was liked by all who knew him at St. Lazarus, and much as he was
respected by those who were brought into collegiate relations with him,
was not the very best pastor whom the Church of England could have given
to the people of Eiderdown; but many who will admit this will still
think that in being ordained as a young man on the title of his
fellowship, he did that which was becoming to him as one who had passed
through his university education with honour and success. Fellows of
colleges always have been clergymen, holding high characters as such in
their profession, and why not the Reverend Joseph Brown? Is it not also
known to us that such a man, located as a bachelor in his college, is
more likely to lead a good and sober life as a clergyman than he would
do as a layman? Such, probably, would be the arguments used in defence
of clerical fellowships; and we will admit that the Reverend Joseph
Brown has throughout his whole career given support to such arguments by
his conduct. But yet he has never in truth been a clergyman. Though an
ordained priest, he has done no priestly work, and has always been
somewhat angry when any one has suggested to him that he should take a
part in any clerical duties. At first, indeed, he was somewhat careful
in maintaining outward clerical symbols, and was occasionally anxious to
feed himself with inward clerical thoughts, having been moved thereto by
the terrible earnestness of his ordination,--by the solemnity of a
ceremony which, though he had determined to regard it simply as the
means of placing him in the possession of certain temporal advantages,
so impressed itself upon him as being personal to himself, that he could
not at once escape from its bonds. But gradually he overcame that
weakness, and found himself enabled to live, as any other gentleman
might live, an easy pleasant life, with nothing of the clergyman about
him but the word Reverend attached to his name on his cards and letters.
The colour of his lower vestments approaches perhaps nearer to black
than it would have done had he not been so encumbered, and men in the
world at large are perhaps a little less free in their remarks before
him than they would be before other men. This he regrets painfully; but
it is all that he has to regret. The fellows, his predecessors in the
old days,--who were, in fact, monks as well as fellows,--were called
upon to live in accordance with certain monastic and ascetic rules,
which they either obeyed to their supposed glory, or disobeyed to their
supposed peril. Matins, lauds, nones, vespers, complines, and what not,
were their lot,--and came upon them heavily enough, no doubt, if they
did their duty; but now-a-days we do not care much, even at our
universities, for lauds and complines. Undergraduates indeed must “keep”
so many chapels a week, but the clerical fellow is under no such bond.
Even if he were under such bond he could say his prayers in his college
chapel as well as a layman as he can as a clergyman. And one may suppose
that as a layman he would abstain from doing so when the opportunity is
provided with an easier conscience than he can have as a priest. But his
conscience is easy, because he knows that in fact he is no clergyman. He
has simply undergone a certain ceremony in order that he may enjoy his
fellowship,--and hereafter take a living should the amiable and tender
relationship of matrimony fall in his way.
VIII.
THE CURATE IN A POPULOUS PARISH.
Would that it were possible to enforce upon the bishops, as a part of
their duty, the task of furnishing annually a statistical return which
should show what proportion of the clerical duties in their dioceses was
done by curates, and what proportion by other clergymen; and also what
payment had been made to the curates for the work so done, and what
payment to those who were not curates. Such statement might show us for
instance, in a tabulated form, how many morning services and how many
evening services had been performed by each curate, how many sermons
preached by him, how many children baptized, how many dead men buried,
how many marriages celebrated, and, above all, how many cottages
visited. Then, if we could see, together with all this, what amount of
the payment received could be justly appropriated to each task
performed, we should have some clear idea of the manner in which the
revenues of the Church are divided among those who do the work of the
Church. We all know that no such statistical information is within our
reach. The bishops are altogether beyond our power, and cannot be
ordered by any one to do anything. The idea of comparing the work done
with the payment given for the work would be horrible to the imagination
of every beneficed clergyman in the Church of England. It would be
horrible even to the imagination of the curates themselves, who, like
the needy knifegrinder, have no adequate conception of the injustice
they are themselves suffering; and who are, as a body, so well inclined
towards the rules and traditions of the profession to which they belong,
that they have not as yet taught themselves to wish for a change. No
clergyman in our Church has, as yet, taken it into his head that there
should be any analogy, or any proportion, between work and wages in his
profession, as there is such analogy and such proportion in all other
professions. There is a something of revolutionary tendency in the
suggestion that clergymen should be paid in accordance with their work,
which is almost profane to the mind of a clergyman, and which vexes him
sorely as being subversive of that grand position which he holds as the
owner of a temporal freehold. The very irregularity of the payments
still made to parish parsons, and formerly made to bishops, half
justifies a latent idea that clergymen, though they work and receive
payment, are not labourers working for hire. A second son inherits his
living as the elder son inherits his estate;--and the rector who
receives his living from his bishop is equally firm in his possession.
