life of the camp, its stir and throb and discipline, too soon. Take
heed how before the time you join the reserve, only to discover too
late that you are out of harmony with your surroundings, that you are
fretting against the narrowness of the inclosure within which you
are confined, that there is for you no outlook--none--only a bare
subsistence and a safe berth, as there is for other hulks laid up to
rot at ease. If that discovery comes upon you soon enough, break away!
_Make_ the change that will not come, and leave others to chuckle over
their fixity of tenure, and their security, and their trumpery boast
that “no one can turn them out.” But let us have your testimony before
we part--you and we. Bear witness Yes or No! Has the consciousness of
occupying a position from which you could never be removed raised you
in your own estimation, or helped you for one single moment to do your
duty? Has it never kept you down? _Frauds_ are for the weak, not for
the strong--for the coward, not for the brave; they are for those who
only live to rust at ease, as if to breathe were life; they are not for
such as make the ventures of Faith, and help their brethren to overcome
the world.
III.
_THE CHURCH AND THE VILLAGES._
Few men can have watched the movements of opinion during the last few
years without being impressed by the change of attitude observable in
the two contending parties engaged upon the assault and defence of the
possessions of that mysterious entity which goes by the name of the
Church of England.
This entity it must be premised, so far as it has a collective
existence, exists in the person of certain officials who are supposed
to be devoting their lives to certain duties, and are in the possession
of funds which, after every deduction from the grossly exaggerated
estimates of the rhetoricians, are certainly large, and yet are being
added to every week by the lavish offerings of the English people. We
must go back to a remote past if we desire to trace the origin of that
reserve fund for the maintenance of our clergy on which they now live;
a fund which has gone on growing, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly,
for considerably more than a thousand years.
When people talk of _disendowing_ the Church of England, they mean that
this accumulated fund shall be confiscated by the nation for whose
benefit it exists, and that it shall no longer be used for the purpose
to which it has been so long devoted.
But what is this _Church_ that it is to be despoiled and beggared, to
be disestablished and disendowed? We cannot call it a corporation,
for it has no corporate existence as a chartered company or a college
has. It has no representatives in the Lower House of Parliament, as
the universities have. It has no common council with disciplinary
powers, as the Incorporated Society of Law or the Inns of Court have.
It has no _voice_ speaking with authority, no homogeneity deserving
the name. It cannot pass ordinances for the regulation of its minutest
affairs, or impose rules of conduct upon any one, or levy the smallest
contribution from man, woman, or child by its own decrees. You may call
it an army if you please; but it is an army in which the commissioned
officers have no control over the rank and file, no power of enforcing
attendance at drill, no articles of war which any one heeds, and no
generals whom any one fears. This mysterious entity, which is the
sum-total of a multitude of more or less isolated units, we say is the
owner of lands and buildings and rent-charge, and this property it is
said is the property of the Church--the Church? _Nos numerus sumus!_
Without any very great misuse of language, it may be said that among
us there is another mysterious entity; this, too, the sum-total of a
number of isolated units. These units, too, were only the other day
in possession of houses and lands, and buildings considered to be
public buildings; the units were almost in the same position as the
clergy are at this moment, freeholders and practically irremovable;
they were expected to perform certain duties which, as a rule, they
performed with zeal and fidelity. In many cases, when sickness or old
age came upon them, they discharged their functions by deputy; they had
practically little or no discipline of control over them; “visitors”
who never visited, feoffees who never interfered, governors who never
governed. Each of these functionaries was called a Schoolmaster,
and the building in which he officiated was called _a_ school.
The sum-total of these many units had no name; but if the public
buildings were rightly called schools, the aggregate of them might for
convenience be called _The School_. A noun of multitude, standing in
the same relation to its units as the current term “the Church” does to
its units--the Churches.
