THE COUNTRY PARSON.
[Illustration]
Of no class of men can it be more truly said that the good they do
dies with them, and that the evil lives--in the memory of men--than
the country parson. Of the thousands of old rectors and vicars of past
generations, how they have all slipped out of the memory of men, have
left no tradition whatever behind them, if they were good! but the
few bad ones did so impress themselves on their generation, that the
stories of their misconduct have been handed on, and are not forgotten
in a century.
In the floor of my own parish church, in the chancel, is a tombstone
to a former incumbent. The name and the date have been ground away by
the heels of the school-children who sit over it, but thus much of the
inscription remains--
"... The Psalmists man of yeares hee lived a score,
Tended his flocke allone; theire ofspring did restore
By Water into life of Grace; at font and grave,
He served God devout: and strivd men's soules to save.
He fedd the poore, lov'd all, and did by Pattern showe,
As pastor to his Flocke, ye way that they shoulde go."
Not less effaced than the name is all tradition of the man whose
monument proclaims his virtues. Now, I take it, _for this very reason_
the tombstone bears true testimony. If it had told lies, every one
would have known about it, and related this fact to their children;
would have told anecdotes of the parson who was so unworthy, but
concerning whose virtues his stone made such boast. That our old
country parsons were not, as a rule, a disreputable, drinking,
neglectful set of men I believe, because so few traditions of their
misconduct remain.
There was a clever, pleasant book published at the beginning of this
century, entitled, _The Velvet Cushion_. It was written by the Rev.
J. W. Cunningham, Vicar of Harrow. The seventh edition, from which I
quote, appeared in 1815. This book professes to tell the experiences
of a pulpit cushion from pre-Reformation days to the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Here is what the Cushion says--"Sir, you will be
anxious, I am sure, to hear the history of some of your predecessors
in the living; and it is my intention to gratify you. I think it
right, however, to observe, that of a large proportion of them no
very interesting records remain. Mankind are much alike, and a little
country village is not likely to call out their peculiarities. Some few
were mere profligates, whose memory I do not wish to perpetuate."--But
it is precisely these, and only these, that the less charitable memory
of man does perpetuate.--"Many of them were persons of decent, cold,
correct manners, varying slightly, perhaps, in the measure of their
zeal, their doctrinal exactness, their benevolence, their industry,
their talents--but, in general, of that neutral class which rarely
affords materials for history, or subjects of instruction. They were
men of that species who are too apt to spring up in the bosom of old
and prosperous establishments, whose highest praise is, that they do no
harm."
No one can accuse this description as being coloured too high. It is,
if I may judge by early recollections, applicable to those who occupied
the parsonages twenty and thirty years later.
In my own parish in which I was reared, Romaine, one of the most
brilliant luminaries of the evangelical revival, acted as curate for
a while, but not the smallest trace of any tradition of his goodness,
his eloquence, his zeal did I discover among the villagers. At the
very time that Romaine was in this parish, there was a curate in an
adjoining one who was over-fond of the bottle, and was picked up out
of the ditch on more than one occasion. Neither his name nor his
delinquencies are forgotten to this day.
I take it that the state in which the parish registers have been
kept are a fair test as to what sort of parsons there were. Now
certainly they were very neglectfully kept at the Restoration and for
a short while afterwards. That is not to be wondered at. During the
Commonwealth they had been taken from the parsons and committed to
lay-registrars in the several parishes, who certainly kept them badly,
and at the Restoration they were not at once and always reclaimed, but
continued to be kept by the clerk, who stepped into the place of the
registrar appointed by the Commonwealth. But in the much-maligned
Hanoverian period they were carefully kept by the clergy, and as a rule
neatly entered. If such an indication be worth anything, it shows that
the country parsons did take pains to discharge at least one of their
duties. He that is faithful in a small matter, is faithful also, we may
conclude, in that which is great.
I presume that Dr. Syntax may be regarded as typical of the class, and
Combe says of him--
"Of Church-preferment he had none;
Nay, all his hope of that was gone:
He felt that he content must be
With drudging in a curacy.
