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CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND AND WALES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fifth Impression, Twenty-third Thousand. Price 7s. 6d.
Priests and People in Ireland
Extra crown 8vo, 640 pp. Letterpress and 46 Illustrations.
The Times. — " Makes a strong case against the general influence of sacer- dotalism in Ireland. He proves it to be beyond dispute a bar to the intellectual progress of the great mass of the population, an agent of religious bitterness, and, if not a friend, certainly no enemy to political unrest."
The Standard.—" in a land of declining population and stagnant industry, the Chui-ch is daily advancing in wealth."
Spectator.— "States a case against the Roman Church in Ireland of a most appalling character. This book will be, and deserves to be, widely read. "
Contemporary Review.— "No impartial reader can close the book without feeling that it is the testimony of a man who writes solely from a stern sense of patriotism."
Pall Mall Gazette.— "Is an immense improvement on his first work."
Saturday Review.— " A work which has been compiled at the cost of great labour, and published at the cost of considerable courage."
Daily Mail.— "He is nowhere personal, and nowhere does he play the eaves- dropper."
YorksMre Post. - " Robust independence quite foreign to the average Roman Catholic."
Glasgow Herald.— " Makes unmistakably lively reading."
Birmingham Post. — " Constitutes a record that should prove of singular attraction."
Liverpool Courier.- "A degree of vigour and a fearlessness that startles an average English reader."
Five Years in Ireland, 1895=1900
Tenth Edition, 3s. 6d. net. 568 pp. of Letterpress, 32 pp. of Illustrations, including 42 Portraits,
Published in March 1901, Five Years in Ireland has paved the way tor an entire change of feeling and public policy amongst all parties.
Allffpmeine Zeitung— "One of those works which announce a revolution in nuWic opinion, and a new epoch in the history of Ireland. There is no book in the English literature of to-day which has made such an immense sensation as this book."
Deutsche Rundschau.—" Treats all public questions with a degree of upright- ness which has never been equalled amongst Irish Catholics."
ovjpctator — " One can almost see the tears between the lines. Absence of personalities, abnegation of ancient grudges, earnestness and common-sense are his attributes, and he does not lack humour."
Earl of Rosebery, K.G.— "Broad, independent, and fearless."
Primate Alexander.— " Words so true and temperate, so full of impartial thought and luminous common-sense."
Globe.- "Is full of sense and sincerity. . . . Mr. McCarthy has in him the characteristics of the real patriot."
Archbishop Tait
Bishop S. Wii.berforce
Photos by W. <fc D. Downey; and Elliott & Fry,
Church and State in England
Archbishop Tait says that Bishop Wilberforce was intriguins: to secure "Gladstone's succession in tl)e premiership as the sure way for resisting Liberalism in Church and State!" (p. 447.) "Allowing lor certain shades of difference, Lord Salisbury was a ritualist and 'high' churchman, as Mr. Gladstone was"; but, uulikc Mr. Gladstone, he " was on the friendliest terms with Queen Victoria." (pp. 538-9J „ ,. .
Frontispiece
CHURCH AND STATE
IN
ENGLAND & WALES
1829-I906
BY
MICHAEL J. F. MCCARTHY,
B.A., T.C.D., BARRISfER-AT-LAW
AUTHOR OF "PRIESTS AND PEOPLE IN IRELAND" "FIVE YEARS IN IRELAND," "ROME IN IRELAND," ETC.
" The causes of Superstition are, pleasing and sensual Rites and Ceremonies ; exce'^s of outward and pharisaical holiness ; over-great reverence of Traditions which cannot but load the Church ; the stratagems of Prelates for their own ambition and lucre ; the favouring too much of Good Intentions, which openeth the gate to Conceits and Novelties." — Lord Bacon, on Superstition.
DUBLIN HODGES, FIGGIS & CO., Ltd.
104 GRAFTON STREET
LONDON SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., Ltd.
1906
To the Many Thousands of Excellent Clergymen
WITHIN THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND
WHO GIVE THEMSELVES TO THE MINISTRY OF THE WORD; WHO PREACH NOT THEMSELVES, BUT CHRIST JESUS THE LORD ; FAITHFUL MINISTERS OF CHRIST ; STRENGTHENED UNTO ALL PATIENCE AND LONG-SUFFERING ; FAITHFUL HUSBANDS AND FATHERS OF FAITHFUL CHILDREN ; FRUIT- FUL IN EVERY GOOD WORK ; WHO OVERSEE THE FLOCK OF GOD, NOT BY CONSTRAINT BUT WILLINGLY, NOT FOR FILTHY LUCRE, BUT OF A READY MIND
THE AUTHOR DEDICATES THIS BOOK
Wimbledon , August 1906.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
General feeling of despair about the Established Church — Extra- ordinary cases of Proselytism to Romanism via Anglicanism — Broad Church and High Church in rural districts — An Archbishop of Canterbury's son — Rome among the Bishops — English religious customs — Commission on ritual dis- orders— The Christian's duty— The Rationalist's weakness — Priestcraft in Greece, Rome, and Venice — Priestcraft in England — The new Spanish marriage — The ex-Lord Lieu- tenant of Ireland
CHAPTER I
Catholic Emancipation— New spirit of inquiry — Education of the poor — Struggle for a free University in London — Theology unmasked — Milton and Johnson — George IV. and Bishop Howley — J. F. D. Maurice — Durham University — King's College — Commutation of Tithe — Ecclesiastical Commission — National reforms — Four spheres of Ecclesiastical activity 23
CHAPTER II
Jewish and Roman tithe — Tithes at the Reformation — England still under Papal law — Tithes of fishing and of labour — An anti-Christian system — Tithe commutation explained — Ex- traordinary tithes — Value of tithe rent-charge — Decadence of agriculture explained — Fiscal reform and tithe — London tithes — Glebe lands — Church rates 40
CHAPTER III.
Composition and powers of the Ecclesiastical Commission — Re- arrangement of Bishops' incomes— Suppression of Canonries — Ecclesiastical Patronage— Simony — Work of the Com- mission— Clerical riches and poverty — Cause of the poverty — National growth — Ecclesiastical decay — Anglican Church a medieval institution — Bishops' Courts — Cathedral estab- lishments—Dioceses of Canterbury, York, London, Win- chester, Durham, Carlisle, Chester, Liverpool. Manchester, Newcastle, Ripon, Wakefield, and Man 61
CONTENTS vii
PAOB
91
CHAPTER IV
Westminster Abber— Windsor Free Chapel— The dioceses of St. Albans, St. Asaph, Bangor, Bath and Wells, Bristol, Chi- chester, St. David's, Ely, Exeter. Gloucester, Hereford, and Lichfield ...........
CHAPTER V
Lincoln — Tennyson on Church and Nonconformity — Llandaff — Norwich — Oxford — Christ Church College anomaly— Peter- borough— Rochester — South wark — Salisbury — The Sarum Ritual — Southwell — Truro — Worcester — Birmingham — Ecclesiastical Commission — Summary — Ecclesiastical Wealth — Buildings versus Men . . . . . . . ■ 1 1 3
CHAPTER VI
Clericalism at Oxford and Cambridge — Foundation and early history of the Colleges — The Universities at and after the Reformation — Oxford in the eighteenth century — Wesley and Whitefield— Morals and drinking customs . . . 144
CHAPTER VII
The Oxford sacerdotal movement — Keble on national apostacy — The Anglican bishoprics in Ireland — Newman's ante- cedents—His first visit to Rome — The philosophy of lying — Pusey's character— Anti-Hampden cabal — Manning and Gladstone — Archbishop Howley — Newman's coenobitium — The Tracts — Manning as archdeacon — Pusey founds nunneries — The Martyrs' Memorial 166
CHAPTER VIII
The Littlemore monastery — Bishop Bagot and Newman — Glad- stone "trims" — Frederick Faber founds a monastery — Pusey and " the discipline "—Degradation of W. G. Ward— Seces- sions to Rome — Newman and Achilli — Newman in Ireland — Newman is made a cardinal — Manning in Rome — Hampden gets a bishopric — Gladstone as member for Oxford — Man- ning's career as a Roman Catholic— End of Keble and Pusey — The sacerdotal movement considered — The evangelicals and the sacerdotalists— The society Puseyite — Problems for Puseyites — Archbishop Davidson and Bishop Gore . -193
CHAPTER IX
The University Commission of 1S50— Oxford censured— Decad- ence of the colleges — Bishop Samuel Wilberforce- The abolition of religious tests — The Universities Act, 1S77— Reform of the professoriate— The fellows and professors- Benjamin Jowett— History in Oxford— Bishop Stubbs, Pro- fessor Gardiner, and Professor Freeman ..... 226
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER X
PAQK
Oxford — "Religion, Learning, and Education" — Penalties on Marriage — Priest- B^ellows — Wealth of the Colleges— Costly- establishments — Salaries of Heads and Fellows — Enormous outlay on religious worship — Review of the Colleges — Christ Church — Secret Trusts in Hertford College — Non-collegiate Students — Keble College and Ritualism — Clerical influence — Extravagance and frivolity — Poverty of the Universities — Discreditable Reports from the institutions— Loans— Total revenues ........... 249
CHAPTER XI
Cambridge Colleges and University— Their history — The new Statutes — Collegiate finances — Clerical influence — University finances — Summary and total Endowments of Oxford and Cambridge — The Public Schools Monopoly — Lampeter Col- lege— -University of Wales — Owens College — Victoria Uni- versity— Liverpool, Leeds, and Birmingham Universities . 281
CHAPTER XII
Compact between Church and State after the Reformation — The clerical caste more powerful in England than on the Con- tinent—Its influence over literature — Tennyson, Browning, Thackeray, Dickens — The Church and Science — Huxley and Archbishop Thomson — Cobden and the Church — Elementary Education — Sir John Gorst and the aristocracy — Bishop Creighton's presumption — The so-called " National " schools — Proselytism in school — Growth of Ritualism — The Board Schools of 1870 — W. E. Forster 313
CHAPTER XIII
The fight against the Board Schools — The Conservatives and Compulsory Education — Home Rule checks educational reform — Lord Salisbury's advice to the Church — Eccle- siastical strategy — Training and pay of Church teachers — Anti-Christian religion in Church schools — Masses and Missions — Proselytism 335
CHAPTER XIV
Financial distress of the Church schools — The Education Acts, 1902 and 1903 — Alliance between Anglicans and Romans — Ritualism persisted in — Protests by County Councils — En- dorsement by Archbishop Davidson — Church school teaching in St. Albans — The Training Colleges — Education BUI, 1906 — The Bishops' agitation — Mr. Lloyd George denounces clericalism — The "ecclesiastical laymen" — Bishop Talbot's metaphor — Bishop Ingram's threat — The Church and the unemployed — Mysterious demonstrations — The Church pecu- niarily interested in reviving Protection— Extraordinary scene at St. Paul's — Resurrection of the unemployed . . 357
CONTENTS ix
CHAPTER XV
PAGE
How the Laity are churcb-outed by tbe Clergy — Growth of Non- conformity at home and in tbe colonies — Tbe Church Patronage" system — Tbe Benefices Act, 1898 — The case of St. George's, Botolpb Lane — Preferments given for political services — Archbishop Davidson on workhouse chaplains — The Bishop of Kensington — Queen Anne's Bounty — Active traffic in Church patronage still prevalent .... 405
CHAPTER XVI
The Churchwardens — The Convocations — Their ancient powers — Their suspension and revival — Tbe Houses of Laymen — The Diocesan Conferences — A travesty of representative govern- ment— The Liverpool Diocesan Conference, 1903 — Messrs. Black & Green, Limited — St. Paul versus Bishop Chavasse . 441
CHAPTER XVII
The ? Representative Church Council — Preliminary meetings — Excessive power of the archbishops — Helplessness of the laity — First regular session — Undistinguished attendance — Debates on tbe council's constitution — Revolutionary out- bursts of Church dignitaries not followed by action — In- effectual protests by laymen — Triumph of sacerdotalists — The lay franchise fixed on religious basis — Bishops differ, but prelacy always wins — Revolt of the churcb-outed in Cheshire — Bishop Jayne mobbed at Birkenhead . . . 472
CHAPTER XVIII
History and analysis of Anglican ritualism — Society of tbe Holy Cross- — St. George's "riots" — "The Priest in Absolution" — Pusey triumphant — Pusey and Gaume — Other ritualist societies — Sacerdotalism in the Schools, the Army, and the Navy — Anglican religious orders, male and female — Trade in ritualistic appliances — Legal decisions against ritualism — The Mackonocbie, Purchas, and other cases — The Eccle- siastical Courts Commission, 1882-3 ..... 503
CHAPTER XIX
Ritualism under Salisbury and Gladstone — Queen Victoria's position — Deception of the evangelical party by the bishops — Continued practice of ritualism — Tbe campaign of Bishop King of Lincoln — His trial by Archbishop Benson — Appeal to the Privy Council — Lord Halsbury's judgment — Bills for Disestablishment in Wales, 1S93 and 1S94 — Sacerdotal party appeal to Rome — Parliamentary motion for disestablishment in England, 1S97 — The Pan-Anglican bishops— Condemna- tion of ritualism by Parliament, 1899 — Continued growth of ritualism — Archbishop !Maclagan involved — Church Discip- line Bill, 1903 — The Royal Declaration assailed by Archbishop Davidson 539
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XX
Ecclesiastical Discipline Commission, 1904 — The sacerdotal party's first move — Evidence of illegalities restricted — Testi- mony of medievalists admitted without limit— Doings of sacerdotal party, 1904-6 — Father Adderley— Bishop Gore — Bishop Ingram — Clerical criminality — Parish of Wimbledon . 589
CHAPTER XXI
Report of Ecclesiastical Discipline Commission, 1906 — Evidence of Rev. W. E. Bowen, Sir J. Lawson Walton, Mr. J. Athelstan Riley, Rev. W. H. Frere, Lady Wimborne, Mr. Henry Miller, and others — Episcopal Church of America — Refusal of evangelical evidence — Unjustifiable recommendations — Sacerdotalist claims more audacious than ever — The nation's duty — Conclusion ... .... 632
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
(FIFTY-FOUR IN NUMBER)
Queen Victoria, Archbishop Tait, Bishop S. \
WiLBERPORCE, W. E. GLADSTONE, AND THE > Frontispiece Marquis op Salisbury ' The Fortresses op the Church op England To face page 23
Lord John Russell ^^ .g
Salisbury and Lincoln Cathedrals . . ,, gj
Archbishops Davidson and Maclagan . . „ 7 c
Peterborough and Durham Cathedrals . . „ 91 The Bishop of Lincoln in Episcopal Vestments
Bishops Talbot and Gore
Canon Pusey and Rev. John Keble ... ,, 166
Nicholas Wiseman, Cardinal .... „ 178
H. E. Manning and J. H. Newman, Cardinals, „ 193 Results op Puseyism— An Anglican Monastic
Order of the Present Day . . . ,, 212 Results of Puseyism— An Anglican Ritualistic
Church at the Present Day .... ,, 233
All Souls and Keble College Chapels, Oxford ,, 255 King's College and St. John's College Chapels,
Cambridge ^ 281
Anglican Priests op the Present Day . ,, 307
113 136
xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Ritualism which Bishop Creighton pos- tered To face page 325
An Anglican High Church of To-Day . . ,, 348 William Edward Forster and Augustine
BiRRELL „ 357
Altar in Ely Theological College . . . „ 368
Bishop Ingram and Rev. W. Carlile ... ,, 388
The Idolatrous Reredos in St. Paul's . . „ 403
Bishops Chavasse and Jayne . . . . ,, 44'
School op an Anglican Religious Order . ,, 462
Bishop Perceval and Mr. J. C. Colquhoun . „ 485
John Kensit ,, 494
The Machinery op Ritualism 1
> . . • „ 509 What England owes to Oxford )
Captain Cobham and Lord Halifax ... „ 524
Bishop King „ 539
Jesuits' Church, Wimbledon, and Anglican
Church, Roehampton „ 553
The Gloucester Reredos „ 573
The Mass or Choral Communion Service . . ,, 593
CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
INTRODUCTION
General feeling of despair about the Established Church— Extra- ordinary cases of Proselytism to Romanism via Anglicanism- Broad Church and High Church in rural districts — An Archbishop of Canterbury's son — Rome among the Bishops — English religious customs — Commission on ritual disorders — The Christian's duty — The Rationalist's weakness — Priestcraft in Greece, Rome, and Venice— Priestcraft in England— The new Spanish marriage — The ex-Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
The widespread circulation of " Priests and People in Ireland " brought its author into contact with Christians of every denomination, not only in the United Kingdom but in the most distant colonies. The correspondence which he received comprised thousands of letters from people of all conditions — day-labourers, artisans, shopkeepers, professional men, clergymen of all creeds, politicians, Church dignitaries, and members of the nobility. The burden of all the letters was the same, namely, that the spread of priestcraft is under- mining the national character, not only in Ireland but in England, where its influence is not more perceptible in the churches than in the public schools and uni- versities.
Taken as a whole, the letters directly expressed, or insinuated, a feeling of despair in reference to the
A
2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Churcli of England. The holder of one of the richest dignities in the Established Church, for instance, wrote a long letter of inquiry, the following extracts from which are remarkable for their candour :—" Let me thank you for your very interesting and crushing book. It is of great value at a moment when our Anglicans are playing the same game. . . . The fierce feelings excited by the Education debates " (in 1 902) " show that this country is in no hurry to hand over the com- mand to the black-coats, whether Romans or Anglicans. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to any one who will face clerical wrath as you have done. . . . The con- dition of religious matters in England is far from satisfactory. We have lost — if we ever had it — the affection and confidence of the town masses. Religion is too often mere dependence, and that no less in Protestant than in Catholic circles." The writer then went on to describe " the later breed " of ritualism as " little more than a grotesque copy of certain ' Catholic ' usages, and a secret belief in the sacramental and priestly system." And he concluded thus : " I imagine that the honest Romanists are smitten with contempt for such poor reflections of what is to them the most serious element of the Christian system of faith and practice. But Church matters are now very distasteful to me, and all points towards a disestablishment, and to an outburst of fanatical zeal in consequence."
Hundreds of others declared that the Roman priestcraft which the author denounced in Ireland only differed in degree from the Anglican priestcraft which prevailed in England. Nay, they said that, of the two evils, the Roman priestcraft in Ireland was less dangerous to the State; because it affected a smaller number of people, and was an open fire which, however brightly it might seem to blaze at
A SAD LETTER 3
present, was being watched, and might be extinguished more quickly than is now thought possible. AVhereas, the ravages of Anglican priestcraft were like those of a hidden fire consuming the vitals of the nation while the surface of things as yet continues fair to the eye.
But of all the letters which the author received, there was one which imperatively aroused him to action. It came in 1902, soon after the appearance of " Priests and People," and was as follows : —
"Dear Sir, — I have just finished your book, ' Priests and People,' and I feel that every true follower of Christ owes you a debt of thanks. But I especially do so, for it may, please God, prove a most valuable weapon in my hands to bring back and save from the priests of Rome my dear young son, whom they have entrapped and carried off to the English
College at , without allowing him to come home
to take leave of his mother. This was done just a year ago, and he is coming home for a holiday at ray urgent request (and of course at my expense), in July or August next, for two months,
" He was on the point of going to Oxford, and I had hoped he would have been eventually ordained in the
English Church. He is young (now years),
impressionable, enthusiastic ; and, being a gentleman and well educated, will no doubt be a valuable prize for the priesthood, unless I can save him from that fate.
" His brother, who is years older, and feels with
me entirely in this matter, is also deeply interested in your book ; and we have thought whether a trip to Ireland might not help to open my younger son's eyes. Especially valuable would it be if you would be so kind as to see him or allow his brother and him to call on
4 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
you then ; as I feel sure that your words, as belong- ing to the Roman Church, would have a far deeper value than any we could say. Would you do this to help me ? I shall be more grateful than I can say if you will talk to him a little. — Yours truly,
A photograph, which was enclosed, showed me that the writer's son was one of those handsome English youths, who are turned out of the public schools year after year, and with the subject of whose education and character we shall deal in the proper place.
It was only a few months after the receipt of this letter that I was astonished at reading in the leading Irish clerical newspaper, that " an attempt to put down ' Romish practices ' in one of the Anglican churches in London, St. Michael's, Shoreditch, had had a sensa- tional result."^ "First of all," it was stated, "the vicar, the Rev. H. M. Evans, resigned his living " ; and the report went on to say, " The development entered on another stage on Sunday, when about half the con- gregation, with a portion of the choir, attended the new Catholic church of St. Mary's, Moorfields, the church being hastily got ready for their reception, and Cardinal Vaughan issuing a special faculty to permit English hymns to be sung. In addition to the attend- ance at mass, a large number of St. Michaels Sunday school children, led by their teachers, attended Sunday school at St. Mary's. In the evening the worshippers and children from St. Michael's had the prior right of entrance to St. Mary's, and the new building was crowded. Meanwhile the services at St. Michael's were carried on with a diminished choir and congrega- tion half the usual size ! "
1 Freeman's Journal, February ii, 1903.
"THE PANTING HEART OF ROME" 5
A few days afterwards the same newspaper pro- claimed : " Despite every effort to induce the intending converts to return to the AngHcan Church, they seem determined to embrace the CathoHc faith, and at eleven o'clock mass, which was celebrated by the Rev. Father Threed, M.A., Archbishop's House, between 150 and 200 of the ex-Anglicans were present, and showed the utmost devotion throughout the service, especially during the Elevation. After the first Gospel, the Rev. Father Chase, himself a convert, having been formerly Protestant vicar at Plymouth, preached a sermon plainly intended for the new-comers, in which he pointed out the unity which exists and has always existed in the Church, as compared with the many doctrines enunciated in the various branches of the Church of England. At the conclusion of mass, the entire congregation sang ' Faith of Our Fathers.' In the evening the church was crowded in every part, and, when the rosary was recited, the former attendants of St. Michael's were plainly heard giving the responses, while they joined in the English hymns sung during benediction. Father Chase again preached, and at the close of the ceremonies, ' Full in the Panting Heart of Rome ' was sung. Special instructions have been arranged for the new-comers prior to their being formally received into the Church."^
These occurrences threw a new light upon the wrong endured by my correspondent ; and hearing from her some weeks later that her son was not to come home, as she had wished and expected, I paid a visit to her home in one of the most beautiful districts of rural England, met herself and her eldest son, and stayed some days in the locality. The circumstances which I discovered there, and which had led to the young man's change of religion, revealed to me the existence
* Freeman's Journal, February i6, 1903.
6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of a disintegrating process at work within the Church of England, as to whose extent I had until then no definite conception. The rector of the parish was a country gentleman, a magistrate, a man of private means, and patron of his own living, who took his place in county society, and did his duty according to his lights. The comfort and lethargy of an animal existence betrayed themselves in the lives of the people and the appearance of the country. The parish church had doubtless often witnessed the celebration of mass, according to the Sarum use, in days before the Refor- mation. There was no active vice, neither was there any active virtue. The peasants did not know the difference between Richard Cobden and John Calvin, did not know the inter-relation between " district councils," " county councils," and " parliament." They lived from hour to hour, their mental vision as limited as their physical horizon, which was never distant more than a mile ; steadily engrossed with their sleep, their food, their work, and their animal joys.
But in the neighbouring parish, over the crest of the nearest hill, the vicar was, and is, a Puseyite, a ritualist, and an active member of the sacerdotal party, a man who considered himself a super-human priest, and only incidentally an EngHshman; quite a different person from the rector I have described. But rector and vicar, different as were their liturgical practices, were both equally Roman on one point, and that was in their firm belief that the people for whom they ministered had no right to have their wishes con- sulted as to the conduct of the services in the parish church ; and each alike, in his own way, regarded him- self as the spiritual master of his parishioners, and not their minister.
The vicar, acting under the loftiest official patron- ao-e in the Established Church, practised all the ritual,
AN ANGLO-ROMAN VICAR 7
sacraments, sacrifices, and ceremonies by which the Roman priests maintain their baneful supremacy over the imaginative and credulous Celts of the south of Ireland. In his church were statues, stations of the cross, altars, candles, coloured lamps, and confessionals. I learned that auricular confession was practised, ab- solutions pronounced, and penances imposed. An excellent equivalent for the Latin mass was found in choral communion services without conmiunicants, with liberal interpolations from the ancient liturgies mumbled as if in a foreign tongue, with melodra- matic gestures, genuflections, and prostrations; the vicar wearing Roman vestments and being served by cassocked and surphced altar-boys. Processions were arranged, holy feasts were kept several times a week, and fasting communion was distributed every morning.
I heard that this cult of priestcraft had flourished in the parish for some years, but was not of native growth, having been imported by the ritualist vicar. I found that the respectable churchgoers eschewed the ritualist's church, and worshipped at the church of another vicar close at hand. Who, then, kept up the cult of ritualism ? It was maintained by a small number of wealthy people, some of them strangers, who had come to reside in the locality. A number of credulous poor were induced to attend the church and send their children to the schools by the prospect of reward — they were " rice Christians," or people of the class known as "soupers" in Ireland. Others came to the church, because they "liked the show," and did not feel that any serious principle was affected by it. But the respectabihty and worth of the parish were assuredly not involved in the proceedings, and had no partnership in the vicar's guilt, beyond that which the priest and the Levite incurred when they
8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" passed by on the other side," and did nothing to help the man who had fallen among thieves.
The youth, in whose fortune I was interested, had been tempted to give up attendance at his own parish church and join the ritualists in the neighbouring parish. He there met a well-to-do lady, one of the worshippers, in whose society he spent much of his time. On all sides he heard nothing but praise of Romanism. Like Pusey, the misguided young English- man might truly say : " From much reading of Roman books, I am so much impressed with the superiority of their teaching that I dare not speak against things." ^ Every one with whom he came into contact seemed, as Pusey said of himself, only to " desiderate more love for Rome." His rich patroness actually joined the Church of Rome, though she still continued her associations with the Anglo-Roman establishment, and she offered, if he consented to become a Roman priest, to pay all the expenses of his education. The vicar not only did nothing to prevent him, I was informed, but gave him every facility for leaving the Church of England, appearing to regard it as the legitimate end of his own " Romeward " practices.
The young man was quickly put into communication with some English Jesuits, by whom he was " received into the Catholic Church," taken away from his mother in the fashion which she described in her letter to me, and placed in an ecclesiastical college on the continent to be educated for the priesthood. The young man was not allowed home to see his parents at the ex- pected date, nor since ; he therefore did not come to Ireland, nor did I ever see him. But I had an opportunity of seeing more than one of his letters, which gave me an indication of the innocent amiability
^ " Life of Dr. Pusey," ii. 456.
PUSEYITE DISLOYALTY 9
of his character. He delighted in the feast-days, fasts, and sacramental observances of the Roman Church, believed in the supernatural power exercised by the priests in the confessional and in the act of transubstantiation, and looked forward to his ordination as an ancient Roman might have looked forward to being admitted into the ranks of the gods.
All fair-minded people will agree (i) that a loyal minister of the Church of England could not have acted as this vicar did, and (2) that if the vicar were a Roman Catholic priest masquerading as an English clergyman, for the twofold purpose of drawing " the produce of his living" and entrapping Anglicans into the Roman Church, he could not have shown greater zeal in the interests of his master, the Pope of Rome.
Furthermore, even if the Church of England were one of those Churches which subsist entirely on the contributions of their adherents, the case of this young man could not fail to excite the deepest sympathy and regret. But, when we consider that the Church in which this underhand proselytism was practised is a State institution, with the 'sovereign of the realm as its official head, and that it draws millions of money every year in land-tax and house-tax levied upon English and Welsh citizens of all denominations, under the name of commuted tithe, it must be admitted that the issues at stake are of national im- portance and all citizens of England, of every creed and of no creed, are concerned in the ignominy of those proceedings.
After this object lesson in the nature and results of what is called Ritualism, I saw fresh force in the request made by so many of my correspondents that I should investigate the behaviour of the Anglican
10 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
sacerdotalists. I accordingly determined to study the constitution and conduct of the Church of England, with a view to publishing a book on the subject, for which I had already collected a considerable amount of material; and I had scarcely decided on my method of procedure when the following announce- ment appeared in the newspapers to strengthen my resolution : " The Press Association is informed by the TaUet that the Rev. Robert Hugh Benson, M.A., son of the late Dr. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, has been received into the Catholic Church at the Dominican Priory, Woodchester, by the Rev. Father H. Rednald Buckler. Mr. Benson was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was ordained m
1894."^
Commenting triumphantly upon the conversion of the Archbishop's son, the Tablet, which is the official organ of the Roman Church in England, said: "He is only one of several converts who have come to the fold from the homes of Anglican bishops and their families. For instance, Mr. Algar Thorold, during his father's tenure of the see of Winchester, became a Catholic ; and another Bishop of Winchester, Samuel Wilberforce, encountered the same kind of un- intended but inevitable opposition when his daughter, Mrs. J. H. Pye, took the journey to Rome, which three of her uncles likewise made. A grandson of Bishop Wilberforce is counted amongst the English Jesuits ; and at Woodchester, where he was received, Mr. Benson, son of an Archbishop, is likely enough to have some very interesting exchanges of thought with Father Bertrand Wilberforce, O.P., the nephew of another Anglican prelate. Again, Archbishop Tait of Canterbury (of whom his wife jokingly said he believed all Catholic doctrines but the celibacy of
1 Freeman's Journal, September 16, 1903.
ANGLICAN BISHOPS AND ROME ii
the clergy) had a brother-in-law among the converts to the Roman Church, the Rev. E. B. K. Fortescue, himself Provost of St. Ninian's, Perth. Another convert, Father Harper, S.J., had a brother among Anglican colonial bishops. Bishop Ryder, who entered the Catholic Church, had a daughter who became a nun. In Father Ryder, of the Birmingham Oratory, that bishop has a grandson. Miss Mary Stanley, a fervent convert to the Church, which she served diligently by her labour and her fortune, was a daughter of Bishop Stanley of Norwich, and a sister of the Dean of Westminster. Archbishop Whately, Newman's old antagonist, supplied a nephew to the Catholic Church, afterwards known as Father Pope. Lady Charles Thynne was a daughter of Bishop Bagot of Bath and Wells. Father Coleridge, S.J., had a brother-in-law in Bishop MacKarness of Oxford ; and Dr. Pusey gave a great-nephew to the Society of Jesus, and two great-nieces to be enrolled among nuns."
I knew that many of the leading characters in this chant of triumph — Whately, Pusey, Newman, Wilber- force, Bagot, and Tait — must figure largely in any contemporary history of the Anglican Church, and they will all be found in their proper places in the following pages. I had not proceeded far with my work/ when I found it would be desirable to reside constantly in England ; and circumstances happily en- abled me to do so. For twenty years I had been visiting England, and had taken a perennial interest in com- paring the social and religious habits of the English with those of the Roman Catholic Irish. There was scarcely a variety of religious worship which I had not attended, beginning with Welsh chapels at Holy- head, Bangor, Colwyn Bay, and Rhyl. More than once on a Sunday, while waiting for the London
12 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
train at Chester, I had attended afternoon service at the cathedral, and afterwards joined the audience at the Salvation Army celebration in the hall close to the railway station.
In Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle- on-Tyne, Sunderland, and other large northern towns ; amongst the Welsh, and amongst the Bible Christians in Cornwall, I had attended miscellaneous religious gatherings in churches, chapels, and stuffy mission halls on week-days and Sundays ; and had been no less in sympathy with the humblest of them than with the stately morning service in Ely or York Minster.
On my first visit to Spurgeon's Tabernacle, I had stared spellbound at beholding Mr. Spurgeon and his associates seated round a table on what seemed to me to be a stage, in full view of a vast audience, with cups and bread before them, forcibly — and, as it seemed to a Roman Catholic, sacrilegiously — recalling Christ and the Apostles as they are grouped in Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper.
Evensong in the solitude of Durham cathedral on a May afternoon, while birds might be heard twittering and leaves rustling in the trees over the winding Wear, when the great organ was not re-echoing through Carileph's massive pile ; morning prayer in the cool- ness of the bare Norman nave of Gloucester in July, when the temperature out of doors was almost tropical — functions at which I seemed to be the sole repre- sentative of the laity, except the vergers — had for me their own distinctive charms, equal in every respect to those of a well-attended afternoon service in Westminster Abbey, or a crowded evening service at St. Paul's. Open-air meetings, children's seaside services on the sands from Seaford to Seascales, mission services on heath and common, in Hyde
COMMISSION ON RITUAL DISORDERS 13
Park, or on the street sides of Liverpool, had all alike appealed to me, and excited my admiration for that English faculty of knowing no weariness in well-doing.
But, prior to 1902, I had no desire to probe beneath the surface of things in England, and I accepted every manifestation of Christian ardour, in flimsy tent or massive temple, for what it professed to be ; the pleasurable consciousness of my own dis- interestedness and aloofness enabling me to observe all alike dispassionately. Now, however, I knew that there was at least one species of English religious service, " where more is meant than meets the ear " ; and which, despite its fair appearance, undoubtedly fostered many un-Christian and, as I thought, un- English practices beneath the surface. I came to live in England in June 1 904 ; and this book, commenced at the close of 1902, is the result of over three years' reading and observation, put forth in all earnestness and humility, by one who is conscious of its inade- quacy and many shortcomings.
In April 1904, a royal commission was appointed to inquire into the ritual disorders prevailing in the Established Church. As I had been in close touch with the Evangelical party within the Church ever since the publication of my first book, " Five Years in Ireland," in 1901,1 knew that the Anglican Christians disapproved of the appointment of this commission. In their own words, " the time for inquhy had passed, the time for action had long arrived ; " and they re- garded its appointment as a device of Mr. Balfour to evade the production of a Church Discipline Bill. The unexpected change of Government, giving Free Church- men an unprecedented ascendency in the House of Commons, placed the ritual commission in a position of great difficulty; for its members comprised an arch-
14 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
bishop, two bishops, other dignitaries, and several lay- men, all of them faithful sons of the Church and bound to the Establishment by the strongest ties. They have been sitting in secret for the past two years ; and when the Church Association, and other great Christian societies, within the Church, had supplied them with details of ritualism in over 800 Anglican churches, the commissioners stopped a flow of disquieting testi- mony which could have been prolonged to indefinite length. The more plausible ritualists allege that they are within the letter of Charles II.'s Prayer Book, for- getting the admonition that " we should serve in the newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter ... for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." The commission, it was generally anticipated, would be bound to minimise the illegalities of all ritual- ists, and the Christian party in the Church hoped for little from it beyond the publication of their evidence ; devoutly wishing that it may be the last of a long series of ritual commissions — all of which have ended m fiasco. From our point of view the commission is merely an additional proof of the stream of tendency to- wards Romanism which we have been discussing. We, on our part, must go back to first principles, and, in considering the questions at issue, we cannot ignore the financial support which the ritualists com- pulsorily levy on the nation at large. Therefore the fundamental questions of tithe, ecclesiastical patronage, and finance will be discussed in full in the following pages, and we shall endeavour to ascertain the re- sponsibility of the public for the practices which are condemned. The domination of the sacerdotalists over education of all grades, university, secondary, and elementary, will also be examined and its con- sequences illustrated by statistics and examples. The public is interested in two main questions; (i) Is the
THE TEACHING OF JESUS 15
nation subsidising ritualism ? and (2) Are the ritualists moulding the characters of the rising generation ?
We do not approach the subject from the stand- point of any particular religious denomination ; but rather from the point of view of the ordinary citizen of the United Kingdom and of the millions of British Christians who have unreservedly taken their stand with Christ — the greatest of all Protestants, as well as the greatest opponent of and sufferer from sacerdotalism. The reader must not expect to find in these pages merely an addition to the Hst of "mealy-mouthed philanthropies " which " divorce the Feeling from her mate the Deed ; " but if, however, censure be occasion- ally passed on those in high places, it is of necessity and not of choice ; and the word, it is to be hoped, will never be found divorced from its due foundation of fact. If the conclusions arrived at appear to sup- port either the Free Church or the Low Church policy, it is solely because one or other happens to coincide with what seem to be the true interests of the nation.
It is not necessary to impugn the good intentions of the High Church party who assert that the bishops and priests, as the divinely- appointed repositories of religious truth, have the right (i) to exact payment of the relisrious taxation known as commuted tithe from citizens of all creeds, (2) to supervise all secular education, and (3) to make ecclesiastical laws for the regulation of religious worship independent of the State. We simply deny that the ecclesiastical mana- gers of the 14,000 parochial incumbents who live by the endowments of the Established Church possess any of these rights over the 35,000,000 inhabitants of England and Wales. The levying of taxation and control of education are political privileges ; and we remember, in the words of Lord Macaulay, that " the years during which the political power of the Anglican
1 6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
hierarchy was in the zenith were precisely the years during which national virtue was at the lowest point."
It was Christianity alone which overthrew priest- craft and set free the human mind. The teaching of Jesus made the Kingdom of God on earth a reality. " Never did so much joy fill the breast of man," says Renan : " For a moment Humanity, in this the most vigorous effort she ever made to rise above the world, forgot the leaden weight which binds her to earth and the sorrows of the life below." And it is to the revival of Christianity at the Reformation that mankind owes the large measure of mental freedom that it now enjoys. We search in vain among the scientists, the rationalists, the imperialists, or the commercialists, for that glorious unselfish- ness and fearlessness of all consequences which in- spired the scathing judgment : " Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer : there- fore ye shall receive the greater damnation . . . for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him two fold more the child of hell than yourselves ... for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess ... for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. ... Ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell ? "
What scientist, rationalist, imperialist, or commer- cialist was ever sufficiently imbued with the love of his kind to emulate the example of Paul, and adjure his fellow-men thus: "Put on the whole armour of
THE CHRISTIAN'S DUTY 17
God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places ? " None that we know of. The great rationalists, on the contrary, have too frequently made friends with principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness. They have given us their discoveries, their abstract reasonings, their em- pires, their trades ; and we accept them with a grateful sense of their extraordinary value. There have been glorious martyrs to the cause of science whose names will be venerated when so-called " saints " will be for- gotten. But, while the Christian yields to none in his eagerness for scientific truth, he goes further than the rationalists, and he tells them they have compromised too often with the rulers of darkness, and have bowed themselves down before spiritual wickedness in high places ; and that the discoveries with which they enriched humanity have been to a great extent nulli- fied by the anti-Christian and anti-scientific falsehoods with which the discoverers unprotestingly allowed the new truths to be intermixed and overwhelmed.
The Christian, bound by his Master's example, has a mandate to denounce, where the rationalist feels himself at liberty to condone. The Christian will pity the Magdalens and corrupted undergraduates of Oxford, for instance ; but he cannot let the sancti- monious rogues go scatheless under whose tutelage vice reigned so long in the ancient universities. The Christian will join in the general lamentation over the softening of character observed in the ex-pupils of our public schools, but he is not prepared to make friends with the sacerdotal managers of those schools, by whom the casuistry and unveracity of Pusey and Newman have been set up as the highest code of
B
1 8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
moral pliilosopliy, and who have cast forth, as bread upon the waters, a new generation of Machiavels and duty-shirkers — including the great Anglo-Indian's "flannelled fools" and "muddied oafs" — destined to return to us without honour " after many days."
Science and rationalism had a golden opportunity in Greece : but their intellectual leaders compromised with the " mammon of iniquity," which was the priest- craft of their day, with the result that the priestcraft of Greece survived to perform the funeral rites of Greek philosophy and civilisation ; and the day came when nothing was left of " the glory that was Greece," but the Greek pope and his friend the Greek bandit. The imperialists of Rome also were in league with spiritual wickedness, and, while their rationalist Pilates were ruling or policing the world, were subsidising a system of priestcraft founded upon sensuality and superstition ; with the result that their civihsation too passed away, and Rome became a prey to the robber, the assassin, and the pontiff. The commerciahsts of Venice also pretended to revere a priestcraft in which they disbelieved ; like the Greeks and Romans, they thought they might safely despise it ; but it is a dangerous policy to honour in public what one con- temns in private. The trade of Venice languished unto death, the fabric of her greatness disappeared as if it were a dream, but the priest of Venice survived to celebrate his mass near the deserted arsenal of the once proud Queen of the Adriatic.