He may be blessed with 1,000_l._ a year for doing very little, or have
200_l._ a year for doing a great deal; but in either case what he
receives has no connection with what he does, and therefore no such
statistics as those of which we have spoken can be supplied. No
revelation will be made to us tending in any degree to give us the
information for which we ask.
That there will come an adjustment between work and wages in the Church,
as in all other professions, is certain. Indeed, much has been done
towards this adjustment already, though not after the fashion above
proposed. The incomes of all bishops have been arranged on such an
idea,--to the great detriment, as has before been explained, of
episcopal magnificence. Deans and canons have fallen beneath the
levelling hands of ecclesiastico-political economists. And out of the
funds which have been acquired by these adjustments and curtailings of
ecclesiastical wealth, certain incumbents working in populous parishes
have received augmentations of pay, making their incomes up to the very
modest stipend of 300_l._ per annum. But nothing in all this has touched
the great body of the clergymen of the Church of England, or has as yet
shown any general recognition of the principle that the hire of the
labourer should be proportioned to the labour done.
In speaking of the work and wages of curates, it must of course be
admitted that in all professions and all trades the beginner should be
contented to work his way up, taking at first, and being contented to
take, a modest remuneration for the very best that he can do. The young
barrister does not get fifty-guinea fees at once, nor does the young
medical practitioner jump at once into the good graces of the old ladies
and gentlemen who make the fortunes of mature doctors; but at the bar,
and in the profession of physic, there is at least some proportion kept.
The man who gets the most money is generally the hardest-worked man;--or
if, in some cases, it be not so, the lower man who works harder than him
above him receives something like a fair share of the spoil. If he be
successful in work he is successful in pay also. Being successful in
work, he will not work without success in pay. But the curate, let his
success in work be what it may, does not even think that he has, on that
account, a claim to proportionate remuneration. If he can get to the
soft side of his bishop, if he have an aunt that knows some friend of
the Lord Chancellor, or a father who has means to buy a living for
him,--and he be not himself of too tender a conscience in the matter of
simony,--then he may hope to rise. But of rising in his profession
because he is fit to rise he has no hope. The idea has not, as yet, come
home to him that he has a positive claim upon his bishop because he has
worked hard and honestly in his profession.
It is notorious that a rector in the Church of England, in the
possession of a living of, let us say, a thousand a year, shall employ a
curate at seventy pounds a year, that the curate shall do three-fourths
or more of the work of the parish, that he shall remain in that position
for twenty years, taking one-fourteenth of the wages while he does
three-fourths of the work, and that nobody shall think that the rector
is wrong or the curate ill-used! All the world,--that is to say, the
rector’s friends and the curate’s friends also,--have been so long
accustomed to this state of things, the bishops have had it so long
under their eyes, the idea of a temporal freehold in a living being a
good thing for the parson instead of a good thing for the parishioner
has got such a hold of us all,--that we none of us see the injustice of
the present practice, or stop to inquire how it grew up among us,
originating in a practice that was not unjust. When the rectors and
vicars were very many among us in comparison to the curates, when a
curate was needed in but few parishes,--the ordinary tenure of a curacy
was, of course, short. There have been instances, no doubt, since the
earliest years in which curates were employed, of curates who have
remained curates till they were old men; but the succession from the
smaller number of the inferior grade to the much larger number of the
superior grade was, of course, rapid, and a clerical babe would be
contented to take a curacy even at seventy pounds a year, who might
reasonably expect to be raised from that humble position after a service
of two or three years. But now-a-days, since the immense increase of
population has forced upon us an increase of curates,--any increase in
the number of endowed rectors and vicars being out of our reach,--the
clerical babe must become a clerical old man on the same pittance, and
it is coming to pass that young men whose friends have been at the
trouble of giving them a good education, do not like the prospect of
becoming curates, without any prospect of rising from their curacies to
the glories and comforts of full-blown parsondom.
And in considering this matter we must remember that the curate of
to-day is deprived of a great advantage which belonged as a matter of
course to the curate of yesterday. The latter was presumed to be, by
virtue of his calling, a gentleman, and as such possessed almost a right
to be admitted into society which neither his fortune nor his own
abilities would have opened to him. He was a gentleman as it were by Act
of Parliament, and it was understood that he might receive where he
could not give, and so enjoy many of those good things which a liberal
income produces, though such things were beyond the reach of his own
purse. Thus the pains of his position were mitigated. And in this way
the poor clergyman mixed with men who were not poor, and received a
something from his status in the world, to which no disgrace was
attached, though it was something which he could not return. But we may
say that all this is now altered. A clergyman is no longer a gentleman
by Act of Parliament. Till the other day he was admitted into all
families simply because he had a place in the reading-desk of the parish
church;--but he is no longer so admitted. Things have become changed
within a few years, and mothers are becoming as chary of admitting the
curate among their flocks--till they know exactly what are the curate’s
bearings--as they have ever been in regard to the new young doctor till
they have known his bearings. Under these circumstances, all men who
care for the Church of England are beginning to ask themselves how the
race of curates is to be continued.