Indeed, on ev'ry Sabbath-day,
Through eight long miles he took his way,
To preach, to grumble, and to pray;
To cheer the good, to warn the sinner,
And, if he got it,--eat a dinner:
To bury these, to christen those,
And marry such fond folks as chose
To change the tenor of their life,
And risk the matrimonial strife.
Thus were his weekly journeys made,
'Neath summer suns and wintry shade;
And all his gains, it did appear,
Were only thirty pounds a-year."
And when he dies--
"The village wept, the hamlets round
Crowded the consecrated ground;
And waited there to see the end
Of Pastor, Teacher, Father, Friend."
What a charming picture does Fielding draw in his _Joseph Andrews_ of
Mr. Abraham Adams, the parson--gentle, guileless, learned, and very
poor. And Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield--was ever a purer, sweeter
type of man delineated? The description given of his parsonage and mode
of life is valuable, and must be quoted; for it shows what a change has
come over the parsonage and the parson's manner of intercourse with his
parishioners since Goldsmith's time.
[Illustration: An Old Country Parsonage, Bratton-Clovelly.]
"Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill,
sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and prattling river
before; on one side a meadow, on the other a green. My farm consisted
of about twenty acres of excellent land, having given an hundred pounds
for my predecessor's good-will.... My house consisted of but one story,
and was covered with thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness;
the walls on the inside were nicely whitewashed, and my daughters
undertook to adorn them with pictures of their own designing. Though
the same room served us for parlour and kitchen, that only made it
warmer. Besides, as it was kept with the utmost neatness, the dishes,
plates, and coppers being well scoured, and all disposed in bright rows
on the shelves, the eye was agreeably relieved, and did not want richer
furniture. There were three other apartments--one for my wife and me,
another for our two daughters, within our own, and the third, with two
beds for the rest of the children."
Our old parsonage houses precisely resembled this description, but
hardly any remain. They have given way for more pretentious houses; and
with the grander houses the habits and requirements of the parsons have
grown.
"Nor were we without guests; sometimes Farmer Flamborough, and often
the blind piper, would pay us a visit, and taste our gooseberry wine.
These harmless people had several ways of being good company; for
while one played, the other would sing some soothing ballad--_Johnny
Armstrong's Last Good Night_, or _The Cruelty of Barbara Allen_."
Crabbe, himself a clergyman, does not give the most favourable sketch
of the village parsons; and yet his country vicar is a man of perfect
blamelessness.
"Our Priest was cheerful, and in season gay;
His frequent visits seldom fail'd to please;
Easy himself, he sought his neighbour's ease.
* * * * *
Simple he was, and loved the simple truth,
Yet had some useful cunning from his youth;
A cunning never to dishonour lent,
And rather for defence than conquest meant;
'Twas fear of power, with some desire to rise,
But not enough to make him enemies;
He ever aim'd to please; and to offend
Was ever cautious; for he sought a friend.
Fiddling and fishing were his arts: at times
He alter'd sermons, and he aim'd at rhymes;
And his fair friends, not yet intent on cards,
Oft he amused with riddles and charades.
Mild were his doctrines, and not one discourse
But gain'd in softness what it lost in force:
Kind his opinions; he would not receive
An ill report, nor evil act believe.
* * * * *
Though mild benevolence our Priest possess'd,
'Twas but by wishes or by words expressed.
Circles in water, as they wider flow,
The less conspicuous in their progress grow,
And when, at last, they touch upon the shore,
Distinction ceases, and they're viewed no more.
His love, like the last circle, all embraced,
But with effect that never could be traced.
Now rests our Vicar.--They who knew him best
Proclaim his life t' have been entirely--rest.
The rich approved,--of them in awe he stood;
The poor admired,--they all believed him good;
The old and serious of his habits spoke;
The frank and youthful loved his pleasant joke;
Mothers approved a safe contented guest,
And daughters one who backed each small request;
In him his flock found nothing to condemn;
Him sectaries liked,--he never troubled them:
No trifles fail'd his yielding mind to please,
And all his passions sunk in early ease;
Nor one so old has left this world of sin,
More like the being that he entered in."