The self-centred apathy of the Rationalist has always been overborne by the superstition of a flourishing hier- archy and priesthood, and the real or assumed creduhty of their followers. "In all superstition," says Lord Bacon, "wise men follow fools, and arguments are fitted to practice in a reversed order." The truth of this is obvious, for we see numbers of wise men in
THE NEW SPANISH MARRIAGE 19
England to-day following in the train of prelates and priests who never did a good thing and never said a wise one, but who are avowed preachers and practisers of superstition. It may be true, as Bacon says, that an educated atheism " did never perturb States ; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no farther." But it is also true that the atheism of the Augustan age, which he had in view, by conforming to a super- stition in which it disbelieved, marked the beginning of the end of imperial Rome.
Is England resolved to pursue a temporising policy towards the superstition which, as Bacon says, " hath been the confusion of many States, and bringeth in a new Primum Mobile which ravisheth all the spheres of Government " ? We hope she is not, though there are many signs that our leaders at least are looking backwards. On 8th March 1906, Monsignor Giuseppe Sarto, late of Venice, now Pope Pius X., announced with justifiable pride the receipt of the following telegram from Princess Victoria Eugenie, niece of King Edward VII., and grand-daughter of Queen Victoria : " At the moment of entering the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church, I desire humbly to thank your Holiness for all your fatherly goodness towards me, and I also wish to offer myself with all my heart as your most devoted and loyal daughter. Asking again ;your prayers and your apostolic benediction, Victoria Eugenie." ^ " My future bride," said the young King of Spain, successor of Mary's husband, in a telegram to the same personage at Rome on the following day, " is happy to call herself a devout daughter of the Catholic Apostolic Roman Church, and joins me in asking for your Holiness's benediction, so that the Lord may con- cede us His favour in this and in the future life."
While these negotiations with Rome were proceeding,
^ Ileuter's telegrams, March 9, 1906.
2 0 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the respected sovereign of the realm, King Edward VII., head of the State Church, but also holder of the papal title " Fidei Defensor," was flitting to and fro across the Spanish border, with his headquarters at Biarritz, giving the sanction of his presence to all the proceedings in connection with the new Spanish marriage. His Majesty was in company with his special 'proUgd, the Earl of Dudley, ex-Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to whom Sir Edward Carson, ex-Solicitor General for England, wrote as follows, not many days after the Roman telegrams : " You once told me that you thought Ireland ought to be governed through the medium of the Catholic priesthood, in order that it might become a happy and contented Catholic country ! " ^ Lord Dudley denied this most specific charge ; but his conduct in Ireland had so entirely fitted in with Sir Edward Carson's description, and his repudiation was so qualified by Puseyite casuistry, that one is not prepared to dismiss lightly the clear asseveration of his able accuser, who reiterated his statement,^ taunting the ex-Lord Lieutenant with " treachery " and his " fatal policy of surrender."
It would be intolerant to deny the right of freedom of choice in matrimony or religion to a lady in any rank of life, but that is no reason why one of those interested in her — in this case, any British subject — may not regret the choice, accompanied as it is by countless other circumstances of the times, all sympto- matic of decadence and loss of Christian virtue. One does not readily forget how, between 1471 and 178 i, the Spanish theologians burned 32,000 of their fellow- countrymen for what they stigmatised as heresy, but which we should now call the pursuit of knowledge ; and how in the same period they malignantly burned
' Correspondence, March 19, 1906. 2 Further letter, March 20, 1906,
THE BRIGHT SIDE 21
in effigy 17,000 persons who had escaped from prison, and condemned 291,000 others to imprisonment in dungeons, or labour in the mines and in the galleys, for the same offence. " It is impossible," wrote a fearless Englishman in 1869, " that any nation should stand a policy like this, without paying a heary penalty in the deterioration of its breed, as has notably been the result in the formation of the superstitious, unintel- ligent Spanish race of the present day." ^ And when one furthermore considers the present state of Spain, in whose chief commercial city, Barcelona, the English Protestant chapel was forbidden to open its front door until 1905, it may be said without exaggeration that we are not to congratulate ourselves lightly on the new ties of affinity into which we have entered.
Our Anglican sacerdotalists claim to be the same Church as that which " brutalised human nature by her system of cehbacy applied to the gentle," and " demor- alised it by her system of persecution of the intelligent, the sincere, and the free." But while it would be wrong to ignore the ominous elements of the religious outlook in England, admitted as they are on every hand, it would be no less reprehensible to overlook its pro- mising features. As the well-tried sagacity of the august sovereign is not to be overshadowed by one or two acts of which our consciences may not approve, and for which his Majesty cannot be held primarily responsible ; neither is it to be supposed that the people of this country have lost that spirit of Christianity and that readiness to suffer in the cause of righteousness for which they have been so long remarkable.
The English people are not afflicted with that in- termittent propensity to fear and sorrow which, as Hume says, is real poverty, and is so profitable to the priests ; but are rather blessed with that steady pre-
^ "Hereditary Genius," by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin.
22 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
disposition to hope and joy which is real riches and is a grievous obstacle to the sacerdotalist. And there is this further difference between Roman and Anglican Catholicism. The Romans have been so crushed into uniformity that there is no independence left in them ; and one cannot denounce the evils of Romanism in any country without condemning all its priests. Amongst Anglican clergymen, on the other hand, the sacerdo- talists, however numerous, are only a section of the whole ; and thousands of others are as independent in their Christianity as Wickliffe, Cranmer, and old Hugh Latimer — nay, even as John Bunyan and John Wesley. Moreover, the impieties of the sacerdotal managers of the Church have caused Christians of all denominations, inside and outside the Church, to combine into one homogeneous whole, not only outnumbering the Anglo- Romans, but far surpassing them in earnestness and real influence.
The result of the recent general election has proved clearly that the mind of the nation is not under the influence of those prophets who so long dominated the face of British print ; and it is not too much to hope that we may now obtain some of those substantial reforms which have been wanted for so many years. The first essential of progress for any nation, which maintains an endowed and established religion, is that its people should come to a frank understanding with their religious governors. The time is now ripe for doing so, and, as a help towards that end, we shall begin our study of the recent history and conduct of the Church of England as by law established and by tithe maintained.
H "J
CHAPTER I
Catholic Emancipation — New spirit of inquiry — Education of the poor — Struggle for a free University in London — Theology unmasked — Milton and Johnson — George IV. and Bishop Howley ■ — J. F. D. Maurice — Durham University — King's College— Com- mutation of Tithe — Ecclesiastical Commission — National reforms — Four spheres of Ecclesiastical activity.
The passage of the Roman Catholic ReHef Act, popularly known as the statute of Catholic Emancipa- tion, on April 13, 1829, may be said, for many reasons, to mark the beginning of the contemporary history of the Church of England. This measure was almost entirely due to the exertions of Daniel O'Connell, who aroused the latent energies of the hitherto dispirited Roman priests, invested them with a sense of their own importance, and made sacerdotalism a power in politics for the first time since the expulsion of James II.
Catholic Emancipation was followed by the acutest stage of the Irish tithe agitation, or Tithe War, as it has been styled owing to the violence with which it was prosecuted. My father, who was ten years old in 1832, when the war was at its fiercest, told me he saw a peasant hunted through the fields by two cavalry soldiers on a fine summer's day, and killed within sight of where he and my grandfather were standing. The tithe agitation resulted in the passage of the first Irish Tithe Act in 1832, and of the Irish Church Temporalities Act in 1833, by which two Anglican archbishoprics and eight bishoprics in Ireland were abolished as from next avoidance.
In the second decade of the nineteenth century,
24 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
after the fall of Napoleon, the representatives of the English people began to consider seriously the neces- sity for domestic reforms, and, in consequence, the sources of revenue, methods of administration, and scholastic monopolies of the Church of England became a subject of public curiosity and dissatisfac- tion. The three statutes affecting the status, revenues, and economy of the Church in Ireland, therefore, opportunely led the way for changes no less revolu- tionary in the Church of England. In 1833, as we shall see, began the sacerdotalist movement in Oxford ; in 1834 was appointed the first Ecclesiastical Com- mission; in 1836 were passed the Tithe Commutation Act and the first Ecclesiastical Commission Act.
But even before the date of Catholic Emancipation, the right of the Anglican Church to its scholastic monopolies in Oxford and Cambridge had been ques- tioned by the awakened intelligence of London Chris- tians. As the degeneracy of those abodes of learning will be discussed at length in later chapters, it will suffice to say here that the warmest friends of the ancient universities admit that the intellectual centre of gravity of the nation had been shifted from Oxford and Cambridge, and transferred to London, during the eighteenth century.^ " One of the chief characteristics of the eighteenth century," as Buckle says,^ " and one which pre-eminently distinguished it from all that preceded, was a craving after knowledge on the part of those from whom knowledge had been hitherto shut out." In 1769 was held in England the first public meeting, in the modern sense of the term, for the ventilation of political grievances. In 1781 Robert Raikes organised the Sunday schools, which
1 "History of the University of Oxford." Hon. G. C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton. 1886.
2 <' History of Civilisation in England." Ed. 1871, vol. i. p. 430.
JOSEPH LANCASTER 25
had been initiated some years earlier by Lindsay and others, for imparting secular knowledge to the lower orders on the only day they had time to receive it.
In 1789 tithe had been abolished in France;^ and, though public worship was re-established, the clergy only received small salaries from the State, and never again levied ad valorem duties on the national wealth. It was not until long after Bonaparte's banishment that hatred of France abated sufficiently to permit Englishmen to appreciate the justification for the Revolution; and even when prejudice had died away, the English never assimilated the great French con- ception of the right of all citizens to equal treatment from the State, which has assumed a concrete form recently in the elevation of M. Loubet and M. Falli^res to the presidency of the Republic. In 1 791, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the house and chapel of Joseph Priestley, whose eminence as a dis- senting clergyman, a scholar, and a scientist, had aroused the hostility of the Church, were looted and burned in Birmingham.
About 1796 the young Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, assisted by monitors of his own training, began to give secular instruction to poor children in Borough Road, Southwark, on non-sectarian lines ; and his action astonished the community almost as much as the dis- covery of radium surprised us recently. The Royal Lancasterian Institution, founded in 1805, the origin from which we have yet to evolve a genuine system of national education, was followed in 1807 by a bill empowering the ratepayers of any parish to build a public school, which passed the Commons but was rejected by the peers at the solicitation of the bishops.
An Established Church is almost the first institution
^ " Such night, unforeseen, but forever memorable, was this of the Fourth of August, 1789" (Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. i. p. 191).
26 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
to be adversely affected by an increase of knowledge, because the suspicions of the people are aroused at discovering the ignorance of ecclesiastics whom they have been drilled into reverencing as the repositories of all useful learning. But the leaders of the English State Church, admonished by the Reformation, and even more so by the Civil War, have been trained to watch with a jealous eye every progressive movement of popular thought, and know how to divert or divide its force without seeming to oppose it.
" For as old sinners have all points O' th' compass in their bones and joints, Can Ly their pangs and aches find All turns and changes of the wind, So guilty sinners in a State Can by their crimes prognosticate, And in their consciences feel pain Some days before a shower of rain." ^
Conscious of impending danger, the hierarchy took prompt measures to preserve their paramountcy; and, in 1 8 1 1 , the sectarian association was founded known as the " National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church," which began to set up those Church schools, of which we now hear so much. In 1820 the bill to enable parochial ratepayers to build public schools was again introduced, and again rejected by the bishops, who demanded that the teachers should be Anglican com- municants and subject to dismissal by the State clergy. Having thus asserted their sovereignty over the minds of the poor, the theocracy was next called on to do battle for the mental despotism which it wielded over the well-to-do.
About the year 1825 several leading Londoners of the middle class, who had severed their connection with the State-endowed Church, perceived that the public at
1 Butler's "Hudibras."
LONDON UNIVERSITY 27
large had a right to university education unhampered by religious tests, and unvitiated by dogmatic theology ; and, more important still, that they had the power to provide themselves with the object of their desires. They incorporated themselves by deed in 1826 ; sub- scribed a capital sum of ;^i 60,000 in 1827 ; had the foundation stone of their college buildings laid by the royal Duke of Sussex in the same year, and called their institution " The University of London." They applied for a charter, but their request was not acceded to, their proceedings being looked upon as flagrant heresy and rebellion.
The young Quaker might have justified his conduct by pointing out that there were no schools for the poor, and that he was only supplying an admitted want. But the promoters of the London University could plead no such justification, for did not Oxford and Cambridge, the national universities by divine right, satisfy every legitimate want of Englishmen in the matter of higher education? If it was objected that all who did not subscribe to the creed of the Church of England were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, the obvious answer was that such ill- conditioned persons were not worthy to receive any higher education whatsoever, and their exclusion from the universities was in the interests of the State. If well-to-do Londoners declared that they objected to send their sons to reside in a hot-bed of celibate immorality, such as each university then was, the scornful answer was that the morality which was deemed fit and proper for the sons of the aristocracy was surely good enough for the sons of mere trades- people, however affluent.
The charter was peremptorily refused ; but, never- theless, the new college was opened in 1828, and so confident were its proprietors of obtaining a charter
2 8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
empowering them to confer degrees, that they adver- tised it as the University of London. There were classes in arts, law, and medicine, which were attended by 577 students shortly after its doors were opened. Its curriculum read like a new gospel, including, as it did, " languages, mathematics, physics, the mental and moral sciences, together with the laws of England, history, political economy, and the various branches of knowledge which are the objects of medical education" — and no theology. It was the first non- theological and non-sectarian place of learning of its class ever established in England, and therefore marks an epoch in English history which will be remembered as long as the name of England survives.
If it be doubted that the exclusion of theology from a university curriculum was an event of national importance, surpassing in the magnitude of its results even the battle of Hastings, or Magna Charta, or Waterloo ; it must be remembered that these achieve- ments, remarkable as they were, left the mind of the nation unenfranchised ; whereas to set Englishmen free from theology was to put illimitable mental wealth and power within their reach. Theology was a despotism and a lie, which had been stifling the human mind in England for a thousand years. As one looks back upon the theological times, the puerile ignorance of men who were considered " learned " is well calculated to make us humble. One does not allude so much to the money -making theologians themselves as to the brilliant minds which were trying to grow and struggling vainly towards the light amidst the all-depressing fog of theology. John Milton, for instance, who died in 1674, seriously believed that the idiotic nonsense compiled by medieval literary forgers, under the divine pseudonym of Hermes Trismegistus, was a genuine contribution to human knowledge.
THE THEOLOGICAL DAYS 29
" Or let my lamp, at midnight hom-, Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear With thrice great Hermes." 1
And in 1768, nearly a century after Milton's death, the "learned" Dr. Johnson made the following solemn declaration: "Swallows certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw them- selves under the water, and lie in the bed of a river ! " The opinions of Milton and Johnson about the theologians were diametrically opposed. Milton had no respect for a bishop, whom he regarded as an impostor ; poor Johnson regarded a bishop as an Olympian temporarily sojourning amongst mortals. Bishops were not moral or well behaved any more than the Olympians; but, for Johnson, they were always gods. His "profound reverence for the hier- archy," says Boswell, " made him expect from bishops the highest degree of decorum ; he was offended even at their going to taverns ! " Says Johnson, doubtless thinking of the old Oxford days of which we shall have much to say : " A bishop should not go to a house where he may meet a young fellow leading out a wench." But Milton and Johnson, differently as they esteemed the theologians, both alike illustrate how the mind was starved and humanity deceived when theology was "the queen of sciences." And, of all the wrongs done by theology, the greatest perhaps was that it deprived mankind of the know- ledge of Christ, His virtue and His simplicity, and destroyed men's confidence in the mercy of " Our Father Which art in Heaven."
The opening of the new college took place in the same year which saw the passage of the Corporation
^ " II Pengeroso,"
30 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and Tests Repeal Act/ by which the necessity of receiving the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England, as a qualification for public office, was abolished, and non-members of the Established Church were relieved of many civil and religious disabilities. The leading spirits of the London University movement were Nonconformists who saw their sons excluded from degrees in Oxford and Cambridge by the laws enforcing subscription to the creed of the Established Church as a condition pre- cedent to admission to the privileges of the ancient universities. Arrayed against them were almost all the wealth and social influence of England. Evil seemed to be triumphant all around them ; and the Established Church had entered into league with the Prince of Darkness. George IV., one of the most vicious men that ever lived, sat upon the throne of England, and William Howley, bishop of London, had declared ex cathedra that the constitutional fiction " The king can do no wrong " applied to morals as well as politics.
It was under such circumstances that the pro- prietors of the new university found it advisable to secure, or accept, the patronage of many lay Church- men of exalted position, like the Duke of Somerset, who was chairman of the council. But, apart from such well-meant but unpropitious aid, the movement enlisted the sympathy of the most enlightened men of the day, including Campbell the poet. Lord Brougham, Joseph Hume, Hallam, Grote, James Mill, and Zachary Macaulay. The promoters, as it now appears, might have attained their high ideal if they had dispensed with aristocratic patronage and relied upon themselves and those men of learning and ability who believed in the inherent justice of their cause. 1 9 Geo. IV. cap. 17.
FIGHT FOR A FREE UNIVERSITY 31
The bishops adopted the same poHcy to checkmate unsectarianism in higher education as they had found successful in counteracting the Lancasterian move- ment; and, in 1829, they founded a sectarian estab- lishment called King's College, London, to which a charter was granted without demur, and which was opened immediately as a semi-Government institu- tion forming the east wing of Somerset House.
The case of J. F. T>. Maurice illustrates how the rigorous application of religious tests in the univer- sities subserved the ends of proselytism and under- mined the principles of promising young men, whose fathers, seeking truth by many paths, had ventured forth from the sacerdotal fold of the Established Church. Maurice, though a Dissenter, was allowed to take the University course at Trinity College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and in 1826 passed for his degree with first-class distinctions. In order to obtain the degree it was necessary to subscribe to the creed of the Established Church, and this young Maurice's conscience would not suffer him to do. He not only sacrificed his degree but also a fellowship which was offered to him, left Cambridge, and settled down in London as a journalist. But he soon succumbed to the powers opposed to him ; he entered Exeter College, Oxford, subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, took his degree, and in 1835 became a priest of the Established Church.
During those nine years, 1826-183 5, the promoters of the free university in London had been vainly petitioning for a charter empowering them to confer degrees on such men as Maurice. And the Anglican theocracy, on their part, were not only successfully opposing them, but also taking effective steps to fore- stall any similar movement for free university education on the part of the Nonconformists of the North. At that
32 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
time William Van Mildert, bishop of Durham, wielded a palatine jurisdiction, being what was called a prince- bishop, his income being about ;!^2 0,000 a year, while the revenues of the dean and canons were ;^3 7,000. These rich sinecurists set aside, out of their many estates, a property near South Shields, which they valued at ^3000 a year, as an endowment for a new university to be permanently attached to their cathe- dral. They promoted a bill in Parliament to carry out their object, and, such was the political power wielded by the Church that legislative sanction was immediately given to their proposals. An Act was passed in 1832 creating the University of Durham, with power to grant degrees in all faculties, with the bishop of the diocese as its visitor, and the dean and canons as its governors ex officio — an arrangement which subsists to this day.
Meantime matters remained at a deadlock with the University of London during 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, and 1833, though the new institution was proceeding with its work successfully and attracting students in large numbers, and though the pulse of England beat quickly under the stimulus of that liberal spirit which still lives in Macaulay's transcendent essays. In 1833 slavery was abolished by statute in all the British dominions; in 1834 the new scheme of poor law relief, which still subsists, became the law of the land. But the hearts of the lords spiritual and temporal were not softened towards those daring spirits who would set university education free from the trammels of Anglican theology, and in 1834 the House of Lords threw out Joseph Hume's bill for the admission of Nonconformists into Oxford and Cambridge.
Many of the distinguished Churchmen who had espoused the cause of a free university in London were now growing cold in their adherence, and expressing
THEOLOGY TRIUMPHANT 33
their preference for a system which kept all history and science under the tutelage of theology, as embodied in the prospectus of King's College. In 1835, as a last resort, the proprietors of the " London University " presented an address to the House of Commons pray- ing for a charter, with power to confer degrees. The Government refused the petition, and in 1836 the proprietors were forced to accept a collegiate charter conveying no power to confer degrees — thus dashing the justifiable hopes on which the ;^ 160,000 had been so philanthropically subscribed. In the same year a charter was granted to a council, of which the Earl of Burlington, afterwards Duke of Devonshire, was the chancellor, and amongst the members of which were four bishops and the Rev. Dr. Arnold of Rugby, in- corporating them as the University of London, with their headquarters at the Earl of Burlington's house in Piccadilly, and endowing them with power to appoint examiners and confer degrees in all faculties.
The original " University of London " became simply University College, its only privilege being that its students were entitled to present themselves for degrees after satisfying the examiners appointed by the Earl of Burlington, the bishops, and their colleagues. The same privilege was extended to King's College and to a number of small Nonconformist and Roman Catholic seminaries in the provinces and in Ireland. Such was the result of the first serious encounter between theology and knowledge, between the priests and the public in England, the stake at issue being the right of citizens in a given locality to establish a university at their own expense, without submitting to priestly supervision.
As the case of J. F. D. Maurice is typical, his career after taking Anglican orders is worthy of note. He was immediately appointed chaplain to Guy's Hospital, and a few years afterwards his services were secured
c
34 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
by King's College, in which he was appointed Professor of Modern History and English Literature. To teach history in a sacerdotal institution must be a hateful task to one who loves truth and has a living con- science. But Maurice escaped the censure of his masters for six years, and in 1 846 was made Professor of Ecclesiastical History, and at the same time ap- pointed chaplain of Lincoln's Inn. After eight years of service he dared to intrude into the special domain of the theologians by publishing a collection of theological essays, and his views meeting with the disapproval of the theocracy he was persecuted and driven from his professorship. But the spirit of his fathers was in him, and he could not rest in indolence. He founded the London Working Men's College, and, depending for support upon his chaplaincy, he threw himself into the work of enlightening his fellow-men, and strongly advocated the higher education of women. In 1860 he resigned his chaplaincy for the perpetual curacy of St. Peter's, Vere Street, where he continued till 1866, when the University of Cambridge appointed him Professor of Moral Philosophy, a chair which he held until his death in 1872. Maurice is but an ex- ample of thousands of promising men whose minds were corrupted and whose lives were spoiled by the prevailing despotism of theology.
The contest about the London University, as well as all the other signs of the times, proved how great had been the awakening of the public mind, and it was clear that the new inquirers meant to probe deeper into the causes of things than the reformers of the sixteenth or the revolutionaries of the seventeenth century. Convinced that scientific knowledge and the practice of virtue, rather than militarism or sacerdotal- ism, were the well-spring of material power, the men of the nineteenth century, though, for peace sake, they
RELIGIOUS REFORM 35
might continue to tax themselves for the support of the theologians, were not to be satisfied with ploughing the surface soil of religion and politics.
The friends and leaders of the Church, on their part, pursuing their policy of diverting, dividing, and defeating, without seeming to oppose, determined to prevent reform from outside by reforming the Church from within, as the best means of preserving their sacerdotal autocracy and their universal tithe. The year 1832, in which the first parliamentary Reform Act was passed, also saw the enactment of a measure abolishing the Court of Delegates and making the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council the final court of appeal for ecclesiastical cases. In 1833 the Church Temporalities Act,-^ already mentioned, reduced the number of Anglican bishops in Ireland from twenty-two to twelve; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel ap- pointed a commission to inquire into the condition and revenues of the Church ; in 1836 were passed the Tithe Commutation Act,^ first Ecclesiastical Com- mission Act,^ and the Marriage Act,^ which first legalised marriages performed in chapels by Non- conformist clergy.
The Tithe Act, which abolished the payment of tithe in kind and substituted a rent-charge, with a view to averting disestablishment by terminating the conflicts between parsons and farmers, will be dealt with in detail in the next chapter. The Ecclesiastical Commission Act, as amended in 1 840,^ gave the commissioners, of whom the bishops themselves were the majority, plenary powers to overhaul the finances of every diocese and capitular body ; to create a common fund out of the moneys and revenues derived from the suppression of canonries and other sinecures,
1 3 & 4 Will. IV. cap. 37. 2 6& 7 Will. IV. cap. 71.
* Ibid. cap. 77. ^ Ibid. cap. 85. ^ 3 & 4 Vict. cap. 113,
36 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and the curtailment of excessive episcopal incomes ; and to expend it at their discretion in re-arranging and augmenting the incomes of poorer bishoprics and benefices. The working of this statute will occupy our attention in the third and succeeding chapters.
Numerous special Acts were also passed dealing with miscellaneous tithes and endowments, such as those of the London city churches, of capitular bodies like the collegiate church of Manchester, and of rich cures like the Bishop- Wearmouth rectory.
In 1838 the Pluralities Act was passed, making it illegal for any individual to hold more than two benefices, and those within ten statute miles of each other.^ Over six centuries before, the Lateran Council had forbidden any cleric to hold more than one cure of souls ; but the ease and frequency with which dis- pensations were procured at Rome, in return for fees, made the rule more honoured in the breach than the observance. A statute of the twenty-first year of Henry VIII.'s reign vested the right of granting such dispensations in the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the result that, at the opening of the nineteenth cen- tury, the 1 1,000 English benefices were held by about 5000 incumbents, many of whom held three or four livings, and most of whom resided out of their parishes, leaving their spiritual duties to be grudgingly per- formed by curates at starvation salaries, while they themselves only remembered their parishioners to harry them by the forcible collection of tithes. Even in 1 846, when the Pluralities Act had been eight years in operation,^ one-third of the incumbents were still non-resident — the residents numbering 7445, and the non-residents 3366. Of the non-residents, 2189 performed no spiritual duties; 1635 had got
1 I & 2 Vict. cap. 106.
^ Parliamentary Papers, 1846.
RE-BIRTH OF SACERDOTALISM 37
exemptions, mostly on the grounds that their residence was in another benefice held by the individual ; 787 had licences to live out of their parish; and 950 absented themselves without exemption or licence.
In 1840 the measure known as the Church Dis- cipline Act became law/ authorising the criminal prosecution of any clergyman practising a ritual at variance with the Reformation settlement. But, as the right to proceed was made contingent on obtaining an order from the bishop, the statute failed to realise the expectations of evangelical Churchmen, whose apprehensions it had been enacted to allay.
The concession of Catholic Emancipation thus syn- chronised with many notable developments of policy on the part of the Anglican hierarchy and priesthood, as well as with several important manifestations of a change in public opinion with regard to the Church. On the one hand, the bishops and senior dignitaries, coerced, perhaps, by the political friends of the Estab- lishment, acquiesced in the necessity of accomplishing a reformation in the finances of the Church. On the other hand, the younger generation of priests, who conceived themselves endowed with all the super- human power claimed by their Anglo-Roman pre- decessors before the Reformation, now had their suppressed ambitions aroused, as we shall see, and thought themselves justified in setting up the practices of Roman priestcraft within the Church of England. And, lastly, two great counteracting forces were set up in opposition to sacerdotal pretensions. The first was the settled opposition led by educated Noncon- formists, but representative of the public at large, to the sacerdotal autocracy in education. The second was the equally insistent antagonism of an earnest and independent section of the clergy and laity of
>• 3 & 4 Vict. cap. 86.
38 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the Church itself, represented now by the Church Association and kindred bodies, to what they truly described as " the Romanising policy of the prelates and ' priests ' of the Church of England."
The career of the Church during the seventy-six years since Catholic Emancipation, from 1 829 to 1906, will be found to have been accurately foreshadowed by the typical incidents and statutes which I have selected from the eventful years between 1829 and 1840. The energies of the Church party have ever since divided themselves into four spheres of activity, the first and second being aggressive, and the third and fourth defensive in character : —
(i) The commercial energy of the Church has ex- pended itself in carrying out the processes of tithe commutation and redemption, the operations of the Ecclesiastical Commission, and many extra-statutory schemes for the increase of clerical incomes, such as special diocesan funds and societies for the collection of money — all of which may be described as work of an offensive or forward character.
(2) The sacerdotal force of the Church finds ex- pression in the acts of the sacerdotal party, whom the Church Discipline Act was meant to check, and who aim at re-establishing a belief in the supernatural powers of the priests, and restoring the sacramental system and liturgy of the Roman Church as it existed in Eng- land before the Reformation. Sacerdotalism seems to threaten a reversion to Romanism in the event of dis- establishment, and one of the consequences anticipated from it would appear to be the prevention of statutory disendowment as the result of the fears thus excited.
(3) The educational policy of the Church is neces- sarily defensive, for no ecclesiastical corporation could well have enjoyed a greater monopoly in education than the Church of England did in the year 1829.
EVANGELICALS IN THE CHURCH 39
The educationalists aim at preserving as much as may be preserved of the Church's immemorial supremacy over secular as well as religious education. Com- mercialist and sacerdotalist both join forces with the educationalist ; for experience teaches that if the control of education be lost, the endowments will not long survive. The incidents connected with the foundation of Durham and London Universities, of the Lancas- terian Institution and National Society, are typical of the long fight for mastery over the schools which has been waged, occasionally by open rupture, but mostly by finesse, between the priests and the public in England for seventy years.
(4) The Christian or evangelical energy of the Church represents the earnest convictions of those who feel that Christianity, with its gospel of self- expenditure for the benefit of others, is a necessary of life, as priestcraft is the precursor of death, not only for the individual but for the nation ; and who, with justification, attribute England's prosperity to the strenuousness and integrity of her Christian leaders since the Reformation. The Pluralities Act and the Church Discipline Act are typical of the ideals aimed at, since 1840, by the large body of Christians who remain within the fold of the Established Church, namely, spiritual zeal in all clergymen and Christian purity in all public worship. Their work is defensive in its nature, as they aim at nothing more than pre- serving and transmitting to their children the com- promise between Christianity and priestcraft which was settled at the Reformation, though they believe im- plicitly in a personal Saviour, full atonement, and present salvation for all who accept the sacrifice of Jesus.
We shall now briefly consider the origin, nature, and method of enforcingpaymentof tithe — the foundation on which the entire sacerdotal establishment is supported.
CHAPTER II
Jewish and Roman tithe— Tithes at the Reformation— England still under Papal law— Tithes of fishing and of labour— An anti-Christian system— Tithe commutation explained — Extraordinary tithes — Value of tithe rent-charge— Decadence of agriculture explained— Fiscal reform and tithe— London tithes— Glebe lands— Church rates.
The management of the business side of the Church differs little in essentials from that of any commercial concern, yet it works in complete unison with the sacerdotal side. The sacerdotalists, whose theory and practice are most superstitious and medieval, usually become dignitaries, and thus acquire positions of power at the business side of the Church. Hence arises that curious combination of childish, sacerdotal proclivities with commercial acuteness, which is the main character- istic of the Anglican hierarchy and priesthood, and which, on a grander scale, was always characteristic of the Roman hierarchy in the days of its supremacy. At the present day the keenest Anglican champions of the supernatural efficacy of priestly rites, borrowed from paganism or from degenerate medieval Christi- anity, will be found going into the Church as the pro- fession Avhich was once the most lucrative in the world, and which still offers to the ambitious youth prizes of extraordinary value in money, leisure, and social position.
When one considers the unsubstantial title for the levying of tithes, which are its chief property, it must be admitted that the efficiency with which the busi- ness side of the Church has been managed, during the seventy-six years since Catholic Emancipation, could
AUTHORITY FOR TITHES 41
hardly be excelled. The earliest biblical authority for tithe rests upon that remarkable passage in the four- teenth chapter of Genesis, so strangely detached from the context, in which Melchizedek, the first recorded priest, momentarily appears to Abraham ; and, having received " tithes of all," as suddenly disappears. When the modern sacerdotalist. Bishop Gore for instance, asperses the authenticity of Genesis, for the purpose of diverting and dividing the opposition of the scientists, we shall find him drawing the line at " the call of Abraham " — that is to say, at the twelfth chapter of Genesis — Abraham having been the first man to recog- nise the status of the professional priest and acknow- ledge his right to " tithes of all.'"'
Tithes were characteristic of the Persian as well as of the Jewish religion. The " magi, or sacerdotal order, levied a general tax on the fortunes and industry of the Persians," says Gibbon. And he adds in a note : " The divine institution of tithes exhibits a sinsfular
O
instance of conformity between the law of Zoroaster and that of Moses. Those who cannot otherwise account for it, may suppose, if they please, that the magi of later times inserted so useful an interpolation into the writings of their prophet." ^ But it was Charlemagne, the same sovereign who endowed the popes with central Italy, that first sanctioned, in or about 800 A.D., the levying of tithes by statute in a Christian State. " His laws," says Gibbon, " enforced the imposition of tithes, because the demons had pro- claimed in the air that the default of payment had been the cause of the last scarcity";^ and, he adds in a note : " Such obligations have country gentlemen to his memory ! " The pontiff of the day, Leo III., presented the Emperor of the West with a splinter
* " Decline and Fall," i. 240 ; Oxford, 1S27. - Ibid. vi. 222 ; same edition.
42 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of " the true cross," whicli, encased in a gold locket, was worn as an amulet by successive French sovereigns, and was found on the neck of the Prince Imperial after he had been slain by the Zulus on ist June 1879.
The canon lawyers, taking advantage of Charle- magne's concession, made minute regulations as to the nature and collection of the tax, which were adopted by the councils and synods, promulgated as decrees, and enforced by ecclesiastical law. Thus it came to pass that the texts referring to Jewish tithes, in Genesis xiv., Leviticus xxvii., Numbers xix., and a misconstruction of certain passages in the New Testa- ment, became the foundation on which was based one of the most mercenary systems of oppression of which there is record in history.
Tithes were essentially a " Roman " institution ; and, of all the legacies of evil left to England by the sacerdotalists of pre-Reformation times, compulsory tithe-payment and the subjection of education to established religion are by far the most baneful. The first mention of tithes in an English statute does not occur until two centuries after the Norman conquest ; their enforcement was left to the ecclesiastical courts ; and their payment cannot be said to have been en- joined by statute law until Henry VIII.'s reign.-^
The Reformation in England, it must not be for- gotten, did not spring from the people, but came from the king and nobility ; who were moved to it, not only on religious grounds, but also by the urgency of curb- ing the great power and wealth and greater pretensions of the priestly profession. Henry VIII. , by suppress- ing the monasteries, dispersed what may be called the pope's standing army in the land ; but he did not interfere with the secular clergy, who may be described as the pope's auxiliary forces. The common people,
1 27 Hen. VIII. cap. 20 ; 32 Hen. VIII. cap. 7 ; 2 & 3 Edw. VI. cap. 13.
FIRST REFORMERS AND TITHE 43
except the beggars and criminals who received doles and sanctuary from the religious houses, rejoiced in the measures taken against the priests ; but, the general mass of them did not understand the questions at issue, and, as a political force, they were almost a negligible quantity. The pioneers of the Reformation, therefore, were forced to rely upon the assistance of the parish priests ; and, in order to reconcile those Anglo-Roman functionaries to the rupture with Rome, Henry VIII. and his son, Edward VI., gave their high sanction to tithe recovery by legal process.
The parish priests did not favour the Reformation ; but, finding their tithes even more secure under the new dispensation than they were under the old, they found it to their advantage to conform. They gladly reverted to Romanism when Mary gave them the opportunity of doing so ; but once again joined the Reformed Church under Elizabeth, who also thought it advisable to give the sanction of special statute law to the payment of tithes. The first generation of Protestant parsons, therefore, found tithe collection established by law under the Reformation settlement, and did not hesitate to reap the advantage.
If the Reformation may be described, with justice, as partial and illogical, its partiality mainly lies in the fact that it still left the clergy independent of, and a caste apart from, the people. It is not the remnant of Roman ritual which remained after the Reformation ; but rather the legacy of Roman ecclesiastical lands, Roman powers of taxation, Roman scholastic mono- poly, and Roman church government, inherited by the Anglican clergy, which form the true substance of what is now called the Romanism of the Established Church. The English clergy never ceased to be leviers of taxes at the bayonet's point for their OAvn support, and monopolists in education at Oxford and Cambridge.
44 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
And, so far as the collection of tithe rent-charge is concerned, this country is still governed by papal law ; for those lands which the popes exempted from tithe are still exempt,^ and those which they declared tith- able are still subject to the impost.
Whatever appearance of reasonableness there may have been for the enforcement of tithe by the Roman Church when the people were bound to believe in the supernatural powers of the priests, there was no spiritual justification for it when Christianity was re- established as the national religion at the Reformation. As Blackstone truly says, " the title of the clergy to tithes upon any divine right certainly ceased with the Jewish theocracy."
Under such authority, then, one regrets to say, since the Reformation, the ministers of the Church of Eng- land have claimed by right of law and exacted by open force or secret espionage, sanctioned by all manner of legal pains and penalties, a tenth part of everything which grew out of or was produced upon the land. The tenth pig, lamb, colt, calf, fowl ; the tenth turnip, bean, pea, sheaf of corn, cock of hay and fleece of wool ; the tenth of the eggs, milk, cheese, and butter. More than one writer on the subject sarcastically remarks that the children were the only living creatures, pro- duced on the land, of which the parson did not demand a tenth ; and Robert Herrick, the voluptuous vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire, thus puts the sarcasm into poetry : —
" If nine times you your bridegroom kiss, The tenth you know the parson's is ; Pay then your tithe ; and doing thus Prove in your bride-bed numerous. If children you have ten, Sir John Won't for his tenth part ask you one."
1 The exemption was confirmed by 31 Hen. VIII. c. 13.
TITHE OF FISH 45
This was the universal tithe levied in England by professional bullies under the leadership of tithe- proctors, who came upon the land, seized the parson's share of the harvest, sold it at the market town, deducted their own percentage of the spoil, and sent the balance to the parochial " vicar of Christ " — fre- quently an absentee pluralist who received it with as little qualms of conscience as the landlord took his rent. In many cases the tithes were leased to tithe- farmers, like the publicans of old, who paid the parson a fixed sum, and extorted the tithes to the last farthing, so as to have the greatest possible profit for themselves. There were tithes of fishing-, of millinsr, of minerals, and of manual labour — which were customary, and ruthlessly insisted upon, in many localities ; a tithe of the fish taken in the sea, or in a particular river, a tithe of the multure taken in certain mills, a tithe of the minerals, a tithe of the produce of a man's labour, or a tithe of his time !
James Buchanan, incumbent of Leith, was com- pelled, in 1833, to make a return of profits derived from tithe of fish in his parish, for the information of the legislature. He had leased his tithe of fish for 1830 and I 83 I at ^^175 a year; and in 1832 put it up to competition, and got ;£^2 20 for it. In the last- mentioned year, however, the Newhaven fishermen ob- jected to paying, and he had to accept a reduced rent from the tithe-farmer. This tithe was levied in right of specific townlands in his parish whose occupants pur- sued the trade of fishing, but in which the incumbent levied other tithes as well. His scale of taxation was : —
Tithe.
Last of herrings is. 8d.
Twenty dry tish . . . . . i fish.
Each boat of fish . . . . .is.
Each creel . . . . . .id.
Each dreg-yawl or fishing-boat belonging
to Leith or Newhaven . . . iis. 8d. a year.
