As the Lady Abbess of St. Albans might have said, there was an
abomination of parsons in the county town; some schoolmasters who were
not in clerical practice, but cleric; some in actual service. They did
not in those days wear livery as servants, not necessarily apostles, of
I.H.S. Two of them I still see talking automatically, faster than they
could think; one of these with the nose and mouth of Punch. I still see
another, a pale-faced pulpiteer and a screamer; the confidence-reservoir
of single ladies turned forty odd; a man who met you with a twirl of his
glove by its finger, and a sort of whistling smile that seemed to say to
itself, “I have done him before I have begun.” The men did not care for
him because what gossip is to some was censoriousness in him; still the
women liked him, and thought five of his ten toes were already in heaven.
The parsonics are the only professionals who do not seem able to get
their own living by going into practice—they like to be endowed. Some are
glad to get a hundred pounds per annum for life; some, doing the same
work as they do, bid for two, four, six, eight, and ten hundred; others,
with yet less work, accept much more than this; but they have uncles. Why
don’t these guaranteed rats set up for themselves in practice like the
nonconformists? They would be found churches. Doctors do so, and lawyers.
They should obtain the licence like these, then preach what they liked
within limits, prescribed by the Royal Church. Doctors do all this within
the rules of their royal colleges.
Imagine the great profession of physic endowed, and its baronets,
arch-doctors of Canterbury and York, giving away livings to their nephews
and nieces: the doctor of St. James’s £1000 per annum, the doctor of
St. Giles’s £150. It is a little so with the law—the chancellors,
attorney-generals, and judges are endowed, but not so the barristers,
except with wit; and what poor creatures would these be compared to what
they are, if they had to begin on curacies, and, perhaps, end on them,
say of £100 per annum, unless they had influence enough to get themselves
made vicars of law, rectors of law, as well as deans of arches?
But no Church has ever reformed itself: _non possumus_ is the motto of
them all.
But the Church has got its large fortune safely invested, and in the best
order, as if to make confiscation easy. Its proprietary consists of human
beings not differing from others, and rich in worldly wisdom. If they
really wished to save the Church, they would do their utmost to throw
off the State and take their money with them, and reform themselves on
the model of the civil service and the army, dividing the revenues into
livings of equal amount, to be gained by competitive examinations. But
human nature must have its way; it will last their time, and after them
the deluge. In two or three more new parliaments they will be too late.
In the present condition of clericism, many do not know what to be at. An
intimate of mine who would have liked to steal a spiritual march on me,
which no man ever did yet, was a curate of twenty years’ standing, and
so far a perpetual one in the sense of being the hireling of vicars and
subject to a month’s warning, like the moon. He had subscribed his mite
of belief to the doctrine of eternal punishment.
This good personification of humanity had a vivid notion, together with
an unwholesome fear, of our modern Hades, formed originally out of a few
metaphors of Scripture, and improved by Dantesque and Miltonic talent,
though its latitude and longitude is still undiscovered among the
heavenly bodies.
This well-meaning teacher, some two or three years after my accident (a
leg divided against itself so that it could not stand, and made into two
unequal halves at the socket), suggested persuasively that I must have
felt very grateful to the Almighty at not being killed outright. But he
was so much at fault that I avoided the discussion, and answered, “I am
my own chaplain, and transact all my spiritual business myself, under my
own frontal bone (_os frontis_); but should I be in want of spiritual
assistance, my inclination would be to apply to the Archbishop of
Canterbury or to the Bishop of London as the best authorities in Divine
practice. However, not to be over reticent, I may tell you that no sense
of future favours as regards gratitude arose in my mind; for we cannot
entertain two ideas at once, and mine was to ask myself, as a scientific
physician would do, whether my leg was as I last left it, or whether the
head of the femur and the shaft had parted company. As to thankfulness at
not having lost my life, that would have involved an emotion functionally
incompatible with the faintness and pain that got hold of me. The pain
has continued; I am taken prisoner by it, and condemned to an armchair
for life. Not unfrequently, therefore, I think how much better it would
have been for me had I been killed off at once. So you must perceive that
your forecast is made without any knowledge of the facts.”
A doctor never gives his opinion of another without being called in; why,
then, should a parson? But it was well meant, though deficient in the
greatest of delicacies, called tact.