Clever, true, and cutting. Crabbe knew the class, its excellences and
its weaknesses. We are considering the excellences now; we will recur
to the weaknesses later.
Fielding does, in his _Joseph Andrews_, give us a study of another
type of parson--Trulliber, "whom Adams found stript into his waistcoat,
with an apron on, and a pail in his hands, just come from serving his
hogs; for Mr. Trulliber was a parson on Sundays, but all the other six
might be more properly called a farmer. He occupied a small piece of
land of his own, besides which he rented a considerable deal more. His
wife milked his cows, managed his dairy, and followed the market with
butter and eggs. The hogs fell chiefly to his care, which he carefully
waited on at home, and attended to fairs; on which occasion he was
liable to many jokes, his own size being with much ale rendered little
inferior to that of the beasts he sold.... His voice was loud and
hoarse, and his accent extremely broad. To complete the whole, he had a
stateliness in his gait when he walked, not unlike of a goose, only he
stalked slower."
But this parson was only a boor, he was not disorderly.
I have an old coachman, near eighty, who has been in the family since
he was a boy, and of whom I get many stories of how the world went at
the beginning of this century. Said he to me one day, "My old uncle he
lived in Maristowe; he was bedridden nigh on twenty years, and in all
those years Parson Teasdale didn't miss coming to see and read and
pray with him every day, Sunday and week-day alike."
We make much fuss about parochial visiting now, but is there any
visiting like that? In _The Velvet Cushion_, a dialogue between the
Vicar and his wife is chronicled.
"'I am not sure,' said the Vicar, 'that it is not a presumptuous
reliance upon the goodness of God,--an abuse of the doctrine of Divine
mercy, that has kept me at home to-day, when I should have gone to
visit old Dame Wilkins. An' so now, my dear, let us go to Mary Wilkins'
directly.' Her bonnet was soon on, and they hobbled down the village
almost as fast as if their house had been on fire. Mary Wilkins was
a poor good woman, to whom the Vicar's visit three times a week had
become almost one of the necessaries of life. It was now two hours
beyond the time he usually came; and had she been awake, she would
really have been pained by the delay. But, happily, she had fallen into
a profound sleep, and when he put his foot on the threshold, and in his
old-fashioned way said, 'Peace be with you,' she was just awaking. This
comforted our good man, and, as he well knew where all comfort comes
from, he thanked God in his heart even for this."
The old parsons lived more on the social level of the farmers and
yeomen than of the squires, but they were in many cases men of
very considerable culture. It was not, however, those who were the
best scholars who were the best parsons. I will give presently
my reminiscences of one of the last of the old scholar-parsons.
Unfortunately, scholarship is on the decline, at all events among those
who occupy country parsonages.
It has been often charged against the old parsons, that they preached
mere morality, and above the heads of their people, interlarding
their sermons with quotations in Greek and Latin. As for preaching
morality--I do not care to apologize for their doing that. Nothing
better can be preached; nothing was more necessary to be preached in
the last century. Judging by the registers of baptisms in parishes,
at no time was there so much immorality among village people than
at that period when our country parsons were charged with preaching
morality--excepting always the present. Those who made this a matter of
accusation, meant that the Gospel, as they called their peculiar view
of religion, was not insisted on; forgetting all the while that the
Gospel is pretty well stuffed with exhortations to morality, and above
all, that model for all sermons, the one preached on the Mount. But
I do not believe that mere morality, apart from Christian faith, was
preached. There is a pretty passage in _The Velvet Cushion_ descriptive
of a sermon at the beginning of this century, which I cannot take to be
a description of something quite extraordinary and out of the way.
"'My love,' said the Vicar, 'this fact is worth a thousand
arguments--the common people heard Christ gladly. Socinianism never
fails to drive them away. A religion without a Saviour is the temple
without the Shechinah, and its worshippers will all desert it. Few
men in the world have less pretensions as a preacher than myself,--my
voice, my look, my manner, all of a very ordinary nature,--and yet, I
thank God, there is scarcely a corner of our little church where you
might not find a streaming eye or a beating heart. The reason is--that
I speak of Christ; and if there is not a charm in the word, there is
the train of fears, and hopes, and joys which it carries along with it.