46 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Another return, presented to Parliament in 1833, tells how Rev. Francis Liindy, rector of Lockington, Yorkshire, demanded in that year the following " tithes, offerings, oblations, and obventions of four pence in the pound on the amount of their wages " from the following labourers in his parish : —
|
Yearly Wages. |
Tithe. |
|||||
|
£ |
s. |
s. cl |
||||
|
Jeremiah Dodsworth |
13 |
0 |
4 4 |
|||
|
Jeremiah Dodsworth |
(a second year |
|||||
|
hired weekly) . |
15 |
0 |
5 0 |
|||
|
William Hall |
10 |
10 |
3 6 |
|||
|
Harrison Moment |
9 |
0 |
3 0 |
|||
|
Henry Blakeston . |
15 |
0 |
5 0 |
|||
|
William Foster |
8 |
8 |
2 8 |
|||
|
George Fenl)y |
6 |
6 |
2 0 |
|||
|
John Hall, | year |
10 |
10 |
3 6 |
|||
|
John Milner |
15 |
0 |
5 0 |
|||
|
Mathew Blakeston |
8 |
8 |
2 8 |
|||
|
Carling Risim |
16 |
0 |
5 4 |
|||
|
John Dodsworth . |
15 |
0 |
5 0 |
|||
|
William FallowfieLl, m |
iller's servant |
18 |
0 |
6 0 |
||
|
Robert Brathv/ait, pre |
mised to com |
|||||
|
pound, but now refu |
-eth |
15 |
0 |
5 0 |
The labourers refused to pay, and Lundy applied for a summons against them, which was granted to him by Rev. John Blanchard and Robert Wylie, two magistrates of the East Riding. An order for pay- ment was made by the justices, which was not com- plied with. Then Lundy decided to proceed to extremities against Jeremiah Dodsworth, the first defendant, and put a distress order into the hands of the local bailiffs to seize and sell this farm labourer's goods to the amount of 9s. 4d. and 2s. 8d. costs. The bailiffs found no goods on the poor man's premises. Thereupon Lundy obtained from his fellow-priest, Blanchard, the justice of the peace, a warrant for the apprehension and commitment of Jeremiah Dodsworth to prison for three months.
The order was addressed first " to all the Constables
FARM-LABOURER IMPRISONED 47
in the East Riding, and especially to the Constable of the town of Lockington " ; and secondly, " to the Keeper of the House of Correction at Beverley." " These are," it says, " in His Majesty's name to command you to deliver into the custody of the said Keeper the body of Jeremiah Dodsworth of Lockington, servant of husbandry, convicted before me" of owing the tithe to Lundy and having no goods to satisfy the distress. The keeper of the prison says, in his report to the House of Commons, that there was no certificate of trial or conviction, and that he obeyed the order for imprisonment, having Blanchard as his sole authority.
In the parishes of Fulwood, Claughton, Leyland, Rufford, Standish, Eccleston, Stalmine, and Ulverston, all in Lancashire, there were, from 1830 to 1833, no less than 1322 suits by tithe-owners against indi- viduals, for the recovery of tithes, in the Chancery Court of the county palatine. Of these, one regrets to say, 136 were by lay impropriators.
The injustice of this imposition, practised by edu- cated men upon an illiterate peasantry, was intensified by the sanctimonious pretence that it was all done " for Christ His sake " ; when we know that the essence of the offerings to Christian ministers, sanc- tioned by Christ, is that they should be voluntary acts of grace. " Provide neither gold nor silver, nor brass in your purses," He exclaimed ; " and into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and there abide till ye go thence." Christ's commandment was to give to the poor; the Anglican commandment was to take forcibly from the poor, for the enrichment of the priests; and such was the nature of the property from which prince-bishops and pluralists derived their wealth.
Over 2000 local Acts for commutation of this
48 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
odious traffic had been passed before 1836; and " moduses," or methods of voluntary payment with- out espionage or seizure, had been arrived at in numerous other cases. The archbishops and bishops, deans and chapters, minor cathedral dignitaries, and other clerical appropriators, had all commuted their tithes before 1836. Lord John Russell, who had charge of the Tithes Act in the House of Commons, described tithe as " a discouragement to industry, a penalty on skill, a heavy mulct on those who expended the most capital and displayed the greatest skill in the cultivation of the land." He also de- clared that " the tithes were the property of the nation " ; but, so effectively did the landlords play their part as buffers between the parsons and farmers, and such was the unexampled patience of the English peasantry, that there had never been, as there has never since been, any universal or systematic stop- page of payment — nothing beyond a long-continued grumble, and an occasional skirmish in the cornfields at harvest.
It is not easy to find a man in this degenerate planet who will hesitate to enforce an old-established payment when he can rely upon doing so with success ; and the worst that can be said of the English parsons, judged by the standard of ordinary men of the world, is that they ruthlessly acted upon this mercenary rule. Before the Act of 1836, it was by suits in the eccle- siastical courts, under a final penalty of excommunica- tion, which no longer inspired terror, that the priests enforced payment of their " moduses." But the Com- mutation Act, though ostensibly a measure of relief, introduced by a Cabinet Minister who declared tithes to be " the property of the nation," established the priest's right to tithe rent-charge on an unassailable basis, and declared the tithe-owner's claim to be equal
Lord John Eussell
He " described tithe as a discounigeinent to industry, a penalty 011 skill, a heavy mulct on those who expended the most capital iu the cultivation of the laud." He also declared that " the tithes were the property of the nation." (p. 48. )
To face p. 48
PARSON'S CLAIM CONFIRMED 49
to what was then considered the most sacred of all property in the eye of the law, namely, the landlord's right to rent. Now, for the tirst time, the tithe-owner was given the right of entry and distraint, when his rent-charge was in arrear for twenty-one days ; and of taking possession after forty days, if the chattels found on the land were not sufficient for the satis- faction of his debt. The tithe-owner was empowered to " act and demean himself in relation " to any farm whose tithe rent-charge was in arrear, " as any land- lord may for arrears of rent reserved in a common lease for years."
The landlord was bound to pay the rent-charge, but he was empowered to recover it, by all the processes available to the tithe-owner, from the occupying tenants, who were held to have no rights, having then as now no property in the soil. Yearly tenants who made a declaration that they held their farms free of tithe, and leaseholders whose leases stipulated for the payment of the tithes by the landlord, were, nevertheless, bound to pay the tithe-owner if he demanded the rent-charge from them — their remedy being to deduct from their rent the amount so paid. In this respect the tithe-owner was given a double remedy against the tenants as well as the landlords.
As the members of the Society of Friends were most opposed to the payment of tithe, a special clause was enacted against them. In all other cases the tithe-owner could only seize property found on the lands actually in arrear, but he was authorised to seize all personal goods belonging to " those persons called Quakers, whether on the premises or else- where " — an iniquitous provision which was only re- pealed in 1 89 1. The spirit of proud security by which the Church party in those days were actuated may be gathered from the fact that they should have
D
so CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
thus used a nickname, or term of derision, in desig- nating their opponents in an Act of Parliament,
Nay, this supposed Act of relief and abolition went further, for it ordered a class of " extraordinary " tithes to be levied, by way of rent, on hopgrounds, orchards, fruit plantations, and gardens, which had never been specially taxed by the old canonists, and these new imposts were paid for fifty years, until the Extra- ordinary Tithes Redemption Act of 1886 declared them to be " an impediment to agriculture," enacted that they should not be levied on any land put into cultivation after that date for the production of hops or fruit, and ordered existing extraordinary tithes to be commuted for a rent-charge of 4 per cent, on their capital value.
To enforce a universal system of commutation for all existing tithes and moduses, for the assurance of clerical incomes, was the work set to the Tithe Com- missioners by the Act of 1836. There were three head commissioners, two appointed by the Govern- ment and one by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a number of assistants. The terms of commutation were settled in some cases voluntarily,^ in others compulsorily. The clear, net average yield of the tithes to the parson in each parish, deducting costs of collection and marketing, was ascertained by sworn inquiry ; and the rent-charge, in lieu of tithe, was apportioned on that basis for each allotment of land. As the cost of collecting and realising the tithe used to be considerable, the rent-charge was much less than the tithe.
The framers of the Act adopted a scheme already in use, by which the rent-charge should rise in good and fall in bad years, by enacting that every rent- charge " shall be deemed to be of the value of such
1 Up to October i, 1838.
CORN-RENT EXPLAINED 51
number of imperial bushels of wheat, barley, and oats, as the same would have purchased at the average price of corn for the preceding seven years," if it " had been invested, one-third in wheat, one-third in barley, and one-third in oats." And the standard prices of corn were fixed in 1837 at — wheat 7s. o|-d., barley 3 s. I i^d., and oats 2s. gd. per bushel.^
Let us suppose the rent-charge, in lieu of tithe, on a particular farm to have been fixed at £100. That sum, divided into three equal parts, would have purchased 94.9 bushels of wheat, 168.4 bushels of barley, and 242.4 bushels of oats at the standard prices fixed in 1837. In any future year, therefore, the amount of that rent-charge would be, not ^100, but the money value of those quantities of wheat, barley, and oats, at the average price for the seven years preceding the particular year. The septennial average price of each class of corn is published by the Government in January every year, and the abstruse calculation of the value of each rent-charge of iS^ 100 is deduced therefrom. In 1 904, for instance, the money value of a rent-charge, initially worth .£^100, would have been the cost of the specified quantities of corn at the mean average price which obtained in 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, and 1903; and, as in those years corn had fallen considerably below the standard fixed in 1837, the money value of the tithe rent-charge of i^ioo in 1904 was only about £6g.
All the tithe in England had been commuted, with very few exceptions, when the corporate existence of the Tithe Commissioners ceased in 1882, and their duties were transferred to the Land Commissioners for England, under the Settled Land Act of that year. In 1887 a parliamentary return of commuted 1 7 Will. IV. & I Vict. cap. 69.
5 2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tithe was published, from which it appears that 1568 clerical appropriators — that is to say, bishops, deans, and chapters, and other dignitaries who have " appro- priated " the tithe in a number of parishes without being under any obligation of parochial work, includ- ing the sum drawn by Christ Church, Oxford, in its capacity as a diocesan chapter — drew an income of ^681,695; parochial incumbents, 4524 rectors and 3262 vicars, had a gross revenue of ^2,415,040; seventeen Oxford colleges, exclusive of Christ Church, divided the sum of ;^42,898 ; seventeen Cambridge colleges drew ^^67,646; certain hospitals, ^^3 2,000; certain public schools, including Eton and Winchester, corporations, and City companies, ^52,511. As the collegiate and scholastic tithe-drawers were until
o
recently exclusively clerical, and are still clerical to a large extent, we arrive at a total tithe rent-charge of nearly ;^3, 2 50,000 directly levied on English land for the support of the hierarchy and priesthood in a single year.
In addition to these figures, 2096 lay impropriators owned the tithe in a number of benefices, the com- bined commuted income of which, in the same year, was ^^766, 3 34. Before the dissolution of the monas- teries by Henry VIIL, the monastic corporations had " appropriated " the tithe of numbers of benefices all over the land. The " great tithes " of these parishes were paid to the monasteries ; and the resident priest, or vicar, as he was called, had to eke out his subsist- ence on the " small tithes," which were of the least value and most difficult to collect. When Henry VIIL relieved the country from the incubus of the monks, some of the monastic property was transferred to lay- men, who still reserved their right to the great tithes, and came to an arrangement with the vicars to per- form the spiritual duties of the benefices. These
LAY IMPROPRIATORS 53
laymen are called " impropriators," by way of contrast to the clerical " appropriators," who occupy a similar position with regard to the parishes whose tithes they claim. They do not take all the tithes, and have frequently endowed the vicar, or come to some amicable arrangement for a division of the tithes. In the parliamentary return of 1836, for instance, one finds the tithes set down as belonging to " the lay impropriator and vicar ; " or " lay impropriator and curate ; " or " lord of the manor and vicar ; " or " pre- bendary and vicar ; " or to the " clerical rector " alone. But a considerable amount of the tithes, even when belonging solely to lay impropriators, find their way also into clerical pockets.
Tithe rent-charge may be " redeemed " under the Tithe Redemption Act, passed in 1878; but it is enacted that the minimum price must be twenty-five years' purchase, and that the tithe-owner and land- owner must apply jointly for its redemption. If the rent-charge is in right of a benefice, the consent of the bishop and patron must be obtained, and the capital realised is invested. When lands have been divided into small plots for building, or when lands have been taken by public bodies, the tithe rent-charge may be redeemed on the terms quoted. Every town tenant is paying his quota of religious taxation in his house rent, and in the taxes levied for the acquisition of parks, open spaces, cemeteries, market-places, and labourers' allotments.
In 1889 the then newly created Board of Agri- culture took the place of the Land Commissioners. In 1 89 1 a new Tithe Act was passed, re-enacting the landlord's liability for the tithe rent-charge, and for- bidding him to enter into contracts with his tenants for its payment by them, and entitling the parson to obtain a decree in the county courts against the
54 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
landlord for arrears. This Act gave no relief to the tenants ; it only made tithe rent-charge and rent proper payable together to the lord of the soil ; and thereby helped to conceal the identity of the tithe by merging it in the rent. The parson's final remedy is still by distress levied on the lands in arrear, or by appointing a receiver over them to take the rent and profits ; and he has no personal remedy against any other property of the landlord or occupying tenant.
Though, as I have said, tithe rent-charge is paid in town as well as in country, it is on the farmers it presses most heavily. Few of the commercial and professional classes realise the burden of this religious taxation, which, being as Lord John Russell said, " a discouragement to industry, and a penalty on skill," is largely responsible for the bankrupt state of English agriculture. A farm in Suffolk, 5 1 7 acres in extent, of which 65 acres are marsh land, paid a greatly reduced rent of ^^400 in 1900; and its apportioned tithes came to no less than ;^i32, i8s. Another farm of 845 acres, of which 210 acres was marsh land, paid a rent of ;^5oo in 1900; and the ap- portioned tithe was £i6t,, 2s. Another farm of 1500 acres of light land in Wiltshire, the rent of which in 1900 was only 13s. an acre, paid 5s. an acre, or £2>7S ^ year, in tithe.^ From these figures one may discover why the United Kingdom imports annually ;^i 79,5 5 3,09 1 worth of foreign agricultural produce, while large areas of English land lie derelict or half- tilled. But the evil results of the tithe rent-charge on the agricultural industry are twofold ; because landlords are induced by the liability for its payment to give their best farms to tenants who are members of the Established Church. The most energetic men
1 These cases are taken from Mr. Rider Haggard's recent work, *' Rural England," published in 1903.
THE FISCAL REFORM SCHEME 55
are thus often kept out of the farms, Free Churchmen are forced to seek prosperity and Hberty in the towns, and the rural districts are too frequently left a prey to indift'erence and stupidity.
It is not to be supposed that Mr. Chamberlain started his tariff reform scheme with the sole object of raising the value of tithe rent-charge. He may have been actuated by a variety of motives. With- out mentioning the necessity for a new departure after the Boer war, there are several skilled trades pursued in Birmingham and elsewhere, notably the manufacture of fire-arms, which would benefit by protection ; and numbers of people honestly believe we ought to have protection. But it is clear that the bishops and priests, whose stipends depend on the value of tithe rent-charge, as well as the landowners whose rents would be inflated by a rise in the price of corn, eagerly seized the op- portunity presented by Mr. Chamberlain's scheme to obtain an increase of income without pretending to seek it. Every tithe-owner in the land became a " fiscal reformer," knowing that if the price of corn could be got back to what it was in 1878, a tithe rent-charge which is only worth £6(^ to-day would rise in value to ^i 1 2. It is not clear that the farmers were enthusiastic, for they have given up growing corn in many districts, and they wince at the prospect of increased tithe.
Mr. Chamberlain, on his part, made a palpable bid for the support of landowners and ecclesiastics by always putting the proposed duty on imported corn in the forefront of his programme ; and always con- tending, like a true Puseyite, that a tax on imported corn would not raise the price of wheat, and that a rise in the price of wheat would not cause a rise in the price of bread ! Mr. Chamberlain always spoke of a nominal duty of 2s. a quarter; but if the tax was
56 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
to be merely nominal and to produce no results, why did he so insistently press for it and make it the first plank in his platform ? Mr. Wyndham, who speaks from the inner sanctuary of the Church, as it were, and knows the views of the landlords, showed that they did not intend to be satisfied with the mere name of a prohibitive duty. " He had been informed," he said, " by a reliable authority, that no duty less than i 5 s. a quarter on corn would have any protective effect " ! ^ In comparison with the ecclesiastical and territorial magnates, an individual, even of Mr. Chamberlain's ability, is but a pigmy ; and, like the dwarf in the fable, the great Birmingham politician, in his alliance with the spiritual and temporal giants of the land, has received most of the blows and buffets, while the giants, by means of their ally's scheme, have distracted public attention from their own monopolies.
The tax, or tithe, on house rent in the city of London, and tithes of fishing and minerals and personal tithes, but not tithes of milling, were excluded from the Commutation Act. The unique religious taxation in London was originally imposed by episcopal con- stitutions and enforced by canon law ; until Henry VIII. , in order to enlist the support of the City clergy in his disputes with Rome, passed an Act just before his death enforcing its quarterly payment under heavy penalties.^ " Citizens and inhabitants " were bound to pay to the " parsons, vicars, and curates, after the rate following," namely, " of every x.s. rent by the year of all and every house and houses, shops, ware- houses, cellars, stables, and every of them, within the said city and every liberty of the same, xvj .d. ob. And every of xx.s. rent by the year of houses, etc., ij.s. and ix.d. And so above the rent of xx.s. by the year ascending from x.s. to x.s. according to the rate afore-
^ Parliamentary Debates, March 12, 1906. ^ 37 Hen. VIII. cap, 12.
LONDON CITY TITHES 57
said." The meaning of this is that a person paying ten shiUings rent for his house was bound to pay IS. 4^d. to the parson — and that all rents over that amount paid a tithe of 2s. gd. in the pound !
This heavy tax was paid, without significant oppo- sition, until the passage of the City Tithes Act in 1864, which enacted that the tithes in the following parishes, instead of varying with the rental, were thenceforth to consist of fixed payments settled by " the parishioners in vestry assembled and the in- cumbents, with the approval of the bishop of the diocese and the consent of the patron " : — St. Andrew, Undershaft, ;^2 5oo; St. Catherine, Coleman, ;^i 500; All Hallows, London Wall, £1^00; St. Ethelburga, ;^950 ; All Hallows, Barking, ^2000; St. Olave, Hart Street, £2600. The East India Dock Company agreed to pay an annuity of ;^8oo for ten years, immediately following the Act, in lieu of tithe, to the incumbent of St. Catherine, Coleman, but after that date its contribution was to be based on its assessment. The amounts pay- able in the parishes of St. Alphage, London Wall (;^i3 5o); All Hallows, Staining (;^ 1 600); and in St. Martin Outwich, Threadneedle Street, St. Peter le Poor, Broad Street, and Christ Church, Newgate Street, amounts unspecified, were to be arranged by a similar process. In the last-named parish the settlement was to be contingent on the consent of the " Wardens and Company of the Mystery of the Grocers." ^ In other parishes a corn-rent was to be substituted for a tithe on house rents. Having settled the amount of money payable in the given year, its equivalent in corn — if invested in equal parts in wheat, barley, and oats at the mean average prices for the twenty-eight years
^ 27 & 28 Vict. cap. 268. The standard price of corn fixed for the City varied slightly from that fixed for the rest of the country, viz., wheat 6s lo^d., barley 4s. i^d., oats 2s. 9|d.
58 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
precedin<3^ — was ascertained ; and the septennial aver- age price from year to year of that quantity of corn became the tithe.
Several Tithe Acts were passed for the City, notably the statute of 1879,^ which, having recited the Act of Henry VIII., extended the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 to all uncommuted City tithes. The church- wardens were authorised to levy the amount of this corn-rent in pound rates and to pay the incumbents. The same penalties were attached to non-payment as in the case of poor rate — namely, imprisonment and disfranchisement ; and, as the incumbent was also given power to proceed for arrears against the church- wardens personally, it may be said that no greater legal compulsion could have been put upon the citizens of a free country to enforce the payment of ministers of religion. Men of all creeds, men who did not re- quire the services of those ministers or believe in the doctrine they taught, were thus forced into their service. And, furthermore, the city tithe-owners enjoyed this advantage over their brethren who col- lected tithe rent-charge in other parts of the country, that the amount of their tithe was not assessed for, or subject to, local taxation ; whereas all other tithe- rent-charge was so assessed.
The inappropriateness of the comparison between the City clergy and the poor, involved in making the tithe rate a poor rate, may be gathered from the amount of the fixed annual payments to the incum- bents in the parishes we have quoted. The respon- sibility for the abandoned condition of the East End rests primarily on the sinecurists who held rich City benefices for the past hundred years. In many cases, while the population of their parishes dwindled from year to year, they indolently drew their large stipends,
^ 42 cfe 43 Vict. cap. 176.
RICH CITY INCUMBENTS 59
doing nothing for Christ's sake, and ignoring the depravity of the congested regions just outside their boundaries. In other cases, where the rich benefices inchided poor areas, the incumbents were equally oblivious of the fate of their own parishioners. Nor has the juxtaposition of rich priests and degraded people ceased to exist in London, within and without the City boundary. The present value of the payments to twenty of the City incumbents is set down at £2'/,'/ 10 per annum ; and many of the holders of these benefices, now and within the past twenty years, were suffragan bishops in the diocese of London, Canterbury, and elsewhere, who did no real parochial work, and left their parishioners to the mercy of poorly paid deputies. Others, like Rev. Malcolm MacColl, canon of Ripon, have been absentees, who rarely appeared east of Charingr Cross.
Such, then, is the tithe or religious taxation — such the method by which it is levied, and such the policy of those who would increase its amount. There is no justification for it under the Christian dispensation, and one's sense of justice is shocked by the details of its enforcement in all their grossness before the Commutation Acts. But, though day-labourers are no longer thrown into prison by rapacious parsons, tithe, as we see, is still paid and its payment enforced by all the rigours of the law. Let its apologists contend, if they will, that the religious taxation only amounts to ;^4, 000,000 a year now as against .^6,000,000, which they hold it would amount to if the Act of 1836 had not become law ; ^ the principle at stake is not affected thereby. It is wrong to enforce the payment of tithe ; and it is no less iniquitous to enforce pay- ment of 1 3s. 4d. than of 20s.
But the commuted tithe does not cover all the
^ A calculation by Sir James Caird, who prepared the return of 1887.
6o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Church's drawings from land ; for in 1887 the bene- ficed priests held no less than 659,548 acres i rood 17^ perches of freehold land, commonly called " glebe," representing, to some extent, the remnants of the estates of their Anglo-Roman predecessors, as well as land given under Enclosure Acts, or as commutation for tithe under local statutes as well as the Act of 1836, which permitted a landlord to convey 20 acres in one parish to the parson in lieu of tithe rent-charge. Much of this glebe is worked by the parsons, while more of it is let ; and in 1887 the moderate estimate of its yearly letting value was no less than ;^9o8,28i.
Besides the tithe, there used to be another impost analogous to tithe, namely, church-rates. Not only were ratepayers of every creed bound to support the incumbent, as they are still bound to do, but they were also compelled to maintain the fabric of the parish church. Year after year bills had been passed by the House of Commons for the abolition of these rates, and the measures had always been thrown out by the House of Lords ; but church-rates were ulti- mately abolished by an Act passed by Mr. Gladstone in 1868, without any scheme of commutation or com- pensation.
We shall now consider the operations of the Ecclesi- astical Commission, and inform ourselves as to the financial endowments of the archbishops, bishops, deans, and chapters of the Established Church.
Salisbury Cathedral
The cathedral " palace, deanery, canons' residences, and other ecclesiastical hiiildinos cover an area equal to that of a fair-sized town They constitute one of the greatest of the many uioniiments of medieval sacerdotalism jjreserved in this country." (p. 130.)
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Lincoln Cathedral
"The amljitions of the aspiriny Norman liisliops are evidenced not only in the colossal minster itself, but iu the adjacent cloisters, chapter-Iiouses, old ei)iscopal palace, and remains of other buildinus. Nor does the new palace at Riseliolme show much evidence of the growth of self-sacriiice." (p. 115.)
To face p. 61
CHAPTER III
Composition and powers of the Ecclesiastical Commission— Re- arrangement of Bishops' incomes— Suppression of Canonries— - Ecclesiastical Patronage— Simony— Work of the Commission- Clerical riches and poverty— Cause of the poverty— National growth— Ecclesiastical decay— Anglican Church a medieval in- stitution—Bishops' courts— Cathedral establishments— Dioceses of Canterbury, York, London, Winchester, Durham, Carlisle, Chester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Eipon, Wakefield, and Man.
The first Ecclesiastical Commission of 1836 consisted of tlie two archbishops, three bishops, the Lord Chancellor and chief Cabinet Ministers, and three laymen — a clear majority being non-clerical.^ Broadly speaking, two reforms were effected by this body : — I. The incomes of the richer bishops, having been considered, were fixed by the Act at " suitable " amounts, " as from next avoidance," and the surplus was apportioned between the poorer sees; 2. they recommended the suspension of a number of canonries and other sinecures in cathedral churches, so as to insure the augmentation of clerical incomes in other quarters. The second Ecclesiastical Commission Act of 1840,^ amongst other things, gave legal sanction to the suppression of the canonries condemned by the first commission ; made it incumbent on deans to reside eight months, and on canons three months each year within the precincts of the cathedral whence they drew their salaries; fixed the minor canons' salary at ;^i5o; forbade the payment of all non-residents, prebendaries and others ; vested in the commission
^ 6 & 7 Will. IV. cap. 77. - 3 & 4 Vict, cap. 113.
6i
62 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the revenues of the suppressed canonries as well as the separate estates of the deans and canons who were not suppressed ; and vested in the Crown the right of appointing all the English deans.
Fifty-two canonries were thus suppressed in the following cathedrals : Canterbury 6, Durham 6, Wor- cester 6, Westminster 6, Winchester 7, Windsor 8, Exeter 3, and two each in Bristol, Chester, Ely, Gloucester, Lichfield, Norwich, Peterborough, Ripon, Rochester, Salisbury, and Wells. All the canonries in Southwell collegiate church, all except two in St. David's and Llandaff, and the non-resident deans of Wolverhampton, Middleham, Heytesbury, and Brecon, were also suspended. Provision was made for annexing canonries to the office of archdeacon, with a view to enhancing the status of archdeacons. Two canonries in Ely cathedral were annexed to professor- ships in Cambridge, and three canonries in Christ Church cathedral, Oxford, to professors in Oxford — a shrewdly devised policy which was a disaster to the universities, for it strengthened the authority of established religion over higher education.
The work of suppression and re-adjustment having been done — the bull having been taken by the horns, so to speak, by the first commission — the Act of 1840 transformed the Ecclesiastical Commission into a clerical body, with powers to remove the suspension of canonries from time to time, as they thought fit. The commission in 1905 consisted of the archbishops, all the bishops, the deans of Canterbury, St. Paul's, and Westminster, the Lord Chancellor, President of the Council, First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Home Secretary, the Lord Chief Justice, Master of the Rolls, and judges of the Probate and Admiralty Court ; three laymen as appointed by the first Act ; four laymen nominated by the Govern-
THE ECCLESIASTICAL COMMISSION 63
ment, and two by the Archbishop of Canterbury ; and three paid members, called Estate Commissioners, two appointed by the Government and one by the Arch- bishop of Canterbury, drawing salaries of i^iooo to ;^I200 a year.
The prelates, with the deans and primate's nominees, now constitute a clear two-thirds of the membership. Five members form a quorum, of whom two must be bishops, and these bishops can adjourn the meeting for the attendance of more bishops. Every lay member must swear, on appointment, that he is " a member of the United Church of England and Ireland," or, as it now runs, " of the Church of England as by law established." Viscount Halifax, a generalissimo of the sacerdotal party, and chairman of the English Church Union, is one of the lay members, and therefore must have taken this oath. But, apart from Lord Halifax's personal position, the oath illustrates how the policy of " taxation without representation," revolted against by the colonies 140 years ago, still prevails in England; for, while all denominations are bound to contribute tithes to the Church, Anglican Churchmen alone have a voice in its financial management.
This unique corporation, for which there is no parallel under the constitution, possesses powers analogous to those of the Local Government Board ; it holds inquiries and examines witnesses on oath ; and its schemes for the re-arrangement of dioceses, benefices, and clerical incomes, when approved by the Privy Council and published in the London Gazette, become operative as Acts of Parliament. All the " mortmain " statutes against the holding of land by religious corporations with perpetual succession, from Magna Charta to i and 2 William IV. cap. 115, were abrogated in its favour; and it was empowered to hold, buy, sell, let, and manage all kinds of real and
64 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
personal property. Cathedrals and all charities con- nected with religious worship were excluded from the Charitable Trusts Act of 1853 for its benefit. Its schemes — fixing salaries and transferring estates from one lord spiritual or capitular body to another ; pro- viding residences for deans and other dignitaries ; arranging for repairs to cathedrals ; for improvements to the palaces, stables, and pleasure grounds of bishops ; for episcopal investments, mines, and fisheries ; for the sale or exchange of tithe rent-charges, manor rights, and numerous other species of property — may be numbered by the thousand.
Certain ecclesiastical lawj^ers hold that the vesting of the collective property of the bishops and chapters in a single corporation created by statute has shattered " the important principle on which the inviolability of the Church establishment depended."^ This opinion does not affect the more important revenue from tithes to which there never was any "inviolable" right, and in which the vested interest of the Church may be compared to the vested interest of the Civil Service in the income-tax or spirit duties. But the managers of the Church were impressed by it, and we shall find them re-endowing bishops and capitular bodies with separate estates in lieu of the fixed stipends out of a common fund which were at first decided on. Apart, however, from the legal view of the question, an impartial study of the Ecclesiastical Commission's record of sale and barter for seventy years discloses scant evidence of that godliness and self-sacrifice which were so characteristic of the Founder of Christianity, and does not tend to estab- lish the genuineness of the bishops' pretensions to apostolical succession. The general body of parochial
1 " Law of Church and Clergy," by C. A. Cripps, K.C., Vicar-General of Canterbury and York.
SALE OF BENEFICES 65
incumbents endowed with tithe rent-charges are outside the scope of the Commission, except when benefices are attached to episcopal or capitular endowments, or when new ecclesiastical districts have to be carved out of ancient parishes.
In considering the cash incomes of bishops and capitular bodies now about to be specified, it must be remembered that each bishop and chapter is the patron of several benefices, and that the patronage of a benefice, constituting a class of property known as an " advowson," has always commanded its money value ; a regular market for and recognised trade in the sale, purchase, and exchange of advowsons having been carried on by well-known agents throughout the country. The very Act which created the commis- sion sanctions the right to sell a cure of souls to the highest bidder in the open market. Its 69tli section makes provision for the sale of benefices annexed to the headships of colleges in Oxford and Cambridge ; its 70th section expressly authorises the benefices annexed to the regius professorship of divinity in Cambridge to be sold, and the money so realised in both cases was to be invested. Another section, declaring that the rights of patronage and presenta- tion to benefices vested in high ecclesiastical officers must not be sold, implies pre-existing simoniacal practices by clerical dignitaries.
It is, therefore, for the reader to say how far, if at all, the bishops, deans, and chapters, as judged by their acts collectively and individually, are likely to have supplemented their incomes from the valuable advowsons they possess. Their patronage was never confined to their own dioceses, but was scattered promiscuously over other sees, so that local public opinion constituted no effectual check on their action.
To sell an advowson is said to be simony, and, as
E
66 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
we shall see, a stringent law against the practice was passed in 1898; but are not all the proceedings in connection with tithe collection, and the adjustment of episcopal and capitular incomes derived from tithe, worse than simoniacal ? To exercise in return for money the sacred powers alleged to be inherent in a priest is called simony. " Thy money perish with thee," said the indignant Peter to Simon Magus, " because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money ! " Simon made a voluntary offer of money for the apostolic gift. But what should we have thought of Peter, if he had not only offered his powers for sale, but compelled people to purchase them against their wills by threats of fine and im- prisonment ? We should assuredly have said that his offence was greater than that of Simon. Yet the position of the episcopal and sacerdotal tithe collectors in England was that of men putting apostolic gifts up for sale at a price fixed by themselves, and bludgeoning the public if it did not purchase.
Apart from the creation of over 3000 new parochial districts and the augmentation of incumbents' salaries, the broad result of the operations of the commis- sioners will be found to have been the " improvement " of the property committed to their care, with the least possible disturbance of the episcopal and capitular establishments. In 1835, for instance, the arch- bishops and bishops were drawing a gross revenue of ^181,631,^ of which a net income of ;i^ 160,292 was available for their own use ; they are now drawing a net income of over i^ 100,000.^ In 1835 the
1 " Liber Ecclesiasticus " ; Report of the first commission, published by royal authority, 1835.
" A parliamentary return on Church property and revenues, pub- lished 1891, gives the episcopal incomes as ;^98,9o8, to which we must add about ^5000 for the sees of Southwark and Birmingham created in 1904, towards which the older sees of Rochester and Worcester contribute something over ;!^iooo a year.
ALLEGED CLERICAL POVERTY 6y
cathedral and collegiate churches had a gross income of ^^284, 24 1, of which the net profit divided be- tween the dignitaries was ;^2o8,2 89 ; in 1 89 1 they drew ;^ 1 9 2,400. The incomes from separate properties of prebends and other dignitaries used to amount to ^75,854; this item has been largely devoted to aug- menting the incomes of parochial incumbents. In 1835 the incomes of 10,718 benefices used to be ;^3.2 5i,i59; in 1891 the incomes drawn in over 13,900 benefices were ^^^4. 3 13,622. In 1835 there were 1006 curates, at an average salary of ;^86, appointed by resident incumbents; and 4224 curates, at an average salary of £Z i , doing work for non- resident pluralists. To-day the number of curates is about 7500, at a much higher average salary, and a far larger proportion of incumbents reside in their parishes. In 1835 there were 62 sinecure rectories which returned their incomes at i^ 18,622, and four others which made no returns. It is alleged now that there are no sinecure rectories, but the incumbents of empty parishes in the City of London and elsewhere, with no real duties to perform, draw more money than the old sinecurists.
When one hears of the depression of clerical in- comes, and feels disposed to sympathise with struggling bishops, deans, chapters, and benefice-holders, it should be remembered that the Church is better off now than it was before commutation, and that the true object of all ecclesiastical legislation since then has been to improve its financial position. The amount of money drawn by the Church, as we shall see, is larger now than at any other period since the Reformation.
The undoubted poverty of many Anglican priests, 103 of whom were admitted into pauper institutions within the last ten years,^ is due to three causes : ( i ) the
' Pamphlet issued by the Secretary of the Clergy Provident Association.
68 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
unfair division of the national endowment; (2) the want of sympathy for the parsons on the part of the Church laity, a concomitant of the iniquitous tithe system, aggravated by the disloyalty of the ritualists ; (3) the incapacity of men brought up on a mental diet of dogmatic theology to supplement their incomes by legitimate personal exertion.
As an illustration of the first cause we may refer to two recent sermons. Dr. H. M. Sinclair, who draws £1000 a year as canon of St. Paul's, unblushingly proclaimed, on February 11, 1906, that "a large number of the clergy were improperly fed, and some- times on the verge of starvation." ^ Bishop Gore, an unmarried man, preached a sermon at St. Paul's on February 21, 1906, on "the startlingly inadequate remuneration paid to clergymen," knowing that he himself drew ;^iooo a year from 1894 to 1902 in the sinecure office of canon of Westminster, ^^4500 a year as Bishop of Worcester from 1902 to 1904, and now draws ;^3 5oo a year as bishop of the small diocese of Birmingham.
A painful illustration of the second cause may be found in the suicide of the daughter of an Oxfordshire incumbent, aged fourteen, who poisoned herself in her father's laboratory on February 8, 1906. An inquest was held, at which the father is reported to have said that " the boycotting to which he had been subjected by some of his parishioners" had unhinged his daughter's mind.^ Even Bishop Gore, though himself one of the leaders of the latter-day Puseyites, ad- mitted in his recent sermon that " there were abuses and scandals which hindered the outflow of spontaneous giving." ^ Yes ; the scandal of excessive salaries.
Examples of the third cause are innumerable. A
1 Sermon at Eastbourne, Daily Express, February 12, 1906.
2 Daily Express, February 12, 1906. ^ Ibid. February 22, 1906.
GROWTH OF THE NATION 69
Berkshire incumbent was sentenced on February 9, 1906, to a term of hard labour for extensive frauds. He had been sent to penal servitude for forgery thirty years before, when he was a curate in Yorkshire, and it was now urged in mitigation of sentence that he was in severe distress and knew no other way of raising money than by fraudulent courses. Much less reprehensible, of course, but altogether repugnant to one's ideas of the duties of a priest of the Established Church, is the case of a clergyman in South London, who became the landlord of a public-house, and had himself photographed as he stood in church costume inside the bar. He is the holder of the highest degrees from Cambridge University, and fills the office of workhouse chaplain, and candidly avows that he went into the liquor business to procure the means of placing on the market a musical invention by which he claims to have " killed the tonic sol-fa system." ^
What has really happened is that the relative wealth and importance of the rest of our institutions, our free professions and open trades, have enormously increased, as compared with the secular organisation of the Church, which possessed no vital germ of truth or utility within itself to enable it to expand "pari pass2i. with the nation. But the money and estates which the Church retains, immense though they be, are by no means the most important of its possessions. Its aggressiveness has been checked, its right to dictate has been questioned and denied, and its power of guiding the people for the advancement of ecclesiastical interests has been shaken. Those who have escaped from the control of bishops, deans, and chapters are now, owing to the mental liberty thereby achieved, infinitely wealthier than the Church itself Those
1 Daily Express, February 15, 1906.
70 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
who disapprove of the Church's financial, govern- mental, and theological system, and have discovered the direct way to Jesus for themselves, now outnumber those who still nominally believe that the grace of God is distributed through the medium of a theocracy of bishops, deans, and chapters. But, despite all this, the influence retained by the Church, at Court, in politics, in society, and, above all, in education — and which is derived from the same Roman title as the residuum of its estates — still continues to be embar- rassing and, being founded on fiction, constitutes a danger to the commonwealth.
The executive government of the Church is, with some modifications, still the same as that established everywhere by the Roman hierarchy. The bishop is the head of a large district, called the diocese — a diocesan pope having his chair or throne (the Latin cathedra) in a great temple, hence called a cathedral, which means the church in which is the bishop's cathedra or chair. The bishop sat on his throne ; God rested in the tabernacle in the form of bread. The bishop and God were interchangeable terms, and in practice were synonymous. The bishop's residence was a palace, the " see " meant nothing more than the seat (Latin sedcs), the seat of the bishop, who was surrounded by his college of priests, now the dean and chapter, and an official court, like a monarch.
Before the Reformation the cathedrals at Canter- bury, Durham, Winchester, Carlisle, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, and Worcester were served by monastic priests ; but when Henry VIII. suppressed the monasteries the service was transferred to secular deans and canons. At the same time the great monastic churches at Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, and Peterborough were converted into cathe- drals, and the surrounding districts formed into new
CAPITULAR WEALTH 71
dioceses. On the other hand, the cathedrals at York, London, Chichester, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, Salisbury, Wells, and the Welsh cathedrals of St. Asaph's, Bangor, St. David's, and LlandafF, which had always been served by secular priests, continued as before, and were known as cathedrals " of the old foundation."
These cathedral corporations, monastic and secular, amassed enormous estates. Timorous believers and remorseful sinners made pilgrimages to them from long distances, and, in order to purchase forgiveness from God, endowed them with land. A man from Northumberland or Lancashire, for instance, would journey to Winchester or Wells to make his confession, and, to ease his own mind, would convey his freehold property in the north either to the community at Winchester, or, perhaps, to a secular prebend at Wells, from whom he had obtained absolution — a practice which explains the promiscuous manner in which capitular estates are still scattered over various counties. In the cathedrals served by secular priests each dignitary held his own property separately, and was therefore called a prebend. In the monastic cathedrals the property was held in common, but after the Reformation their dignitaries too were called prebends, though they never held separate estates in the true sense. The bishop had his own estates, the dean and chapter had theirs, and between them they held the cream of the land in their neighbourhood, as well as properties at a distance.
Each dignitary, from the bishop and dean to the vicar-choral or smallest prebend, in the secular cathe- drals, had his separate estate — conveyed to him or his predecessors by pious penitents who denuded themselves of their property in the hope of gaining eternal bliss ; and the lowest of these officials drew his rent and tithe
72 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
with as much authority as the lord spiritual. In con- sidering the present estates of the Church, one must remember that, in the Plantagenet reigns, the priests owned half the land of England ; and one must not be astonished so much by what the successors of the Roman officials have managed to retain, as by the amount which the laity have succeeded in rescuing from them. One must also confess to feeling little or no surprise that those bishops and capitular bodies, who boast of their direct succession from the Anglo- Roman clergy, should have a 'penchant for Romanism and venerate an ecclesiastical system whose officials managed to annex half a realm at a time when landed property was the only species of wealth.