To whom did the property from which the schools were kept in
efficiency, and their masters furnished with a maintenance--sometimes
with much more than a mere maintenance--to whom did this property
belong? I can find but one answer. It was the property of the nation;
a reserve fund which the nation had permitted certain individuals to
set apart from time to time for the furtherance of the education of
the people, the object aimed at being considered so excellent that
the conditions imposed upon posterity by the founders were allowed to
remain in force, these founders being supposed to have entered into a
contract with the nation that, in consideration of the value of the
surrender made, the reserve of property should be sanctioned, and the
conditions imposed be held to be binding upon posterity. The land or
the rent-charges which yesterday were private possessions ceased to be
so to-day: they _were_ private property, they became public property,
and constituted the Educational Reserve.
I can no longer resist the conviction that, as in the one case so in
the other, the nation may reconsider its treaty with School or Church;
may determine that the reserve hitherto set apart for the education
of a class, or a district, or the founder’s kin, should no longer be
applied according to the compact sanctioned in previous ages, and may
in the same way reconsider its compact with the alienation of property
now known as Church property, and deal with that far larger reserve
hitherto applied for the promotion of the moral and spiritual welfare
of the people. The nation has the right to do this, as it undoubtedly
has the power. Whether in this case _summum jus_ would not be found to
be _summa injuria_ is quite another question.
But it is one thing to say this large reserve shall be administered
otherwise than it is, and quite another thing to say that it shall
cease to exist as a reserve at all. It is one thing to deal with our
ecclesiastical endowments on the lines that school endowments have been
dealt with, and quite another to deal with them as Henry the Eighth
dealt with the property of the religious houses. To adopt the one
course would be readjustment, to adopt the other would be confiscation.
Nevertheless, if the majority of the new electorate should decidedly
and unequivocally pronounce that such is its pleasure, assuredly the
property now held in reserve in the shape of religious endowments will
be confiscated. Religion will be the luxury of the rich and well-to-do;
the proletariate and the agricultural labourer will have to supply
themselves with an inferior article, or to do without it altogether.
If a revolution so tremendous, if a calamity so overwhelming, is to
befall this nation, and is to take effect by the deliberate choice of
its people, at least let a great nation address itself to the task with
the semblance of dignity; at least let it be clearly explained and
firmly adhered to that the clergy reserve is not to be given over to
general pillage. Do not be guilty of the baseness of bidding for the
votes of the proletariate by holding out hopes of a general scramble.
Do not corrupt the poor dwellers in the villages by inviting them to
embark in a filibustering raid upon their friends and neighbours.
* * * * *
It is a question which a philosopher might worthily employ himself in
answering--how it has come to pass that during the last fifty years the
struggle for supremacy between political parties has tended to become
less and less a regular _warfare_ and to assume more and more the
character of a _game_. Nay! It is rapidly developing into a game rather
more of chance than of skill, and one in which the most daring and
reckless adventurer is just as likely to sweep off the stakes as the
most gifted and sagacious player. It is one of the most unhappy results
of this condition of affairs that there has grown up in our midst a
class of touts and hangers-on who do the dirty work of either side and
bring discredit upon both. They are the swell-mob of politics. Such
creatures live by inventing grievances and fomenting discontent, their
doctrine being that whatever is is wrong; their artillery is always
charged with explosive promises. These men are going up and down the
land loudly proclaiming that the parsons have robbed _the poor_ of
their own, and are holding out to their dupes the wildest hopes that
when the spoliation comes _the poor_ shall be the first to benefit by
the great change.
We shall never be able to silence the voice of charlatans. The
sausage-seller in Aristophanes is the type of a class of men who have
found no scope for their talents in any honest calling, and who because
they must live have been forced into the trade of lying vociferously.