The people feel, and then they must listen.'"
Evelyn in his _Diary_ says, in 1683, "A stranger, and old man,
preached--much after Bishop Andrews' method, full of logical divisions,
in short and broken periods, and Latin sentences, _now quite out of
fashion_ in the pulpit, which is grown into a far more profitable way
of plain and practical discourses, of which sort this nation, or any
other, never had greater plenty or more profitable, I am confident."
Pepys is hardly to be quoted as a judge, as he went to church to see
pretty faces, not, or not mainly, to hear sermons, and his criticism is
not always to be trusted.
"1667, 26th May, the Lord's Day. I went by water to Westminster to the
parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective glass
up and down the church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing
and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that, and
sleeping, I passed away the time till the sermon was done."
"1667, 20th August. Turned into St. Dunstan's church, where I heard an
able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest
maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got
further and further from me; and at last I could perceive her to take
pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again,--which
seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I
fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she
on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered
a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke
up, and my amours ended also."
"1667, 25th August, Lord's Day. Up and to church, thinking to see Betty
Michell, and did stay an hour in the crowd, thinking, by the end of
a nose that I saw, that it had been her; but at last the head turned
towards me, and it was her mother, which vexed me. So I back to my
boat."
No, Pepys was no judge of a good sermon, his mind was otherwise engaged.
Sermons now-a-days produce little or no effect, because there are too
many of them. The ears of hearers have been tickled till they are no
longer capable of sensation. One hears curates boast of having preached
some seven sermons in one week, and miserable stuff it must have been
that flowed so freely; and yet good enough for the hearers, who, by
accustoming their ears to be always hearing, are unable to appreciate
a really good discourse, or if they appreciate, allow it to produce no
effect whatever upon them. Our audiences in church are like those who
live in railway arches, who become so accustomed to the rush overhead
of trains, that none ever rouse them, and they cannot sleep without
the intermittent rush to lull them.
The sermons of the end of last century and the beginning of this
do not please us, because they are cast in a different mould, they
_generally_ appeal to a different side of us than do those of the
present day. They were addressed to the natural, healthy conscience,
and to plain, everyday common-sense, such as all men possess. Modern
sermons are appeals to the feelings, amiable, sentimental emotions,
and these amiable, sentimental emotions have become accustomed to be
scratched, like cats, and purr when that is done. It was an epithet
of scorn launched on Pope Damasus, that he was "ear-scratcher" to the
ladies,--such is, however, the highest glory of a modern preacher.
Crabbe undoubtedly hit the old country parsons on their weak point when
he said of his vicar, that his main characteristic was timidity. He was
infinitely blameless, but also immeasurably afraid.
"Thus he his race began, and to the end
His constant care was, no man to offend;
No haughty virtues stirr'd his peaceful mind;
Nor urged the Priest to leave the Flock behind;
He was his Master's soldier, but not one
To lead an army of His martyrs on:
Fear was his ruling passion."
Courage is born of conviction, and our old English country parsons had
no definite convictions, a sort of vague, nebulous, inchoate notion
that Christianity was all right, and that the Church of England was a
_via media_, and they deprecated anything like giving precision and
outline to faith, and assuming a direct walk which was not a perpetual
dodging between opposed errors. I ventured in one of my novels,
_Red-Spider_, to sketch this sort of parson, who never in the pulpit
insisted on a doctrine lest he should offend a Dissenter, nor on a duty
lest he should make a Churchman uneasy. And it was characteristic of
the race. In the Faroes there are sixteen different names for fogs,
and the articles of the Christian faith were only varieties in fogs to
these spiritual pastors. The nebulous theory prevailed in astronomy,
and in divinity as well. Some old-fashioned people resented the
resolution of the nebulæ into fixed stars; and so also in that other
province do they look on it as next to sacrilege to give to faith
definition.
It is, however, only since parsons have begun to see definite ends
that they have assumed any steadfastness in their walk and directness
in their course. In Fielding's time the country parsons wore their
cassocks as a usual dress. "Adams stood up," he relates, "and presented
a figure to the gentleman which would have moved laughter in many, for
his cassock had just fallen down below his great-coat, that is to say,
it reached his knees, whereas the skirts of his great-coat descended no
lower than half-way down his thighs."