The ritualistic adoration of God, who was supposed to be in a continual state of offended majesty at the vice and impiety of the whole world outside the cathe- dral close, was the ostensible business of these ecclesi- astical corporations. But they were really societies for mutual worship ; the cathedral being the local heaven in which God held His court, and the bishop and his college of priests in their gold vestments, illumined by a blaze of lights or enveloped in a cloud of incense, were the glory of God made manifest to the credulous believers. The dean was master of the court ; the precentor had to arrange the details of ritual ; the chancellor was learned in the casuistry by which the whole system was defended ; the treasurer kept the gold and silver vessels, the jewelled vest- ments, crosiers, altar plate and rich furniture, which constituted the reserve, or treasure, of the corporation, and was of enormous value ; the canons were the per- manent officials of the cathedral, bound by rule or canon; the archdeacons supervised the parochial clergy in the interests of the central authority. Each official had his deputy, so that the minor officials were known
ENGLAND AND SPAIN 73
as the sub-dean, succentor (sub-precentor), vice-chan- cellor, and the minor canons, or canons' vicars.
The English cathedral system, then, continues almost as it was in Roman times, with the all-important ex- ception that the people have ceased to believe in it. The solitude in which well-paid canons conduct daily services in our cathedrals recall the words of an English Roman Catholic dignitary, who visited Spain recently to " study closely the cathedral idea at full work." " Nowhere," he tells us, " is the liturgical service so thoroughly carried out and on such majestic lines. I was much struck with the way the laity was ignored. The dignified canons and minor canons in their stoles, as the clergy of the church, Avere the congregation." The same authority says : " To be quite frank, in a cathedral the people are altogether a secondary con- sideration. Whether they are there or not is uncon- sidered. Ofiice will be sung and high mass celebrated. The liturgical procession will wend its way round the sacred walls, and the stately function will be conducted, whether a lay congregation be there or not. The angels are congregation enough for a cathedral besides the clergy " !
As these are also the principles on which cathedral worship is conducted in England at the present day, at a cost of over ;^2 00,000 a year, the new alliance with Spain must have brought much joy to the hearts of Anglican bishops, deans, and chapters. In England the canons' stalls provide luxurious billets for the ecclesiastical friends of the court or of the political leaders ; and many of the members of these chapters are excellent men of unblemished character. But at their best they never did more than play the part of a national chorus chanting the praises of the established order of things, varied occasionally by a sensational sermon from some self-advertising dean or canon who
74 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
pretended to denounce what his order was subsidised to uphold. They may have been playing to the angels; but, of recent years, as the necessity for a national chorus has disappeared, they have shown a tendency to become a disturbing element in society.
The dean and chapter, the capitular or head body, govern the cathedral or collegiate church indepen- dently of the bishop. Nay, they are supposed to elect the bishop; and the Crown's method of appointment is to send a cojigi d'dire or letter to the capitular body ordering them to elect a specified individual to the bishopric.
Under this medieval system England and Wales are divided into thirty-seven dioceses, each of which has (i) its episcopal court, consisting of the bishop and his officials; and (2) its capitular body, having charge of the cathedral, and consisting of the dean and canons, their deputies, honorary canons, organist, and chapter clerk. The episcopal court in Canterbury, which will serve as an illustration of all, consists of the archbishop, who has a town and a country palace ; two bishop deputies ; eight chaplains ; two resident chaplains ; private secretary ; principal and deputy registrars ; eight assessors ; judge and registrar of the Arches Court for ecclesiastical cases ; registrar of the Court of Faculties ; two legal secretaries ; vicar- general ; apparitor-general ; commissary-general ; high seneschal ; diocesan architect ; and surveyor of dilapi- dations. It is not yet fifty years since the custody and interpretation of all testamentary dispositions formed part of the archbishop's prerogative, all pro- bate business being transacted by his deputy sitting as judge of the Prerogative Court at Doctors' Com- mons ! The capitular body at Canterbury consists of the dean, six canons, six preachers, and three minor canons — all in receipt of salary ; and, in addition, twenty-three honorary canons.
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ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 75
It must not be imagined that the salaried diocesan officials constituting the episcopal courts are supported out of the bishop's income. There is an elaborate system of fees from which these and other officials draw substantial revenues. There are fees for all grants of faculties ; fees on donation, presentation, nomination, collation, institution, installation, induc- tion, or licence ; on ordinations ; consecration of burial grounds ; visitations ; and on the performance of almost every other act done in the alleged service of Christ — their amounts being drawn up with legal precision by the archbishop and vicar-general of each province, assisted by a master-in-chancery.i
The Archbishop of Canterbury's was the first of the episcopal incomes to be reduced, in 1837, by ^^7,500 per annum. Its gross value then was ^22,216, of which the net profit of ;^ 19,182 was available for the holder. A new residence was built for the archbishop at Addington, near Croydon, though ^60,000 had just been raised for rebuilding Lambeth Palace ! The income was readjusted in 1846 to ;^i 5,000; and in 1867 the primate was endowed with lands in Ad- dington, Surrey ; lands at Appledore, Charlton, Acol, Monkton, St. Nicholas-at-Wade, and Stourmouth ; lands and tithes at Buckland, Guston, Cheslett, Coldred, Hoatli, Houyham, Minster, and Reculver ; tithes at Ash-next-Sandwich, Northbourne, Alkham, Chapel-le- Ferne, Heme, Herne-Hill, Marden, Tonge, Lynsted, and Doddington, all in Kent, to secure a minimum income of that amount. In 1891 the admitted net revenue of the archbishop was ;^ 15,871, 3s.;" from which we may judge how little he has suffered. His patronage comprises tAvo archdeaconries, six preacherships, and
^ 30 & 31 Vict. c. 135.
- His sources of income were : — lands, £7,TS'^, los. 5d. ; tithe rent- charge, ;i^7,777, 14s. 3d.; houses, ^107; timber, ;i^i2o; dividends, ;^ii5, i8s. 4d. Parliamentary Return on Church Property and Revenues, 1891.
ye CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
about two hundred benefices, to the majority of which he appoints at every vacancy, and to the rest at alternate vacancies.
Lambeth Palace itself is figurative of the way in which the Church has been overshadowed by the growth of the nation. Time was when it dominated the Surrey side of the Thames, opposite Westminster, when the passing boatmen looked with awe upon its towers and battlements. To-day it is rendered almost unnoticeable by St. Thomas's Hospital on one side, typical of the great advance of the scientific profes- sions, and Doulton's potteries on the other, emblematic of the expansion of all useful trades. The present archbishop. Dr. Davidson, who will be referred to again, has appointed two suffragan-bishops to assist him — Dr. Walsh, who draws salaries as canon and archdeacon ; and Dr. Pereira, who is rector of All Hallows, Lombard Street, a City parish in the diocese of London, now valued at ^1263 a year, and of which the dean and chapter of Canterbury are the patrons. Thus in 1906, despite the Pluralities Act, we find a parish in one see annexed to provide an income for the bishop-deputy of another.
In 1835 the gross revenues of the dean and twelve prebends of Canterbury were £21,^'^!, of which ;^ I 5,582 was the net profit divided, the dean taking two, and each prebend taking one share. The capitular revenues were commuted in 1862 for a fixed sum of iJ^5700 per annum, besides parsonages and certain lands; but in 1866 the dean and chapter were re- endowed with lands in Kent calculated to produce a minimum income of that amount, in lieu of the fixed payment ; and inasmuch as their revenues were returned in 1891 at ;^ 18,022, 13s. 3d.,^ they seem to be wealthier now than they were seventy years ago.
^ Subject to ;^iooo per annum to King's School endowment.
ARCHBISHOP OF YORK yy
Their patronage also is considerable, including about thirty-five benefices. Owing to the prevalence of hop- growing, Kent was the county on which the " extra- ordinary " tithes used to press most heavily, often amounting to ^3 per acre ; and it was, perhaps, to Archbishop Howley's keenness as a business man, in 1836, that their invention was to be attributed. The glebe lands held by incumbents in the diocese amount to 4749 acres, the estimated rental of which in 1887 was i^8i68.
The arch-diocese of York was reduced in area in 1836 by the creation of the new diocese of Ripon, and the archbishop's income was fixed at ^10,000. His gross revenue in 1835 was ;^i 3,798, of which he used to appropriate a net profit of i^i 2,629. His actual income was returned in 1891 at ^10,440, 12s. 8d. The landed estates, tithes, and rent-charges, manor temporal courts, manorial rights, and allotments of the dean and canons Avere vested in the commission, with right of sale, in return for ;^44io per annum, the dean's income being fixed at ;^2000, and the canons at, presumably, ^700. But they were sub- sequently re-endowed, and, in 1891 the chapter revenues were £^6o\ — derived from securities, £\o\ ; house rents, i^iooo; tithe rent-charge, i^i28i ; and lands, .^^43 2 3. The separate properties of the prebends, precentor, sub-chanter, vicars-choral, sub- dean, and succentor were also vested in the commis- sion for fixed revenues. The establishment now consists of the dean, four residentiary canons, twenty- five prebendaries, and five vicars-choral.
The archbishop's patronage includes all the cathe- dral dignitaries, except the dean, and over 170 benefices ; that of the dean and chapter extends to twenty-five livings. The glebe lands, held by parochial clergymen, amount to 45,646 acres, the rental of
78 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
which in 1887 was valued at ;^57,578. The present archbishop is Dr. Maclagan, whose actions will form the subject of remark in another chapter. There are three suffragans — Dr. Crosthwaite, predendary, arch- deacon, and rector of the rich living of Bolton Percy, valued at ;6^i5oo per annum; Dr. Blunt, canon of York and vicar of Hessle, a living valued at ;^50o; and Dr. Quirk, prebend of York and vicar of Broom- hall, Sheffield, a living valued at over £600. Dr. Quirk's and seven other livings in Sheffield are remarkable for the fact that their patronage, instead of being vested in strangers, belongs to the " burgesses " of each church — an arrangement which those who believe in the usefulness of the Established Church may well wish to see universally adopted.
As the Bishops of London, Winchester, and Dur- ham enjoy some species of precedence over the other bishops, being entitled ex officio, for instance, to seats in the House of Lords, irrespective of seniority ; and also being in receipt of larger incomes than their brethren, we shall consider them first, and take the other sees in alphabetical order according to their provinces. The Bishop of London's income, the gross value of which in 1835 was «^ 15,133, the net profit being £iTf,g2g, was reduced by ;^5ooo in 1837; and in 1846 was re-adjusted to iJ^i 0,000 — certain lands at Hornsey and Finchley being ordered to be sold. The properties of the dean and chapter, producing in 1835 -^11,295, were also vested in the commis- sioners ; the dean's income was fixed at ^2000 ; those of the four canons at £1000 each; and a special order in connection with the treasurership was made in 1858. All the capitular salaries are now paid by the commissioners ; but there was still a separate estate which yielded ;!^3032 in the hands of the chapter in 1891, derived as to ^^665 from tithe
BISHOP OF LONDON 79
rent-charge, and as Lo ^^1705 from lands in Essex. The cathedral establishment consists of the dean, four canons, thirty prebends, and seven minor canons. There were several schemes for the improvement of Fulham Palace in 1871-75; while those connected with City churches seem innumerable. The diocesan glebe lands include 4921 acres and 108 houses, the estimated rental value of which in 1887 was ^^24,851.
The bishop's patronage is extremely valuable, in- cluding, as it does, the treasurer, chancellor, precentor, and all the prebends of St. Paul's, the two arch- deaconries, and about 188 benefices, some of which are the richest in the city ; while that of the dean and chapter extends to over sixty livings. The present bishop is Dr. Ingram, of whom there will be much to be said elsewhere. He has three sufl'ragans. Dr. Turner, rector of St. Andrew, Undershaft, the City parish whose tithes were commuted for ;^2 500 a year, and which may well be described as a " sinecure rectory," seeing that its population now is only 157; Dr. Ridgeway, rector of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, a City living valued at over ;^3000 a year gross and i^2i20 net; and Dr. Lang, who draws salary as canon and treasurer of St. Paul's. There is also an assistant- bishop. Dr. Barry, who holds the sinecure office of canon of Windsor, valued at £1000 a year; and another assistant-bishop " for North and Central Europe," Dr. Wilkinson, endowed with the City living of St. Catherine, Coleman, the tithes of which were commuted for i^i 500 a year, but which is now valued at £1000.
The Bishop of Winchester had a gross income of ;^ 1 2, 1 70 in 1835, the net profit to the holder being ^^11,150. In 1879 ^ scheme was arranged under which lands and tithes in Bishopstoke, South Stone- ham, Hambledon, Houghton, Barton Stacey, East
8o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Meon, Overton, Ramsey, and Steep, in Hants ; Apple- drane and Chidham, in Sussex ; and Farnham, in Surrey, were settled on the bishop, so as to secure a minimum income of ^7000 a year. Schemes were also promulgated in 1870-77 in connection with Farnham Castle, Surrey, where the bishop resides, and Winchester House, in St. James's Square, which was sold to assist in making up an endowment for the see of St. Albans. The gross income of the dean and chapter of Winchester in 1835 was ;^i5,573; the net dividend being ^12,783. Under the new scheme the incomes of the dean and five canons were settled at about i^2000 and ;^iooo respectively. They were re-endowed with lands, however, and their revenues were returned in 1891 at ;^i 1,346, of which ;^8i3 came from investments, ^289 from house rent, ^1609 from tithe rent-charge, .^1872 from manorial property, and ^^8763 from lands. The present estab- lishment consists of the dean, five canons, and three minor canons. The bishop's patronage includes three archdeaconries, five canonries, and about 136 benefices ; that of the dean and chapter twenty-four benefices. The present bishop is Dr. H. E. Ryle, son of Dr. J. C. Ryle, first bishop of Liverpool; and there are three suffragans — Dr. Sumner, canon ; Dr. Macarthur, late of Bombay ; and Dr. Boutflower. The amount of glebe lands held by incumbents is 9986 acres, the rental of which was estimated at ;^i 3,333 in 1887.
Durham used to be the richest see in England, owing to the mineral and agricultural wealth of the ecclesiastical properties ; and, as Bishop Van Mildert happened to die early in 1836, its revenues came immediately into the hands of the commission. In other cases the diminution of income only came into effect " as from next avoidance," i.e. at the next en- suing vacancy; though it must be related, to the
DIOCESE OF DURHAM 8i
credit ot' more than one bisliop, that they consented to the reductions taking effect during their own lives. The Bishop of Durham's gross income in 1835 Avas £2i,ggi, the net profit to the holder being £ig,o66. In 1837 it was curtailed by the sum of i^i 1,200 per annum; in 1846 it was re-fixed at ;^8ooo, and so remains ; being well secured upon lands in Durham and other counties. The actual income returned in 1 89 1 was ^8140, I2S. lod.
In 1835 the revenues of the dean and chapter were ^35.071, of which the net profit was ;^2 7,933. The source of their wealth may be guessed fi-om the recorded payment by Lord Londonderry, in 1832, of a fine of £44,266 for the renewal of a colliery lease. The corporation consisted of a dean and twelve pre- bends, each of whom, figuratively speaking, was as fat as a Durham ox, who divided the capitular profits into fourteen shares annually, of which the dean took two and the prebends took one each. There were also eight minor canons. In 1852 the dean's income was reduced to twelve-seventeenths of its former value, which left it still worth about ^^3000 a year; and the incomes of the six canons were reduced by one-half and fixed at iJ^iooo each, their remaining property being conveyed to the commissioners. In 1882 the county of Northumberland was taken out of the see of Durham, and erected into the new bishopric of Newcastle ; so that the area of the diocese of Durham is now comparatively small, though the bishop and capitular body continue relatively rich. The revenue realised by the dean and chapter in 1891 from the separate property left in their hands was no less than ;^ 1 7,0 1 7, of which ;^ I 5,196 was derived from lands. Of this amount they pay ;^3000 a year to Durham Grammar School, no small share of which o;oes in clerical salaries.
82 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
When William the Conqueror visited Durham cathedral he expelled the Saxon married priests, and re-staffed it with Norman celibates. When Cromwell visited it, he sequestered its revenues, and handsomely endowed therewith the first Durham university; but at the Restoration, the university was abolished, and the cathedral re-endowed. The capitular establish- ment now consists of the dean, five canons, and five minor canons. One may see those dignitaries, as I myself have seen them, enjoying their otium cum difjnitate within the cathedral close, on top of Carileph's Acropolis, while they are in residence ; earning their money by celebrating morning prayer and evensong in a deserted cathedral, and guarding the dust of St. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede — their title to the property and the trust being con- tested by the powerful body of Roman priests at Ushaw, close at hand.
The bishop's patronage includes all the canonries, two archdeaconries, and 132 benefices ; while the dean and chapter are the patrons of 50 benefices. The present bishop is Dr. Moule, a man of piety and worth, who was transferred to Durham direct from the Norrisian professorship of divinity at Cambridge, and thus supplies the first of many proofs of the connection between education and religion, which may be gathered from this sketch of the bishops and capitular bodies. The dean is Dr. G. W. Kitchin, who was tutor in 1863 to the present King of Denmark, the brother of Queen Alexandra.
The glebe lands held by incumbents amounted to 8660 acres in 1887, the yearly value of which was estimated at ^10,289. The Durham land is, perhaps, better farmed than any in England. The rents are high, having reached the startling average of ;^5, los. per acre for the whole county in the prosperous
CARLISLP] 83
seventies. The holdings are of moderate size, and almost entirely in the hands of working farmers ; and, as there is none of that waste caused by ornamental trees Avhich is so detrimental to agriculture in the midlands and south, it is a pleasure to a thrifty man to gaze upon the clean, well-tended fields of a Durham landscape. After the transfer of the capitular pro- perty, the commissioners were, next to the Duke of Cleveland, the largest landowners in Durham, owning no less than 26,868 acres in this rich county — a handsome Roman legacy for which the legatees may well feel grateful.
Besides Durham, there are also in the province of York, the sees of Carlisle, Chester, Liverpool, Man- chester, Newcastle, Ripon, Wakefield, and Sodor and Man. The diocese of Carlisle was one of the first to benefit by the operations of the commissioners, receiv- ing an annual grant of i^2000 from the surplus taken from Durham, and having its bishop's income raised, in 1837, from £^2585 to i5^4500. A fresh scheme was settled in 1865, by which the bishop was endowed with 3582 acres of land in Dalston, Metheringham and Dunston, and Fiskerton in Cumberland; and Wild Moor Fen in Lincolnshire ; as well as with tithe rent- charge in Cardew, Skiprigg, Bishop High Head, Holme Hill, Brickabank, Broadfield Tythings, and Broadfield District, in Cumberland ; it being calculated that these lands and rent-charges would yield the statutory income.
The dean and chapter, whose gross revenue in 1835 was ;^6443, the net dividend being ^^5381, at first conveyed all their land to the commission for a pay- ment of ;^568o per annum, a sum of ^2000 in cash, and a grant of ;^i 5,000 for repairs to the cathedral. This arrangement was changed in 1865 for an endow- ment of lands in the parishes of St. Mary and St.
84 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Cuthbert, Carlisle, and in Wetheral ; as well as tithes in Corridge, Crosby-upon-Eden, Cumwhittory, Eden- hall, Heyton, Stanwix, Thursby, and Warwick ; besides the manors of Morland, Wetheral Botchesgate, John de Chappie, Lerton and Little Salkeld, all in Cumber- land. In 1872 a minor canonry was annexed to the archdeaconry of Carlisle, and minor canons were ap- pointed at ;^i50 a year, with the benefices of Adding- ton w. Glamblesby, Kirkland, Roshby w. Woodside, Westward, Seberghen, and Cross Canonby. The dean and chapter's revenues were returned in 1891 at ^7303, 5s- 6d.
The bishop's patronage includes four canonries, two archdeaconries, and fifty-five benefices ; while that of the dean and chapter extends to thirty-one benefices. The glebe lands held by incumbents amount to 24,268 acres, of which the estimated rental in 1887 was ;6^24,i23. The present bishop is Dr. Diggle, late archdeacon of Birmingham, where he is said to have won the venera- tion of Mr. Chamberlain.
The Bishop of Chester's income, the gross value of which in 1835 was £T,g^i, was augmented to ;^45oo in 1837; afterwards readjusted; and it is now about ;^4200. There were schemes for the sale of the old and improvement of the new palace in 1867 and after- wards; and in 1879 the bishop was endowed with lands in Raskelfe, Tholtorpe, and elsewhere in Cheshire. In 1835 the gross revenue of the dean and chapter was returned at £21 ^s> of which the net dividend was stated to be only ^634. In 1854 their lands were transferred to the commission for a fixed grant of ^5060 a year; but in 1866 they were re-endowed with lands in Chester and Stoke, and tithe rent-charges in Stoke and Brimsage. In 1891 the capitular revenues were £y^62, of which ^^242 5 is ear-marked for " the fabric." The establishment consists of the
CHESTER AND MANCHESTER 85
dean, four canons, and four minor canons. The cathedral was originally the Benedictine Abbey of St. Werburg, founded and endowed by Hugh Lupus, nephew of William the Conqueror, and made a cathedral by Henry VIII. The diocese was twice reduced in size since 1836, at the creation of the sees of Manchester and Liverpool. The bishop's patronage includes all the canonries, two archdeaconries, and sixty- six benefices ; that of the dean and chapter fourteen benefices. The glebe lands held by incumbents consisted of 3737 f^cres, the yearly rental of which in 1887 was valued at ;^8i83. The present bishop is Dr. Jayne, a man of ritualistic bent, whose proceedings will be re- ferred to again, and who had been for some years principal of St. David's College, Lampeter — an institu- tion which we shall discuss subsequently.
Manchester, constituted out of Chester by statute^ and sundry orders in council from 1839 to 1847, consists of the archdeaconries of Blackburn, Lancaster, Manchester. The collegiate church, which was also the parish church of the rectory of Manchester, was made the diocesan cathedral, its warden and fellows, whose gross revenues in 1835 were £4.6^0, the net dividend being ;^402 5, becoming the dean and chapter. Under a special statute, the dean's salary was fixed at £1 500, and that of the four canons at £600 each, and the rest of the endoAvments were ordered to be divided amongst the incumbents of new districts formed by the commissioners. These new districts were very numerous, consisting of All Souls, St. Andrew, St. Anne, St. George, St. James, St. John, St. Mary, St. Matthew, St. Michael, St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. Peter (Oldham Road), all in Manchester, besides many others in suburban areas." The bishop's income was fixed at
1 10 & II Vict. cap. 108. ^ Parish of Manchester Division Act, 1850 ; 13 & 14 Vict. cap. 41.
86 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
;iC42oo in I 84 1, partly made up of the prebendal pro- perty of Southwell collegiate church, which was divided between Ripon and Manchester. When the first bishop was appointed in 1848, he was allowed ;^400 a year extra for a house, until Bishop's Court was acquired, which has since been improved under a special scheme.
The property retained by the chapter has enormously increased in value since 1835; the revenues in 1891 being no less than ^^29,664, of which ;^2 1,472 was from house rent, ;^302i from tithe rent-charge, and ;£^4i83 from investments. The present establishment consists of a dean, four canons, and two minor canons, who are not likely to go to bed supperless. The glebe lands held by incumbents are 8059 ^^cres, valued in 1887 at ^22,618 yearly rental. The bishop's patron- asfe includes the four canonries, two archdeaconries, and 158 benefices ; that of the dean and chapter 2 3 livings. Some of the livings are lucrative ; as, for instance, Burnley, valued at ;£^2000 a year, held by the suffragan bishop. Dr. Pearson; and Blackburn, £1200, held by the assistant bishop, Dr. Thornton, who hoisted his church flag half-mast high at the death of Pope Leo XIII. The present bishop is Dr. Knox, whose record before preferment was that of a Christian, but whose behaviour in opposition to the Education Bill of 1906 was tinged with the worst traits of sacerdotalism.
In 1878 the Bishoprics Act of that year was passed, authorising the foundation of four new sees — Liver- pool, Newcastle, Southwell, and Wakefield — of which three are in the province of York ; but stipulating that the number of lords spiritual sitting and voting in the Upper House should not be increased thereby. The commissioners were authorised to receive public con- tributions, and to appropriate portion of other episcopal revenues, for the endowment of the new sees. It was
LIVERPOOL 87
enacted, that when the capital subscribed for one see should be sufficient to produce ^^3000 a year, with promises to raise the stipend to ;^3 500 in five years, the commissioners should apply for an order in council, constituting the new bishopric and making its bishop a body corporate. This astute provision as to a minimum endowment in advance, proved such a useful stimulus to charity, that it was brought into play in 1904, as we shall see, at the creation of the sees of Southwark and Birmingham.
Liverpool was incorporated in 1880, and consists of the archdeaconries of Liverpool and Warrington ; the bishop's income being fixed at about ;^42 00. The endowment subscribed seems to have fallen short of that sum by about i^iooo a year; for, in 1891, it only produced ;^3245, 12s. 8d., derived from — re- duced annuities, £64, i6s. 6d. ; Liverpool Corporation bonds, ;^968, 15s.; Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, ^1262, los. ; London and North- Western preference stock, ;i^949, i is, 2d. ; the balance being made up by the commissioners. No dean and chapter exist, and, therefore, the bishop is nominated directly by the Crown ; but if a capitular body be created when the new cathedral is complete, they will enjoy the right of receiving a cojig^ cl'dire, or an order to elect, when the Crown nominates a bishop for the diocese. Dr. John Charles Ryle, the first bishop, was succeeded in 1900 by Dr. F. J. Chavasse, ex-principal of Wicklifte Hall, Oxford, to whom more than one reference will be made in the course of our narrative. The bishop's patronage covers the two archdeaconries, rural dean- eries, and under twenty benefices. The glebe lands are 2400 acres, valued in 1887 at a rental of ^5634,
The diocese of Newcastle, consistingf of the deaneries of Northumberland and Lindisfarne, taken from Dur- ham, was incorporated in 1882, and the stipend of
88 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the bishop fixed at about ;^3 5oo. The endowment subscribed fell short of the statutory income, and in 1 89 1 only produced £2y6?>, 17s. 6d., made up of tithe rent-charge, ;^400 ; Consols, £y6 ; Tyne Im- provement Commissioners' bonds, ^6^2291, 19s. 2d.; the balance being made up by the commissioners. The church of St. Nicholas, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, was made the cathedral. There is no dean, but there are two canons — Dr. Gough, vicar of St. Nicholas, a living valued at ^700, and a Dr. Southwell. The arch- deaconries are held by Mr. Henderson, vicar of Wall- send, a living valued at over ^700, and Mr. Hodgson, of Berwick-on- Tweed, a living valued at ^^480. The glebe lands are 5640 acres, valued to produce a yearly rent of £762,1 in 1887. The bishop's patronage con- sists of the canonries, archdeaconries, and forty-three livings.
Wakefield, the third of the sees created under the Act of 1878, was carved out of Ripon ; but the first bishop was not appointed until 1888, when about ;^ 3 0,000 had been spent in restoring and beautifying the parish church of All Saints, which is now the cathedral. The see consists of the archdeaconries of Halifax and Huddersfield. There are no dean and chapter, but there are two archdeaconries, which, with thirty benefices, constitute the patronage of Bishop Eden, who was transferred from a suffragan bishopric in Canterbury in 1897, and whose income is about ;^3000 a year — of which, in 1891, £2J(^\, 9s. came from securities provided by the endowment.
The diocese of Ripon, which consists of the arch- deaconries of Craven and Richmond, was carved out of York in 1836. The bishop's income was fixed at ;^4500 in 185 1, and successive grants of ;^ 10,000, ;£'2000, and ;^i5oo were given to him for his palace at North Stainley, in 1839, 1841, and 1852. There
RIPON AND MAN 89
was an old collegiate church in Ripen which, in 1835, had a gross revenue of ;!^8o4 ; but the incomes of the new dean and four canons were fixed in 1852 at ^1000 and ;^5oo each respectively, and are paid by the commissioners. The glebe lands were 24,445 acres, valued at ;^28,824 yearly rental, in 1887. The bishop's patronage includes the canonries, arch- deaconries, chancellorship, and about eighty-nine bene- fices ; that of the dean and chapter covers twelve benefices. Dr. Carpenter, the present bishop, thinks that " alike among the unenlightened advisers of the Vatican and in the circles of evangelical ignorance, the voice of knowledge is refused and its messengers cast out ! " ^ By " evangelical ignorance " he means the ignorance of those who know the Gospel by heart and revere it as their rule of life — and of whom it is a libel to say that they are unwilling to admit the truth of every useful science. There is a considerable amount of ritualism in the diocese of Ripon, which is neither scientific nor evangelical, and Avhich can only be indulged in by men whose ignorance of the Gospel must be fully equalled by their deficiency in the first condition of scientific inquiry, which is a genuine love of truth. There are two suffragans- — ^Dr. Pulleine, rector of Stanhope, in county Durham, a living valued at over ;^i6oo; and Dr. Smith, archdeacon and canon of Ripon, whose duty it is to " pull the labouring oar " for the diocesan, as we shall learn in another place from Bishop Talbot, who, as vicar of Leeds, worked for six years under Bishop Carpenter.
The recent history of the diocese of Man, or Sodor and Man, as the clerical authorities insist on calling it, is instructive. In 1825 an Act was passed purchasing the manorial rights of the Duke of Athole, who had
* "The Christian Church," by Bishop Carpenter, Ency. Brit., new edition, 1902.
90 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
previously surrendered the lordship of Man to the Crown for an annuity of ;^2000, afterwards raised to ;^30oo. For his annuity he received ;^i 50,000; for rents and alienation fines, ;!f 34,000 ; and as money compensation for tithes, sundries, and the patronage of the bishopric and fourteen advowsons — the aggregate yearly value of which was ^6000 — he received ^^233,144. To find so enormous a sum of money paid to an individual by statute for surrendering the patronage of a bishopric and fourteen livings, is an admirable illustration not only of the value of eccle- siastical patronage, but of the legal sanction which was given to its sale and purchase in open market. The Bishop of Man's income in 1835 was ;^272 5; in 1 89 1, it was returned at ;^268i. By virtue of an unintelligible arrangement, he sits, but does not vote, in the House of Lords. Besides the Bishop, Dr. Stratton, there are an archdeacon, four canons, and thirty-five beneficed clergymen, and a number of Anglican curates. The population of the island in 1901 was 54,758, of whom it would appear the greater part were Non- conformists.
This concludes our survey of the province of York, and we shall now return to the province of Canterbury.
rETERBOKOUGH CATHEDRAL AND PALACE
"Tlie bishop was re-endowed with laud iu 1862; and in 1865 there was an exchansre of properties between him and the bishops of other dioceses, as well as a scheme for improving the palace ; iu 1869 a scheme for i)roviding a palace chapel ; and in 1881 a scheme for adding pleasure grounds to the palace." (p. 125.)
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Durham Cathedral and River Wear
"One may see those dignitaries enjoyin<y their otium cum dignitate within the cathedral close, on top of Carileph's Acropolis, earning their money by celebrating morning prayer and evensong in a deserted cathedral, and guarding the dust of St. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede— their title to the property and trust being contested by the powerful body of Koman priests at Ushaw, close at hand." (p. 82.)
To face p. gt
CHAPTER IV
Westminster Abbey — Windsor Free Chapel — The dioceses of St. Albans, St. Asaph, Bangor, Bath and Wells, Bristol, Chichester, St. David's, Ely, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, and Lichfield.
Besides Canterbury, London, and Winchester, already dealt with, the province of Canterbury contains the sees of St. Albans, St. Asaph, Bangor, Bath and Wells, Bristol, Chichester, St. David's, Ely, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, Llandaff, Norwich, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochester, Salisbury, Southwell, Truro, Worcester, Southwark, and Birmingham. It also con- tains two collegiate churches, the last in England to retain an independent government and jurisdiction apart from the dioceses in which they are situated, namely Westminster Abbey and St. George's Chapel at Windsor. In 1835, the gross revenues of the dean and chapter of Westminster were ^^30,1 4 5, of which the net divi- dend for the dignitaries was £ig,g28. In 1843 the property was vested in the commissioners, the dean's income was cut down by one-fifth to ;^2000 per annum, the incomes of the canons (now five in number) were reduced by one-third to ;^iooo each, two of the canonries were annexed to the incumbencies of St. Margaret's and St. John the Evangelist, Westminster, and the salaries of the six minor canons were fixed at the statutory scale of ;^i5o each. In i860, capi- tular lands at Launton (Oxon) were vested in the commissioners for ;^7500 and an annuity of ;€^20 5, and Oxford rectory was surrendered for £2^7^ and ;^ioo per annum. In 1869 the dean and chapter were granted £ggoo per annum, with lands and tithes
92 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
at Ashelworth and Harfield (Gloucester), Islip and Launton (Oxon), Liddington and Chiseldon (Wilts), Westminster and Hampstead (Middlesex), Castle Morton, Church Honeybourne, Grendon Bishop, Grendon Warren, Pencombe, Bromyard, and elsewhere in Herefordshire, Birtsmorton (Worcester), Harpenden and Albury (Herts). The establishment now consists of the dean, five canons, of whom one is subdean and another is archdeacon, six minor canons, one of whom is precentor and another sacrist, a commissary, an organist and assistant, a receiver-general, and chapter clerk. In 1888 the separate landed estate of the chapter, ^^46 8 6 per annum, was transferred to the commissioners ; but there was a tithe rent-charge revenue of ;^i599, ^^^ house property of the yearly value of ;^5iio, still held directly by the chapter after that date. They also held residence houses of the annual value of £2 $'^6; and their patronage includes twenty-eight benefices.
Windsor Free Chapel of St. George, as it was called, established for the service of the royal castle, had a gross revenue in 1835 of ;i^2 2,475, the net profit divided amongst the dignitaries being ;^ 19,3 80. It was declared a collegiate church in 1 840 ; the rectory of Haseley was severed from the deanery; and the salary of its minor canons was fixed at the usual scale of ^^150. The properties were vested in the commissioners in 1867; and the establishment consists of a dean, at ;^2ooo, who is registrar of the order of the Garter; four canons at ^1000 each; five minor canons ; an organist and a chapter clerk. In 1 89 1 the only property not vested in the com- missioners was certain securities producing ;^294 yearly and the residence houses, the annual value of which was estimated at ^^974. The patronage of the dean and chapter includes fifty-eight benefices.
ST. ALBANS 93
St. Albans diocese was formed by a special Act of Parliament in 1 8 7 5 . It consists of Hertfordshire and Essex, which were separated from Rochester in 1877 by orders in council. The endowment subscribed yielded .^2201, 4s. in 1891, made up of Consols, £i, 4s.; and railway debentures, ;^2i96, of which £i6y^ was interest on the proceeds of the sale of Winchester House. The balance of the income of ;^3 5oo is supplied by the Ecclesiastical Commission. Though so near London, the labourers in this diocese are, perhaps, as backward and benighted as any to be found in England ; as well in the rural districts as in that portion which constitutes the outer East End ; and in no part of England has the social domination of the Church remained more unquestioned. There is a special fund for the augmentation of clerical incomes in the diocese, which produced i^i7,866in 1903. In the rural districts the clergy hold 18,755 acres of glebe land, the estimated rental of which in 1887 was i^2 3,864. The bishop's patronage includes three archdeaconries and sixty-one livings. The old abbey church of St. Albans on the river Ver, the Verula- mium of the Romans, from which Lord Bacon took his title of Verulam, was restored by the late Lord Grimthorpe at immense cost, and is now the diocesan cathedral. Its rector, Rev. W. J. Lawrence, acts as dean of the diocese, there being no endowed capitular body. His living is valued at ^^330, and he also draws salary as archdeacon. There are two suffragan bishops, who also hold office as archdeacons — Dr. Johnson, rector of Chelmsford, a living valued at ;^5oo; and Dr. Stevens. The late Lord Salisbury was the principal churchman in the diocese, and his place at Hatfield is only a few miles distant from the cathedral.
The diocese is a stronghold of Conservatism, where
94 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
education is depreciated and mental stagnation prevails amongst the peasantry. It is not many years ago since the moral condition of the lower classes in Essex compelled the county magistrates to come together, under the presidency of Lord Rook- wood, and pass a resolution calling upon the Govern- ment " for permission to inflict the punishment of flogging, in addition to imprisonment, in all cases of rape, attempted rape, and indecent assaults on women and children."^ Yet we find Sir F. Carne Rasch, who represents Mid-Essex, supporting a proposal to reduce the vote for education, and complaining " that the Government taught the children of the agricultural labourer what he did not want them to know, and the people had to pay the highest price for it."- In the same debate Colonel Lockwood, who represents the Epping division of Essex, which I also know some- thingf of, having lectured there since I came to England, " explained the views of the farmers on the educational question. They said that the education was now no better, while the charge was much increased." 3 The Bishop of St. Asaph's income was fixed at ^4200 in 1 851; and certain tithe rent-charges in Northorpp were vested in the commissioners, in 1861, for ;^ 1 1 5 per annum. In 1835 the gross revenue of the chapter of St. Asaph was returned at £1462. The incomes of the dean and four canons were sub- sequently fixed at respectively ^700 and ;^3 50, paid by the commissioners. At present the capitular body consists of the dean, six canons or prebendaries, and seven cursal canons; and in 1891 held a separate estate in tithe rent-charge valued at ,^1400 per annum. The bishop's patronage includes the dean, two arch- deacons, all the canons and prebends, and 1 1 3 livings,
1 The Time.% January 6, 1898. 2 The Standard, August 2, 1905. ^ Ibid.
BANGOR AND ST. ASAPH 95
many of which are valuable. The four Welsh dean- eries are in the gift of the bishops ; whereas all the English deans are appointed by the Crown, the dean's independent authority being to some extent a check on the bishop. There were 4655 acres of glebe land held by incumbents in 1887, the estimated rental of which was ^^^53 10.
The Bishop of Bangor's income was fixed at ^^4200 in 1 8 5 I , when the Llandyffnan rectory and chapelries were severed from the see, and compensation paid therefor. The chapter of Bangor held no collective property in 1835, each dignitary holding his own; but in 1 89 1 it is credited with a tithe rent-charge of ^1615 in Montgomeryshire. The income of the dean and four canons, fixed at about £yoo and ^350, is paid by the commissioners. Besides these there are five non-resident and two minor canons. The bishop's patronage includes the deanery and, except one canonry, all cathedral dignitaries ; and about eighty livings. The estimated rental of 4291 acres of glebe lands held by incumbents in 1887 was ^3387.
Every lover of British scenery is well acquainted with the dioceses of Bangor and St. Asaph, which comprise all North Wales. In 1838, while the creation of the see of Manchester was pending, the commissioners obtained an order to unite the two sees ; but it was never acted on, and was repealed in 1847. We know how religious and industrious, how sanguine yet how persevering, and, above all, how Nonconformist are the North Welsh folk. The scrupulous cleanliness of the labourers' cottages and the farm-houses is not more striking than the profit- able thoroughness with which the farms are tilled. The people, from Anglesey to Flint, regard England as a foreign land, and prefer their native language to the universal English which, they say, is " like a
96 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tailor's mitten, made up of scraps from everybody's cloth." They have built their chapels everywhere ; and the established churches are sparsely attended, except in summer, when the visitors come, and then they are well filled by Nonconformists and Church folk alike from Lancashire and the midlands.
