the large farmers must have made very large profits, the percentage
upon the actual capital embarked (unless my information has been
strangely untrue, and the calculations that have been laid before me
strangely inaccurate) being in many cases larger even than that which
the shipowners earned in _their_ good times. Is it to be wondered
at that they became frequently intoxicated by their success, and
got to believe that they were a superior order on whom the welfare
of the nation depended? Or, again, can we be surprised that their
awakening from their dream has not been pleasurable, and has somewhat
soured them? Ten years ago a _gentleman farmer_--and every man who
farmed 500 acres was a gentleman farmer--looked down upon the retail
tradesman as quite beneath him in station, and regarded the parson
as a respectable official whom it was the right thing to support,
though he might care very little for him and his ways. In those days
the farmer’s sons and the parson’s were frequently schoolfellows; the
young people drew together, and the farmer’s pupils too were another
link between the farmhouse and the rectory. The bad seasons and the
fall in prices came together, and the collapse was very rapid. But in
nine cases out of ten, whereas the farmer’s losses meant a disastrous
abatement which extended over his _whole_ income, the parson felt the
pinch only in the fall of the tithe or in the rent of his glebe. His
private fortune, being for the most part settled, remained as it was
before. In East Anglia not 5 per cent. of the clergy are living upon
the income of their benefices; but I should be very much surprised
to find that 5 per cent. of the tenant-farmers have any considerable
investments outside their working capital. The result is, that though
the clergy have suffered quite severely enough, they have not suffered
nearly so much as the farmers. The one has had to submit to a painful
loss of professional income, and has had to fall back upon his private
resources; the other has too often found himself with his credit
balance approaching the vanishing point, the trade profit has been
_nil_, and there have been no dividends from investments outside the
going concern to keep up the old style or meet the old expenditure.
When neighbours have been in the habit of meeting on equal terms,
and one goes on pretty much as before, while the other has become a
trifle shabby, and has to consider every shilling that he spends,
it is almost inevitable that the poorer of the two should feel less
cordial than before. He revenges himself upon the laws of the universe
by proclaiming that there is wrong and injustice somewhere. Why is he
on the brink of ruin while the parson has only knocked off his riding
horse, or ceased to take his annual trip to the Continent, or lessened
his establishment by a servant, or it may be two? He forgets that his
neighbour is living upon the interest of realized property, and that he
himself has to live upon what he can make, and upon that alone.
But what irritates the farmer most is that, at the worst, the parson
is getting _something_ out of the land while he is getting little or
nothing; and though he knows as well as any one else that the tithe
stands for a first mortgage upon the land, or for an annuity charged
upon the land, which takes precedence of every other payment; and
though he knows also that, in too many instances, he has himself to
pay interest on the capital with which he has been pursuing his
business, and that this interest has to be provided for whether that
business is carried on at a profit or a loss, yet he persists in trying
to convince himself that he was “let in” when he made himself liable
for the tithes; he tells you he has “to pay the parson,” and he does
not like it. The parson is always _en évidence_, the landlord is out of
the way--almost an abstraction, as the Government is; the agent _must_
be submitted to, so must the tax gatherer. But the parson, could he not
be got rid of? Granted that it would all come to the same in the end,
and that if you could eliminate the parson the tithe would be laid on
to the rent sooner or later, yet it might be very much later, and the
end might be a long way off, and in the meantime he, the farmer, would
put the tithe into his own pocket and into that of no one else. Hence
there smoulder in the minds of many the smoky embers of discontent, and
there is a coldness between the former friends. We are conscious of
it, but we see no cure at present. When the tithe comes to be paid by
the landlord, there may be a return to the old friendliness; but the
_gratia male sarta_ always leaves traces of the rift. I forbear from
dwelling any longer upon this branch of the subject. When men are sore
and in danger of becoming soured, then is the time for exercising a
wise and tender reserve.
