"There has been a sad falling off in clerical character," says the
Gentle Reader. "In the old books it is a pleasure to meet a parson. He
is so simple and hearty that you feel at home with him at once. You know
just where to find him, and he always takes himself and his profession
for granted. He may be a trifle narrow, but you make allowance for that,
and as for his charity it has no limits. You expect him to give away
everything he can lay hands on. As for his creed it is always the same
as the church to which he belongs, which is a great relief and saves no
end of trouble. But the clergyman I meet with in novels nowadays is in a
chronic state of fidgetiness. Nothing is as it seems or as it ought to
be. He is as full of problems as an egg is full of meat. Everything
resolves itself into a conflict of duties, and whichever duty he does he
wishes it had been the other one. When the poor man is not fretting
because of evil-doers he begins to fret because of the well-doers, who
do well in the old fashion without any proper knowledge of the Higher
Criticism or Sanitary Drainage. What with his creed and his congregation
and his love affairs, all of which need mending, he lives a distracted
life. Though the author in the first chapter praises his athletic
prowess, he seems to have no staying powers and his nerves give out
under the least strain. He is one of those trying characters of whom
some one has said that 'we can hear their souls scrape.' I prefer the
old-time parsons. They were much more comfortable and in more rugged
health. I like the phrase 'Bishops and other Clergy.' The bishops are
great personages whose lives are written like the lives of the Lord
Chancellors; and they are not always very readable. But my heart goes
out to the other clergy, the good sensible men who were neither great
scholars nor reformers nor martyrs, and who therefore did not get into
the Church Histories, but who kept things going."
When he turns to the parson of "The Canterbury Tales" he finds the
refreshment that comes from contact with a perfectly wholesome nature.
Here is an enduring type of natural piety. In the person of the good man
the prayers of the church for the healthful spirit of grace had been
answered in full measure. In his ministry in his wide parish we cannot
imagine him as being worried or hurried. There could be for him no
conflict of duties; the duties plodded along one after another in sturdy
English fashion. And when the duties were well done that was the end of
them. Their pale uneasy ghosts did not disturb his slumbers, and point
with vague menace to the unattainable. The parson had his place and his
definite task. He trod the earth as firmly and sometimes as heavily as
did the ploughman.
If the virtues of the fourteenth-century parson were of the enduring
order, so were his foibles. The Gentle Reader is familiar with his
weaknesses; for has he not "sat under his preaching?" The homiletic
habit is hard to break, and renders its victim strangely oblivious to
the passage of time. Every incident suggests a text and every text
suggests a new application. In the homiletic sphere perpetual motion is
an assured success.
What sinking of heart must have come to laymen like the merchant and the
yeoman when the parson on the pleasant road to Canterbury called their
attention to the resemblance between their journey and
"...thilke parfit, glorious pilgrymage,
That highte Jerusalem celestial."
They knew the symptoms. When the homilist has got scent of an analogy he
will run it down, however long the chase.
It would be interesting to discover the origin of the impression so
persistent in the lay mind that sermons are long. A sermon is seldom as
long as it seems. But it is always with trepidation that the listener
observes in a discourse a constitutional tendency to longevity. In his
opinion the good die young. As it is to-day so it was on the afternoon
when the host, with ill-concealed alarm, called upon the good parson to
take his turn.
"Telleth," quod he, "youre meditacioun;
But hasteth yow, the sonne wole adoun.
Beth fructuous, and that in litel space."
It is needless to say that what the parson called his "little tale in
prose" proved to be one of his old sermons which he delivered without
notes. He was very unskillful in concealing his text, which was Jeremiah
vi. 16.
We are familiar with that interesting picture of the pilgrims as they
set out in the morning, each figure alert. I wonder that some one has
not painted a picture of them about sunset, as the parson was in the
middle of his discourse. It is said that in every battle there is a
critical moment when each side is almost exhausted. The side which at
this moment receives reinforcements or rallies for a supreme effort
gains the victory. So one must have noticed in every over-long discourse
a critical moment when the speaker and his hearers are equally
exhausted. If at that moment the speaker, who has apparently used up his
material, boldly announces a new head, the hearers' discomfiture is
complete. This point of strategy the parson, guileless as he was,
understood and so managed to get in the last word, so that "The
Canterbury Tales" end with the Canterbury sermon.
By the way, there was one ministerial weakness from which Chaucer's
parson was free,--the love of alliteration. One is often struck, when
listening to a fervent discourse against besetting sins, with the
curious fact that all the transgressions begin with the same letter of
the alphabet. There is something suspicious in this circumstance. Not a
great many years ago a political party suffered severely because its
candidate received an address from a worthy clergyman who was addicted
to this habit, and instead of the usual three R's enumerated "Rum,
Romanism, and Rebellion." The chances are that he meant no offense to
his Roman Catholic fellow citizens; but once on the toboggan slide of
alliteration he could not stop. If instead of rum he had begun with
whiskey, his homiletic instinct would have led him to assert that the
three perils of the Republic were whiskey, war, and woman-suffrage.
It is to the credit of Chaucer's parson that he distinctly repudiated
alliteration with all its allurements, especially in connection with the
seductive letter R.
"I kan nat geeste '_rum_, _ram_, _ruf_,' by lettre;
Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre."
When it came to plain prose without any rhetorical embellishments, he
was in his element.
It must be confessed that the clergyman is not an eminently
Shakespearean character. The great high ecclesiastics, like Pandulph and
Wolsey, are great personages who make a fine show, but the other clergy
are not always in good and regular standing. They are sometimes little
better than hedge-priests. But what pleasant glimpses we get into the
unwritten history of the English Church in the days when it was still
Merry England. The Cranmers and the Ridleys made a great stir in those
days, but no rumors of it reached the rural parishes where Holofernes
kept school and Nathanael warmed over for his slumbering congregation
the scraps he had stolen in his youth from the feast of the languages.
As for the parishioners, they were doubtless well satisfied and could
speak after the fashion of Constable Dull when he was reproved for his
silence.
"Goodman Dull, thou hast said no word all this while."