One fine summer's day, when I happened to be staying at Colwyn Bay, the Bishop of St. Asaph drove to Colwyn from his palace in the Vale of Clwyd. Among the guests at my boarding-house were a party of devout. Christian people— Methodist, Baptist, and Church folk, innocent and single-eyed souls who obtruded their religion on the observer, and whose conversation was largely about ministers, churches, and Christian work. They might have pleased their indignant and unmer- ciful fellow-boarders, if they had chattered about the comic songs at the Pavilion and the witticisms of the coons ; or described glens and mountains, seas and sunsets, straits and promontories, as " purty, very purty indeed " ; but they committed the crime of being earnest when they should have cultivated the virtue of indifference. Christians though they were, however, I never saw a group of people thrown into such hysterical excitement as they were by the arrival of the bishop. During the day of his visit and the following day, one might hear the word " Bishop " re- echoing in drawing-room and dining-room, hall and stair. The bishop had come to open a bazaar, I think ; and the audience who crowded round his carriage and filled the hall, must have been chiefly English Noncon- formist visitors.
The incident recalled De Quincey's experience when, " after wandering about in Denbighshire, Merioneth- shire, and Carnarvonshire, he took lodgings in a small, neat house " in Bangor, where he was insulted by his landlady and obliged by his own sensitiveness to leave
BATH AND WELLS 97
a comfortable lodging, because he had not evinced sufficient interest in the gossip related to him about the bishop. " The proudest class of people in England, or at any rate the class whose pride is most apparent," said the mortified genius, " are the families of bishops." " With them," he says, " it is all up-hill work to make known their pretensions." I could not help thinking that the scene I witnessed in Denbighshire was calcu- lated to excite a little pardonable pride, or vanity, not only in the bishop but in every member of his family ; and if a child or relation of the Bishop of St. Asaph had come to our boarding-house, our earnest anti- prelatists would have been almost as flattered as if a visitant had come from Heaven itself. They would not have deserted their convictions, but their zeal, I fear, would have been abated by the contact.
I attended a lecture on the Education Act a few evenings after, presided over by a clergyman who used to visit the Christian guests at our boarding-house. The wealth of the lecturer's imagery and illustrations was literally bewildering ; but his whole deliverance was full of revolutionary innuendoes, in which kings, nobles, and church dignitaries were ail contemptuously satirised. Indeed, if a tenth of his semi-expressed theories were put into practice, by even a tenth of the population of the town in which he was lecturing, the existing order of things here would receive such a shock as was not felt since Cromwell.
The income of the Bishop of Bath and Wells was reduced by .^1000 per annum in 1837, and re-adjusted to ;^5ooo in 1845; ^^d there were several schemes for improving the palace. The collegiate church at Wells, the diocesan cathedral, had a gross income of ;^8378 in 1835. The dean's income was adjusted to £ 1 000 in 1 8 5 I , and the chapter lands were vested in the commissioners for an annual payment of ^5425
G
98 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and a sum of £2100 compensation. The bishop's patronage comprises 60 livings and the canonries ; the chapter's 19 livings. The glebe lands in the diocese, which includes the county of Somerset, amount to 16,648 acres, the rental of which in 1887 was valued at i^2 3,626. Wells cathedral, more clearly perhaps than any other, enables the student to realise the extraordinary power of the priests in pre-Refor- mation times. It was always a secular foundation, and its priests were in keen rivalry with the great monastic order at Bath Abbey close at hand. Secular priests, it is alleged, have excelled the regulars in the sense of citizenship and unselfishness ; but they erected this enormous, ornate, and fabulously costly cathedral at Wells, with its thousands of images, its altars and other decorations, in the middle of the thirteenth century, when the terrified peasants of Somerset lived in huts in which we should not like to house our pigs at the present day. Before the bishop began to build the cathedral, he had erected a vast feudal palace for himself, moated and walled-in like a baronial strong- hold, which was added to by his successors, and the magnificence of which is still belauded by thoughtless visitors. The remains of a great vicars' college and other residences of the prebends may still be seen in the cathedral close, and their grandeur helps us to understand the difficulties our forefathers had to face in freeing us from priestly domination. One may imagine Jesus, as Mr. Russell Lowell so finely conceived Him, hearing the " bitter groans " of the serf labourers issuing from the hoary foundations of those idolatrous masses of masonry, and asking the lords spiritual : —
" Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then, Ou the bodies and souls of living men ? And think ye that building shall endure Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor ? "
IN SOMERSETSHIRE 99
Wells itself, with its mayor, aldermen, and council- lors, a village with a population under 5000, is typical of all Somersetshire, not only in its sleepiness, but in the idolatrous character of its churches. In this county the ritualism of Roman times seems the rule rather than the exception amongst Church of England clergymen. It was in Somersetshire that the Anglican " priest," known as the Rev. Mr. Smyth-Piggott, estab- lished his Abode of Love in 1904; and it was there also that the following incident occurred, which was related to me by a public official as having happened to himself. In company with an official of one of the London boroughs, he cycled across Clifton suspension bridge into Somersetshire on a summer evening. Going farther than they had intended, they lost their bear- ings ; and, night coming on, they sought lodgings in a village, the name of which he gave me. Not only were they refused accommodation, but the doors would not be opened to them ; nor were they vouchsafed a retort from an upper window. They tried the inn, but the publican gave them as gruft" a denial as if he were John Mengs^ himself. They had made up their minds to spend the night on the road, when they met a man who turned out to be the " labour-master " of the local poorhouse. He told them they had no possible chance of procuring a lodging in the village. His words to them were : " The squire owns every house in the place ; the parson is the squire's cousin and acts as his representative in the village. The agreements under which the villagers hold their houses stipulate that if they admit a lodger, even for a night, without the express consent of the parson, they must give up possession ; hence all houses are closed against you, and you have no chance of admission " !
Those who have read the " Opium Eater " will
1 The tyrannical host in " Anne of Geierstein."
TOO CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
remember that the Bishop of Bangor had warned De Quincey's landlady about her lodger, of whom the woman had taken a minute description to the palace ; and " thereupon (it seems) the good bishop had taken occasion to caution her as to her selection of inmates."
Alarmed at the thought of being in so uncivilised a neighbourhood, the cyclists implored their informant to admit them to the workhouse, and they accom- panied him thither. He said he could not admit them ; but offered at great risk to himself, as he assured them, to let them sleep in his own house on condition that they would leave at dawn before any one was astir. They agreed, and in the grey of the morning hurried out of the inhospitable place.
In the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford may be seen " a tally-stick used as a receipt for money paid to release animals from the pound, Wellington, Somerset, 1895," and a photograph of "two magic hearts stuck with pins," the original of which is to be found in the Taunton Museum, curiosities representative of the illiteracy and superstition still prevalent in a district of England which was the peculiar domain of the secular priests.
One of the first acts of the commission of 1836 was to merge the diocese of Bristol with that of Gloucester ; Joseph Allen, the then bishop, being promoted to Ely. The gross income of the bishop at that time was ;^3032 ; that of the dean and chapter being ^4280. The collegiate church or cathedral was closed in 1844, and re-opened, after extensive repairs, in 1861. The dean and chapter vested their property in the commissioners in 1862, in return for an annuity of ;^3390 and a sum of i^6ooo towards the repairs fund ; but they retained the lands in the precincts and the estate of College Green. The sixty-six years that Bristol was without
RELIGION IN BRISTOL loi
a bishop — 1 8 3 i - 1 8 9 7 — curiously synchronised with a robust development of Christianity, all the varied phases of Nonconformity growing strong. The period was also remarkable for a phenomenal growth in the prosperity of the city, the population of which increased from 100,000 to 300,000. Public libraries, schools, and scientific institutions multiplied. George Miiller erected his amazing orphanages, and free churches outnumbered those of the establishment.
During this remarkable improvement, the Church authorities were busy in beautifying the old cathedral, and nearly ;^ 100,000 was collected or raised for restoring it to its Roman splendour, when it was the church of the great abbey of St. Austin, founded by the Danish buccaneer, Fitz Harding, in the twelfth century. St. Mary Redcliffe, the parish church of Bristol, was also restored at a cost of ;^5 0,000. And, to crown all this architectural work, Bristol was separated from Gloucester, and received a bishop of its own in 1896, with a court and sacerdotal college complete, from the dean to the surveyor of dilapida- tions. The bishop receives the statutory revenue of ^3000 from the commissioners, and the capitular revenues are divided amongst the dean, four canons, and three minor canons ; while a phalanx of honorary canons, twenty-four strong, add consequence to the establishment. The bishop's patronage includes an archdeaconry and forty-five benefices ; that of the dean and chapter, thirty-nine benefices. This revival of medievalism in Bristol, which was consummated ten years ago, was one of the strangest phenomena of the close of the nineteenth century in England. But that it has not dulled the edge of local Christianity as yet, we may infer from the fact that North Bristol was the constituency which elected Mr. Augustine Birrell, Minister of Education, in 1906, as the chief repre-
I02 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
sentative of dissent from the practice of sacerdotalism in State-maintained elementary schools.
The more recent medieval revivals at Birmingham and Southwark were accompanied by no such outlay on decorative stonework ; not for want of the will on the part of Bishop Gore and Bishop Talbot, but through lack of generosity on the part of a public who do not seem to appreciate the soporific atmosphere generated by a massive temple and a bishop's court, after the fine old Roman style, with daily services conducted for the edification of the angels. A working Christian bishop who should keep his clergy in order and quicken the spiritual life of his diocese should be a boon to any locality, and all denominations should desire to see the number of such overseers multiplied. Such men do not regard ritual as a substitute for Christ-like work and example ; nor are they bred in the stupefying atmosphere of sacerdotalism.
In 1835 the gross income of the Bishop of Chichester was ;^4375. The estates were vested in the commissioners, who now pay the diocesan a net stipend of ^4200. The dean and chapter and college of vicars-choral used to have a gross income of ;^ 5 06 8, of which the net dividend was £^g6s. The incomes of the dean and canons were fixed at ;^iooo and i^50o respectively, but they were afterwards endowed with estates in lieu of a regular stipend. The estab- lishment now consists of a dean, chancellor, four canons, twenty-seven prebends, four "Wiccamical" prebends, and four priest-vicars. The revenues in 1 89 1 amounted to ;^6447, derived from — dividends, £60; house-rents, ^267; tithe rent-charge, ;^2 832; lands, ;^3272. The bishop's patronage includes fifty- five livings and all the dignities, except the deanery and two prebends ; the dean and chapter are patrons of two prebends and twenty-one benefices. In 1887
CHICHESTER AND ST. DAVID'S 103
the glebe lands held by incumbents were 6927 acres, the letting value of which was put at £i\,i7g. Car- dinal Manning was archdeacon of Chichester in the first years of the Ecclesiastical Commission, when it seemed as if Romanism had a great future before it in England, and he revived those Roman practices for which the diocese is remarkable. Chichester is a typical centre of ecclesiasticism. Bishop Wilber- force, Dean Hannah, Chancellor Davey, J.P., and the canons are the leaders of law and fashion in the neat, somnolent, little city, where the words " By order of the Dean and Chapter " are to be found at every turn- ing. The cathedral spire vies with the Duke of Norfolk's castle at Arundel in dominating the flat, well-farmed country. Motoring one Sunday from Bognor to attend the cathedral service, the agricultural labourers were everywhere in the fields ; many at work, others resting themselves half-dressed, others with dogs surreptitiously looking for game. A sparse audience, mostly ladies and school children, attended the service which is maintained at such cost, while a jackdaw and a swallow, having flown round the nave frequently, perched ominously on the " altar." Across the road simultaneously, in the sub-deanery church, a choral communion service, at which there were no communicants, was being conducted by two priests in surplices, stoles, and coloured hoods, with posturings, posings, and bowings, like the Roman Mass. It was most ridiculous and unedifying to hear the commandments " Thou shalt not kill," and " Thou shalt not steal," trilled forth in operatic recitative by a burly, self-conscious priest, who looked as if he were ashamed of himself.
The Bishop of St. David's income was augmented by i^ 1 600, and fixed at ;^4200, in 1839; and in 1843 certain rents of mines in Llanddewi Brefi were appor- tioned between the bishop and the commissioners.
I04 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
In 1835 the gross revenues of the capitular body were £2^46; in 1844 the dean's income was fixed at ;£^700, and four canons at half that amount. The glebe lands in the diocese exceed in value those of the other Welsh sees, being 24,560 acres in extent, calculated in 1887 to produce a rental of ;^i 8,382. The bishop's patronage includes the dean, four arch- deacons, twelve prebends (of whom the King appears to be one), two vicars-choral, and 162 livings with unpronounceable names but by no means despicable stipends. The dean and chapter present to nine livings. The episcopal abode is at Abergwili palace, Carmarthen, nearly 40 miles away from the cathedral, which stands on a slope overlooked by the insignificant village of St. David's, close by St. David's Head, and only 60 miles from Carnsore Point in Wexford across St. George's Channel.
St. David's was the first episcopal preferment given to William Laud by James I. Its isolated cathedral and the palatial ruins in its vicinity, so eloquent of episcopal greatness in Roman days, are figurative of the estrangement of the mass of the people from the Established Church in Wales, despite all that has been done to force or entice them into conformity. The spirit of Edmund Tudor, father of the founder of the Tudor dynasty, seems to remind the Welshmen from the tomb where his body lies in the cathedral, that they, no less than their kinsmen the Scots, gave kings to England ; and those highly-strung people still seem to regard it as their duty and destiny to conquer rather than yield to their wealthy neighbours of the Saxon land. The extraordinary series of incidents known as the Welsh Revival of 1905 were largely enacted in this diocese as well as in Llandaff. A wave of emotional piety, a sudden yearning for righteousness and repentance for past wrong-doing, with which formal
ELY 105
religion had no connection, swept over the population. Bishop Owen at Abergwili, and Bishop Lloyd at Lampeter, knew as little about it as their gigantic predecessor, Connop Thirlwall, historian of Greece and correspondent of Miss Johnes of Dolacauthy, knew of •■' Rebecca," the weird giant in woman's clothes, who demolished the toll-gates in South Wales. Now that the fervour has subsided, the Principality finds itself enjoying an unprecedented amount of respect in the United Kingdom, specially represented in the Cabinet, taking a leading part in the advancement of elementary education, and beholding sacerdotalism in Wales on the eve of disestablishment and disendowment.
The diocese of Ely was one of the rich sees, the bishop's gross income in 1835 being ;{^i 2,677, of which ^ 1 1,105 was net profit. In 1837 it was curtailed by ;^25oo; and was fixed at ;!f55oo in 1845, when a sum of £10,646 was paid to the bishop in lieu of certain lands surrendered. In 1874 the bishop was permanently endowed with lands in Downham, Ely, and Wisbeach, and tithes in the parish of Elm, all in Cambridgeshire, and other properties calculated to produce his statutory income, He has a town resi- dence at Ely House, Dover Street, in addition to the palace at Ely. The dean and chapter had a gross income of ;6^865i, of which the net dividend in 1835 was ^6405. As the result of their dealings with the commissioners, they were endowed with tithes and lands in eighteen parishes distributed over the counties of Cambridge, Lincoln, Norfolk, and Suffolk. Their income in 1891 was ;^8o52, derived from — land, £4372 ; tithe rent-charge, ^3333 ; and houses, ^^347. The bishop's patronage includes four archdeaconries, the chancellorship, and sixty livings ; while that of the dean and chapter includes twenty. The glebe lands held by incumbents in this leading agricultural dis-
io6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
trict were 49,395 acres in extent in 1887, the moderate estimate of their rental being ;^52,9io.
The reUgious house at Ely, founded by Etheldreda, queen of Northumberland, in the seventh, was pil- laged by the Danes in the tenth century; but it had become one of the richest monasteries in England in the twelfth century. The abbot, chafing under his subjection to the Bishop of Lincoln, used his influence with Henry I.; and in 1107 the island of Ely was erected into an independent bishopric under the jurisdiction of the monastic priests. At the Refor- mation the enormous church, which the monks had been beautifying and adding to throughout the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, became a cathedral, which has been recently restored and re-decorated at a cost of over ;^8o,ooo, and is now one of the most imposing monuments of Roman priestcraft in the country — a magnet which attracts the young clerical mind, and saps its Christianity. The bishops of Ely have always been a power in the University of Cam- bridge, which is in the diocese ; the present bishop. Dr. Chase, was promoted, in 1905, direct from the Norrisian professorship of divinity.
The see of Exeter was one of the poorer sees which benefited by the first operations of the commissioners. In 1838 the bishop's gross income of ;^3i47 was raised to a net income of ;^50oo, and a substantial grant was given for repairing the palace. The dean and chapter were wealthier than the bishop, their gross income in 1835 being ^10,438, of which the net dividend was ;^70 52. This property must have increased in value, for in 1862 their lands were vested in the commissioners for an annual payment of ;^ 1 1,500 — the dean's income being fixed at ;^2000, and the canons' at ;^iooo each. In addition, they held a separate estate in tithe rent-charge, which
EXETER AND GLOUCESTER 107
yielded i^ 1 089 in 1891. The archdeaconry of Corn- wall was separated from Exeter by Act of Parliament in 1876, and converted into the independent see of Truro. The bishop's income was then diminished by -^800. His patronage was also decreased, but is still considerable — including, as it does, the precentor, chancellor, treasurer, and sub-dean ; three archdeacons, four canons, twenty-four prebends, and forty-four bene- fices. The patronage of the dean and chapter includes fifty-two livings. The glebe lands held by incumbents are 30,7 52 acres in extent, estimated in 1 887 to produce a yearly rental of ;^2 2,6 8 7. Exeter itself, as a city, is typical at once of the lethargic atmosphere bred by sacerdotal establishments and of the comfort amidst which our well-endowed priests pass their lives. Dr. A. Robertson, ex-principal of King's College, London, is the bishop. He has as suffragan, Dr. Trefusis, who draws salary as canon and prebend. The dean, Dr. Earle, is also a bishop, having been at one time suf- fragan of London and rector of St. Botolph, Bishops- gate, The diocese has long been a hot-bed of ritualism, and many of its clergymen, relying on the legal en- forcement of tithe, or on the support of certain wealthy individuals of Roman sympathies, conduct their services and hear confessions as their prede- cessors used to do in pre-Reformation times. The present bishop, a new appointment, has given some indication that he is opposed to Romanism; but his zeal may have been stimulated by the two years' sitting, 1904-6, of the Royal Commission of inquiry into ecclesiastical disorders.
The diocese of Gloucester used to include Bristol until recently. In 1835 the bishop's income was £244.6, of which ;^2 2 82 was net profit; in 185 i it was fixed at £^5000, and a new palace built in 1862; but the stipend was reduced to about ^^4300 on the
io8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
re-establisliment of the see at Bristol. In 1835 the revenue of the dean and chapter was £6231, the net profit on which was £46^ i. In 1855 they vested their property in the commissioners for an annual payment of ;^8 5 60 ; and at that time a house was bought in the cathedral precincts as a residence for the canonry attached to the mastership of Pembroke College, Oxford. The capitular body was afterwards re-endowed with lands calculated to produce the statutory stipend ; and the establishment now consists of the dean, five canons, and three minor canons ; their revenues in 1891 being returned at ;^7405. The bishop's patronage includes two archdeaconries and sixty-two benefices ; that of the dean and chapter nineteen livings. The glebe lands in the diocese of Gloucester and Bristol in 1887 were 30,369 acres, with an estimated yearly letting value of ^36,670.
Gloucester was one of those stupendous Benedictine churches which were converted into cathedrals by Henry VIII., and their revenues apportioned for the maintenance of new sees. Its interior is remarkable for its sraunt massiveness ; and the tombs of Robert of Normandy and Edward II. serve to remind one of the character of the famous men who enriched these shrines from motives of selfish cowardice. When Laud was dean of Gloucester, he also filled the ofiice of chaplain-in-ordinary — and, we shall add, flatterer-in- extraordinary — to James I., whom he used to describe, in sermons preached before the monarch's face, as David and Solomon rolled into one. He records in his diary how the king met him in 1621 and praised his services, lamenting that as yet he had done nothing adequate to reward them, having only given him " the shell without the kernel," by which he meant the deanery of Gloucester.
On a brilliant July forenoon I happened to be
HEREFORD 109
walking through Gloucester's empty aisles, admiring its spaciousness, when a dapper little gentleman in a surplice, preceded by a seedy-looking verger, diminutive as weasels in a Californian forest, stepped across the nave and disappeared in the north transept. It was Bishop Mitchinson, master of Pembroke College, Oxford, doing his duty as canon in residence, and going to say matins in the choir for the odification of himself, the vergers, and the angels. I was invited to step into the choir before the large iron gates were closed, but I declined ; as the dazzlingiy blue sky outside, of which I got a peep through the open clerestory, seemed imperatively calling one to leave a cavernous abode, reminiscent of nothing ennobling or useful to humanity, where pious credulity was so often imposed upon, and the light of Christianity hidden under the bushel of priestcraft.
The Bishop of Hereford's gross income in 1835 was -^3090, of which the net profit was calculated at £2^16. In 1837 it was fixed at ;^42oo net by the commissioners. In 1843 demesne lands on the south of the Wye were added to the palace grounds. In 1848 a scheme was passed for enlarging the bishop's stables, and in 1874 a scheme for improvements in the palace. In 1880 the bishop was permanently endowed with lands in Bosbury, Hampton Bishop, Hereford, Stoke Edith, Stretton Grandsome, and Yark Hill ; and with tithe rent-charges in Almeley, Bosbury, Eye, Lyonshall, and Muchcowarne, and with rights of fishery in the rivers Lugg and Wye — the whole being computed to produce a net profit of ;^42oo per annum. The dean and chapter had a gross income of ^5912 in 1835, the net profit being put at ;6^4530. In 185 I the dean's income was fixed at ;^iooo, those of the canons at ;£^5oo ; and the chapter lands were vested in the commissioners. The capitular body
no CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
were, however, re-endowed with lands, and their revenues in 1891 were returned at -^9417, derived from — dividends, ^488 ; houses, £106 : manorial pro- perties, £122; lands and rents, ^^2681 ; tithe rent- charge, ;i^6o20. The capitular establishment now consists of the dean, four canons, twenty-six prebends, and four vicars-choral.
The bishop is Dr. Perceval, who has been considered for many years to be the oasis of evangelicalism in the desert of sacerdotalism represented by the episcopal bench. He was headmaster of Rugby for eight years, and went direct from the school to the cathedra in 1895 — an illustration of the close connection between the public schools and the clergy of the Established Church which will be considered in another place. The bishop's patronage includes two archdeacons, four canons, all the prebends, and thirty-two benefices. The dean and chapter appoint to six minor canonries and twenty-nine benefices. The glebe lands held by incumbents in 1887 amounted to 15,067 acres, the moderate estimate of their yearly value being ^19,168.
The " extraordinary " tithe used to press heavily on Hereford, as it used to be a famous county for hops and apples. I have always considered it to be the richest-looking shire in England, a land overflowing with milk and honey and lapped in profound peace, far from the rush of cities and the smoke of factories, the greenness of its landscape enriched by the red and white of the magnificent Hereford cattle, which are usually allowed to suckle their calves. The priests knew where to pitch their tents, and the rich land of the valleys of the Severn, Wye, and Avon must have been completely at their disposal before the Reforma- tion. One may see with the naked eye, as I have done myself, three of their colossal churches from the top of Cleeve Cloud in Gloucestershire — namely, Glou-
LICHFIELD 1 1 1
cester to the south-west, Hereford to the north-west, and Worcester to the north, while not many miles farther south are the three great churches at Bristol, Bath, and Wells. Hereford, like Wells, was always in the hands of the seculars. The present cathedral was built by the Norman bishops from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, but its principal tower collapsed 1 20 years ago, doing considerable damage to the west front. The work of restoration lasted for over a generation, and was completed in 1862.
The Bishop of Lichfield had a gross income in 1835 of ^4375, of which ;^392 3 was net profit, which the commissioners augmented to ;^45oo net in 1837, and transferred the archdeaconry of Coventry to the see of Worcester. The palace and manor of Eccleshall were sold, and a scheme was sanctioned for improving the palace at Lichfield in 1852. The gross income of the dean and chapter was ^^2442, the net dividend being ^2081. They surrendered their lands, and the in- comes of the dean and canons were fixed at ;^iooo and ;^5oo respectively. The capitular incomes are still paid by the commissioners, except for some separate property which yielded ;^453 in 1891. The establishment now consists of the dean, four canons, nineteen prebends, and four priest-vicars. The bishop is the Hon. Augustus Legge, son of Lord Dartmouth. There used to be a suifragan, Sir Lovelace Stamer, called Bishop of Shrewsbury, who appears to have retired in favour of the Hon. A. J. Anson, son of the Earl of Lichfield, who is now assistant bishop. There is a Roman bishop of Shrewsbury in the diocese, who sees much cause for encouragement in the ritualistic practices which have prevailed in many of the Anglican churches for the last forty years.
The episcopal patronage of Lichfield includes three archdeaconries, all the canonries and prebends, and
112 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
1 1 5 benefices ; the capitular patronage covers fourteen livings. The glebe lands in the diocese amount to 12,201 acres, the estimated yearly rental of which in 1887 was ;i^2i,5 58. Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury school, and compiler of a large number of school books, was the first Bishop of Lichfield to benefit by the operations of the commissioners. His appointment in 1836, as a reward for his labours in the sphere of pedagogy, is another illustration of the immemorial subjection of education to religion in England — a legacy from pre-Reformation times. Lichfield, though a secular foundation, was a head centre of Roman priestcraft, and it was there, in 1 6 1 2 , that the last execution by fire for alleged heresy took place in England, the martyr on that occasion being Edward Wightman, a baptist. The cathedral was despoiled and damaged at the Reformation and in the Civil War; but it has been restored by the Church authorities, who have never spared any expense in re-establishing the buildings of their Roman pre- decessors. It is now virtually a new cathedral, and its triple towers are visible at a great distance on a clear day along the Trent valley, dominating the land of potteries, collieries, and breweries from Burton to Birmingham and Stafford to Tamworth.
We shall conclude our sketch of the bishops, capitular bodies, and dioceses in the next chapter.
As Published by Church AssocLatloii.
The Bishop op Lincoln in Episcopal State
"The more closelr one considers how identical the clerical and educational professions have been in Enoland for so lon^- a time, and how the interests of the publishing trade have been bound up with the rich Church which controlled the universities the schools, and the parish librarii^s, the oreater one's astonishment grows, not at the continuina: sub- jection of national tliou-ht to sacerdotal influence, but at the great, if still partial, libera- tion which has taken place." (p. 114)
To face p. 113
CHAPTER V
Lincoln — Tennyson on Church and Nonconformity — Llandaff — Norwich — Oxford — Christ Church College anomaly — Peter- borough — Rochester — Southwark — Salisbury — The Sarum Ritual — Southwell — Truro — Worcester — Birmingham — Ecclesi- astical Commission — Summary — Ecclesiastical Wealth — Build- ings versus Men.
The diocese of Lincoln, of which Thomas Wolsey was once the diocesan, used to be one of the greatest ecclesiastical properties in England. At the Reforma- tion, Oxford and Berks were taken from it and erected into the diocese of Oxford. In 1837 the commis- sioners deprived it of Bedford and Huntingdon, which were added to Ely ; of Buckinghamshire, which was added to Oxford ; and of Leicester, which was added to Peterborough. We may imagine the power and riches of Wolsey, who was not only Bishop of Lincoln but Archbishop of York and Bishop of Winchester — the ecclesiastical potentate of England from the Tees to the Solent.
The bishop's income, which was returned at ^^49 13 in 1835, was fixed at ^^5000. In 1864-9 ^^ was re- endowed with lands in Nettleham, West Ravensdale, and High Taynton ; as well as tithes in Melton Ross, Hagworthingham, Hareby, Lincoln, Lusby, Rinholme, and the manor of Nettleham, the net profits from which were estimated at the amount of his statutory income. He also received a grant of ;^5ooo for the improvement of his palace. The revenues of the dean and chapter in 1835 were returned at ^7807 gross, of which the net dividend was said to be £y i o i ; but the accuracy of this estimate is impugned by the fact
"3 H
114 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
that, when their lands were transferred to the com- missioners, they received in exchange an annual payment of ^^^9200, a pension of ;i^300 for the chapter clerk, and certain lands in the city of Lincoln and elsewhere ; the dean's income being fixed at ;^2000, that of the canons at ;^iooo. The pre- bends held lands in scores of townlands, not included in the chapter revenues, which were also surrendered in lieu of fixed stipends. The capitular body, con- sisting of the dean, four canons, fifty-two prebends, and three priest-vicars, are now paid by the commis- sioners, and, in addition, hold separate property, which in 1891 yielded ;^224i.
The present bishop is Dr. King, ex-principal of Cuddesdon College, a leader of the sacerdotalists, who was promoted straight from the canonry in Christ Church College to which is annexed the regius professorship of pastoral theology in Oxford. The more closely one considers how identical the clerical and educational professions have been in England for so long a time, and how the interests of the publish- ing trade have been bound up with the rich Church which controlled the universities, the schools, and the parish libraries, the greater one's astonishment grows, not at the continuing subjection of national thought to sacerdotal influence, but at the great, if still partial, liberation which has taken place. The bishop's patronage includes all the canons, two archdeacons, all the prebends, and 10 1 benefices, and has been exercised now for over twenty years by the present diocesan. The dean and chapter's patronage includes thirty-three livings. There is a suffragan bishop, Dr. MacCarthy, who is vicar of Grantham. The glebe lands held by incumbents are exceedingly valuable, being 67,818 acres in extent, in 1887, with an estimated yearly letting value of ^87,131 ; but in
TENNYSON'S LINCOLNSHIRE 115
a great farming county like Lincolnshire we may fix their value much higher.
The secular priests were always in the ascendant at Lincoln, though there were several monastic commu- nities in and near the city up to the Reformation. The ambitions of the aspiring Norman bishops are evidenced not only in the colossal minster itself, but in the adjacent cloisters, chapter-houses, old episcopal palace, and remains of other buildings. Nor does the new palace at Riseholme, some distance outside the city, show much evidence of the growth of self- sacrifice. The relations between parsons and people in modern Lincolnshire are admirably shadowed forth in Tennyson's dialect poetry. How refreshingly candid was the churchwarden's advice to the youth who had come as curate under an outspoken incumbent : —
" An' thou'll be 'is curate 'ere, but, if iver tha' means to git 'igher, Tha' niun tackle the sins o'theWo'ld,an' not the faults o' the Squire. But niver not speak plaain out, if tha' wants to git forrards a bit, But creap along the hedge-bottoms, an' thou'll be a bishop yit." ^
The contemptuous toleration of the squires for the rectors is vividly illustrated in that great poem, " Aylmer's Field," in Avhich Tennyson rises to heights unequalled elsewhere. The squires are grandly de- nounced as : —
" These old pheasant-lords, These partridge-breeders of a thousand years, Who had mildewed in their thousands, doing nothing Since Egbert."
But the rectors were no better. The benefice was regarded as an entailed estate descending from father to son, or to the nearest relative of the last holder, irrespective of qualifications for the cure of souls. It
' One of his last published poems, " The Churchwarden and the Curate," written in the Spilsby dialect.
ii6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
was a heneficium in the true sense of that word, namely, a property of which the tenant for Hfe had the usu- fruct— which in this case meant a right to one-tenth of the property of every one else in the parish : —
" Aylmer followed Aylmer at tlie Hall, And Averill Averill at the Rectory."
The rector's young brother, Leolin, is allowed to play with Sir Aylmer Aylmer's daughter, Edith ; but the squire
" Like an Aylmer in his Aylmerism, Would care no more for Leolin's walking with her Than for his old Newfoundland's."
" The girl and boy, sir, know their differences ! "
Even after the double tragedy of the lovers' deaths, the rector does not dare to mention it from the pulpit until Lady Aylmer
" Sent to the harrowed brother, praying him To speak before the people of her child, And fixt the Sabbath."
The two versions of the " Northern Farmer " illustrate the difference between the old parsons, before Catholic Emancipation, and the new ritual- ists bred under the Pusey regime. The old-style parson administered counsel to the sick, and de- manded payment of his tithe in the same breath.
" Parson's a bean loikewoise, an' a sittin' 'ere o' my bed. ' The amoighty's a taakin' o' you to 'issen, my friend,' a said, An' a towd ma my sins, an's toithe were due, au' I gied it in
hond ; I done moy duty boy 'um, as I 'a done boy the lond."
The service in church was a mystifying perform- ance for the old farmers ; the sermon was unintel- ligible :
FARMERS AND PARSONS 117
" An' I hallus coomed to's clioocli afoor moy Sally wur deiid, An' 'eard 'um a buuimin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock ower
my 'ead, An' I niver knawed whot a mean'd, but I thowt a 'ad summat
to saiiy, An' I tliowt a said whot a owt to 'a said an' I coom'd awaiiy."
The new parson is looked down upon, and the farmer forbids his son to marry the daughter of the vicarage : —
" Thou'll not marry for munny — thou's sweet upo' parson's lass — Noa — thou'll marry for luvv — an' we boath on us thinks tha an ass."
Ritualism, with its saints' days, has come to stay in the parish : —
" Seea'd her todaiiy goa by — Saaint's-daay — they was ringing the bells. She's a beauty thou thinks — an soa is scoors o' gells."
The parson is an objectionable character, bred at Oxford or Cambridge ; his ritualism probably an excuse for multiplying services in the parish church, so as to eke out his income by frequent collections : —
" Parson's lass 'ant nowt, an' she weant 'a nowt when 'e's dead, Mun be a guvness, lad, or summut, and addle her bread."
" An' thin 'e coom'd to the parish wi' lots o' Varsity debt, Stook to his taal they did, an' 'e ant got shut on 'em yet."
The spirit of the old " Northern Farmer " still lives. A Lincolnshire friend told me recently of an elderly farmer in the shire who, being about to get married for the second time, was asked by his bride to promise her that he would give up swearing and attend church on Sundays, and his reply was, " I doant moind if I gi' up sweaarin', but I'm dommed if I goas to chooch ! "
ii8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Nor did our great poet leave the Lincolnshire Free Churchmen unsung. The Christians of Wesley's county were naturally dissatisfied with the Aylmers at the Hall, and the Averills at the Rectory. But the Powers that Be were all on the side of Aylmerism and Averillism. Perversion was rife as well as conversion. The superstitious old churchwarden, a Baptist who had joined the Church, adjures the curate to denounce his late co-religionists : —
" Naay, but tlia mun speak hout to the Baptises here i' the town, Fur nioast on 'em talks agean tithe, an' I'd like tha to preach
'em down, Fur they've bin a-preachin' mea down, they heve, an' I haates
'em now, Fur they leaved their nasty sins i' my pond, an' it poison'd the
cow."
The " Northern Cobbler," one of the finest heroes of humble life, perhaps, that was ever drawn, was a Lincolnshire Methodist, and the poem was clearly meant to illustrate the strength of character of the peasantry who broke with the Church. He had fallen a prey to the passion for drink, lost his trade, and beaten the best of wives. He thinks of how he had courted her in the old days after chapel, when
" Muggins 'e preached o' Hell-fire an' the loov o' God fur men, An' then upo' coomin awaay Sally gied me a kiss ov 'ersen."
The bedraggled condition of his wife, as compared with her winsomeness before marriage — " Sally sa pretty, an' neat an' sweat " — fills the drunkard with remorse : —
" An' Sally wur sloomy an' draggle taail'd in an owd turn gown, An' the babby's faace wurn't wesh'd an' the 'ole 'ouse hupside down."
Resolved to fight against the craving for drink, he
THE "METHODY MAN" 119
buys a quart bottle of gin, and sets it unopened in the window before the bench at which he worked : —
" ' Stan' 'im theer i' the uaiirae o' the Lord an' the power ov 'is Graace, Stan' 'im theer, fur I'll loook my hennemy strait i' the faiice.' "
Prosperity soon follows in the wake of sobriety, and the bottle of gin in the window of the reformed drunkard becomes a parochial wonder which the neighbours come to gaze upon — first the blacksmith, then the doctor, the squire, and even the parson : —
" ' Thou'rt but a Methody man,' says Parson, an' laays down 'is 'at. An' 'e points to the bottle o' gin, ' but I respecks tha fur that.' "
If this " Methody man " had been under the influ- ence of one of Bishop King's sacerdotalists, he would have been advised to go to confession, take fasting- communion, perform penances, and observe saints' days. He should probably have become an inter- mittent drunkard, periodically revived by priestcraft, and exhibited as a testimonial to the powers of his ghostly father; or he should have become a "hopeless drunkard," like the twenty Oxford men whom Bishop Ingram boasts of, in another chapter, as having " on his hands " in the East End. But the sturdy Free Churchman relied, not upon any professional priest, but on " the naame o' the Lord an' the power ov 'is Graace " ; and he looked his enemy straight in the face. That is the frame of mind which wins the re- spect of millions of conforming Churchmen for their Nonconformist brethren ; and Mr. George Harwood, M.P., well expressed the feelings of evangelicals when he said a few years ago at Mill Hill School that " he believed it was to Nonconformity that the country would have to look to bring it back to its serious and earnest mood."^
1 Daily News, June 18, 1903.
I20 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
The Bishop of LlandaflPs income was returned at ;£^ioo8 gross in 1835 ; the dean and chapter estimated their total revenues at only ;^8 1 o ; the cathedral and palace were in ruins. The method decided upon for rehabilitating the Church in Wales seems to have been to increase the salaries of bishops, restore Roman cathedrals, and rebuild episcopal palaces ; and in Llandaff this policy was pursued. The bishop's in- come was augmented to ^^4200 net in 1839, and an extra annuity of -^300 was paid to hun while his palace was being completed, under a new scheme which was only published in 1858. The salaries of the dean, £yoo, and the four canons, ;^3 50 each, were undertaken by the commissioners. The old Roman cathedral, said to be the seat of the earliest English bishopric, was restored at great cost, and opened for public worship in 1869. The bishop's patronage includes the dean, four canons, two arch- deacons, and eighty-four benefices; that of the dean and chapter twenty-four benefices. The glebe lands held by incumbents in 1887 were 8081 acres, the yearly letting value of which was estimated at £1 1,986.
Llandaff was a city from time immemorial ; and, like so many other centres of ecclesiasticism, its fortunes were at nadir when the commissioners came to its relief. It has now been absorbed in Cardiff, of which it forms a suburb ; and Bishop Hughes, from his comfortable retreat near the banks of the TafF, has ample leisure to ruminate on the stupendous prosperity of the great seaport — for which the Church cannot claim a shred of credit. Three local problems may well give the occupant of the Llandaff cathedra food for reflection: — (i) How shall he convmce the Welsh folk of his divine supremacy and special com- munion with Omniscience, seeing that his predecessors
LLANDAFF AND NORWICH 121
had no revelation of the amazing riches of the country tapped by the Taff Valley railway, the discovery of which has revolutionised the fortunes of South Wales ? (2) Is there no way but that of enriching bishops, deans, and chapters, restoring Roman cathedrals, and building ornate churches, to win the Welsh people over to the Anglican Church ? And (3) Why did the late Marquis of Bute, lord of Cardiff, having received his education at Christ Church, Oxford, when Pusey was the pope of the university, revert to Romanism, in 1868, instead of abiding in the half-way-house provided for him in the restored cathedral of Llandaff ? In fine, why is the invertebrate comprehensiveness of Anglican sacerdotalism — busy only about profits and endowments — equally repulsive to aristocratic Romans and plebeian Christians in Wales ? Is it because it is neither hot nor cold ? Or, is it because, like the boy and the nuts, it is too grasping ; and, without regard to principle, seeks profit by accommodating itself to every religious cult, from Romanism to Christian Science ?
The Bishop of Norwich's income was returned at ^5395 ill 1835, the diocesan at that time being Henry Bathurst, famous as the only Whig prelate in the House of Lords, and the strenuous supporter of Catholic Emancipation. His motives in taking up this attitude may be gleaned from his " Memoirs," written by his son, in which the writer roundly attacks the Whigs for not having promoted his father to a richer see, as a return for his faithful support of the party. The bishop's income was fixed at ^^4500 net, and he was afterwards re-endowed with lands in Hellesdon, Horning, Hoveton, Ludham, and Neati- shed, and tithe rent-charge in Happishog, all in Nor- folk ; the net profit of which was calculated to produce the statutory income. His remaining property was
122 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
vested in the commissioners in 1 864 ; and there have been schemes for improving his palace from 1858 to
1873.
