady Corisande" of "Lothair," is none
other than a daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, the former firm
friend of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.
If the Marquis of Bute was indeed a suitor for the hand of a daughter
of the Duke of Abercorn, I am quite sure that he might have succeeded
in his endeavor, for I believe that that worthy nobleman has been
blessed with ten daughters and four stalwart sons, who can all answer
to the Slogan of the Hamiltons.
The young Marquis has residences and castles, and immense domains,
at Mt. Stuart; Isle of Bute, at Cardiff Castle, Glamorganshire, at
Dumfries House, and he has a town house in London; besides, his name is
inscribed on the registers of four London and three Parisian Clubs.
The ablest man in the English Roman Catholic Church is Archbishop
Manning, who has been such a firm supporter of the Papal Infallibility
in the Ecumenical Council. In due time, no doubt, this prelate will
have the Cardinal's red hat conferred upon him for his services.
The greatest scholar in the Roman Catholic Church, in England, is Dr.
J.H. Newman, the celebrated Oxford Tractarian, or Puseyite, who became
a convert to Catholicism, with Manning, and since 1840 has devoted his
brains to the service of his new Mother Church with great learning and
zeal. His picture shows one of the most spiritual faces in England--it
is almost weird in its nature.
There is a monument erected to a man named Dow, in St. Botolph's Church
(Church of England) Aldgate, who bequeathed a sum of money to the
clerk of the church, to pay him for ringing a bell at midnight, on the
occasion of the execution of a criminal at Newgate. This was to call
the attention of the condemned man to his soul.
It was this same Robert Dow who left, by will, in the year 1612, the
sum of £1 6s. 8d., annually, as a fee to the Sexton of St. Sepulchres,
which is just opposite Newgate Prison, for pronouncing two solemn
exhortations to condemned criminals on the night preceding and on the
morning of their execution, as they passed the church-door on their way
to Tyburn-Tree.
[Illustration]