Let us for a moment look at the life of a curate of the present day. We
will suppose that he comes from some college at Cambridge or Oxford. We
will so suppose because Cambridge and Oxford still give us the majority
of our clergymen, though we can hardly hope that they will long continue
to be so bountiful. He enters the Church, moved to do so by what we all
call a special vocation. During the period of his education he feels
himself to be warmed towards the teaching of the English Protestant
Church, and as he finds the ministry easily in his way he enters it--and
at about the age of twenty-four he becomes a curate. He is at first
gratified at the ease with which are confided to him the duties of an
assistant in the cure of souls, and does not think much of the stipend
which is allotted to him. He has lived as a boy at the university upon
two hundred a year without falling much into debt, and thinks that as a
man he can live easily upon seventy pounds. Hitherto he has indulged
himself with many things. He has smoked cigars, and had his wine
parties, and been luxurious; but as a curate he will be delighted to
deny himself all luxuries. His heart will be in the service of his God,
and his appetites shall be to him as thorns which he will make to
crackle in the fire. To eat bread without butter and to drink tea
without milk is a glory to him,--and so he begins the world.
And for a year or two, if he be not weak-minded, things do not go badly
with him. The parson’s wife sees far into his character, and is kind to
him, stirred thereto by a conviction of which she is herself
unconscious, that the money payment made by her husband is insufficient.
The dry bread and the brown tea are still sweetened by reminiscences of
St. Paul’s sufferings, and the young man consoles himself by inward
whisperings of forty stripes save one five times repeated. To be
persecuted is as yet sweet to him, and he knows that in doing all the
rector’s work for seventy pounds a year he is being persecuted. But
anon there grows up within his breast a feeling in which the grievance
as regards this world is brought into unpleasant contact with the
persecution in which he has a pietistic delight. He still rejoices in
the reflection that he cannot possibly buy for himself a much-needed
half-dozen of new shirts, but is uncomfortably angry because the rector
himself is not only idle, but has bought a new carriage. And then he
gives way a little--the least in the world--and at the end of the year
owes the butcher a small bill which he cannot settle. From that day the
vision of St. Paul melts before his eyes, and he sighs for replenished
fleshpots.
But he still works hard in his curacy,--perhaps harder than ever, driven
thereto by certain inward furies. What will become of him,--of him, with
his seventy pounds a year, and nothing further to expect as professional
result, if he be deserted by his religious ecstasy? But religious
ecstasy will not permit itself to be maintained on such terms, and
gradually there creeps upon him the heart-breaking disappointment of a
soured and an injured man. In the midst of this he takes to himself a
wife. It is always so. The man who is most in the dark will be the best
inclined to take a leap in the dark. In the lowest period of his
despondency he becomes a married man--enjoying at the moment a little
fitful gleam of shortlived worldly pleasure. Then, again, he is a male
saint for a few months, with a female saint beside him; and after that
all collapses, and he goes down into irrevocable misery and distress. In
a few years we know of him as a beggar of old clothes, as a man whom
from time to time his friends are asked to lift from unutterable depths
of distress by donations which no gentleman can take without a crushed
spirit--as a pauper whom the poor around him know to be a pauper, and
will not, therefore, respect as a minister of their religion. In all
this there has been very little, we may say nothing, of fault in the
curate himself. As a young man, almost as a boy, he placed himself in a
position of which he knew the old conditions rather than those then
existing around him--and through that mistake he fell.
But young men are now beginning to know, and the fathers of young men
also, what are at present the true conditions of the Church of England
as a profession, and they who have been nurtured softly, and who have
any choice, will not undergo its trials--and its injustice! For men of a
lower class in life, who have come from harder antecedents, the normal
seventy pounds per annum may suffice; but all modern Churchmen will
understand what must be the effect on the Church if such be the recruits
to which the Church must trust.
IX.
THE IRISH BENEFICED CLERGYMAN.
The difference between an Irish and an English parson is greater,
perhaps, than that which exists between Irishmen and Englishmen of any
other special denomination, and is of a nature exactly contrary to that
which generally marks the distinctive character of the Milesian and the
John Bull. The normal Irishman is a jolly fellow; but the normal Irish
Protestant clergyman is a severe, sombre man, one who speaks of life in
sad, subdued tones,--unless when he is minatory in the pulpit,--one who
looks at things around him with a continual remembrance that life is but
a span long, that men are but grass of the field, that the sickle is
ready and the oven heated, and that it is worth no man’s while to be
comfortable here on earth. He is preaching every moment of his life,
preaching in his gait, preaching in every tone of his voice, preaching
in every act that he does, preaching in every turn of his eyes. Find him
asleep, and you will find him preaching with a long-protracted,
indignant, low-church, Protestant snore, very eloquent as to the scarlet
woman. But an English parson, let him be ever so much given to
preaching, preaches only from his pulpit. He may scold, advise, or
cajole in the school, the cottage, or the drawing-room; but he keeps his
sermons for his Sunday work. An Irish clergyman does not shake hands
with you without leaving a text or two in your palm,--with his own
special comments on their tenour as regards the Pope.