The dean and chapter's net income in 1835 was returned at ^^5245. Their properties were assigned to the commissioners in 1869, except 353 acres and sundry lots near the cathedral, in return for other lands, an annual grant of -^2600, a sum of ;^5200 compensation, and ;^ 12,000 for cathedral repairs. The dean's salary was fixed at ;^I300, and the four canons were limited to £6$o each; but the capitular body was further endowed in 1878 with lands in Frostenden, Uggeshall, Wrentham, in Suffolk ; Wood- ham Walter and Little Baddow, in Essex ; and tithe rent-charge in Dilliam, Helvergate, Ingham, Martham, and Thurston, in Norfolk, and other rent-charges in Norwich ; and managed their property independent of the commissioners. In 1891 their revenue was returned at £12,4.61; derived from — land, ^£^65 13; tithe rent-charge, ;^2 344 ; house rent (including former residences of dean and chapter), ;^292 2 ; and sundries £6Zi. The establishment consists of the dean, four canons, and two minor canons, who seem to be twice as well off as their predecessors seventy years ago — if the return made in 1835 was accurate.
An immense sum of money was spent during the nineteenth century in restoring Norwich cathedral to its ante-Reformation splendour. It is one of the most ambitious, and perhaps the most typical, of the immense Norman and Benedictine churches erected to cow the Saxons into submission. Bishop Sheep- shanks, the present diocesan, is the author of some books of a sacerdotal nature, such as " Confirmation and Unction of the Sick," and " Charge — Eucharist, and Confession." He has two suffragans. Dr. Bowers, vicar of North Creake, a benefice valued at ^1025;
OXFORD 123
and Dr. Fisher, rector of Burgh w. Billockby, valued at ;^5oo. His patronage includes three archdeaconries and about ninety-eight benefices, many of which are valuable ; that of the dean and chapter includes forty- four livings. The glebe lands held by incumbents were 28,416 acres in extent, with an estimated yearly letting value in 1887 of .^£^37,480.
Oxford is, in many respects, a unique diocese, whose bishop wields a peculiar influence, owing to his connection with the university, with which the bishopric is much more closely identified than Ely is with Cambridge ; and the diocese has long been — and probably on that account — noted for the ritual- istic practices of its clergymen. In 1837 the bishop's income was augmented to ;£^5ooo, on next avoidance; having been returned in 1835 at £^106 gross, and £26^Z net. In 1852 Cuddesdon rectory was dis- severed, and the bishop got a life annuity of £27^ as compensation. In 1856 Stanton Harcourt rectory was vested in the commissioners, and the bishop received £^ 1 00 in cash and a stipend of .^ 1 1 5 to re- coup him for the loss. He surrendered Burford rectory in the same year for ;^i30o and an annuity of ^27. In 1877 he was endowed with lands in Aylesbury (Bucks), Burford, Cropredy, and Cuddesdon, in Oxford ; and with tithes in Bleubery and Wokingham, in Berks ; Great Marlow, in Bucks ; and South Leigh, in Oxford — the whole being valued at ;^5ooo net per annum — and, between 1846 and 1883, there were many schemes for improving Cuddesdon palace and demesne. In 1 89 1 the bishop's revenues, managed independently of the commissioners, were returned at ^^5643, 3s. 4d.
The dean and chapter of Oxford have long been one of the richest capitular bodies in England. Their endowment consists of the properties of Christ Church College, originally founded by Wolsey, and of which
124 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
they are the proprietors and governors. In 1835 they returned their gross revenues at ;^2 5,899, and their net dividend at ;^i 2,203; but one is not con- vinced of the accuracy of these figures, when one finds that their drawinsjs had to be curtailed to ;^i 7,000 net in 1867. We shall further find, when we come to deal with Oxford university in another chapter, how the commission of inquiry appointed in 1850 censured them for having abused their trust, by dividing the collegiate revenues amongst themselves, instead of spending the money on ad- vancing education; and shall learn how the gross revenues of the college, from estates only, without counting internal revenue or trust funds, are ;^43,79i, IS. 6d.
The dean is ex officio head of Christ Church college, which gives the lead to the whole university, and is deferentially spoken of as The House; four of the canons are ex officio regius professors of divinity, Hebrew, ecclesiastical history, and pastoral theology ; a fifth is ex officio Lady Margaret professor of divinity ; and the sixth canonry is annexed to the archdeaconry of Oxford. In 1866-67 the anomalous position of the college with regard to religion and education was referred to Sir John Taylor Coleridge, Sir W. Page Wood, Sir Roundell Palmer, and Mr. Edward T. B. Twistleton, as a friendly board of arbitration ; and their award was embodied in the statute known as the Christ Church (Oxford) Act. They restricted the incomes of the dean and chapter to the ample sum of ;£^ 1 7,000 a year — the largest amount known to be spent on religious service in one educational institu- tion ; the college chapel was formally recognised as the diocesan cathedral; and, in addition to their own drawings, the chapter were authorised to accumulate a fabric fund for keeping it in repair.
PETERBOROUGH 125
The ample payments to the capitular body for religious services were further curtailed to ;;^ i 5 , 5 00 by the university statutes of 1881, which will be dealt with at length ; and in 1 904 the drawings under the head of " chapter fund " in the university accounts are given as £14,604, 12s. 8d. — which is still an immense sum, as the capitular body only consists of the dean and six canons. There are twenty-four honorary canons, who get no pay and have no authority. Bishop Paget, the present diocesan, was successively canon and dean of Christ Church before his promo- tion in 1 90 1. His suffragan, Dr. Randall, was arch- deacon of Oxford and canon of Christ Church until 1902. The bishop's patronage is extensive, including three archdeaconries and about 1 1 3 benefices ; that of the dean and chapter including ninety-two benefices scattered over many dioceses. The glebe lands held by incumbents were 44,157 acres in extent, and their yearly letting value was estimated in 1887 at ;^5 6,249.
The Bishop of Peterborough's income, returned at ^3518 gross and ;=^3io3 net in 1835, was raised in 1837 to ;^45oo net. Herbert Marsh, who was re- warded with a bishopric by Pitt for secret information sent from Germany, was the first to benefit by the change. The diocese was also increased in size by the addition of the county of Leicester, The bishop was re-endowed with land in 1862; and in 1865 there was an exchange of properties between him and the bishops of other dioceses, as well as a scheme for improving the palace; in 1869 a scheme for providing a palace chapel ; and in 1 8 8 1 a scheme for adding pleasure-grounds to the palace. The dean and chapter returned their gross revenues at £6 357 in 1835, and the net dividend at .^5118. The dean's salary was fixed at ^1000 and the canons' at ;^5oo; but, in lieu of a fixed payment, they were subsequently endowed
126 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
with lands valued at ;i^6ooo net per annum, situ- ated in Eye, Newborough, Peakirk, Paston, Marholm, Peterborough, Irthlingborough, and other places. The revenue from these lands, acknowledged in 1891, was ^6912. The present capitular body consists of the dean, four canons, and three minor canons.
Peterborouc^h cathedral, with the remains of the old episcopal palace, deanery, and canons' residences, con- stitutes a striking souvenir of Norman monasticism, and a fitting tomb for Catherine of Aragon. It was roughly handled by Cromwell, as a centre of sacer- dotalism, but has been tenderly restored by the Church authorities at vast expense. One feels grati- fied that those medieval churches have been pre- served ; but one must protest against preserving along with them the practices of medieval priestcraft. We should all like to see the temple of Capitoline Jove at Rome, or the Parthenon at Athens, preserved in their pristine perfection ; but who could contemplate their preservation with equanimity if it entailed a perpetua- tion of the religious rites and idolatrous sacrifices with which they were associated ? This observation is made generally, in justification of Cromwell's action, and not with special application to Peterborough, whose present dean, Dr. Barlow, was known as a man of evangelical views before preferment.
The bishop's patronage includes the four canonries, two archdeaconries, and about eighty-eight benefices ; that of the dean and chapter eight benefices. The glebe lands held by incumbents are more valuable than those of any other diocese, being 74,632 acres in extent, and of the estimated yearly value in 1887 of
;^I07,66l.
The see of Rochester, one of the oldest in England, has gone through many vicissitudes, being deprived of Essex at the foundation of the see of St. Albans, and
ROCHESTER AND SOUTHWARK 127
quite recently of those parts of Kent and Surrey which now form the diocese of South wark. In 1835 the gross revenue of the bishop was returned at ^1523. It was augmented by the commissioners, and adjusted to ^^5000 in 1851 ; and, although the diocese is now one of the smallest in England, it still remains at the respectable figure of ;^4000. The dean and chapter were wealthier than the bishop, and returned their gross revenues in 1835 at ^7178, the net dividend being ;f 5 106. In 1891, long after the separation of Essex from the diocese, they continued to be even better off than before, and returned their revenues at ;^i 2,70 1 .
The capitular body still consists of the dean, four canons, and two minor canons, the strength at which it stood before the separation of Southwark. Dr. Reynolds Hole, the famous carnation-grower, was the dean of Rochester, a post valued at ;^i3oo a year, until his death in 1 904. Of the canonries, which are valued at £600 a year, one is attached to the Oriel professorship of interpretation of Scripture at Oxford, and is now held by the Rev. T. K. Cheyne. Of recent years the diocese has been regarded as a chief centre of monasticism and ritualism — " a centre of ecclesiastical Fenianism," the Church Association called it in 1 902 — ^ but for that, however, the bishop of the noAv restricted see. Dr. Harmer, cannot be held responsible. The bishop's patronage, in the united sees of Rochester and Southwark, used to include three archdeaconries and about seventy-three benefices ; that of the dean and chapter thirty-one benefices. The glebe lands held by incumbents before the last division of the diocese were 1729 acres, estimated in 1887 at the yearly value of £y2)26.
The ecclesiastical divisions of Rochester which form
^ "An Indictment of Dr. Talbot, Bishop of Rochester" ; issued by the Church Association, June i8, 1902.
128 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the new diocese of Southwark are the rural deaneries of Greenwich, Lewisham, Woolwich, Battersea, Camber- well, Clapham, Dulwich, Kennington, Lambeth, New- ington, Barnes, Beddington, Caterham, Godstone, King- ston, Reigate, Richmond, Streatham, and Wandsworth. The church of St. Saviour's at Southwark was made the cathedral, subject to the rights of the incumbent, Dr. Thompson, and of the patron, who is the bishop. The statute enacted that " there shall be transferred to the endowment fund of the bishopric of Southwark such portion of the income of Rochester as will reduce the income of the Bishop of Rochester from ;^4500 to i^4000, irrespective of tenths or first-fruits." ^ The Southwark bishopric bill failed to pass in 1 902 and 1 903, owing to the evangelical protest against Bishop Talbot's ritualism ; but Bishop Gore came to the rescue in 1 904, and, with Mr. Chamberlain's assent, a joint bill creating new sees for Birmingham and Southwark was passed. Thomas Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury, died oppor- tunely in 1837 ; and the commissioners at once decided that ;^5000 was "a suitable income" for the bishop of that diocese. In 1844, a fi'esh examina- tion into the revenues of the see was made, as the result of which the commissioners decided that " at the next avoidance" the future bishop should con- tribute a fixed payment of ;^i85o a year to the common fund for the augmentation of the bishops' stipends in the smaller sees. Under such circum- stances, it is difficult to explain how the bishop's income came to be returned in 1835 at only ^^4145 gross, and ^3939 net. In 1847 the payment seems to have begun, though Bishop Denison did not die until 1854; and in 1 8 5 1 the bishop's estates were taken over, and his income definitely fixed at its present amount, ;6"5ooo, paid by the commissioners.
1 Southwark and Birmingham Bishoprics Act, 1904.
SALISBURY 1 29
Salisbury was always served by secular priests, and not only its dean and chapter, but also its prebends, precentor, succentor, treasurer, and vicars-choral, had separate property in several districts. In 1835 the dean and chapter returned their income at ^3613 gross, and ;^3042 net. The dean's income was fixed at £ 1 000 in 1 8 5 I , and that of the canons at about half that sum. In 1861 the capitular lands were surrendered to the commissioners for an annual pay- ment of ^4200, and a grant of ;^i 0,000 towards repairing the cathedral. But in 1875 the dean and chapter were re-endowed with lands in lieu of a money payment; and in 1891 their revenues were returned at ^^69 5 8. The capitular body now con- sists of the dean, Dr. Webb, late Bishop of Bloem- fontein, four residentiary canons, four minor canons, and a number of prebendaries. Dr. Wordsworth, the present bishop, was appointed in 1885, direct from the Oriel professorship of Scripture in Oxford. His patronage includes the precentor, chancellor, succentor, sub-dean, three archdeacons, all the pre- bends, besides about sixty benefices ; that of the dean and chapter, twenty-one benefices. The glebe lands held by incumbents were 17,693 acres, in 1887, and their estimated yearly letting value was £2^^,171.
The sacerdotalists call the diocese Sarum, and not Salisbury. The old cathedral church used to be on the hill at Old Sarum, until Bishop Poore obtained a papal bull, in 12 17, authorising him to establish his cathedra at Salisbury, or New Sarum. Bishop Poore, having changed his quarters from the bleak hill at Old Sarum, where the whistling winds drowned the chanting of the canons, began building his new edifice in the plain in 1220. There was no scarcity of funds, and the main building, which the visitor
I
I30 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
sees to-day, was dedicated for service in less than forty years. Bishop Poore also built a palace for himself, of which a considerable portion is still ex- tant. Bishop de la Wyle built the cloisters and the chapter-house ; Bishop Wyville built the tower ; and in 1375, a century and a half after the com- mencement of the structure, the great spire, 404 feet high, was completed. Such was the work which employed the best energies of the land in those days.
It is unnecessary to expatiate on the size and beauty of the cathedral, which must be as familiar to most readers as it was to Mr. Pecksniff and his deluded pupils ; nor on the palace, deanery, canons' residences, and other ecclesiastical buildings, which cover an area equal to that of a fair-sized town. They constitute one of the greatest of the many monuments of medieval sacerdotalism pre- served in this country ; and, by way of contrast with the older and ruder remains at Stonehenge, only a few miles away, present an object-lesson of the highest value to all students of that religious craft to which Jesus was so implacably hostile. It is something to be thankful for that the Norman bishops — unlike their Italian brethren, who destroyed the linest remains of pagan antiquity — did not break up the druidical monoliths as material for their more ornate temple.
The diocese of Salisbury is now chiefly remarkable for having given its name to the Sarum breviary, or missal, prepared about 1087 a.d., by Bishop Osmund — a Norman lighting priest who came over with the Conqueror and built the cathedral at Old Sarum — and the first printed edition of which appeared about 1483. At that time bishops, though in full com- munion with and absolute subjection to Rome, were
SARUM BREVIARY— SOUTHWELL 131
allowed to compile diocesan breviaries, with special devotions in the form of collects, hymns, and ritual for particular services and festivals. Other secular cathedrals had their breviaries as well as Sarum — notably York, Hereford, Exeter, and Lincoln — but the Sarum became popular, and was the most gene- rally used up to the Reformation. The Sarum Use, as it was called, was the form of communion service almost universally observed here before the Prayer Book was settled in the reign of Edward VI. At the present day, many of the hymns which Christians object to in the publication called " Hymns Ancient and Modern," are taken from the Sarum breviary, which is now illegally used by hundreds of Church of England clergymen in preference to the Prayer Book. The use of incense and altar-lights in our churches at the present day is justified by the specious plea that the Prayer Book did not super- sede the old missals. " According to the use of Sarum," we are told, " the priest, after being himself censed by the deacon, censed the altar before the Introit began." ^ Therefore all the ritualists in England to-day feel bound to do likewise, as if there had been no Reformation, and as if the world had stood still since the days of Osmund the Nor- man ! Old Sarum enjoyed the unique honour of returning two members to Parliament until the Reform Act of 1832, though it was totally uniri- habited for many decades before that date ; and, if the ritualists had their way, doubtless, it would still be represented in the legislature.
The diocese of Southwell, created by the Bishoprics Act of 1S78, was only incorporated in 1884, and con- sists of the two counties of Derby and Nottingham. The endowment subscribed does not appear to have
^ " Notitia Eucharistica," Scudamore.
132 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
been sufficient to produce the minimum income of ;^30oo specified in the Act; for, in 1891, the capital only yielded ^^2239, 3s. 8d., received from — Consols, ^351, 14s.; Metropolitan 3 per cent, stock, ;^2i5, 9s. 8d. ; and railway debentures, £16^ 2. The com- missioners made up the balance of the statutory stipend. The old collegiate church at Southwell is the diocesan cathedral ; but as its revenues — which were returned at £22. \\ gross and £gS4 net in 1835 — li^d been bestowed on Manchester and Ripon before the foundation of the diocese, there is no capitular body. The church, which is a very ancient foundation, was restored, at considerable expense, before the incorporation of the diocese, and is a very large and handsome edifice. It was originally built by the Archbishop of York, and the remains of a bishop's palace, partially restored also, stand close by the minster. The town, or city, of South- well is, like Wells, an insignificant place, its popula- tion in 1 90 1 being only 3160, the existence of which was almost forgotten until the establishment of the see. It is about fifteen miles north-east of Notting- ham, and six east of Newark-on-Trent, and is situated near the centre of Notts.
There were no less than forty important monastic establishments in the county of Nottingham at the Reformation. Grey friars, White friars, Benedictines, Praemonstratenses, Carthusians, Austin friars, Gilber- tines, Cluniacs, and Cistercians, all joined in fleecing their deluded fellow-countymen, and their priestcraft still lingers in the air. The tendencies of the present occupiers of the glebe lands may be judged from the fact that, on 6th February 1906, Mr. A. B. Markham, M.P., one of the county members, acting in his capacity as a parishioner of Shirebrook, obtained an order from the Consistory Court directing the incumbent to remove
TRURO 133
from the church the followmg rituahstic apparatus : — fourteen stations of the cross, three crucifixes, a sacring bell, and a number of altar cards.^ The bishop's residence is at Thurgarton priory, which was one of the Austin monks' properties, and his patronage in- cludes about sixty-four livings. The glebe lands held by incumbents are valuable, being 32,746 acres, with an estimated yearly letting value in 1887 of ^^^48,589.
The see of Truro was founded by statute in 1876, and consists of the archdeaconry of Cornwall, then separated from Exeter. The Bishop of Exeter's in- come was reduced by ;^8oo to assist in making up the new bishop's endowment, which, however, fell short of the requirements of the Bishoprics Act of 1878, as it only produced £2 2gy, 9s. 6d. in 1891 — namely, ;^90 from tithe rent-charge and ^2207, 9s. 6d. from railway debentures, the balance of the episcopal salary of ;^3000 being made up by the com- missioners.
In 1878 an Act was passed 2 for the accumulation of a chapter fund, transferring a canonry from Exeter to Truro, and authorising the incorporation of a dean and chapter when the endowment was sufficient to yield an income of ;^iooo for a dean and ^300 each for four canons, A new cathedral — of which the old parish church of St. Mary constitutes the south aisle — was commenced in 1880, and opened for service in 1887, In that year an Act was passed^ transferring the advowsons and rights of patronage belonging to the dean and chapter of Exeter, within the diocese of Truro, to the dean and chapter of Truro; declaring the south aisle of the cathedral to be the parish church of St. Mary's, with all the rights appertaining
' The full judgment is given in The English Churchman of February 8, 1906.
2 41 & 42 Vict, cap. 44, * 50 & 51 Vict. cap. 12.
134 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
thereto ; declaring the remainder of the building to be " the cathedral church " ; forbidding any alteration of the fabric of the south aisle without the consent of the bishop ; constituting the rector of the parish church the subdean of the cathedral; appointing the bishop to fill the office of dean, without obligation of resi- dence, and, apparently, without extra salary ; and incorporating the dean and chapter, though the condi- tions laid down in 1878 had not been fulfilled. The capitular body now seems to comprise two salaried canons, and an official called a " missioner " canon, the bishop acting as dean ; and there are three priest- vicars or minor canons.
The episcopal residence is at Par, on the south coast, at the head of St. Austell's Bay, midway between Plymouth and Truro ; and the bishop's patronage includes two archdeaconries, two canonries, and about 3 8 benefices ; that of the dean and chapter 12 livings. Falmouth is the most valuable benefice in the diocese, being estimated at £1^40; and its rector's tithes enjoy immunity from taxation, being the only tithes in England outside the City of London possessing that privilege. The glebe lands held by incumbents in 1887 were 8313 acres, the estimated yearly letting value of which was £1 1,604.
In 1903 the cathedral was consecrated after many decorative additions, the Prince of Wales, in his capa- city as Duke of Cornwall, being present. I happened to be in the locality at the time, and was much struck by the widespread interest taken in the pro- ceedings by Nonconformists as well as Church folk ; and, whatever may have been felt on the subject, nothing but sweet words were spoken.
Cornish folk regard themselves, not as inhabitants of an English county, but of a separate duchy or prin- cipality. Cornwall used to be known as West Wales
WORCESTER 135
in Saxon times ; and its people preserve many of the racial characteristics of the Celts. The county is studded with the chapels of Bible Christians, Primi- tive Methodists, Wesleyans, Congregationalists, and Baptists. Many of the parish churches are old Roman places of worship ; and the incumbents, as a whole, are ritualistic — men apart from the people, living on forcibly-levied tithes, and keeping up the tradition that they are of that upper class to which belong the justices of the peace and county gentry. It would be a poor compliment to the earnestness of Cornishmen to say that the robustness of their Christianity was due to their distance from the lord spiritual at Exeter ; but it seems as if the local bishop, with his cathedral and attendant court, were likely to enhance sacerdotal influence in the duchy. Roman Catholics are increas- ing in numbers in Cornwall, which is a universal out- come of Anglican ritualism. Numbers of French monks and nuns, some of them in lay attire, others in religious costume, were looking for quarters in the coast towns in 1903 ; and it was by no means easy to please their fastidious tastes in the matter of accom- modation, while they seemed to have abundance of money.
The Bishop of Worcester's income was returned at £6<^\6 gross and £6^6<) net in 1835. But, as in many other cases, these figures seem to have been well under the mark ; for in 1 8 5 1 the commissioners, having decided that ;^5ooo was "a suitable income " for the Bishop of Worcester, curtailed the bishop's stipend by ;^2 5oo a year, which still left him i^5ooo. In 1870 he was re-endowed with lands and tithes in Grimsley, Hartlebury (where the principal palace was), Fladbury, Inkbarrow, Claines, Stoke Prior, and Wol- verton, all in Worcestershire, and elsewhere, calculated to produce his statutory income. The dean and
136 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
chapter returned their income in 1835 at £i2,oS8 gross, and ^^84 7 9 net. The bishop's second palace at Worcester was converted into a dean's residence in 1846; and in 1859 the capitular body surrendered their lands to the commissioners for ^^^9000 per annum. The dean is said to draw ;^ i 5 00 and the canons ;^8oo a year ; their salaries, as well as those of four minor canons and other chapter officials, being paid by the commissioners. The separate property held by the chapter in 1891 amounted to ^^822 a year. The bishop's patronage, before the arch- deaconry of Birmingham was constituted a separate diocese in 1904, consisted of two archdeaconries (Worcester and Coventry) and about 94 benefices ; that of the dean and chapter, of 38 benefices, includ- ing the parish of Wimbledon in Surrey — to which reference will be made in a succeeding chapter. The glebe lands held by incumbents in 1887 were 28,849 acres, the estimated yearly letting value of which was ^^45,156.
During 1902 - 1904 Dr. Gore, ex-librarian of Pusey's library at Oxford and one of the leaders of the sacerdotal party, held the bishopric of Worcester, and it was at his instigation that the new diocese of Birmingham was created. He, being a celibate and a pioneer of the Puseyite, or rather Newmanite, move- ment for the re-establishment of monastic orders, did • not occupy Hartlebury Castle, but lived in certain premises which he called " Bishop's House " at Worcester. Dr. Yeatman-Biggs, the present bishop, has re-opened Hartlebury Castle, though the episcopal stipend was reduced to ;^4200 in 1904.
The Worcester minster was a monastic foundation. It was originally in the diocese of Lichfield, but be- came so powerful that, like Ely and other monastic establishments, it was constituted a cathedral and
BIRMINGHAM 137
assigned a see of its own, or territory in which the abbot might wield his sovereignty over the bodies and souls of men. The present edifice was built and added to from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, and was restored during the latter half of the nine- teenth century at a cost of about «^ 100,000. The rivalry between the secular and monastic priests in England and their evenly-balanced powers are well exemplified by the way in which the two great monastic cathedrals at Worcester and Gloucester confronted the secular cathedrals of Hereford and Lichfield. Whatever faults we may find with our recent and still incomplete emancipation from sacer- dotal influence, one has just reason to feel thankful that the sinister powers represented by those colossal minsters in pre-Reformation times no longer exist to terrorise the mind of the nation.
The diocese of Birmingham consists of the arch- deaconry of Birmingham and the rural deanery of Handsworth, and its bishop is Dr. Gore, who draws a statutory income of about ;!^30oo a year from the commissioners, made up by an endowment accumu- lated under the Bishoprics Act of 1 904 and an annuity of ;^8oo from the Bishop of Worcester's income. As Bishop Gore will be mentioned again, we shall only say of him here that his patronage in his new diocese is that formerly held by the Bishop of Worcester. There is no capitular body, and the glebe lands held by incumbents are included in the figures given for Worcester.
Birmingham was one of those centres of Noncon- formity, free thought, and vast political energy which, like Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Bradford, Sheffield, Bristol, and Nottingham, seemed to thrive and revel in its freedom from sacerdotal influence. Villiers and Bright and the other pioneers of the movement for
138 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the repeal of the Com Laws were prophets in Bir- mingham in those days, and it is not much more than twenty years since its present prophet, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, made the welkin ring with his denunciations of those " who toil not, neither do they spin," and divided the enemies of the people into four classes, which he called " the four P.'s," namely, priests, parsons, publicans, and protectionists.
Now all that is changed, and Mr. Chamberlain's policy is one for increasing the duty on imported corn, the direct and only general result of which, as yet disclosed, would be a rise in the value of tithe rent- charge. Mr. Chajuberlain, who is accused of having taught geography in the local Sunday schools, has become a reverent admirer of medievalism, and has accepted the allegiance of every incumbent in the land to his alluring scheme of fiscal reform. Since the Boer War his family seem to have set a new and en- hanced value upon the benediction of " our venerated Archdeacon " ; he has helped to estabhsh the Birming- ham bishopric, and incidentally the Southwark bishopric, at the invocation of the apostle of modern monachism ; h,e has gone over to the party " who toil not, neither do they spin," and has become the chief supporter of all those iniquitous " P.'s " against whom he used to inveigh. In this startHng change of conviction, or of policy, Mr. Chamberlain has carried Birmingham with him, but he has lost the confidence of the rest of the United Kingdom, which has clearly given its verdict against any increase in tithes.
The parochial work of the commissioners, carried on simultaneously with the diocesan operations which we have described, consisted in splitting up old parishes into districts, helping to build churches and chapels- of-ease, and increasing the salaries of incumbents. It was carried out in the same strictly commercial spirit ;
DIVISION OF PARISHES 139
nobody ever thought of moving unless all risk was covered and payment secured beforehand. Schemes for the establishment of new ecclesiastical districts have been promoted, as a rule, on the following lines : (i) the rector or vicar of the old parish, the patron and the leading parishioners, apply for the division of the parish; (2) the commission requests them to provide the funds; (3) a fund is procured by solicita- tion amongst the wealthy, and negotiations ensue as to what shall be the relative amounts of the local subscription and the contribution from the commission : (4) the money so decided upon is invested, and the district is constituted ; (5) the patronage of the new district is vested in the rector or vicar of the old parish, or in the bishop ; (6) the new incumbent is then appointed with an assured stipend, an income from fees, and fixity of tenure, independent of the parishioners; (7) if it be necessary to build a church, a subscription is raised to cover part of the expense, and the rest can be borrowed on most favourable terms — interest and sinking fund being an annual charge for which special appeals are made.
Three points will be observed in connection with new districts thus created : (i) in suburban localities, where portion of a parish has become thickly popu- lated with a lower class of people, the rector or vicar usually promotes the scheme for cutting off the con- gested district from his own cure of souls; (2) there is, as a rule, no difficulty in procuring the best possible sites for new churches, owing to the fact that the landlords usually belong to the Established Church ; (3) in eight cases out of ten the new districts are managed by ritualistic clergymen, and the Church services are conducted on semi-Roman lines, especially where the inhabitants belong to the poorer classes.
As a sample of the work of the commission, let us
I40 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
recite what they did in 1904. They constituted or assigned thirty-three districts, altered the boundaries of thirty-two parishes or districts, substituted six new churches for six old ones, approved of seven churches provided under various schemes, and sanctioned twenty- four tables of fees for as many parishes. Nor did they forget the bishops, deans, and chapters ; for they also authorised the rebuilding of the episcopal residence of St. David's, sanctioned alterations in the palace at Manchester, and an exchange of lands by the Bishop of Ely.
Whatever shortage of money there may have been elsewhere, the commissioners were abundantly supplied. Their financial position continued satisfactory, and they reported, despite some depreciation in the rental of lands, an increase of income due to interest, dividends, ground rents, houses, and tithe rent-charges. They set aside £ i 5 0,000 from their mineral receipts during the year for annual grants made prior to October 1887, and they provided new grants to the amount of ;^2 50,ooo for the endowment and augmentation of benefices. They held in Government and municipal securities, ;^5,502,i09, 6s. 5d., of which ^^2,151,148, 15s. iid. was London County stock ; they held in cash .^1,134,194, i6s. 2d.; their trust account amounted to ^569,099, 9s. 6d., in securities and cash; their investment account amounted to ^5,908,744, 13s. 2d., of which ^^3,268,751, 19s. id. was in cash; their mortgage account amounted to ;^6,856,797. In the balance sheet their Government and other securities are valued at i^8, 5 48,079, 3s. 2d., and the amount of cash at ;^9,5 57,390, i8s. The receipts for the common fund in 1904 amounted to ^^2,133,753, 2s. 5d. The expenditure amounted to ;^i,547,243, 19s. id., leaving the large balance of ;^586,509, 3s. 4d. to be carried to next account.
SPIRITUAL FINANCE 141
Over 3000 new ecclesiastical districts or parishes have been created since 1840, as we have said; but the commissioners prefer to record their triumph in pounds, shillings, and pence, and to judge it entirely by the increased amount of money it has put into the hands of the profession. The nature of their property may be illustrated by a curious example. It appears that a City alderman in the fourteenth century, wish- ing to endow a prebendary at St. Paul's, conveyed a few acres of freehold land to the chapter for that purpose. This land was leased to the Corporation of London, and when the lease expired the property was worth over .^50,000 a year to the commissioners. In their latest report,^ from which we have been quoting, they claim that during the sixty-four years, 1 840- 1 904, they have augmented the incomes of 6000 benefices by annual payments charged on the common fund, amounting to ;i^86s,6io per annum, which, as they proudly state, is equivalent to a capital value of ^^26,076,8 50. They made benefactions with the same object which amounted to ^269,700 per annum, which they say is equivalent to a capital sum of ^^6,291,000. And they claim, as if it were a subject of legitimate pride for a spiritual association, that the total increase in clerical incomes made by their instrumentality is ^i,i 12,310 per annum, repre- senting a capital value of ;6^ 3 3,477,8 50.
According to the official return of 1891, the two archbishops, thhty-threu bishops, and 13,894 beneficed clergymen — total, i 3,929 ecclesiastics — drew an annual income of ^5,499,871 as a national endowment from tithes and land. Whereas the entire annual payment by way of salaries to the French Catholic Church, before its disestablishment in 1905, only amounted
'"Report of the Ecclesiastical Commission for the year 1904," issued in 1905.
142 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
to 41,000,000 francs, or i^ 1,62 3, 762, to maintain seventeen arclibishops, sixty-seven bishops, 185 vicars- general, 695 canons, and 34,000 cur^s and desservants — total, 35,464 ecclesiastics. Besides the national en- dowment, the Anglican beneficed clergy receive addi- tions to salary, and the curates, or unbeneficed clergy, are almost entirely supported from special subscriptions, called "voluntary" offerings; no less than .1^708,441 being thus collected for the 7500 curates in 1904, which comes to ;^94 per head. The total "voluntary" collections in 1904 were ^7,81 1,673, of which a great deal went in clerical salaries, ^1,261,750 went for church building, ^^623,410 for church schools, and the larger part went to missions and organised charities under clerical control; the solicitation for those " voluntary " offerings being as persistently maintained as if there were no endowment.
Having now concluded our territorial survey of the governing establishment of the Church of England, we may judge how pre-occupied the episcopal mind has been, since 1 840, in securing the utmost comfort for the episcopal body. The best energies of all the bishops, deans, and chapters must have been concentrated upon (i) preserving and restoring the Roman cathedrals as the rallying centres and landmarks on which the whole system chiefly depends ; and (2) husbanding and im- proving their properties, now exchanging real estate and rent-charges for cash annuities, and anon re- exchanging money for lands.
If one were asked to say whether the great Norman cathedrals or the men who compose the hierarchy and capitular bodies constitute the more important part of the Established Church, one would be inclined to decide in favour of the buildings. Those of us who have been bred under sacerdotal tutelage are apt to be too severe in our censures on iconoclasts, whether
MINSTERS OR MEN? 143
barbarian, early Christian, Moliammedan, or Puritan. The Pagan rehgion could hardly have been extirpated if the temples and statues had been left standing ; and it was a well-founded belief in the value of architecture which urged the medieval priests — often inspired by the medieval kings — to cover Europe with cathedrals. I doubt if there is any one in Europe now, from Gibraltar to the Ural Mountains, who worships Jupiter; but, if the temples had been left standing, his adorers might still be reckoned by millions. If the Mohammedans had not broken the idols and rased the temples in Asia Minor, North Africa, and Greece, we might enjoy the luxury of beholding sacrifices offered to Zeus and Athena, and of assisting at Eleusinian mysteries at the present day. The Christian sets no store by buildings ; his aim is to make the bodies of men richly-furnished temples of the true God, But the Anglican hierarchy expended their best energies on the cathedral churches, and, following the self-indulgent example of their Roman predecessors, never forgot their own palaces and creature comforts. Like true priests, they throve amidst the degradation of humanity all around them, and never cherished the idea that the body of the poorest human being might be made a temple more agreeable to the Deity and valuable to the State than all the minsters between Canterbury and Carlisle.
" Ah, Constantine, of how much ill was cause, Not thy conversion, but those rich domains That the first wealthy Poi^e received of thee ! "
We shall now consider the educational monopolies of the Church in Oxford and Cambridge, and see how the sacerdotalists within the universities were promoting the higher education of Enghshmen while their supe- riors outside were building cathedrals and palaces and augmenting clerical incomes.
CHAPTER VI
" But we, unworthier, told Of college ; he had climbed across the spikes, And he had squeezed himself between the bars, And he had breathed the Proctor's dogs ; and one Discussed his tutor, rough to common men, But honeying at the whisper of a lord ; And one his Master, as a rogue in grain Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory."
Tennyson, Tlie Princess.
It is in the history of Oxford and Cambridge — those inestimable monopolies bequeathed by the Roman ecclesiastics to their Anglo-Catholic successors — that one must seek for the true origin and nature of the Church's existing influence. There the youthful heirs of the lords of the soil were flattered and indulged by the clerical parasites, "honeying at the whisper of a lord," who acted as their tutors and who looked to their pupils for preferment in after life — thereby cementing, as it were in blood, the connection between the territorial magnates and the Church. It was not without reason that Douglas Jerrold made Lady Blushrose say to her domestic chaplain : " I don't see why you should despair. There is the Bishop of Blank ; he was only chaplain, and taught, what is it ? hie, hoc to the children. You are certainly as good as he, and then you can swim so well ! How lucky it was that you brought his lordship's nephew out of the Isis ! How very lucky for your prospects — how strange now if some day it should prove that you fished a mitre from a river." ^
1 " The Story of a Feather."
A HINT FROM GLADSTONE 145
The clerical heads and fellows, " rough to common men," compelled poor scholars, sons of respectable parents, to abase themselves in the discharge of menial offices which the child of the humblest citizen of ancient Rome would have indignantly refused to perform for Augustus or Tiberius — and thus laid the foundation of the " fagging " system in English public schools. There the mind of the upper classes has been trained since the Reformation in reverence for the Church ; and frequently in irreverence for every precept of Christian conduct, under the tutelage of men characterised by Tennyson as " rogues in grain veneer'd with sanctimonious theory."
All tutors were not rogues, nor all pupils dissolute. The governing powers in the universities did not re- present the nation, but only the clerical caste ; and many undergraduates, who entered college only as a customary formality, became confirmed in their opposi- tion to sacerdotalism when they left it. But the per- vading air of Oxford and Cambridge, under the sole management of celibate priests, like that of medieval and latter-day Rome, was impregnated with indolence, frivolity, and self-indulgence. Mr. Gladstone must have been conscious of the irregularities of Oxford in his own undergraduate days when he thus specified some temptations to which a youth of high birth was not subjected in the Heroic age : " His early youth is not solicited into vice by finding sensual excess in vogue, or the opportunities of it glaring in his eye and sounding in his ear. Gluttony is hardly known; drunkenness is marked only by its degrading char- acter, and by the evil consequences that flow so straight from it; and it is abhorred."^ Young men got inoculated with vice at the universities, those with
' " Juventus Mundi," 1869 ; written about the time he ceased to repre- sent Oxford in Parliament.
146 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
strong moral constitutions being purified or hardened ; others being weakened or destroyed by a cure which was worse than the actual disease they would have encountered in the world outside.
It is a misapprehension to suppose that the term univcrsitas, as applied to Oxford and Cambridge, im- plied a universality of subjects taught or faculties conferred. It meant nothing more than a society, company, or community, in which property was held in common. In ancient Rome, collegia, or colleges, of priests and vestal virgins could hold and inherit property in common, and were, with other corporate bodies, included under the general title universitas, in contradistinction to the individual or singularis 2)ersona. Both English universities are managed on similar lines, but Oxford has been more aggressively sacerdotal in character than Cambridge ; and was, moreover, the birthplace of modern Anglican priest- craft. Therefore, we shall devote our attention princi- pally to Oxford, premising at the same time that the histories of both universities are almost identi- cal, so far as endowments and administration are concerned.
The legends connected with the origin of both places as centres of instruction, as, for instance, that Christ Church College, Oxford, was founded by St. Frideswide and twelve holy virgins in the eighth century, illustrate the sacerdotal character of these monastic guilds, and we cannot agree with Mr. Brod- rick in dismissing them as mythical or incredible.-^ The Frideswide chest, one of several benefactions for the relief of poor scholars, was the earliest form of corporate property held by the university. After
1 " History of the University of Oxford," by Hon. G. C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton ; 1886 — an excellent little work fittingly included in a series entitled " Epochs of Church History."
ORIGIN OF OXFORD 147
the Norman Conquest, when England came into closer touch with the Continent and with Rome, Oxford and Cambridge take their places in English history as teaching centres. The instruction given was almost entirely confined to Roman theology, civil, and, above all, canon law. About 11 50, Vacarius delivered lec- tures at Oxford on Roman civil law ; and Edmund Rich, archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert Grosteste, bishop of Lincoln, became graduates in divinity at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
Giraldus Cambrensis described Oxford at that time as " the place where the clergy of England chiefly flourished and excelled in clerkly lore " — a description which remained true, not only until the Reformation, but until the Universities Act of 1877; and, as we shall see, is not yet inaccurate. The oldest schools at the universities were established for the benefit of regular or monastic priests, and the technicalities of priestcraft constituted their highest ideal of scholar- ship. In 1264 Walter of Merton, bishop of Rochester and Lord Chancellor, expended some of his immense wealth in founding Merton College for secular or parish priests, as opposed to the regular priests ; and his purely professional beneficence is still spoken of as a liberal innovation. University College, the oldest existing foundation, is said to have been established in 1249 by William, bishop of Durham. Balliol was founded soon afterwards by the pious widow. Lady Devorgille, to insure the celebration of masses for her deceased husband, John Balliol. Worcester College was originally founded about the same time for the Benedictines. Oriel was founded in 1324; Queen's in 1340; and New College in 1380; all being clerical institutions in which scholarship meant nothing more than priestcraft or monasticism.