I do not write for these--to these I have no word to say. It is
with the men whose hearts are throbbing with some patriotism, and
who have not lost all loyalty to truth and honour, that I desire to
have my dealings. It is with such that I would humbly and earnestly
expostulate, whatever their philosophical or political opinions, and
whatever may be their creed. Even if it were as easy to prove, as it is
demonstrably the reverse, that there ever did exist in England at any
time or in any place a right on the part of the poor to any portion of
the tithes of a parish or to the glebe, who, it may be asked, are _the
poor_? The receivers of parochial relief, whether in the work-house or
outside it? Or every able-bodied peasant who claims to belong to the
needy classes? Are you going to ask the agricultural labourer to cry
for spoliation, and to bribe him to raise the cry by the promise of
converting him into what our fathers called a “sturdy beggar”? And then
are there no poor artisans? Are the millions of our towns to be left
out in the cold while Hodge disports himself with his new possessions?
Are Liverpool and East London to go on as they are, while Little
Mudborough is to enjoy a feast of fat things?
But the demagogues who live to corrupt the people have promises to make
to others than the labourers. They are telling the tenant-farmers, too,
that they will be gainers by the great confiscation, and endeavouring
to persuade them, too, that when it comes they will be relieved
from the burden of the tithes. Would they be so? If the payment of
tithe were abolished to-morrow, can any sane man believe that the
tenant-farmer would be allowed to put the tithe into his pocket or
to keep it there? Can any sane man believe that rents would not rise
exactly in proportion to the amount of charges from which the tenant
was relieved? Rent is nothing more than the money payment supposed to
represent the just return which the owner claims from the occupier for
the privilege of cultivating his land. The occupier makes his account
and calculates how much he can gain by the compact. The landlord’s
share is his rent. He is the sleeping partner. Relieve the expenses
of the going concern from the payment of the tithe, or, which is the
same thing, add it to the profits, and what power on earth will prevent
the landlord, directly or indirectly, sooner or later, absorbing the
proceeds of the newly-created _bonus_?
Moreover, if you begin to “do away with the tithes,” are you going to
do away with them _only_ in the case where the parson receives them and
does something--at any rate _some_thing--in return for the income he
derives from them? Are you going to let the tithes be levied as before
where they are paid to laymen, to corporations, or colleges? Are those
tithes which are necessarily spent in the parish by the resident parson
to be “done away with,” but all such tithes as are necessarily carried
out of the parish and paid to a London company, an alien, or a college
at Oxford or Cambridge, to be levied as before? Is it a _gravamen_
against the parson that he spends his tithe where it is paid him, and
among the people who pay it, and that he is bound in return for it to
do the payers some services which they may exact on demand? Are you
going to confiscate the tithe where the receiver does something for
it, and to let the man who does nothing for it collect it as before?
Imagine the amazement and disgust of a farmer who should be told that
his neighbour on the other side of the hedge is never to pay tithe
again because in that parish there has been a parson to pillage; but
that he, on this side of the hedge, is to pay it as before, because
Mr. Tomkins, or Mrs. John Smith, or the Saddlers’ Company is the lay
impropriator, and the rights of property are to be respected. It would
not be long, I imagine, before our friend the farmer would go for the
lay impropriator, and with a will too.
But, if the labourer and the tenant-farmer are not to be cajoled by
promises that must needs be illusory, least of all are the landlords
to be gained over by the inducement held out to them that they, of
all men, are to benefit by the change. They more than any other
class are responsible for the loud outcry that has been raised. The
tithe-rent-charge is a first charge upon the produce of the land. They
are the landlords who, as a class, have done their best to make people
forget this fact. How often have we heard of a landlord or his agent
declaring loudly, “I have nothing to do with the tithe--that is a
matter between the tenant and the parson!” A more monstrous assertion
it would be difficult to invent! Far more true would be the direct
opposite, if the parson, or the impropriator, should say, “I, as
receiver of tithe, have nothing to do with you, the tenant--the tithe
is no concern of yours; my claim is upon the owner of the soil!” In
point of fact, it is in the last resort upon the landlord, and the
landlord alone, that the tithe-owner, lay or clerical, has his claim.