[Illustration: Parson in cassock.]
The bands were always worn, the makeshift for the old Steenkirk tie
of fine white linen edged with more or less deep lace. Knee-breeches,
buckled shoes, and a black cocked hat completed his attire.
Some of the old Derby Uncle Toby jugs represent the beer-drinking
parson of an age a little later. The cassock has disappeared, and he
wears a clerical long black coat, with bands and white stockings. The
apron of the bishop is the reminiscence of the cassock, as the hat tied
up with strings of the archdeacon is the last survival of the cocked
hat.
The parson and his parishioners were on very good terms. When the Vicar
of Wakefield came to his new cure, the village turned out to meet him
with pipe and drum. Nevertheless there was occasional friction, mainly,
if not altogether, relative to tithe gathering. There is a harvest-home
song Dryden wrote for, or introduced into his play, _King Arthur; or,
The British Worthy_, in 1691, which forms part of the enchantments of
Merlin, and is sung by Comus and a set of peasants--
"We have cheated the parson, we'll cheat him again,
For why should a blockhead have one in ten?
One in ten,
One in ten;
For why should a blockhead have one in ten,
For prating so long, like a book-learned sot,
Till pudding and dumpling burn to pot?
Burn to pot."
There can be little question that the parson did get cheated over and
over again, and bore it without a murmur.
An amusing ballad is sung to this day in the west of England relative
to the way in which parsons were treated by their parishioners--
"There wor a man in our town,
I knowed him well, 'twor Passon Brown,
A man of credit and renown,
For--he wor _our_ Passon.
Passon he had got a sheep,
Merry Christmas he would keep;
Decent Passon he--and cheap,
Well-spoke--and not a cross 'un.
Us had gotten nort to eat,
So us stole the Passon's sheep--
Merry Christmas us would keep;
We ate 'n for our dinner.
Us enjoyed our Christmas day;
Passon preached, and said, 'Let's pray,
But I'm a fasting saint; aye, aye!
You'm each a wicked sinner.'
Cruel vex'd wor Passon Brown,
Sick to death he laid him down
Passonless was soon our town,
For why?--we'd starved our Passon.
Tell'y--did'y ever hear
Such a story, true but queer,
How 'twixt Christmas and New Year
The flock had ate their Passon?"
There was non-residence undoubtedly previous to the Act against
holding more than one living at a time, unless near together. Men of
birth and influence obtained a good deal of preferment, but never in
post-Reformation times to the extent that this abuse existed before.
To take but one instance. Thomas Cantilupe, who died in 1282, was
Precentor and Canon of York, Archdeacon of Stafford and Canon of
Lichfield, Canon of London, Canon of Hereford, and held the livings of
Doderholt, Hampton, Aston, Wintringham, Deighton, Rippel, Sunterfield,
and apparently also Prestbury. Pretty well! It was never so bad in the
maligned Hanoverian period.
I had a living in Essex which was held formerly by a certain Bramston
Staynes, who was a squarson in Essex, and held simultaneously three
other livings; there was one curate to serve the three churches. The
rector is said to have visited one of his livings twice only in the
twenty years of his incumbency--once to read himself in, the other time
to settle some dispute relative to the payment of his tithes.
I can recall several instances of the old scholar-parson, a man
chap-ful of quotations. One, a very able classic, and a great
naturalist, was rather fond of the bottle. "Mr. West," said a neighbour
one day, "I hear you have a wonderfully beautiful spring of water in
your glebe." "Beautiful! surpassing! _fons Blandusiæ, splendidior
vitro!_-- water so good that I never touch it--afraid of drinking too
much of it."
Some twenty-five years ago I knew another, a fine scholar, an old
bachelor, living in a very large rectory. He was a man of good
presence, courteous, old-world manners, and something of old-world
infirmities. His sense of his religious responsibilities in the parish
was different in quality to that affected now-a-days.
He was very old when I knew him, and was often laid up with gout.