New College, though devised by William of Wyke-
148 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ham for the benefit of secular priests, was itself a monastic institution, and the sacerdotalists say that " whatever was grand in Plantagenet ideal, and sump- tuous in the refinements of art, once adorned its typical chapel." ^ All Souls, or, to give it its full name, "The Warden and College of the Souls of All the Faithful Deceased," was founded in 1427 by Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury. Its forty fellows, of whom fourteen were civil and canon lawyers, had imposed upon them the duty of praying for the repose of the souls of those who fell in the French wars of Henry V. ; and an indulgence of forty days was granted to all Christians in the province of Canterbury who should visit the college chapel and pray for the souls of the faithful departed. Lincoln College was also founded in the year 1427 by Flemming, bishop of Lincoln, famous as the man who was entrusted by the Pope, at the Council of Constance, with the duty of exhuming and burning the bones of John Wickliffe.
While Oxford was the headquarters and rendezvous of priests of every description, it was notorious for the riotous depravity of its students. The struggles of those who were not priests to obtain a little secular learning constitute a pathetic chapter in the history of England, as well as of other European lands. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Oxford was full of unattached students, called chamber-dekyns, belonging to no foundation, who had flocked thither in the hope of learning how to read and write. The practice of founding colleges had been adopted with a view to bringing them under control and making the many corporations of priests directly responsible
1 For many interesting comments on the Roman Catholic character of the Oxford foundations, see, inter alia, " The Oxford Undergraduate of Twenty Years Ago," 1874.
THEOLOGY AND LEARNING 149
for them. They are described as " kirking about the town in taverns and brothels committing murders and thefts," " crowded together in miserable sleeping-rooms, without domestic care or comfort," rendering " menial services in return for their instruction," " sometimes enabled to borrow from the university chest," at other times relapsing into mendicity and asking for alms on the public highways.
In 1432 a special statute was passed for the sup- pression of these " poor scholars," who had begged their way to Oxford from the uttermost ends of England, and whose misdirected zeal is lamentable to look back upon. They regarded alchemy as a greater science than chemistry, and studied astronomy only to acquire a better knowledge of astrology. Medieval theology was then " the queen of sciences," the most profitable knowledge attainable by man, and, while fools were wasting their energies on alchemy and astrology, in the vain hope of transmuting base metals into gold, and of divining the future, the theologians were possessing themselves of almost all the gold and real estate in the country. That was how the Church preserved the lamp of learning in the dark ages — an achievement for which modern priests claim so much credit. They hid its feeble flicker in the inmost recesses of their monasteries, successfully preventing those who wanted light from coming within sight of its rays, until the majority of the custodians them- selves became entirely ignorant of the value of the treasure they were guarding.
The Pope was supreme in the English universities. In the thirteenth century he had laid Oxford under an interdict, and prohibited lecturing there; in the fourteenth, the Bishop of Lincoln, as his deputy, ex- communicated the municipal authorities, and imposed pecuniary fines upon them as penances ; in the fifteenth,
I50 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
we are told that " the resources of Oxford were chiefly wasted m the enormous expense of suits at the court of Rome, whose appellate jurisdiction it had always respected, and whose immediate intervention it had often invoked." Chichole, archbishop of Canterbury, who had founded All Souls College in 1427, recog- nising the Pope's power in England, took the pre- caution to procure a bull from Eugenius IV., in 1439, confirming the foundation, and it was owing to the prevalence of appeals to Rome that Chichele and Eusfenius arranged that fourteen of the sacerdotal fellows of All Souls were to be civil and canon lawyers. The politics of England were then constantly perplexed by interference from Rome and the clashing of two rival codes of law, the ecclesiastical and the secular.
The nature of the canon law, the chief branch of learning in which English priests were instructed at the universities, and which is so venerated by modern Anglican ritualists, may be gathered from a few ex- cerpts taken from the decretals of Popes Gregory VII. and Clement V., promulgated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries : — " The Bishop of Rome has power to absolve from allegiance, obligation, bond of service, promise, and compact, the provinces, cities, and armies of kings that rebel against him, and also to loose their vassals and feudatories." " It is not lawful for laymen to impose taxes or subsidies on the clergy. If laics encroach upon cleric immunities, they are, after admonition, to be excommunicated. But in times of great necessity the clergy may grant assist- ance to the state, with permission of the Bishop of Rome." " It is not lawful for a layman to sit in judgment upon a clergyman. Secular judges who dare, in the exercise of a damnable presumption, to compel priests to pay their debts, are to be restrained by spiritual censures." " The man who takes the
THE CANON LAW 151
money of the Church is as guilty as he who commits homicide. He who seizes upon the lands of the Church is excommunicated, and must restore fourfold." " The wealth of dioceses and abbacies must in no way be alienated. It is not lawful for even the Pope himself to alienate the lands of the Church." As Hallam says : " The superiority of ecclesiastical to tem- poral power, or at least the absolute independence of the former, may be considered as a sort of keynote which regulates every passage in the canon law." ^
Magdalen College was founded and endowed in 1456, by WaynHete, bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancel- lor, an ecclesiastic of enormous wealth ; one of its statutes stipulating that mass should be celebrated annually on the top of its tower on May morning. It is still the richest of the colleges, and its " dreamy and rich cloisters" won the admiration of King James, who called it " the most absolute building in Oxford." In 1509 and 15 16 respectively, Smith, bishop of Lincoln, founded Brasenose College, and Fox, bishop of Winchester, founded Corpus Christi. The dedica- tion of Corpus is as follows : " The founder, to the praise and honour of Almighty God, the most holy Body of Christ, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, as also of the Apostles Peter, Paul, Andrew, and of St, Cuth- bert, St. Swithin, and St. Birin, doth found and appoint this college always to be called Corpus Christi College." In 1525, Wolsey, having superseded Fox and succeeded Smith — and being possessed of colossal wealth as archbishop of York, bishop of Lincoln (the diocese in which Oxford was situated), and bishop of Win- chester— founded the college now known as Christ Church, which he intended to call Cardinal College, and devoted the properties of twenty-one suppressed priories and convents to its endowment.
^ " History of the Middle Ages."
152 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Just before the Reformation the universities had fallen into disrepute, having lost the ascendency which they had exercised, not for the national good, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Their degeneracy, we are told, was humiliating ; and the foundation of Lincoln, Corpus, and Christ Church, by Bishops Smith, Fox, and Wolsey seems to have been part of a con- certed policy aimed at rehabilitating the prestige of sacerdotalism. But the effort did not succeed. Within nine years after the foundation of Christ Church, Henry VIIL consummated by statute the separation of the English Church from Rome,^ and the teaching of canon law was thenceforth prohibited in Oxford and Cambridge.
In the reign of Edward VI., Cranmer smashed all the statues and overthrew the altars in the universities, thereby arousing the indignation of all admirers of religious architecture, and helping to prepare the pyre on which his body was destined to be burned soon afterwards at Oxford. The Edwardian reformers encouraged the study of Hebrew in the universities, and thereby enabled Englishmen to become acquainted with the Old Testament, which the priests had been trading upon for so many centuries, as if it were a revelation made to themselves alone. The study of mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and medicine was fostered ; eminent lecturers and champions of freedom, like Peter Martyr, were brought over from the Continent ; and royal grammar schools were founded with the sequestered revenues of the monasteries.
This movement in favour of education, says Brod- rick, " was essentially popular rather than academical, and by no means tended to increase the relative im- portance of the universities." The academical policy had been to hinder the pursuit of knowledge and exalt
1 25 Hen. cap. 21.
OXFORD ik MARY'S RETGN 153
the mystery of priestcraft. As learning increased, the value of sacerdotalism depreciated, and the prosperity of the universities waned.
The star of the universities again became ascendant when Queen Mary re-established Roman priestcraft. During her five years' reign, two colleges were founded in Oxford — St. John's in i 5 5 5 , of which William Laud was president before his promotion to the episcopacy, and afterwards its principal benefactor, his decapitated body being buried within its precincts ; and Trinity College, founded in the same year by Sir Thomas Pope, friend of Sir Thomas More, the first college established by a layman. " Sir Thomas Pope ordered five ohits (masses for the dead) yearly to be celebrated as festivals of the college ; for Queen Mary, his two wives, his daughter, and for all Christian souls."
Cardinal Pole, Mary's coadjutor, was a papal legatus a latere, in plain words, a local pope with plenary powers. He burned all the English Bibles he could discover in Oxford and Cambridge, forbade the use of English in the universities, and ordered that no language was thenceforth to be officially spoken or written therein except Latin. By Pole's authority the body of Peter Martyr's wife was exhumed from Christ Church, Oxford, and thrown into unconsecrated ground ; but the dean of Christ Church " improved upon his instructions by having it buried under a dung-hill " !
It was to Oxford that Queen Mary sent Archbishop Cranmer and Bishops Ridley and Latimer to undergo " the solemn farce of an academical trial." A body of Oxford and Cambridge doctors of divinity were com- missioned to dispute with and confound the Christian bishops on the doctrine of transubstantiation ; and it was in front of Balliol College that the three reformers were burned to death — Ridley and Latimer in October 1555,
154 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and Craniner on March 21, 1556. Though Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were bishops, their professional status was merely an incident in their Christianity ; ^ and the sacerdotalists disown them to this day as declassds, while they exalt Wolsey and Laud to the position of statesmen and demi-gods in all their text- books prepared for use in schools.
Under Elizabeth, it is euphemistically said that there was a " depression of intellectual life " in Oxford, which means that priestcraft had depreciated in value. But genuine study was encouraged, the Bodleian library being founded in Elizabeth's reign by Sir Thomas Bodley, a member of the queen's household. Exeter College, originally founded by Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, in 13 14, was re-established in 1565 by Sir William Petre, bearer of a well-known Catholic name. Jesus College, in which Elizabeth seems to have taken a special interest as the lineal descendant of Owen Tudor, was founded in i 5 7 1 . It was the only new Oxford foundation of her reign, its endowment being provided by Dr. Hugh Price, a Welshman ; and it has always been known as the Welsh College. The name was apparently meant to recall the memory of the Founder of that Christianity which had been revived by the Reformation, and as an antidote to the Romanism which found expression in such titles as Corpus Christi, All Souls, St. Mary of Winchester, and St. Mary Magdalen.
In the seventeenth century the sacerdotalists regained their influence somewhat under the Stuarts. In 1606, for instance, after the Gunpowder Plot, James I. con- ferred upon the universities the right of presentation
1 Latimer speaks of himself and his colleagues as follows : " Mr. Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury ; Mr. Ridley, Bishop of London ; and I, old Hugh Latimer, were imprisoned in the Tower of London for Christ's Gospel preaching, and for because we would not go a Massing." — Latimer's Remains.
OXFORD UNDER LAUD 155
to all benefices whose patronage had remained in the hands of Roman Catholics ; those in the southern province going to Oxford, those in the northern to Cambridge — a valuable windfall which, being still effective, tends to perpetuate their sacerdotal character.
In Charles I.'s reign, Archbishop Laud was monarch of Oxford ; and is described as " a true and loyal son of the university" as well as its liberal benefactor — though, of course, not on that account a true and loyal son of England and Christianity, or a benefactor of useful learning. In Laud's time drinking- parties had come into vogue at Oxford ; and " the scholars, not excepting the seniors, had been hunted out of ale- houses and taverns by the vice - chancellor and proctors." Under Laud's rule we learn that " two or three students habitually shared the same room, and a poor scholar rarely enjoyed the comfort of a bed to himself unless it was a truckle-bed in his patron's chamber." The patron was usually a " priest " ; and the immorality which prevailed, while " the university was still, above all, a training-school for the clerical pro- fession rather than for the general world," is too gross to be dilated upon, though it must not be ignored.
The demoralisation of Oxford, from a sensual point of view, seems to have been perennial. Whether under the Roman priests of pre-Reformation days, or the celibates of post-Reformation times, it seems to have been more vicious than a garrison or dockyard town ; a home of indolence, and a force antagonistic to popular enlightenment, whose managers reared aloft the banner of learning, while they did all in their power to impose the fetters of priestcraft upon the mind of the nation.
Wadham and Pembroke were founded in the seventeenth century. John Wilkins, brother-in-law of Cromwell., who became bishop of Chester after the
156 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Restoration, was warden of Wadham ; and that college was, even in John Henry Newman's time, regarded as a place where Christianity was respected. During the Civil War, the university threw in its lot with the King and his Roman abettors on the Continent ; and, in 1643, melted down its plate, which weighed 1500 pounds, and was sold at five shillings an ounce, for the benefit of the royalist cause. After the Restoration, Gilbert Sheldon, a pupil of Laud's, appointed arch- bishop of Canterbury by Charles II., built the Shel- donian Theatre at his own expense, with the object of saving St. Mary the Virgin's Church " from profanation by scholastic exercises," James II. endeavoured to re-staff the universities with Roman Catholics ; and, though he met with opposition, he would have ulti- mately succeeded in Oxford if the people had not expelled him from the kingdom.
During Wilham III.'s reign the university was Jacobite, and so remained far into the eighteenth century; its morality at the same time being of the Stuart type, and many degrees lower than the average level of an age no less remarkable for the sensual excesses of the upper classes, than for the " craving after knowledge " exhibited by the lower classes. On October 30, 17 16, Oxford refused to ring bells or illuminate in honour of the birthday of George I. Turnips were thrown at the Royal Regiment of Foot of Ireland as they were marching out to fire a salute on Coronation Day, and they were received with shouts of " Down with the Roundheads ! " The soldiers lit a bonfire in High Street ; and, in reply to charges of breaking the windows of traders who had refused to illuminate, the Major accused the townspeople of " being governed by the colleges," and stigmatised the dons as " a party of disaffected rogues." ^
^ See Parliamentary Papers relating to the riots at Oxford, 17 16.
DEMORALISATION OF OXFORD 157
lu the eighteenth century, which was so remarkable for its uncompromising Protestantism, there were no colleges founded in Oxford ; but Dr. Radcliffe, who had no sympathy with sacerdotalism, presented the uni- versity with a scientitic library, and bequeathed funds for the building and equipment of the Radcliffe Observatory. The curious Oxford publications of this period are redolent of the immoral atmosphere of the place. Dean Swift says that " drinking strong ale and smoking tobacco were the chief accomplishments of the young heirs who were sent to Oxford according to custom," to be educated under the celibate priests who forgathered there. Antigamus, writing in Tlic Oxford Fackd} in 1 7 14, thus stigmatises the married clergy : —
" Hence, hence ye Matrimonial-Tools, Ye thin-legged, pale-fac'd, meagre Train Ye Proselytes to empty Rules, Framed by some nice Adulterer's Brain I Hence chilly, Threadbare Stoick Chastity, And welcome, well-fed, sprightly Leachery " !
Another poet writes " A Vindication of the Oxford Ladies " : —
" These strange Magnetic Ladies of the Town Who even draw to Church the Wanton Goum."
There are odes innumerable in praise of celibacy and free love : —
" What is't we look for in th' inconstant Sex, Born to molest us always and perjjlcx ? "
The Oxford dons, like some ancient Romans, were celibates for selfish reasons. " They married without love, and loved without delicacy or respect " ; " like
^ Published by J. Roberts, near Oxford Arms, in Warwick Lane, 2 Gibbon's " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empue.
158 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Metellus Numidicus, they thought that " had kind Nature allowed us to exist without the help of women, we should be delivered from a very troublesome companion"; and "could recommend matrimony only as the sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty." ^ One is forcibly reminded of what an Irish bishop said to the Nun of Kenmare : " I knew personally," writes Miss Cusack, " a Roman Catholic bishop, the late Dr. M'Carthy, of Kerry, who told me himself that he thought St. Paul's recommendation was intended to be of universal application, and that no one should marry. . , . The good bishop was once asked what was to become of the world if, by common consent, all men and women remained celibate ? He smiled, and replied that he did not think it would be much loss to the world if it came to an end." ^ The Oxford libertines, however, had no intention of allowing the race of mankind to become extinct by reason of their objection to marriage.
As for the " intellectual life " of Oxford at this period, Adam Smith, Dr. Johnson, Lord Malmesbury, Dean Swift, Lord Chesterfield, and Gibbon all join in deploring its decadence. In 1749 the first Professor of Natural Philosophy in Oxford was appointed at a salary of ^30 a year, which indicates the value set upon science by the theologians. Gibbon described his stay at Oxford as " the most idle and unprofitable time of his whole life " ; declaring that " the professors had given up even the pretence of teaching." There were several days in the middle of term when not a single reader entered the Bodleian Library. The truth is that Oxford was no worse than it had always been ; but the ideals of the people were being elevated. The public mind had been awakened,
1 Aulus Gellius, quoted by Gibbon.
^ " Life Inside the Church of Rome" : 1893.
OXFORD IN WESLEY'S TIME 159
amongst other things, by what Southey calls " the practice of giving girls a learned education, which began in England with the Reformation." ^ The eyes of the world had been opened to the absurd pre- tensions of the priests to be deemed the friends of learning or the guardians of morality ; and even Brodrick admits that " the nation at large had lost confidence in Oxford education."
As the Hanoverians became firmly established on the throne, a " new interest," as it was called, began to assert itself in Oxford. But the priestly habit of equivocation still prevailed, and the lack of principle amongst the dons is piquantly satirised in an advertise- ment, aj^ropos of the election of 1 7 5 3 : " Next week will be published A Discourse in which it will be proved to a Demonstration that Passive Obedience means Resistance, and that a love for Popery implies an Affection for the Reformation ; and that to assist the family of the Stuarts is the only way of securing the Protestant Succession. By a True Blue Parson." The sarcasm of another brochure is manifest in its title : " Oxford Honesty, or a Case of Conscience, humbly put to the worshipful and reverend Vice- Chancellor, the Heads of Houses, the Fellows, etc., of the University of Oxford ; whether one may take the oath of King George, and yet, consistently with Honour and Conscience and the Fear of God, may do all one can in favour of the Pretender ? Occasioned by the Oxford Speech and Oxford Behaviour at the opening of Radcliffe's Library, April 13th, 1749."
It was in vain that the Wesleys and Whitefield expended themselves in the effort to recall Oxford to its duties to God and to humanity. " They were called in derision," says Southey, " the Sacramentarians, Bible-bigots, Bible-moths, the Holy, or the Godly Club."
1 " Life of Wesley."
i6o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
The career of George Whitefield, son of the publican who kept the Bell Inn at Gloucester, well illustrates the desire for knowledge which prevailed amongst the lower classes. At fifteen he persuaded his mother to permit him to leave school. She, though in poor circumstances, not only wished him to continue at school, but meant to send him to the University. But the boy saw that she could not afford to gratify her ambition, and " that more learning would spoil him for a tradesman." Accordingly he " put on his blue apron and his snuffers, washed mops, cleaned rooms, and became a professed and common drawer." His mother gave up the inn to her married son ; and, as the brothers could not agree, she " permitted George to have a bed upon the ground in her house, and live with her, till Providence should point out a place for him."
At this crisis a servitor from Pembroke College, Oxford, called on them and gave them the marvellous news that " after all his college expenses for that quarter were discharged, he had received a penny," having obtained education and maintenance in return for his services.
"This will do for my son," cried the sanguine mother.
A loan of ten pounds was procured, and Whitefield entered Oxford as a servitor ; where, we are told, he " found the advantage of having been used to a public- house " ! " Many who could choose their servitor preferred him because of his diligent and alert at- tendance." Whitefield soon experienced the dangers of Oxford society, having "several chamber fellows who would fain have made him join them in their riotous mode of life " ; but " the strength as well as the singularity of his character " enabled him to come scatheless through the ordeaL John and Charles
THE OXFORD MAGDALENES i6i
Wesley and George Whitefield overcame the im- morality of Oxford by their own innate virtue ; and, finding it impossible to improve the university, went forth into the world to reclaim men and women to that Christianity which they had almost forgotten under the spiritual guidance of priests who drew their inspiration from Oxford and Cambridge. A bust of George Whitefield was unveiled at the large tabernacle which bears his name in Tottenham Court Road on May 12, 1906; and it illustrates the advance made by those who were excluded from Oxford in Whitefield's day, to find Lord Justice Cozens-Hardy presiding. Mr. Birroll, minister for education, who was the chief speaker, said, "in the eighteenth century the doors of Oxford were always opened to poverty, provided the would-be scholar was prepared to become a com- municant of the Established Church and willing to support the same under the servile conditions that obtained." ^
In 1753, Gibbon, disgusted by the practices at the university, " disclaimed Oxford for a mother," " revolted against the religion of his country," and became a Roman Catholic. In 1779 Oxford presented a pious petition through its chancellor, Lord North, against the Dissenters' Toleration Bill ; and it was only in 1825 that the mayor and bailiffs were released from the pecuniary penances imposed upon them in 1354 by the Bishop of Lincoln. Down to the date of Catholic emancipation, Oxford continued under the management of celibate priests, who, allowing for many honourable exceptions, were hardly capable of a desire higher than sensual grati- fication, and must have longed only to see sacerdotal- ism once more predominant in England. In 1829, the threatened reformation of the Church perturbed the torpid waters of the universities, and some attempt
^ Tribune, May 14, 1906.
L
1 62 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
was made to purify the moral atmosphere. In 1832 we hear of a penitentiary being established at Oxford " for an unfortunate and numerous class of females," the prospectus ^ of which says : " In Oxford the females who lead a life of prostitution may be divided into two classes : the one, those who are seduced from places of service; the other, children of Oxford parents who associate with and live near the prostitutes ; and the latter class nearly all enter into the path of vice before they are seventeen years of age, very many before they are sixteen, and some as young as fourteen years of age."
The colleges were governed by a set of unmarried sybarites of middle age, who were either priests or intended to become priests as soon as it suited their interests to take up a benefice ; surrounded by youth- ful imitators and pupils, some the sons of wealthy landlords, who attached no importance to education, others, poor scholars, performing menial offices for their clerical patrons in return for such opportunities of learning as the place afforded. Galton truly says that the medieval Church " practised the arts which breeders would use, who aimed at creating ferocious, currish, and stupid natures," and he adds : " a relic of this monastic spirit clings to our universities, who say to every man who shows intellectual power of the kind that they delight to honour, ' Here is an income of from one to two hundred pounds a year, with free lodging and various advantages in the way of board and society ; we give it to you on account of your ability ; take it, and enjoy it all your life if you like ; we exact no condition to your continuing to hold it but one, namely, that you should not marry.
1 Regulations of the Oxford Female Penitentiary : Baxter, Oxford, 1832.
2 " Hereditary Genius," by Francis Galton, 1869.
OXFORD LIQUORS 163
Immorality parties and drinking parties wore rife. The first, of course, cannot be discussed ; and with regard to the second, the mere enumeration of the special concoctions of liquor devised for their own consumption by the gluttonous dons and students, and advertised openly by local tradesmen, is a suf- ficient record of their disgrace. Most of the beverages bear sacerdotal names. Bishop, or spiced wine, for instance, is described as " one of the oldest winter- beverages known, and is to this day preferred to every other, not only by the youthful votary of Bacchus at his evening's revelry, but also by the grave don by way of a night-cap ; and probably derives its name from the circumstance that ancient dignitaries of the Church, when they honoured the university with a visit, were regaled with spiced wine." ^ Dean Swift wrots of it as follows : —
" Fini' oranges Well roasted with sugar and wine in a cup, Will make a sweet Bishop when gentlefolks sup."
Port wine is the foundation of Bishop ; Madeira of the drink called " Lawn Sleeves ; " claret of " Cardinal," and champagne of " Pope." " Lawn Sleeves," " Car- dinal" and " Pope," we are told, " owe their origin to some Brasenose Bacchanalians, and differed only from Bishop as the species from the genus " ! Cyder Bishop consisted of " one bottle of good cyder, a quarter of a pint of brandy, and two glasses of calves' feet jelly in a liquid state." Besides " Oxford Mull," there is " Oxford Punch " or " Classical Sherbet," in support of which it is stated that " Fielding mentions a clergyman who preferred punch to wine, for the orthodox reason that the former was a liquor nowhere spoken against in Scripture " ! The varieties of punch
1 " Oxford Nightcaps " ; a book which went through a number of editions, the one quoted from being that of iS6o.
1 64 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
in use at Oxford drinking- parties include Noyeau, Spiced, Tea, Gin, Red, Royal, Milk, Oxford Milk, and Restorative. Of the last named it is alleged that " many of the first statesmen of the present day (should they see this) will recognise it as the liquor invariably drunk by them at college before they attended their debating parties " ! There is also Leander Punch, invented by a Mr. Fellowes, Egg Punch, Almond Punch, Shrub Punch, and Cham- pagne Punch.
Possets, cups, rumfustian, rumbooze, and wassail- bowls, or " swigs," as they were called in Jesus College, were concocted in endless variety for the sacerdotal Vitelliuses. A receipt for a swig is as follows : " Half a pint of sugar, a pint of warm beer, nutmeg, ginger, four glasses of sherry, five additional pints of beer; stir it well, sweeten to your taste, let it stand covered for three hours ; add three or four slices of thin toast." A particular swig was named Brown Betty, " from one of the fair sex, ycleped a bedmaker, who invariably recommended the mixture so named as a never -failing panacea." Lamb's Wool, derived its name from La mas ubal, the day of the apple fruit, Lammastide, or Lammas. Brasenose seems to have been a particularly bibulous college :—
" Shall all our singing now be o'er Since Christmas carols fail ? No ! Let us shout one stanza more In praise of Brasenose ale !"
An honest Oxford don, when once asked why he did not take holy orders, being in that respect an exception to the general rule, candidly replied that " the pleasurable part of life, mirth and a bottle, was not consistent with the character of a clergyman, and he would not be a scandal to it as too many were." ' Such was Oxford at a time when it was, above all, a
NEWMAN AND ARNOLD 165
training place for the clergy of the Established Church, and a nursery for Anglican bishops, rather than a place of education for the general public. Such it is, to a large extent, at present : for, as Thackeray said, " universities are the last places into which reform penetrates." The race of Hugby and Crump is not yet extinct; and there is at least one Oxford-bred bishop on the bench who thinks " that this is a capital world for beggars, because he, being a beggar, has managed to get on horseback."
Before discussing the administration and endow- ments of both universities, we shall, in a new chapter, briefly consider the sacerdotal movement which took its rise in Oxford shortly after Catholic Emancipation, and which was the foundation of that organised and widespread ritualism which has long prevailed among the bishops and priests of the Church of England. In doing so, it would not be fair to leave out of con- sideration the number of excellent men, clerics as well as laymen, who passed through Oxford while it was misruled by the dominant clerical caste. It is one of the happy characteristics of Protestant as compared with Roman Catholic peoples that they can never be crushed into slavish uniformity. If, for instance, we find Oriel College producing a John Henry Newman to preach a gospel of sacerdotalism and disingenuous- ness, we shall also find it giving to the world a Thomas Arnold to declare that " the Kingdom of God is the perfect development of the Church of God ; and when priestcraft destroys the Church the Kingdom of God becomes an impossibility." ^
' "The Letters of Dr. Thomas Arnohl."
CHAPTER VII
" When recourse is had to instituted forms and ritual injunctions, there is always danger lest men be tempted to rest entirely upon these, and persuade themselves that a painful attention to such observances will atone for the want of genuine piety and virtue." — Hon. Gr. C. Brodeick, History of Oxford.
The latter-day history of the Church of England has been more radically influenced by what is known as the Oxford Movement than by, perhaps, any other cause. To it must be attributed ( i ) the Romanisation of the younger generation of priests ; (2) the further estrangement of the clerics from the laity; (3) the final and avowed fall of the Church from its national status to the level of an Anghcan sect, in opposition to public opinion, and demanding separate treatment for itself, in conjunction with the Roman and Jewish sects, notably with regard to elementary education.
We have Newman's authority for stating that a sermon preached by Keble in St. Mary's Church, Oxford, of which Newman was the vicar, marked the inausruration of the much discussed Tractarian or Ox- ford Movement. "On Sunday, July 14, 1833," says Newman, " Mr. Keble preached the assize sermon in the university pulpit. It was published under the title of ' National Apostasy.' I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833." John Keble, born in 1792, eight years older than Pusey and nine years senior to Newman, was educated by his father — a High Church clergyman, who professed a belief in the "divine right" of bishops. He was a fellow of Oriel College, and had
Hill ifc /'launders, Oxford.
Canon Pusey, of Christ Church, Oxford
His MachiavelHan policy was tliat of " disposiui;- of ultra-Protestantism by a side-wind, and teaeliini;- people Catholicism without their suspecting, while they .ire oulv bent on demolishing- Romanism." (p. 178.)
Preston, Penzance,
Kev. Johx Keble
■Writing- in opposition to the erection of the Martyrs' Memorial at Oxford, in 1839, Keble said : "Anytliing- wliich should separate the present Church from the Reformers 1 should hail as a great good." (.p. 192.) To face p. 166
KEBLE ON "NATIONAL APOSTASY" 167
been a candidate for the provostship in 1827, but was defeated mainly tiirough the opposition of Newman, also one of the fellows.
Newman, in after years, paid him the doubtful compliment of saying that if Keble had become pro- vost in 1827 there would have been no Oxford Move- ment; which means that the preferment would have so altered Keble that no sermon on national apostasy should ever have been preached and no slumbering Newman aroused to action ! But, as we shall see, there were more cogent reasons for the production of this- sacerdotal melodrama than the personal predilec- tions of the actors who adorned the stage. At the date of the delivery of this sermon Keble held the professorship of poetry in Oxford. Pusey, who had also been a fellow of Oriel College, had been appointed in 1828 to one of the richly-paid canonries of Christ Church, to which was annexed the regius professorship of Hebrew. Newman had taken priest's orders in 1824; at Pusey's suggestion had accepted a parochial curacy ; and in 1828 had been appointed vicar of St. Mary's — a benetice of which Oriel College was the patron, and whose parish church was recognised as the church of the university. The movement, therefore, as Brodrick puts it, " had from the first a centre and solid base of operations within the university."
What was the "national apostasy" denounced by Keble, and, as the result of which, the sacerdotal party within the Church of England sprang into existence ? It consisted of nothing more or less than the passage by Earl Grey's Government of the Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833, by which ten sine- cure Anglican bishoprics in Ireland were suspended " as from next avoidance." At that time, when there were only twenty-four bishops in England and Wales, an estabhshment of twenty-two lords spiritual was
1 68 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
quartered upon Ireland ; and the university dons regarded those Irish bishoprics as their own peculiar spoil and the fitting rewards of their own especial virtues — " the constitution of the university and colleges " being, as Brodrick says, " semi-ecclesiastical ; the heads were clerical dignitaries ; nearly all the fellows were bound to be in holy orders."
Nor were the ambitions of the dons unjustified. It was only in 183 i that one of their number, Richard Whately, for instance, who had been a fellow of Oriel at the same time as Keble, and who was afterwards head of St. Alban's Hall, with Newman as his vice- principal, had been appointed, straight from Oxford, to the princely position of archbishop of Dublin. Whately's, though not the best, was far from being a bad appointment. He took what he styled a " common sense " view of Christianity, opposed no less to the superstitions of the sacerdotalists than to those of the illiterate evangelicals. But he failed to differentiate between the extremes which he condemned. The sacerdotalist superstition in Oxford was (i) not a heartfelt belief but a professional cult; (2) was in- excusable, because its votaries had received the advan- tages of education; and (3) was not accompanied by a belief in the absolute necessity of personal virtue. The evangelical superstition ( i ) might be modified by education, (2) always included personal virtue as an essential element, and (3) was a genuine conviction operating inwardly, with no ulterior intention of practising upon the junior or weaker members of society for the profit of an individual or a class. Despite his idiosyncrasies, the rough and ready lon- homie and open hospitality of the logician ultimately induced the " ascendency " party in the Irish capital to accept him ; and he found the Roman archbishop, Dr. Murray, who had grown to manhood in the humble
THE IRISH BISHOPlilCS 169
days before 1829, inclined to be obliging and sub- servient. But Whately's usefulness as an Irish public man ceased when he was confronted with Cardinal CuUen, fresh from Rome, with higher conceptions of the divine right of bishops and priests than even Keble and Pusey ; and no Protestant or Anglo-Catholic bishop in Ireland has ever since retrieved the position held by Whately up to 1852, when he resigned his membership of the Board of National Education.
Whately's appointment had fired the ambition of all the dons in Oxford. Polemical priests who attracted the notice of party-leaders by deliverances couched in the tone of Keble's sermon on " National Apostasy " ; relatives of territorial magnates ; successful tutors and schoolmasters whose pupils possessed wealth and influ- ence-— all of these had been used to look upon an Irish bishopric, deanery, or lesser dignity, as a possible climax to their careers. The lucky recipients went to Ireland as strangers ; claimed one-tenth of the property of every Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and Churchman in their districts by a divine right, which they relied on the British army to enforce ; and lived like the county aristocrats with whom they associated, collect- ing their rents and tithes through agents and tithe- farmers, and performing no useful spiritual duties.
The characters of those Irish bishops are " writ large " in the literature of the eighteenth century. A passing reference to them will be found in the pages of Lecky.^ Archbishop Bolton said that " a true Irish bishop had nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat, rich, and die " — except, perhaps, when he was hanged, as Bishop Atherton of Waterford was in 1640.^ Jeremy Taylor, George Berkeley, and some
1 " History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. i. pp. 205 and 206.
^ For an unnatural offence, thereby, as Lecky says, giving rise to " the only law against this crime on the Irish statute book."
170 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
lesser men shine out like stars in the black tirniament of the Anglican Church in Ireland. But there have been greater theologians than the first, and greater metaphysicians than the second, who never beheld as much money in one sum as would make a quarter's salary for an Irish bishop, and who never saw the interior of a palace. The eminence of such men as Taylor and Berkeley, therefore, is creditable to their own personalities and to human nature, rather than to the establishment of which they were the highly-paid officials.
Dean Swift's sarcasm on the Anglican bishops in Ireland is well known. " Excellent and moral men," he said, " have been selected on every occasion of vacancy. But it unfortunately has uniformly hap- pened that, as these worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath, on their way to Ireland to take possession of their bishoprics, they have been regularly robbed and murdered by the highwaymen frequenting that common, who seized upon their robes and patents, came over to Ireland, and were consecrated bishops in their stead." The " Polish magnificence " of Primate Stone, towards the end of the eighteenth century, is described by Richard Cumberland,-^ who dilates upon the freedom with which the glass circulated and the mitre mingled with the cockade " in several pre- latical houses." It was in this way that the morals of Oxford, borrowed from Rome, were transplanted to Ireland ; and it is no exaggeration to say that the Emerald Isle is still suffering from the results.
But the immorality of the clerical place-holders was more than equalled by the greed of the clerical place-hunters in Oxford and elsewhere ; and there was not even the inducement of promotion for a talented
1 Cumberland's " Memoirs."
THE CASE OF FATHER KIRWAN 171
Irishman to exchange Romanism for the Christianity of the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Father Kirwan, one of the best types of Irishmen known to history, left the Church of Rome in 1787, and joined the Established Church. "Though I have changed the sphere of my exertions," he said, " they shall still, under God, be directed to the same object — to improve the human heart, to enlarge and enlighten the understanding of men, banish religious prejudices, and diffuse through society the great blessings of peace, order, and natural affection." His powers of pulpit oratory are described as equal to Whitefield's ; and Sir Jonah Barrington compared his eloquence to that of Curran and Sheridan. When he preached, " watches, jewels, and bracelets were often flung in fits of uncontrollable enthusiasm into the plate ; " and palisades had to be erected at the doors of the churches to keep out " the overwhelming throng." The governors of all the Dublin day-schools passed a resolution calling on the vestries " to secure to their city an instrument under Providence of so much public benefit."
Had Kirwan been made Archbishop of Dublin he might have won the whole island over to Christianity, so impressed would the Irish Catholics have been by his elevation ; but there was no chance for such a man. Lord Westmoreland, in offering him a living worth i^200 a year, said: "It is far, far below your merits, but Government must reserve its high rewards for the services of its friends"! In 1792, Henry Grattan said of Kirwan : " This man preferred our country and our religion, and brought to both genius superior to what he found in either. He called forth the latent virtue of the human heart, and taught men to discover in themselves a mine of charity of which the proprietors had been unconscious. In feeding the
172 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
lamp of charity lie has almost exhausted the lamp of life. He came to interrupt the repose of the pulpit, and shakes one world with the thunder of the other. The preacher's desk becomes the throne of light." Then Grattan goes on to ask, " What reward ? St. Nicholas Within or St. Nicholas Without. The curse of Swift is upon him, to have been born an Irishman and a man of genius, and to have used it for the good of his country." Eight years afterwards Lord Corn- wallis " bestowed on him the small deanery of Killala, though he had been recognised for thirteen years as incomparably the foremost man in the Irish Church." ^ Had he been appointed to a bishopric, the bibulous gluttons of Oxford would, doubtless, have denounced the act as a " national apostasy."
Those Anglican bishoprics in Ireland, then, where five-sixths of the people were Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, were sinecures of the most indefensible kind; and it was in protest against the abolition of those sinecures, we are told, that the Oxford Move- ment had its mercenary origin. Fully alive as one may be to the excellent characters of the present Protestant bishops in that country, one fears the obstinate attach- ment of the Irish peasantry to Roman Catholicism may be attributed in a great degree to the un-Christian conduct of those old tithe-collecting bishops, whose ranks were so justifiably thinned in 1833 by Earl Grey.
There is a singular lack of simplicity in the char- acters of all the leaders of this Oxford Movement. Keble had published "The Christian Year " in 1827, the year in which his candidature for the provostship of Oriel had been defeated, to encourage, as he said, " a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical
1 " Histor}' of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," Lecky, vol. ii. pp. 506-8.
KEBLE AND NEWMAN 173
religion;" intending it to be a kind of poetical com- panion to the Book of Common Prayer.
" Wlio loves tlie Lord aright
No soul of man can worthless find ; All will be precious in His sight Since Christ on all hath shined."
Yet the author of those pious strains became savage as a tigress robbed of her whelps at the prospect of seeing the prizes of the clerical profession reduced in number. The poet who set to rhyme that noblest of all gospels, " Pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you," was the same preacher who denounced the King's Government as apostates, in language redolent of that old law which said : " Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." So true is it, despite the high standard of disinterestedness claimed for Keble, that, as the Apostle said, " the love of money is the root of all evil." Two years after his sermon, Keble, while retaining his professorship, took possession of the valuable living of Hursley, to which, following the custom of the times, a rich pupil, Sir Wilham Heath- cote, had generously presented him. Keble was the opponent of everything evangelical and liberal. " He was shy of me," writes Newman, " in consequence of the marks which I bore upon me of the evangelical and liberal schools."
Newman's birth and education were very dissimilar to Keble's. He was the son of a London banker, or money-dealer, of foreign extraction, whose bank sus- pended payment when his son was only eighteen years old. Though Newman gave Keble the credit of originating the sacerdotal movement, his state- ment must be received with caution. Before 1833,
174 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Newman, like Keble, had been considered a man of evansfelical views. He had been " converted " at fifteen. He was connected with the Bible Society, and acted as secretary to the Oxford branch of the Church Missionary Society, two great associations in which Nonconformists co-operated with Churchmen in the work of evangelisation. The first clue we get to his character is in an anonymous circular issued by him, as secretary of the Church Missionary Society, in which he broached a scheme for "jockeying" Nonconformists out of the management of that association. His part in the transaction being dis- covered, he was dismissed from the secretaryship in 1830; and in the same year voluntarily severed his connection with the Bible Society.