* * * * *
But, if we should only aggravate the incidence of the immense calamity
which would ensue from the confiscation of the clergy reserve by
handing over the spoils to the labourers, or the proletariate, or the
farmers, or the landlords, and yet the electorate should resolve to
carry out this great spoliation, and call upon the executive to sweep
away the clerical incomes, and lay its hand upon the property from
which these incomes are derived; what is to be done with this huge fund
so confiscated, and how are we to prevent the landlords being in some
form or other the only gainers by the change?
If confiscation comes, let it come, say I, as no half-measure. Let
there be no bargaining, no tinkering, no compromise--in fact, no mercy!
No--no mercy! Let this thing be done in root-and-branch fashion. Let
the nation set its face like a flint; let the Church--it would be the
Church then--begin its new life naked and bare. Both sides will have
a bad time of it. It takes little to decide which will have the worst
time of it, the starved Church or the starved people.
Set the two forces foot to foot,
And every man knows who’ll be winner,
Whose faith in God has e’er a root
That goes down deeper than his dinner.
Therefore, if indeed this nation decides that it can do without
religious teachers, and that these shall live of those who want them,
let us put up our parish churches to auction, and dispose of the
glebes to the highest bidder, and flood the market with comfortable
parsonage-houses, sold without reserve, and let the tithe be levied
by the tax-gatherer, and let _it be levied from the owner of the
soil_, as the land-tax is. Furthermore, let us have no assignment of
any share of the plunder to any class or any special fund. Let us
hand over the proceeds of the sale of churches and houses and lands
to the Commissioners for the Extinguishing of the National Debt, and
not to the ratepayers, not to the Education Commissioners, nor to the
Commissioners in Lunacy for building madhouses, or any other cheerful
and heroic object. Let us have a measure which shall be simple and
thorough, with the fewest possible details to vex and embarrass us
all. As the parsons die, sell their houses, their glebes and their
churches, and let the State at once appropriate the tithe. Let us
be brought face to face with the real meaning of a revolution, the
tremendous magnitude of which few men can have the faintest conception
of. In less than a year after the measure had become law, we should
begin to know in what an experiment we had embarked. The sooner our
eyes were opened the better for us all. The logic of facts is better
than gabble.
Nevertheless, firmly convinced as I am that such a revolution would be
an immeasurable calamity to the people of this country, and especially
so to the agricultural districts, I am quite as firmly convinced
that the present condition of affairs as regards the tenure and
administration of the property now constituting the clergy reserves
cannot possibly go on much longer; that the mere mockery and pretence
of discipline among the clergy themselves must be replaced by something
much more real and effective; that, in short, some large and radical
measures of Church reform are being called for, such as the nation
feels must and shall be carried out, though the great body of the
people do not yet see, and cannot yet be expected to see, on what
fundamental principles such reform should be advocated, or on what
lines such reform should travel.
As a preliminary, as a _sine quâ non_ of all really effective Church
reform, it seems to me that, first and foremost, you must begin, not
by _disestablishing_, but by _establishing_, the Church. As things
are among us, it seems to me that the very word establishment is a
confession on the part of those who use it that they have failed to
discover the right word for that which they would fain obliterate.
We say the Church is a great landlord and wealthy owner of property.
Ought not such an owner to have some control over its own and some
voice in the disposition of that property. Every railroad company in
the land, every joint-stock bank or co-operative association for the
providing of milk and butter, every society for the protection of
cats and dogs, has a constitution. It has its directors or governors,
its recognized officers, its power to make or to alter at least its
own bye-laws, its liberty to dispose of its own funds within certain
limits, the privilege of meeting and of discussing its own affairs when
and where it pleases, and the right of applying to the Legislature of
the country for larger powers if such shall appear necessary for the
carrying out of objects not dreamt of at its first start.
The Church is absolutely lacking in all these respects, for the very
simple reason that the Church, viewed as a going concern in possession
of property, has nothing that can be called a constitution.