The reason of this is not far to seek. The Irish clergyman does not live
in the midst of Protestants with whom he sympathizes, but is surrounded
by Roman Catholics with whom he cannot sympathize, and against whom he
is driven to feel almost a personal enmity, not only by reason of their
creed which he sorely hates, but by reason also of the anomalies of his
own position which are so hateful to them. He is always in a state of
feud,--in a state of feud, not only against the devil, as should be the
case with all of us whether clergymen or laymen, but against Antichrist
on the Seven Hills, against the scarlet woman who goes about devouring,
against the Pope who is to him a ravenous old woman as to whom he cannot
say whether he is most ravenous or most old-womanish, against a creed
which has for him none of the attractions of Christianity,--in which he
sees only the small points of divergence from his own, and which is,
therefore, worse to him than the creed of Mussulman or of Jew. He is
therefore always serious, as is a soldier who is ever buckling on his
armour, and somewhat sad, as is a soldier who cannot get his enemy down
so that he may take away his standard and trample on him. The Irish
Protestant clergyman is ever longing to lead troops of the Roman
Catholics of Ireland in triumph to the top of the Tarpeian rock of
conversion; but they succeed in bringing thither but one and another,
and these one and another are such that they hardly grace the chariot
wheels of their victors.
The popular idea of an Irish clergyman in England is, we think, somewhat
incorrect. He is often supposed to be an idle man, listless for want of
occupation, given to self-indulgence, ill-educated, eager only in
defence of his temporalities, and warmly attached to the party politics
of Protestants, rather than to their religion. Such men may doubtless be
found among the holders of livings in Ireland, as they may also in
England; but such is not the general character of the Irish clergyman.
He is a man always active, though unfortunately his activity has but
small field of usefulness. His air is not the air of a listless man, but
of a man disappointed,--as it may well be. As he goes on in life he may
come to love too dearly his slippers and his armchair, and perhaps to
feel, as disappointed men will feel,--will feel but not
acknowledge,--that the consolations of the dinner-table are, and that
none others are, reliable; but such is not his normal condition of body
or mind. I will not say that he is generally well-educated,--because the
word means so much. But the Irish clergyman has generally read as much
as his brother in England, though his reading has been of a different
nature. Of reading applicable specially to his own profession he has
probably endured more than his brother in England. In short he is more
of a clergyman and less of a man of the world than the English
parson,--with this misfortune, that his clerical activities are always
at work against enemies and not on behalf of friends.
There would not be space for me to say much, in this short sketch, of
the now acknowledged anomalies of the position of the Church of England
as established in Ireland; but I will endeavour to describe the outward
form and bearing of the clergyman whom these anomalies have produced,
begging my readers to believe at the outset that the Irish clergyman may
be regarded, nine times out of ten,--ninety-nine out of a hundred I
think we might say,--as a sincere man, as a man with strong convictions,
who has no shadow of doubt in his own mind that the surest road to
heaven, if not the only one, is by that special pathway of which he
professes to have the clue. There is no reservation within his mind, as
to his religion with its intricacies being good for the ignorant, for
instance, though perhaps not altogether needed for the educated. He has
no doubts. The Eureka with him is a certainty. That men will be saved
and will be damned as they live remote from or attached to papistical
teachings is to him a reality. Now it is something that a man should be
capable of a sincere belief, and that he should succeed in attaining to
it.
The Irish beneficed clergyman has almost always been educated at
Trinity, Dublin, and has there been indoctrinated with those high
Protestant principles with which he has before been inoculated. He is,
of course, the son of an Irish Protestant gentleman, and has therefore
sucked them in with his mother’s milk. He goes before his Protestant
bishop and takes his orders with a corps of other young men exactly
similarly circumstanced. And thus he has never had given to him an
opportunity of rubbing his own ideas against those of men who have been
educated with different proclivities. He has never lived at college
either with Roman Catholics, or with Presbyterians, or with Protestants
of a sort different from his sort. In his cradle, at his father’s table,
at school, at the university, in all the lessons that he has learned, in
all the games that he has played, in his converse with his sisters, in
his first soft, faint, whisperings with his sisters’ friends, in his
loud unreserved talkings with his closest companions, the same two
ideas, cheek by jowl, have ever been present to him,--the State
ascendancy of his own Church, and the numerical superiority of another
Church antagonistic to his own. When we consider all this, and look at
the training which the Irish clergyman has undergone, how can we wonder
at his idiosyncrasies?