So far I have dealt with those trials which the country parson is
exposed to from without; that is, such as arise from his intercourse
with the wicked world--the wicked world that puts its cruel claw into
his pocket, or growls at him, or glares at him, or frightens him, or
laughs at him, or tries to gobble him up. But his trials do not end
there. He has relations with another world--that professional world to
which he belongs in another sense than that by which he is regarded
as a citizen. As a clergyman he is a member of a class, a profession,
a clique if you will, which has a coherence and a homogeneity such as
no other profession can lay claim to, not even the profession of the
law. The lawyer may be half a dozen things at the same time--a trader,
a politician, a practical agriculturist, a land agent, a coroner, a
steeple-chase rider, a general Jack-pudding. Everything brings grist
to his mill, and the more irons he has in the fire the larger will be
the number and the more varied the character of his clients. But the
parson must be a clergyman, and a clergyman only; he is, so to speak,
confined within the four walls of his clerical associations, and if
he steps beyond them he is always regarded with a certain measure of
suspicion. Even literature, unless there be a distinctly theological
flavour about it, he embarks in at his peril; a clergyman who writes
books is looked askance at, as a person whose “heart isn’t in his
work.” Of course we get “narrow-minded.” We all go about with an iron
mask weighing upon us--hiding our handsome features, interfering with
our respiration, stunting our growth.
That is not all, though that is bad enough; we are all ticketed and
labelled in a way that no other class is. Of late years it appears that
the rising generation of clerics has begun to insist more and more
upon the necessity of this professional exclusiveness, and desires
to claim for itself the privileges of a _caste_. It shaves off its
nascent whiskers and glories in a stubby cheek; it dresses in a hideous
garment, half petticoat, half frock, for the most part abominably
ill made; above all, it rumples about its bullet head a slovenly
abomination called a _wide-awake_, as if _that_ would preserve it from
all suspicion of being sleepy and stupid, and it adopts a tone and a
vocabulary which shall be distinctive and as far as possible from the
speech of ordinary Englishmen. “We must close up our ranks,” said one
of them to me, “close up our ranks and present a united front, and
show the world that we are prepared to hang together, act together,
march together. We have been atoms too long; we want coherence, my
dear sir--coherence. We are moving towards the general adoption of the
Catholic cassock!” “Do you mean to say,” I answered, “that you will
persist in sporting that emasculated felt turbanette till you arrive at
the general adoption of the cassock? Then, in the name of all the lines
of beauty, on with the cassock, but away with the wide-awake!” I’m
afraid my young friend was hurt; suspected me of some covert profanity,
and deplored my flagrant want of _esprit de corps_.
And yet I have been almost a worshipper of Burke from my boyhood,
and was early so impregnated with the fundamental positions of the
_Thoughts on the Causes of our present Discontents_ that, if I only
_could_ choose my party, I should follow my leader to prison or to
death, and do his bidding, ἀνδρείως καὶ μύσαντα, never looking behind
me. Unhappily in matters political the curse of a flabby amorphous
eclecticism is upon too many of us; watching the conflict of principles
or policies in a dazed and bewildered frame of mind, we persuade
ourselves that we are philosophically impartial when we are only
indolently indifferent. “Which train are you going by, sir--up or
down?” “I’ll wait and see!” And both engines rush out and leave the
unhappy vacillator to his reveries, till by-and-by the platform is
cleared and the station is shut up for the night, and the gas lamps are
turned down; and there is no moon and no stars and no shelter, and the
wind is rising.
But ever since I have, so to speak, taken the shilling and entered the
Church’s service and put myself under orders, I have loyally stood up
for my cloth, and I am quite willing to bear the reproaches of that
service where there are any to bear. We clergy get a good deal of
stupid and very vulgar ridicule hurled at us, and we cannot very well
retaliate. It is a case of _Athanasius contra mundum_. The “world” is
very big and rather unassailable, and we of the minority are apt to
assume that we can afford to hold our peace, that we gain by turning
the right cheek to him who smites us on the left, and that we should
lose by giving a foul-mouthed liar and coward a drubbing and tossing
him into the horse-pond. We stand upon the defensive. We have hardly
any other choice. But it is rather trying to have to answer for all the
sins, negligences, and ignorances, the follies and the bad taste of all
who wear the wide-awake.