One day, hearing that he was thus crippled, I paid him a visit, and
encountered a party of women descending the staircase from his room.
When I entered he said to me, "I suppose you met little Mary So-and-so
and Janie What's-her-name going out? I've been churching them up here
in my bed-room, as I can't go to church."
When a labourer desired to have his child privately baptized, he
provided a bottle of rum, a pack of cards, a lemon, and a basin of pure
water, then sent for the parson and the farmer for whom he worked. The
religious rite over, the basin was removed, the table cleared, cards
and rum produced, and sat down to. On such occasions the rector did
not return home till late, and the housekeeper left the library window
unhasped for the master, but locked the house doors. Under the library
window was a violet bed, and it was commonly reported that the rector
had on more than one occasion slept in that bed after a christening.
Unable to heave up his big body to the sill of the window, he had
fallen back among the violets, and there slept off the exertion.
I never had the opportunity of hearing the old fellow preach. His
conversation--whether addressing a gentleman, a lady, or one of the
lower classes--was garnished with quotations from the classic authors,
Greek and Latin, with which his surprising memory was richly stored;
and I cannot think that he could resist the temptation of introducing
them into his discourse from the pulpit, yet I heard no hint of this
in the only sermon of his which was repeated to me by one of his
congregation. The occasion of its delivery was this.
He was highly incensed at a long engagement being broken off between
some young people in his parish, so next Sunday he preached on "Let
love be without dissimulation;" and the sermon, which on this occasion
was extempore, was reported by those who heard it to consist of little
more than this--"You see, my dearly beloved brethren, what the Apostle
says--Let love be without dissimulation. Now I'll tell y' what I think
dissimulation is. When a young chap goes out a walking with a girl,--as
nice a lass as ever you saw, with an uncommon fresh pair o' cheeks
and pretty black eyes too, and not a word against her character, very
respectably brought up,--when, I say, my dearly beloved brethren, a
young chap goes out walking with such a young woman, after church of
a summer evening, seen of every one, and offers her his arm, and they
look friendly like at each other, and at times he buys her a present
at the fair, a ribbon, or a bit of jewellery--I cannot say I have
heard, and I don't say that I have seen,--when, I say, dearly beloved
brethren, a young chap like this goes on for more than a year, and lets
everybody fancy they are going to be married,--I don't mean to say that
at times a young chap may see a nice lass and admire her, and talk to
her a bit, and then go away and forget her--there's no dissimulation
in that;--but when it goes on a long time, and he makes her to think
he's very sweet upon her, and that he can't live without her, and he
gives her ribbons and jewellery that I can't particularize, because I
haven't seen them--when a young chap, dearly beloved brethren--" and
so on and so on, becoming more and more involved. The parties preached
about were in the church, and the young man was just under the pulpit,
with the eyes of the whole congregation turned on him. The sermon had
its effect--he reverted to his love, and without any dissimulation, we
trust, married her.
The Christmas and the Easter decorations in this old fellow's church
were very wonderful. There was a Christmas text, and that did service
also for Easter. The decorating of the church was intrusted to the
schoolmaster, a lame man, and his wife, and consisted in a holly or
laurel crutch set up on one side of the chancel, and a "jaws of death"
on the other. This appalling symbol was constructed like a set of teeth
in a dentist's shop-window--the fangs were made of snipped or indented
white drawing paper, and the gums of overlapping laurel leaves stitched
down one on the other.
A very good story was told of this old parson, which is, I believe,
quite true. He was invited to spend a couple of days with a great
squire some miles off. He went, stayed his allotted time, and
disappeared. Two days later the lady of the house, happening to go
into the servants'-hall in the evening, found, to her amazement,
her late guest--there. After he had finished his visit up-stairs,
at the invitation of the butler he spent the same time below. "Like
Persephone, madam," he said,--"half my time above, half in the nether
world."
In the matter of personal neatness he left much to be desired. His
walled garden was famous for its jargonelle pears. Lady X--, one day
coming over, said to him, "Will you come back in my carriage with
me, and dine at the Park? You can stay the night, and be driven home
to-morrow."
"Thank you, my lady, delighted. I will bring with me some jargonelles.
I'll go and fetch them."