* * * * *
If the glaring anomalies and the wholly unjustifiable grotesqueness
which startle us at every turn when we begin to discuss “Church
questions” are to be removed, where are we to begin, and what should be
the lines on which any scheme of readjustment should proceed?
First and foremost, let all obsolete and antiquated privileges, which
are survivals of a long extinct condition of affairs, be swept away,
and with the privileges let the disabilities go also. Let no man be
made either more or less than a citizen of the Empire by reason of his
being in any sense a member of the Church--not a peer of the realm on
the one hand, not disqualified from entering the House of Commons on
the other.
As a preliminary to giving the Church a working constitution, it is my
conviction that the bishops should no longer have seats in the House of
Lords. I cannot see how any director or overseer of any corporation,
or indeed of any department of the State, should be made a peer of
the realm by virtue of his holding office. I am not wholly ignorant
of our constitutional history, although into the historical aspect of
the question I decline to enter now. The facts are what we have to
face; and as things are, however much we may deplore it, there seems
just as little reason why bishops should be raised to the peerage as
why the naval lords of the Admiralty should be created barons. But,
if you dismiss the bishops from the Upper House, you certainly cannot
exclude the inferior clergy from the lower one. Whether in the one
case the Church or the House of Lords would be much the loser may
very reasonably be doubted, notwithstanding the conspicuous ability
which is and has for long been characteristic of the Episcopal Bench.
In the other case, the Church and the House of Commons are just as
little likely to be much the gainers by letting clergymen represent the
constituencies in Parliament. As in France, so would it be in England;
the clerical candidates would be very few, the clerical members fewer.
That, however, does not affect the question whether or not clerical
disabilities should be abolished.
But by far the most necessary and radical reform that is imperatively
called for is the abolition of that preposterous antiquarian curiosity,
the Parson’s Freehold.
The philosopher of the future who “with larger, other eyes than
ours,” shall survey the history of our institutions and tell of their
origin, their growth or their decay, will, I believe, be amazed and
perplexed by nothing so much as by the strange vitality of this legal
phenomenon--the _Parson’s Freehold_. That any man who is in any sense
a public servant should, by virtue of being nominated to hold an
office, be made tenant for life of a real estate from which only by an
act of his own can he be removed--_that_ would seem to most of us so
entirely startling and outrageous in the abstract as to be absolutely
intolerable in the concrete reality. Let us look this thing in the face.
Imagine a postman or a prime minister, a clerk in the Custom House or
the captain of a man-of-war, an assistant in a draper’s shop or your
own gardener, having an estate for life in his office, and being able
to draw his pay to his dying day, though he might be for years blind
and deaf and paralyzed and imbecile--so incapable, in fact, that he
could not even appoint his own deputy, or so indifferent that he cared
not whether there was any deputy to discharge the duties which he
himself was paid to perform. Imagine any public servant being thrown
into prison for a flagrant misdemeanour, or worse than a misdemeanour,
and coming back to his work when the term of his imprisonment was
over, receiving the arrears of pay which had accrued during the time
he was in gaol, and quietly settling down into the old groove as if
nothing had happened. Imagine _any_ public servant being suspended from
his office for habitual drunkenness, suspended say for two years, and
not even requiring to be reinstated when the two years were over, but
gaily taking his old seat and returning to his desk and his bottle, as
irremovable from the emoluments of the first as he was inseparable from
his devotion to the last.
Yet all this, and much more than this, is possible for us beneficed
clergymen. I am myself the patron of a benefice from which the late
rector was nonresident for fifty-three years. Is it at all conceivable
that we should continue to keep up this condition of affairs under
which we have been living so long? The last thing that any other public
servant would dare to confess would be that he was physically or
intellectually or morally unfit for his office. The retort in his case
would be obvious enough--then leave it, and make way for a better man.
But the holder of the Parson’s Freehold smilingly replies, “Certainly I
will retain my hold upon the income after paying my deputy. Am I not a
landlord? and as tenant for life I will assuredly cling to my own.”