As far as the instances of downright wickedness and immorality go, I
think nobody will pretend that any class in the community can show
such a clean bill of health as the clergy. As I look round me upon my
clerical brethren of all ages and all opinions, I can honestly say I
do not know one of them whose daily life is not free from reproach or
suspicion. During all my life I have never myself known more than one
beneficed clergyman who was a real black sheep. That there are such men
of course I cannot doubt, but their aggregate number constitutes, I am
sure, a very small percentage of the class which they disgrace by being
included in it. Surely it is very trying and very irritating to have
such instances brought up against you, not as rare exceptions, but as
examples of the general rule.
Our Nonconformist neighbours know all about such cases, and cannot
understand why they should exist. They know that a Wesleyan or a
Congregational minister who should underlie any grave suspicion would
infallibly disappear from the neighbourhood in a week. Why should
the rector of Z----, whose intemperance has been clearly proved, be
allowed to return to his parish after his term of suspension, and begin
again to minister among the same people whose sense of decency he has
outraged till it was past all bearing? You tell your Nonconformist
friend that it cannot be helped because the reverend sot has got a
freehold in his benefice. “Oh, it can’t be helped, can’t it?” he
answers; “that’s it, is it? The law ain’t to blame, and the bishop
ain’t to blame, and the churchwardens ain’t to blame, and, according
to that, the parson ain’t to blame neither, except that the old fool’s
been and got found out.” These people know that such scandals are
impossible at the chapels; they are not impossible at the churches;
they know that the deacons, and the elders, and the conference, or
whatever the power may be that keeps up the discipline, comes down with
swift severity in the one case, and the rural dean and archdeacons
and the bishops are all but powerless in the other. In many cases the
influence of a bad example, or the memory of a shameful reputation, is
avoided by giving an incumbent indefinite leave of absence; but this
is, after all, only a confession of weakness, and the fact that the
parson still takes the income of the benefice, though his work is done
by another, that itself is a scandal. Ecclesiastical reformers, lay or
clerical, who stop short of dealing with the subject of the parson’s
freehold, are merely hacking and lopping the branches in the vain hope
of saving the tree. If the thing is rotten, let it die placidly, or
let it be cut down bravely. Where you have not the pluck to do the one
thing, why fidget about the other?
Happily, however, we are not much troubled with “criminous clerks,”
we country parsons. The regular out-and-out bad ones usually retire
into holes and corners, and they are but few and far between. We hear
of them much more from our Meetingers than from any one else. The
Meetinger keeps himself posted up with the last clerical escapade, and
fires it off at us when he gets a chance, and the old argument has to
be gone over again, and the parson goes home feeling that he was born
to be badgered, and that he must expect it even to the end of the world.
It may seem strange to the inexperienced, but it is none the less true,
that we suffer a great deal more from the best of our brethren than
we do from the worst. They are the over-zealous, who are determined
to change the face of the world and revolutionize society and reform
everything, and improve everybody, and who cannot leave things alone
to develop and grow, who make their fellow-creatures’ lives a burden
to them. When we are young we have such unbounded faith in ourselves,
and such unbounded ignorance and inexperience. The world is all before
us, and all to conquer and remodel; our seniors are sad fogeys, so
slow, so stiff, so cautious. There is so much dust everywhere and upon
everything. Our brooms are so new, so swishy, and our arms so strong.
We have our wits about us, and our senses all keen and sharp. We find
it hard to believe that we have not been called into being to do a
great deal of sweeping and getting rid of cobwebs. I love to see the
young fellows all bubbling over with energy, and all aflame with fiery
zeal; I would not have it otherwise. God bless them! say I, but they do
rout us about very uncomfortably, and they are very foolish.
It was only the other day that I was asked to go and visit a church to
which a very hurricane of a man had been recently appointed, and which
he had already set himself to restore. He knew no more about church
architecture than I do about Sanskrit, and less about history than I
do about chemistry. He had a small army of bricklayers picking and
slopping about the sacred edifice, tearing down this and digging up
that and smalming over the other. And this reverend worthy had not even
consulted the parish clerk! “Of course you have had a faculty for all
this?” I suggested.