Presently he returned with a little open basket and some fine pears
in it. Lady X-- looked at him, with a troubled expression in her
sweet face. The rector was hardly in dining suit; moreover, there was
apparent no equipment for the night.
"Dear Mr. M--, will you not _really_ want something further? You will
dine with us, _and sleep the night_."
A vacant expression stole over his countenance, as he retired into
himself in thought. Presently a flash of intelligence returned, and he
said with briskness, "Ah! to be sure; I'll go and fetch two or three
more jargonelles."
A kind, good-hearted man the scholar-parson was, always ready to put
his hand into his pocket at a tale of distress, but quite incapable
of understanding that his parishioners might have spiritual as well
as material requirements. I remember a case of a very similar man--a
fellow of his college, and professor at Cambridge--to whom a young
student ventured to open some difficulties and doubts that tortured
him. "Difficulties! doubts!" echoed the old gentleman. "Take a couple
of glasses of port. If that don't dispel them, take two more, and
continue the dose till you have found ease of mind."
But to return to our country parson, who had the jargonelles. His
church was always well attended. Quite as large a congregation was
to be found in it as in other parish churches, where all the modern
appliances of music, popular preaching, parish visitations, clubs and
bible-classes were in force. Perhaps the reason was that he was not too
spiritually exacting. Many of our enthusiastic modern parsons attempt
to screw up their people into a condition of spiritual exaltation which
they are quite unable to maintain permanently, and then they become
discouraged at the inevitable, invariable relapse.
We suppose that one main cause of dissent is the deadness and dulness
of the Church service before the revival of late days; and we
attribute this deadness and dulness to the indifference of these _bêtes
noirs_, the clergy of last century. I doubt it.
At the time of the Commonwealth our churches had been gutted of
everything ornamental and beautiful, and the services reduced to
the most dreary performance of sermon and extempore prayer. At the
Restoration, a very large number indeed of the Presbyterian ministers
conformed, were ordained, and retained the benefices. Naturally they
conducted the Common Prayer as nearly as they could on the lines of
the service they were accustomed to. They had no tradition of what
the Anglican liturgy was; they did not understand it, and they served
it up cold or lukewarm, as unpalatable as possible. They did not like
it themselves, and they did not want their congregations to become
partial to it. The old clergy who were restored were obliged to
content themselves with the merest essentials of Divine worship; their
congregations had grown up without acquaintance with the liturgy--at
all events for some nineteen years they had not heard it, and they did
not want to shock their weak consciences by too sudden a transformation.
When Pepys went to church on November 4, 1660, he entered in his
_Diary_, "Mr. Mills did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer, by saying
Glory be to the Father, &c., after he had read the two psalms; but the
people had been so little used to it, that they could not tell what to
answer." The same afternoon he went to Westminster Abbey, "where the
first time that ever I heard the organs in a cathedral."
Evelyn enters, on March 22, 1678, "now was our Communion-table placed
altar-wise," that is to say, not till eighteen years after the
Restoration! so slowly were alterations made in the churches to bring
them back to their former conditions of decency and order. Whatever
has been done since has been done cautiously and with hesitation, lest
offence should be given.
It was not practicable in our village churches to have the hearty
congregational singing that now prevails, for only a very few could
read, and only such could join in the psalmody.
I have in my possession a diary kept by a kinswoman in 1813. She makes
in that year an entry, "Walked over this Sunday to South Mimms church
to hear a barrel-organ that has just been there erected. It made very
beautiful and appropriate music, and admirably sustained the voices of
the quire, but I do not myself admire these innovations in the conduct
of Divine worship." What would she have said to the innovations that
have taken place since then, had she lived to see them! And they have
been, for the most part, in a right direction; but we must be thankful,
not only for them, but for the evidence they give that the clergy are
somewhat emerging from that condition in which they were, as Crabbe
describes them, when "Fear was their ruling passion"--
"All things new
Were deemed superfluous, useless, or untrue.
Habit with him was all the test of truth;
It must be right; I've done it from my youth.
Questions he answer'd in as brief a way;--
It must be wrong--it was of yesterday."
[Illustration]