“Not I! Faculty indeed! I have to save all the expense I can. I have
made up my mind to have nothing whatever to do with any officials or
professionals of any sort or kind; I’m my own architect!”
Now, if a man chooses to be his own tailor, nobody will be much the
worse and nobody will much care; but when a man sets himself to
“restore” a church by the light of nature, it is a much more serious
matter, and it is almost beyond belief what a brisk and bouncing young
fellow, with the best intentions, and an immeasurable fund of ignorance
to fall back upon, can do without any one interfering with him. You
tell him he’ll get into a scrape--that the bishop will be down upon
him--that there are such things as law courts. He smiles the benevolent
smile of superior wisdom, and dashes on with heroic valour. If he calls
himself a Ritualist, he gets rid of the Jacobean pulpit, or the royal
arms, or the ten commandments, and sets up a construction which he
calls a reredos, all tinsel and putty and _papier mâché_; hurls away
the old pews before you know where you are, nails the brasses to the
walls, sets up a lectern, and intones the service, keeping well within
the chancel, from which he firmly banishes all worshippers who are not
males. As for that gallery at the west end where the singers used to
sit for a couple of centuries, and never failed to take their part with
conscious pride in their own performances, that is abomination in his
eyes--that must go of course, “to throw out the belfry arch, you see,
and to bring the ringers into closer connection with the worship of
the sanctuary.” “I love to see the bell ropes,” said one of these dear
well-meaning young clergymen to me. “They are a constant lesson and
reminder to us, my friend. Did you ever read Durandus on Symbolism?
That is a very precious observation of his, that a bell rope symbolises
humility--it always hangs down.”
But if an energetic young reformer calls himself an Evangelical, he is,
if possible, a more dangerous innovator than the other. Then the axes
and hammers come in with a vengeance. None of your pagan inscriptions
for him, teaching false doctrine and popery. None of your _Orate pro
anima_, none of your crosses and remains of frescoes on his walls; St.
Christopher with the Child upon his shoulder wading through the stream,
St. Sebastian stuck all over with arrows, or St. Peter with those very
objectionable keys. As for the rood screen, away with it! Are we not
all kings and priests? If you must have a division between the chancel
and the nave, set up the pulpit there, tall, prominent, significant;
and if the preacher can’t be heard, then learn the lesson which our
grandfathers taught us, and let there be a sounding-board.
The serious part of all this passionate meddling with the _status quo
ante_ is that any young incumbent can come in and play the wildest
havoc with our old churches without any one interfering with him. The
beneficed cleric is master of the situation, and is frightfully more so
now that Church rates have been abolished than he was before. It is no
one’s interest to open his mouth; is he not _inducted_ into possession
of the sacred building, and is he not therefore tenant for life of the
freehold? As long as he makes himself liable for all the expense, it is
surely better to let him have his way. “I ain’t a going to interfere,”
says one after another; and in six weeks a church which had upon its
walls and floors, upon its tower and its roof, upon its windows and its
doors, upon its every stone and timber, the marks and evidences which
constituted a continuous chronicle, picturing--not telling--a tale of
the faith and hope, and folly and errors, and devotion and sorrow, and
striving after a higher ideal and painful groping for more light in
the gloom--a tale that goes back a thousand years, a tale of the rude
forefathers of the village world which still regards the house of God
as somehow its own--in six weeks, I say, all this is as effectually
obliterated as if a ton of dynamite had been exploded in one of the
vaults, and the genius of smugness had claimed the comminuted fragments
as her own.
Then there is the mania for decorations too. I like to see them; I am
sure the new fashion has been the occasion for awakening a great deal
of interest in, and something approaching proud affection for, our old
churches; but here again people, with every desire to be reverential
and to do the right thing, succeed amazingly in doing just the wrong
one. Have I not seen a most beautiful fourteenth-century rood screen
literally riddled with tin tacks and covered with various coloured
paper roses, festooned in fluffy frills of some cheap material on
which languid dandelions and succulent bluebells lolled damply at the
Eastertide? Next time I saw that exquisite work of art, lo! there was
a St. Lawrence with his eye put out and two holes in his forehead,
and between the lips of a St. Barbara, who for her loveliness might
have been painted by Carlo Crivelli, there protruded a bent nail which
looked for all the world like an old tobacco pipe. Who can “restore”
that precious rood screen or repair the damage wrought in an hour by
the _decorators_ turned loose into that meek little church a year ago?
I think the average laymen who live in the towns can have very little
notion of what the parson suffers when he finds himself turned into a
church in which he has to officiate for the rest of his life, and which
his predecessor has mauled and mangled and murdered, leaving no more
life in it than there is among the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s.
“But do not these rash and furious young zealots of whom you have
spoken burn their fingers sometimes, and does not the bishop sometimes
come down upon them?” Yes! very often, _after the mischief has been
done_. I knew one monster who upon his glebe had some seven of the
noblest oak trees in the county of Norfolk. _Lucus ligna_ was his
view of the case, and he sold them all. Down they came every tree of
them. Some said he wanted to see how the landscape would look without
them, some that he wanted to go to Norway, and there are plenty of
trees there. The patron of the living called that man to account, and
I am told made him disgorge the proceeds of his ill-gotten gains; and
the bishop is generally believed to have sent him a mandate to put
back those trees in their former position. But that clerical monster,
though he plays the fiddle to put Amphion to shame, has never learnt
Amphion’s tune or cared to charm back the giant vegetables that were
once the pride and glory of the countryside. In the days when the
wicked received their reward in this world a thousand evil-doers have
been hanged for crimes incomparably less injurious to the community at
large than that which lies to the charge of this reverend sinner; but
he enjoys the income of his benefice to this day, and grows willows
instead of oaks, not to turn to the use which Timon recommended to one
of his visitors, but to turn into cash; for they grow fast, and the
manufacturers of cricket bats are hard put to it to supply the demand
for their wares.
What we want is to make it at least a misdemeanour punishable by
imprisonment for the parson to touch the fabric of the church under any
circumstances whatever, except with the consent and under the license
of some external authority. But that implies that the ownership of the
church should no longer be vested in a _corporation sole_. It brings us
again face to face with the whole question of the parson’s freehold,
and how long is that mischievous legal fiction--which is, however, a
very stubborn legal fact--to be endured?
If I were to go on in this vein, and dwell upon all the parson has to
suffer from his _predecessors_--the man who built the house two miles
from the parish church; the man who added to it to find room for a
score of pupils; the man who loved air, or the man who loved water, or
the man who loved society, or the man who bred horses, or the man who
turned the rectory into a very lucrative lunatic asylum--I should tire
out my reader’s patience, and the more so that there are other trials
about which it is advisable that I should utter my querulous wail.
I know one clergyman who, though ordained some forty years ago, has
never written or preached a sermon in his life; but I only know one.
His is perhaps a unique case. As a rule, we all begin by being
curates--that is, we begin by learning our business as subordinates.
It would be truer to say we used to begin that way; but subordination
is dying out all over the world, and in the ministry of the Church
of England subordination is a virtue which is _in articulo mortis_.
Nowadays a young fellow at twenty-three, who has become a reverend
gentleman for just a week, poses at once as the guide, philosopher, and
friend of the whole human race. He poses as a great teacher. It is not
only that he delivers the oracles with authoritative sententiousness
from the tripod, but he has no doubts and no hesitation about anything
in earth or heaven. He fortifies himself with a small collection of
brand-new words which you, poor ignorant creature, don’t know the
meaning of. You feel rather “out of it” when he gravely calls your
gloves _Mannaries_ (he does not wear them), and your dressing-gown
a _Poderis_; expresses his mournful regret that there is no
_Scuophylacium_ in the _Presbytery_, nor any _Bankers_ on the walls;
gently admonishes you for standing bareheaded by the grave at your time
of life, when prudence would suggest, and ecclesiastical precedent
would recommend, the use of the _Anabata_; tells you he always goes
about with a _Totum_ under his arm, and a _Virge_ in his right hand.
When he vanishes you slyly peep into your Du Cange, but the _Bankers_
are quite too much for you.