In 1832, Newman and his friend, Hurrell Froude, went abroad, and, early in 1833, we find them in Rome, interviewing Nicholas Wiseman. " We got introduced to him," says Froude,^ " to find out whether they would take us in on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found, to our dismay, that not one step could be gained without swallowing the Council of Trent as a whole." It was Froude who brought Newman and Keble together, and he compared himself on that account to " the murderer who had done one good thing in his life " ! Newman says of Froude : " He professed openly his admiration of the Church of Rome and his hatred of the Reformers. He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty. He had a deep devotion to the Real Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was powerfully drawn to the Medieval Church but not to the Primitive."
It was while he was on such a mission that Newman
1 " Hurrell Froude's Remains," vol. i. p. 306.
THE RIGHT TO LIE 175
sent home a letter, for dissemination amongst his friends in Oxford, in which he described the Roman CathoHc religion as " polytheistic, degrading, and idola- trous " ! And it was on his return from that mission that he heard Keble's sermon.
His object, undoubtedly, was to gain secret admis- sion into the Roman Church, and get a papal dis- pensation, permitting him to hold his preferment and ofldciate in the Church of England at the same time. But at that date the fortunes of the Italian hierarchy had not fallen to the pitch at which they could entertain such a proposition. He could not be admitted without accepting all the Tridentine decrees ; and if he accepted theuj privately, it must have been on the understanding that public con- version should take place at the discretion of the papal authorities. Rev. William Palmer, one of the Tractarians, says of this visit to Rome, that " Froude had with Newman been anxious to ascertain the terms upon which they could be admitted to the Roman Church, supposing that some dispensation might be granted which would enable them to communicate with Rome without violation of con- science." ^ In order to make this sentence intelli- gible we must insert, after the words " communicate with Rome," the words " and officiate in the Church of England."
Newman afterwards denied that they ever " thought of being received into the Catholic Church while they still remained outwardly professing the doctrine and communion of the Church of England." But a denial from Newman does not carry conviction with it. In his work on the " Arians of the Fourth Century," published shortly after Keble's sermon, he upheld the
^ Palmer's " Narrative of Events connected with ' Tracts for the Times.'"
176 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
doctrine of Clement of Alexandria, that a Christian should be prepared to tell hes for the good of " The Church."^ His own opinion on the righteousness of lying supplies us with one of the most peculiar instances on record of the inadequacy of great talents to obliterate the defects of moral character. " For myself," he writes, " I can fancy myself thinking it was allowable in extreme cases to lie, but never to equivocate " ! And again, " Supposing I was driven up into a corner, I think I should have a right to say an untruth " ! ^
When Charles Kingsley, in 1864, quoted Newman as his authority for saying that "truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy," Newman replied with a pamphlet, in which he denied the charge with all the appearance of righteous indignation and injured innocence, and with the highest literary ability. But he soon afterwards informed Sir WilHam Cope by letter that his indignation had been simulated ! None of Newman's intimate associates were more truthful than himself; the motto of Rev. W. G. Ward, for instance, being : " Make yourself clear that you are justified in deception, and then lie like a trooper " ! ^
Newman's philosophy of lying seems to have con- tributed to his popularity with the world at large in after years, when he published ]iis " Apologia." It is true that men and women have told lies in all ages, and do tell lies, and yet that the human race has managed to exist. But it is equally true that all modern improvements date from the moment we gave
' For a full account of the reprehensible practices of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, the reader is referred to that exhaustive and able work, " The Secret History of the Oxford Movement," by Walter Walsh, which has had a most widespread circulation.
2 " Apologia Pro Vita Sua."
' " W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement."
PUSEY'S CHARACTER 177
up the awesome study of mystery and untruth in supernature, and began fearlessly to study science, or, in other Avords, truth in nature, which includes a personal knowledge of Christ. Those who cling to truth may also find consolation in the thought that no man ultimately looked back with satisfaction upon having told a lie, or upon the consequences which flowed from a lie. To justify lying is there- fore wrong, even from a rational standpoint, if we had no higher revelation. To do so was especially wrong in one like Newman, who set himself up as a teacher of youth and an expounder of morality.
Keble's sermon seems to have revealed to Newman a new leverage on which to work up the movement which, he admits, he came back from Italy determined to inaugurate. If he had a secret commission from Rome, it must have been of a vague and general nature. His severance from the Church Missionary and Bible societies are sufficient to explain his change of tactics ; but it must have been the inspiration of Keble's sermon which now led him to speak of his movement as one for the defence of " The Church," by which he gave his audience to understand that he meant the episcopal and sacerdotal establishment founded upon tithes, or property given in lieu of tithes. " We are just settmg up here societies for the defence of the Church," he wrote ; " we do not like our names known, but we hope the plan will succeed " ^ — a legitimate object in connection with which no honest Church of England clergyman should not have feared to publish his name.
Pusey, who had been appointed to his canonry by the Duke of Wellington, was one of those men who might reasonably have looked forward to a bishopric. Unlike Keble or Newman, he was regarded as a
' " Newman's Correspondence."
M
178 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
man of rationalist views, and an upholder of the then recent German theology. His real name was Edward Bouverie, and he took the additional name of Pusey from a small village in Berkshire, of which his father became lord of the manor after Pusey's birth. He joined the Tractarians at the end of 1833, though he did not contribute his tract on baptism till 1835, and did not begin to co-operate with Newman and Keble in translating the works of the Fathers until 1836, when this strange trio — High Churchman, Low Churchman, and Rationalist Churchman — all made common cause in defence of the pecuniary endowments of the profession. Pusey's position in the university was higher, as well as more lucrative, than those of his colleagues ; and his Machiavellian plan of campaign was as follows : " I know not that the popish controversy may not just be the very best way of handling ultra-Protes- tantism, i.e. neglecting it, not advancing against, but setting Catholic views ay^ainst Roman Catholicism, and so disposing of ultra-Protestantism by a side-wind, and teaching people Catholicism without their sus- pecting, while they are only bent on demolishing Romanism. I suspect we might thus have people with us instead of against us, and that they might find themselves Catholics before they were aware " !
The cunning Pusey realised that the Irish bishop- rics had been abolished in deference to Roman Catholic sentiment, and he reasoned astutely that a good method of combating that sentiment in Eng- land miofht be to make friends with it. In his own words to Manning in 1 844, he " only desiderated more love for Rome"; but we may judge of how little disinterestedness his love was made up, by the fact that he clung to his canonry in Christ Church to the day of his death. In 1835, when Nicholas
Nicholas Wiseman, Cardinal
"lu 1832 Newman and liis friend, Hurrell Fronde, went abroad, and, early in 1833, we find them iu Rome iuterviowiui,'- Nichola.-i Wiseman." (p. 174.) " In 1835 wliJn Wiseniau's lectures on Roman Catholicism were published, it was Pnsev who nroeil Is'ewmau to review them sympathetically." (p. 179.) In 1838 Gladstone and Manning " visited Rome together and liad an interview with Wiseman." (p. 184.)
To /ace p. 178
THE TRACTS 179
Wiseman's lectures on Roman Catholicism were pub- lished, it was Pusey who urged Newman to review them sympathetically in The British Critic, the sacer- dotal organ, with a view to scoring a victory over ultra-Protestantism. By " ultra-Protestantism " he meant the practice of Christianity, and the term included all sincere Low Churchmen as well as Dissenting Christians who detested Romanism as the antithesis of Christianity. Pusey regarded the Roman hierarchy as a rival firm in opposition to the Anglican establishment. He would fight Rome with an Anglo-Catholic theology calculated to prove that English priests were as supernatural as Roman. He would deceive English Christians, by leading them to think that his commercial opposition to Rome implied a love of Christianity and a hatred of priest- craft. Having got them to make common cause with him in opposition to Rome, he would teach them Catholicism '■' without their suspecting," and ensnare them in the toils of an Anglican priestcraft which differed in no respect from the Roman. Newman used to call Pusey o yae''ya? — the great man — and says, "he at once gave to us a position and a name. Without him," he adds, "we should have had Kttle chance of making any serious resistance to the Liberal aggression" — a frank avowal of the true object of the Oxford sacerdotal movement.
The method adopted for advancing the views of this society for the defence of the Church was the issue of tracts on questions of ecclesiastical doctrine, the dominating purpose of the writers being to set up within the Church of England a supreme clerical tribunal to settle questions of faith and morals on the model of the Roman papacy. In Tracts 15 and 20, published in 1833, Newman went dead against Rome. " The whole Roman Communion," he wrote.
1 80 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" bound itself, by a perpetual bond and covenant, to tbe cause of Anti-Christ." " Their Communion is in- fected with heresy," he said ; " we are bound to flee it as a pestilence." Newman also preached sermons in support of his views on Sunday afternoons in St. Mary's church, which were largely attended by dons and students, and thus enlisted the willing sympathies of the university for the Tractarian movement. Keble wrote on apostolical succession, marriage with the unbaptized, and the mysticism of the Fathers of the Church ; Williams on reserve in communicating re- ligious knowledge ; Pusey on fasting and baptism.
We do not propose to go into the doctrinal ques- tions discussed in the Tracts produced by those Anglican disciples of Nicolo Machiavelli. Looking through them now, with our knowledge of the radical changes in the endowments of the Church which were being made at the time by statute law, one cannot help regarding them as a vast quantity of dust thrown in the face of an awakened public opinion which was beginning to question the hona fides of the episcopal, capitular, and scholastic mono- polies of the Established Church ; and there is no truth in them.
There was one man in the university who had excited the ire of the Tractarians in an especial degree, and that was Renn Dickson Hampden. He was a year younger than Keble, seven years senior to Pusey, and eight to Newman. He too had been a fellow of Oriel, but had gone out into the world and had come into contact with the people, as curate in several populous parishes. He returned to the uni- versity after twelve years, out of touch with the medievalists ; was appointed Bampton lecturer in 1832 ; and preached his lectures, according to custom, from the pulpit of St. Mary's church. His subject
ANTI-HAMPDEN AGITATION
i«i
was " The Scholastic Philosophy in Relation tu Chris- tian Theology " — a theme calculated to bring him into condict with Romanists and medievalists, who regarded scholastic philosophy and Christian theology as almost synonymous terms.
Newmans mind in 1832 was pre-occupied with what Gibbon calls " the mud of the Arian controversy ; " and as the vicar of St. Mary's he was especially in- terested in the Bampton lectures. His point of view may be gathered from his own statement. " It came strongly upon me, from reading first the Monophysite controversy, and then turning to the Donatist, that we were external to the Catholic Church." In this there is no proof of love for Christ or for righteousness, but only such an admiration for the mystery of priestcraft as a city liveryman might entertain for the mystery of grocers, or any of those other city mysteries, or companies, which have managed to annex such a vast quantity of property. He accused Hampden of Arianism, or, in other words, of denying the divinity of Christ, and issued a pamphlet, curiously entitled " Elucidations of Dr. Hampden's Theological State- ments," which had the ellect of drawing public attention to the alleged heresy. An agitation was industriously fomented against Hampden, and a resolution condemning him for his " heresy " was actually passed by a meeting of Convocation, thereby showing the influence of the sacerdotalists in the university. Newman gave a series of lectures on his own account in St. Mary's, in which he upheld what he described as the Via Media of the Anglo- Catholic Church, or a middle course between Romanism and Protestantism, between Sacerdotalism and Christi- anity.
But the enmity of the sacerdotalists did not check Hampden's career. He rose by successive steps until,
1 82 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
in 1836, he was appointed by the Government to the regius professorship of divinity, which just then fell vacant, and which the Tractarians had earmarked for one of themselves. The blow was, in a small way, almost as stunning as the loss of the Irish bishoprics. The sacerdotalists formed themselves into an " Anti- Hampden Committee " ; and Pusey and Newman got up a petition to the Crown to recall Dr. Hampden's nomination, in which they openly accused their victim of Arianism. And when Lord Melbourne, who was then Prime Minister, rejected their petition, they canvassed the Hebdomadal Council, whose members were with them, and got it to pass a vote of censure on Hampden, which was only defeated in Convocation by the proctor's veto. Hampden was banned by the university, and deprived of many privileges of his office. Students were primed to refuse to present themselves for examination by him in such subjects as tradition and transubstantiation ; and, altogether, he was subjected to the most spiteful persecution by the sacerdotalists.
While the Tractarians were fomenting disturbance from 1833 to 1836, outraging the feelings of religious citizens by a deluge of Tracts advocating the re- establishment of Roman sacerdotalism in the Church of England ; and, above all, while the anti-Hampden agitation was at its height in 1836 and 1837, the first Ecclesiastical Commission was inquiring into episcopal revenues and adjusting episcopal incomes ; and, furthermore, the stiU greater process of tithe commutation, with its attendant exposures of the anti- Christian incidents of tithe collection, was being discussed and perfected in Parliament. One result of the Tractarian movement, therefore, was to divide and divert the force of public opinion, and to distract attention from those sacerdotal endowments and
MANNING AND GLADSTONE 183
monopolies which, since the conversion of the Em- peror Constantino, have been the chief cause of ecclesiastical scandals and abuses.
Besides Keble, Pusey, and Newman, there were two other Oxford men whose connection with the sacerdotal movement must be noticed. Henry Edward Manning, born in 1808, and son of a rich West India merchant, who held the post of governor of the Bank of England in 18 I 2, was sixteen years younger than Keble, eight years junior to Pusey, and seven to Newman. He was educated at Harrow, where his conduct differed in no respect from that of the other sons of rich men to be found there. When he went to Balliol College, Oxford, however, his father suffered a reverse of fortune which compelled Manning to work for his living; and in 1830 he became a clerk in the Colonial Office. Shortly afterwards he became ''■ converted " under evangelical influence ; resigned his clerkship in 1832; returned to Oxford, where he secured election to a fellowship in Merton College, and entered holy orders. He at once paid attentions to a Miss Sargent, whom he married in 1833, and by whose grandmother he was presented to the rectory of Lavington in Sussex. Mrs. Manning died in 1837, when the Tractarian movement and the anti-Hampden agitation were at their height, leaving Manning at liberty to re-commence his career.
William Ewart Gladstone, more than a year younger than Manning, was a Scotsman born in Liverpool, and the son of a wealthy merchant and slave-owner. He was bred in an evangelical atmosphere, and we have his mother's assurance for it that he was truly " converted " in boyhood. At Eton he was distinguished for his virtue and industry, and he went thence in 1828 to Christ Church, Oxford, the headquarters of Anglican sacerdotalism, where he came under the influence of Pusey. Gladstone intended to enter holy orders, and
184 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
would probably have taken up the Church as a career, but for the remonstrance of his father, who advised him to go into politics. In 1833 he was returned to Parliament as member for Newark and an ultra-Tory. He had been opposed to the first Reform Bill, and he now opposed the abolition of slavery by quotations from the Bible. In the same year he joined the Trac- tarians : " Gladstone has joined us," exclaimed Newman. In 1834, while the Government were blocking the movement for a free university in London, Gladstone opposed Joseph Hume's bill for the admission of Dissenters to the universities.
Manning and Gladstone were not only contem- poraries, but intimate acquaintances ; and those two remarkable men assisted in putting the High Church policy into practice, one in the parishes, the other in the political world. On the death of his wife in 1837, Manning joined the sacerdotalists, and published a sermon entitled " The Rule of Faith," which is, so to speak, his own confession of faith in medievalism ; and in 1838 he wrote an open letter to Dr. Otter, bishop of Chichester, censuring the Ecclesiastical Commission. In 1838 Gladstone also published a work, now chiefly remembered through Macaulay's review, " The State in its Relations with the Church," which was the author's complicated profession of implicit belief in the necessity for a compulsory endowment of the medieval Church system, and is one of the dullest books ever written. Gladstone had been opposed to the abolition of the Irish bishoprics, and maintained that the subsidisation of a medieval Church was as indispensable in Ireland as in England; and in December, 1838, he and Manning visited Rome to- gether, and had an interview with Doctor, afterwards Cardinal, Wiseman.
Gladstone, as a rising young Puseyite, was almost
MACAULAY AND GLADSTONE 185
in favour of a theocracy. As Macaulay said, " Mr. Gladstone's whole theory rests on this great funda- mental proposition, that the propagation of religious truth is one of the principal ends of government, as government." As a sample of Gladstone's casuistical style, we may quote the following : " Wherever there is power in the universe," he wrote, " that power is the property of God, the King of that universe — His property of right, however for a time withholden or abused. Now this property is, as it were, realised, is used according to the will of the owner, when it is used for the purposes He has ordained, and in the temper of mercy, justice, truth, and faith which He has taught us. Those principles never can be truly, never can be permanently, entertained in the human breast, except by a continual reference to their source, and the supply of the Divine grace. The powers, therefore, that dwell in individuals acting as a govern- ment, as well as those that dwell in individuals acting for themselves, can only be secured for right use by applying to them a rehgion." " The governing body in a State " must " profess a religion " for the following among other reasons : " First, because it is composed of individual me7i ; and they, being appointed to act in a definite moral capacity, must sanctify their acts done in that capacity by the offices of religion ; inasmuch as the acts cannot otherwise be acceptable to God, or anything but sinful and punishable in themselves " ! This proposition, as Macaulay pointed out, in a casti- gation which must have awakened Gladstone's common sense, applied as cogently to the board of directors of the then recently-established Liverpool and Birming- ham railway, as to the British Government; but, absurd as it now seems, it was in no way more nonsensical than the doctrines advocated in the Tracts — and which Macaulay considered beneath notice.
1 86 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
By the end of 1838 the pecuniary endowments of the profession seemed to be in no further danger. Tithe commutation was an estabUshed fact ; and the Ecclesiastical Commission was recognised as a friendly surgeon, bent upon restoring the maximum of health to a debilitated patient, even at the cost of inflicting some brief but acute pain. In 1840, when the policy of suppressing canonries had reached its limits, the passage of the second Ecclesiastical Commission Act transformed that body into a species of Church Council, with power to increase the incomes of the poorer clergy. It is probable that many of the re- sponsible managers of the Church would now have put an end to the sacerdotal movement in Oxford, and reverted to the status quo ante helium of 1832, before the introduction of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill. They saw that the dislike of priestcraft con- tinued to grow amongst the people ; and when William Howitt published his " Popular History of Priestcraft " in 1833, and his " Pantika " on the same lines in 1835, both books, being the first of their kind published in England, had a widespread circulation.
Archbishop Howley, Bishop Blomfield, and others, whose mcomes had been made public with recom- mendations for their reduction, were smarting under the disclosure ; and may have been inclined to pro- long the sacerdotal turmoil. But, as perferment lies with the Crown and Cabinet, the rising men of the Church professed an anxiety to please the dispensers of patronage, who, in their turn, desired to please the electorate.
William Howley was the titular head of the Church all through the Tractarian movement, having been archbishop of Canterbury from 1828 to 1848. He had been regius professor of divinity in Oxford from 1809 to 181 3, and had then been promoted to the
ARCHBISHOP HOWLEY 187
bishopric of London — a position in which, as we have said, he made himself famous by declaring, during George IV.'s disputes with Carohne, that the con- stitutional fiction " the King can do no wrong," applied to morals. In 1828 the King had rewarded him with the archbishopric ; and his ex-chaplain, C. J. Blomtield, succeeded him in London. In 1829 Howley resisted Catholic emancipation, to which his majestic patron, then almost exhausted with debauchery, was also opposed, as he had been to every relaxation of the penal laws against dissenting Christians. Why should a sovereign support any measure of equality for the benefit of those Christians who thought that Christian virtue should be practised as well as preached, and who dared to dissent from a Church which threw its motherly cloak over the royal misdemeanours ? Howley continued to oppose every measure for the relief of Nonconformists, and did nothino- to discountenance sacerdotalism.
The parochial incumbents soon found their incomes assured without difficulty of collecting; and, as the operations of the Ecclesiastical Commission tended to increase the patronage and power of the bishops, the solidarity of the profession was enhanced. The new cult of sacerdotalism, therefore, which aimed at the perfect organisation of Roman days, recommended itself to the parsons of every shade — High, Broad, Low, and Rationalist — who had combined in defence of the tithes and the professional prizes ; and who now lent a willing ear to those who pointed out the way to regain that supernatural status conceded to priests in pre-Reformation times.
Gladstone got married in 1839, and, though he retained his interest in religion, soon found in domesticity and politics ample scope for his im- measurable energies. But Keble, Pusey, and Newman,
1 88 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
for whom substantial preferment now seemed unattain- able, found no such distraction in their seclusion. Pusey, it is true, had his rich canonry. Keble was ensconced at Hursley, practising ritualism in his parish church; approving all that Newman did; hearing Pusey's confessions, administering absolutions and im- posing penances, and reaping a large profit from the sale of his " Christian " poetry. But Newman had nothing beyond his inconsiderable vicarage, and it was he who, at the end of 1838, took the first definite step towards Romanising the Church of England by hirincr a house in Oxford for the accommodation of young men whom he proposed to form into a monastic order. The university was then so bereft of emuient literary or scientific men that Newman, who had now become editor of Tke British Critic, was regarded as the most remarkable personality in Oxford.
The house was to be " a reading and collating establishment," and the young men were to justify their presence in it by saying that they had come " to help in editing the Fathers." Newman called the place a Coenobitium ; and among its first inmates was James Mozley, who was twelve years junior to Newman, and who ultimately became regius professor of divinity in 1871. Mozley had just stood for a fellowship of Luicoln College — whose head and fellows were anti-Puseyite, and therefore considered " low and slow" by high and fast Oxford — and had been re- jected because of his Puseyite opinions. Another inmate of the " collating establishment " was Mark Pattison, a coeval of Mozley's and a graduate of Oriel. In 1840 Pattison was elected to a fellowship of Lincoln by a trick. " The head and fellows," writes Newman, "have been taken in by Pattison this last term, an inmate of the Coenobitium. He happened to stand very suddenly, and they had no time to
STOPPAGE OF THE TRACTS 189
inquire. They now stare in amazement at their feat." ^ Pattison was ordained priest in 1843, and twenty-one years after became rector of Lincoln College, a post which he held until his death in 1884. In his posthumous autobiography he says : " Since the year 185 I I have lived wholly for study. There can be no vanity in making this confession, for, strange to say, in a university ostensibly endowed for the culti- vation of science and letters, such a life is hardly regarded as a creditable one."
The year 1841 was remarkable in the history of Anglican sacerdotalism — (i) for the stoppage of the publication of the Tracts; (2) for Pusey's visit to Ireland to study the Catholic conventual system there; and (3) for the promotion of Manning to the archdeaconry of Chichester. In Tract 90, Newman had examined and criticised the Thirty- nine Articles, and declared that they did not deny the creed of the Roman Catholic Church, but were only a con- demnation of prevalent " popular " errors at the time ! If this insupportable falsehood were accepted, it would follow as a matter of course that men who had gfiven their assent to the Tridentine decrees, and were in full communion with Rome, might subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles 'without violation of conscience." The appearance of the Tract aroused the diocesan authority to action ; Dr. Bagot, bishop of Oxford, requested that the Tracts should thenceforth cease to be published, and the request was tamely complied with. Four senior tutors, one of them being Dr. Tait, who subsequently became archbishop of Canterbury, issued a protest against this Tract, which they truly described as " suggesting and opening a way by which men might violate their solemn engagements to the university." The Roman Catholics say that Tait's
^ " Newman's Letters."
190 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
action was dictated by a desire for preferment, and allege that he was secretly a Puseyite. The Anglo- Catholics, on their part, consider him a most undis- tinguished Churchman, a mere " practical " person, somewhat like Whately, who " took no part in the Oxford Movement," and one never hears a word of praise for him in their writings.
Bishop Shuttleworth, in promoting Manning to the archdeaconry of Chichester, gave the sacerdotalists their first opportunity of putting their theories into practice in the parishes. Manning was a most " ad- vanced" ritualist at this time. "He offered up," says his biographer, Mr. Purcell, " the Eucharistic Sacrifice for the quick and the dead. He received penitents in confession; and, exercising the power of the keys, he loosed them from their sins ; pronouncing in due form, while making over them the sign of the cross, the words of absolution." Purcell furthermore says: "It was a common practice for Manning, even in the days when in his charges and sermons he was denouncing Romanism and the Popes, to hear confessions at Laving- ton and Oxford, as well as at Wantage and elsewhere."
In 1 840 Rev. W. J. Butler, vicar of Wantage, who afterwards became Dean of Lincoln, thus wrote to Manning for sympathy : " The difficulty with which I am confronted in the practice of hearing confessions is the opposition to be feared on the part of the hus- band to the wife's opening her grief to another man " ! About the same time Newman confided in Manning as follows : " I think that, whenever the time comes that secession to Rome takes place, for which we must not be unprepared, we must boldly say to the Protestant section of our Church — 'You are the cause of this ; you must concede ; you must conciliate ; you must meet the age. Give us more services, more vest- ments and decorations in worship ; give us monasteries.
PUSEY AND MANNING BUSY 191
Till then you will have continual secessions to Rome.' " ^ Manning quickly turned his promotion to account, and in 1 84 1 began a personal visitation ■of every parish church and chapel-of-ease in his district of the diocese of Chichester, his progress lasting for two years, and set up the ritualistic system of worship which subsists there to the present day. He was appointed select preacher to the university in 1842, preached many of his sermons in St. Mary's, and published a work called " The Unity of the Church," which was a covert plea for union with Rome.
Ritualism was now fast spreading in the parishes north as well as south. While Newman was engaged in founding a monastic order, Pusey was devising a scheme to re-establish orders of nuns in the Church of England, beginning with sisters of mercy. Dr. Hook, vicar of Leeds, wrote to Pusey in 1840: "I perfectly agree with you in thinking it to be most important to have a class of persons acting under us, and answering to sisters of charity in some foreign churches." He anticipated " much opposition from those evangelical ladies who at present control the visiting societies ; " and therefore secrecy was neces- sary. He asked Pusey " to train an elderly matron," and send her down to Leeds, " to take lodgings with two or three other females." "Let their object be known to none but myself," he added. " and I would speak of them merely as well-disposed persons willing to assist my curates and myself."^
In June 1841, a lady named Marian Hughes was received into a convent established by Pusey in Oxford, taking the vow of celibacy in St. Mary's church, while Newman celebrated the communion service after the style of the Roman mass. This lady then went to
^ Purcell's " Life of Manning." • " Life of Dr. Pusey," vol. iii. p. 7.
192 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
France to study the organisation of the French nuns, and subsequently became superioress of Pusey's con- vents at Oxford, In August 1841 Pusey wrote to Newman from Ireland : " The Roman Catholics have been so civil that I have not known what to make of it." Archbishop Murray gave him carte blanche to study the administration of the Irish convents ; but we do not hear that he received any open hospitality from his old friend Whately.
It is typical of the spirit of freedom which can never be wholly suppressed even in the most reactionary quarter of England, that the " Martyrs' Memorial " — a monument to the memories of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer — should have been erected at Oxford in 1 840 and publicly unveiled in 1841, Writing in opposition to its erection, Koble said in 1839: "Anything which should separate the present Church from the Reformers, I should hail as a great good." Newman's brother-in- law, Thomas Mozley, rector of Plymtree, and brother of James Mozley, did not conceal the low esteem in which he held the three Christian bishops : " I have never yet succeeded in getting up an atom of affection or respect for the three gentlemen canonised in the Martyrs' Memorial at Oxford. As Lord Blachford once observed to me, ' Cranmer burnt well,' and that is all the good I know about him." ^
As the Oxford sacerdotal movement entered upon a new phase of its existence after 1841, we shall conclude our sketch of its origin, development, and ultimate results in a fresh chapter.
' Thomas Mozley's " Reminiscences of the Oxford Movement."
Stereoscop
Henry Edward Manning, Cardinal
Over two years before he resiyued the arch(Ie;ieoiirv of Chichester, " he knelt down one day in the Piazza di Spaaiia when he saw Pins IX. 's carriai;e approacli- ing- liini, and remained on las knees on the pavement until the pope had passed."
(1)^214.)
John Henry Newman, Cardinal
" Sup])osin'4- I was driven up into a corner, I think I should have a right to say an untruth." (]). 176.) jTo/acc^). 193
CHAPTER VIII
" Gash thyself, priest, and honour thy brute Baal, And to thy worst self sacrifice thyself. For with thy worst self thou hast clothed thy God."
^Tennyson, Aylmer's Field.
The chapelry of Littlemore, od the outskirts of Oxford, being then an appanage of St. Mary's parish, Newman removed his monastery thither in 1842, locating his " young monks," as he called them, in a range of dis- used stables or cottages. He had informed Pusey by letter of his intention to build a monastic house and live in it himself, and the canon gave the project his blessing — and, probably, a subscription. " Certainly," he wrote, " it would be a great relief to have a fxoi'}) ^ in our Church, in many ways, and you seem just the person to form one."
The subterfuges to which the Oxford sacerdotalists had recourse to conceal their real purpose from hostile critics, so that Newman might not lose his incumbency just yet, or Pusey his cauonry, or his disciples their chances of fellowships and other university prizes, seem contemptible in contrast with the self-sacritice and abandon of the devoted men who initiated new religious departures in former times, " Your offering for the young monks was just like yourself, and I cannot pay you a better compliment," Newman wrote to one subscriber. " We should begin next term ; but since, however secret one may wish to keep it, things get out, we do not yet wish to commit young men to
* An abiding place, or retreat.
»93 N
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anything which may hurt their chances of success at any college in standing for a fellowship."
Newman thought, or professed to think, that there Avas to be a great monastic revival, as the result of which outsiders would believe that a respectable paro- chial incumbent, like the vicar of St. Mary's, so far from being a leader, had been compelled to follow the fashion and turn his parsonage into a monastery ! With this theory in his mind, he wrote to another supporter thus : " Supposing I took theological pupils at Littlemore, might not my house be looked upon as a sort of hall depending on Oriel as St. Mary's Hall was ? And, further, suppose a feeling arose in favour of monastic establishments, and my house at Littlemore was obliged to follow the fashion, and con- form to a rule of discipline, would it not be desirable that such institutions should flow from the colleges of our two universities and be under their influence ? " Amongst the inmates of the monastery were Fred- erick Oakeley, Frederick S. Bowles, John B. Dalgairns, Ambrose St. John, Richard Stanton, Father Lockhart, and Albany Christie — from more than one of whom we have minute accounts of the conduct of the establish- ment. In the chapel they had " a large crucifix, bought at Lima by Mr, Crawley, a Spanish merchant living in Littlemore. It was what was called very pronounced — ^with the all but barbaric realism of Spanish art " ! Lockhart says : " We spent our time at Littlemore in study, prayer, and fasting. We rose at midnight to recite the breviary ofiice. We fasted according to the practice recommended in Holy Scripture and practised by the most austere religious orders of Eastern and Western Christendom." The curiosity of the univer- sity, which had nothing better to occupy its attention than the absurdities of this group of decadents in the Littlemore stables,'^'was raised, to white heat. " I
NEWMAN DECEIVES BAGOT 195
cannot walk into or out of my house," complained the modest Newman, " but curious eyes are upon me. Why will you not let me die in peace ? Wounded brutes creep into some hole to die in, and no one grudges it them. Let me alone (sic), I shall not trouble you long ! " Newman's features, even in his later photographs, woidd proclaim him to be a sturdy, over-cunning, and bellicose man ; and at the time he depicts himself as giving vent to this plaintive cry, he was only forty-one years of age, with more than half his life yet before him.
The passage of the Church Discipline Act in 1840, enabling parishioners, with the approval of the bishop, to take criminal proceedings against incumbents for illegal practices, had aroused Dr. Bagot, bishop of Oxford, to a sense of his responsibility. He had already warned Pusey that there was jubilation in Rome over Oxford's abandonment of Christianity. " There are now friends of mine staying at Rome — sensible men, too, and without gossip — and I am assured that the language of the Pope is that of joy and congratulation at the advances which are beinsr made in Oxford towards a return to the doctrines of the ' true Church.' " But the admonition had not affected Pusey 's behaviour. Bishop Bagot now asked the incumbent of St. Mary's for an explanation of conduct which he said "would appear to imply a glaring invasion of all ecclesiastical discipline on your part, or an inexcusable neglect and indifference to my duties on mine."
Newman's reply to the bishop, dated April 14, 1842, surpassed all his previous achievements in the art of prevarication. " I am very much obliged by your lordship's kindness," he began, " in allowing me to write to you on the subject of my little house at Littlemore; at the same time I feel it hard both on
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your lordship and myself that the restlessness of the public mind should oblige you to require an explana- tion of me." He assured the bishop that he was only employed in theological studies and " in the concerns of his own parish." " I have wished to give myself to a life of greater religious regularity than I have hitherto led," he said, "but it is very unpleasant to confess such a wish even to my bishop, because it seems arrogant, and because it is committing me to a profession which may come to nothing."
He had been charged with "being underhand and uncandid," and " he felt it very cruel," and he put the following impertinent case to the bishop for considera- tion : " May I take a case parallel, though different ? Suppose a person in prospect of marriage, would he like the subject discussed in newspapers, and parties, circumstances, &c., &c., publicly demanded of him, at the penalty of being accused of craft and duplicity ? " Having put this utterly untrue and misleading com- plexion on his conduct at Littlemore, he proceeded to " lie like a trooper." " The resolution I speak of," he said, " has been taken with reference to myself alone, and has been contemplated quite independent of the co-operation of any other human being." He had gone to live at Littlemore solely " for the good of his parish." " My population in Littlemore," he said, " is at least equal to that of St. Mary's in Oxford, and the whole of Littlemore is double of it. It has been very much neglected, and in providing a parsonage house at Littlemore, as this will be, I conceive I am doing a very great benefit to my people." The bishop seems to have taken no further steps for the sup- pression of the monastery, whose inmates continued their ritualistic practices.
The sacerdotalists were now drawing near the parting of the ways. They had produced no effect on the
PUSEY TRANSUBSTANTIATOR 197
general public, who remained untouched by, or an- tagonistic to, the revival of medievalism, which was confined to the Anglican priests in Oxford and Cam- bridge, and other priests in the parishes who drew their inspiration from the universities. A fresh move was advisable, and early in 1843 Newman inserted a public advertisement in the press,^ apologising for and retracting his previous strictures upon Rome. It was unsigned, but its authorship was known, and it por- tended a further step on the part of the composer. About the same time Pusey preached a sermon before the university, in which he practically announced his capacity to perform transubstantiation, and for which the authorities suspended him from preaching for three years. Pusey, however, outwitted thenj by pub- lishing his sermon under the seductive title of " The Eucharist, a Comfort to the Penitent," and it is said to have had a sale of nearly 20,000 copies.
As the Government and parliament were opposed to the sacerdotalists, it was becominsr a source of embarrassment to have Newman in the position of vicar of the university church. Bishop Bagot could not be deceived again, nor could he indefinitely ignore the doings at Littlemore. Newman resigned his in- cumbency in September 1843, and ceased to be responsible to Bagot or the university. " I have resigned St. Mary's," he wrote to Manning, " because I think the Church of Rome the Catholic Church, and ours no part of the Catholic Church, because not in communion with Rome, and because I feel that I could not honestly be a teacher in it any longer."
Towards the end of 1843 Gladstone, who had just been raised to the rank of Cabinet Minister by Peel, partially dissociated himself from the sacerdotalists, describing a section of them as " propagators of
^ Oxford Conservative Journal.
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Catholic tenets and usages who do not scruple to denounce Protestantism as a principle of unmixed evil." " Rome," he said, " was a foe, though in her legitimate sphere she be also an elder sister." And he censured those who parleyed with this foe and who " relentlessly pursue with rebuke and invective the Protestant name." ^ But it was not to be expected that any one imbued with the Puseyite's complex standard of virtue should become a whole-hearted opponent of the sacerdotalists, and Mr. Gladstone, with a two-sidedness which would have done credit to George Savile, Marquis of Halifax and prince of Trimmers, piously expressed his satisfaction that " these excellent persons abide in the Church, to enlighten it by the holy example of their lives," ^ Manning also abused Rome, but abated none of his Roman practices. Rome, though a senior partner, must not have all the profits; and, when Pusey remonstrated with him, he wrote in reply : " The Church of Rome for three hundred years has desired our extinction. It is now undermining us. Suppose your own brother to believe that he was divinely inspired to destroy you. The highest duties would bind you to decisive, firm, and circumspect precaution,"
While Pusey's friend Hook was helping in the establishment of nunneries at Leeds, one of Newman's disciples, Frederick Faber, rector of Elton in Hunting- donshire, was founding a monastic order in his parish. Faber had come under Newman's influence as an undergraduate. Fourteen years younger than his master, he had been elected to a fellowship at Uni- versity College in 1837, ^^^ got a travelling scholar- ship which enabled him to go to the continent at the expense of his college. Attracted by the ritual of
1 Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review, October 1843. ^ " Gleanings of Fast Years,"
FABER IN HEAVEN 199
Roman Catholic churches, at which he was a constant worshipper, he became a convert to Romanism, but his conversion did not deter him from accepting the valuable rectory of Elton, and after his induction he made a second trip to the continent.
He visited the Pope on 17th June 1843, midway between Newman's apology to Rome and his resigna- tion of St. Mary's. On entering the presence chamber of the alleged sole Vicar of Christ, Faber tells us he instantly knelt down, " and again, when a few yards from him, and lastly before him. He (the Pope) held out his hand, but 1 kissed his foot " ! While Faber was thus abasing himself, Thackeray was proving to the satisfaction of a laughing world how dearly a cer- tain class of Englishmen loved a lord. " The nearest approach I can make to an imagination of Heaven," says Faber, "is that it is like Rorne."^ There is no reason to doubt the truth of this statement, which may be said to express the inmost conviction of every sincere sacerdotalist. The Pope, or the bishop, is God ; the cathedral ritual is the highest revelation of Heaven. Faber's emotions at Rome were essentially those of a child at a pantomime, as may be conceived from the following description : " When the Pontiff, his eyes streaming with tears, slowly elevated the Lord's Body, suddenly from the roof some ten or twelve trumpets, as from heaven, pealed out with a long, wailing, timorous jubilee, and I fell forward completely overcome."
Faber, like Keble, was a hymn-writer of the highest excellence, and possessed of great imaginative power; but, like all the other young men associated with Newman and Pusey, he thought that those scientific principles on which modern society is based might be trifled with for the advancement of that sacerdotal
^ Bowden's " Life of Faber."
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cause which was to reveal the priest's heaven to the vulgar eye of the common people. Happily for the world, the ordinary man's ideal of eternal bliss is diametrically opposed to that of the sacerdotalist. We can have no doubt as to Faber's having become a Roman Catholic on the occasion of his visit to the Pope in 1843; and his work at Elton for the tvo succeeding years is vitiated by his duplicity in making a free distribution in his parish of such Roman litera- ture as the " History of the Sacred Heart." He chafed under the restrictions imposed on him through having to conform publicly to the Book of Common Prayer. " I feel impatient, thinking I could do all things in my parish as if I were a Roman," he exclaims. Just as Newman and Pusey had tampered with his own mind in his college days, so Faber now set himself to work upon the youths of the parish who looked up to him as the State-appointed custodian of morals. " A number of persons, chiefly young men, began to go to confession to him and to receive communion. Out of the most promising of those penitents he formed a sort of community. They were accustomed to meet in the rectory every night at twelve o'clock, and to spend about an hour in prayer, chiefly in reciting portions of the Psalter. On the eves of great feasts, the devotions were prolonged for three or four hours. The use of the discipline " — a birch-rod, perhaps, or a whip of knotted cords — "was also introduced on Fridays, eves of festivals, and every night in Lent, each taking his turn to receive it from the others." Pusey had introduced the practice of "the dis- cipline" into Oxford; for we find him writing, in 1844, to a friend on the Continent to purchase a peculiar kind of scourge for him. Having mentioned that his own " temptations " were " entirely spiritual," and that he possessed a " delicate frame," he said : " I
PUSEY A COWARD 201
see that, even for such, corporal severities are not to be neglected, but so many of them are unsafe. I suspect the 'Discipline' to be one of the safest, and, with internal humiliation, the best. Could you procure and send me one by B. ? What was described to me was of a very sacred character : five cords, each with live knots, in memory of the five wounds of our Lord. I should be glad to know whether there were any cases in which it is unsafe, e.g., in a nervous person." ^ The hike- warm, self-seeking spirit and utter want of self- sacrifice which permeated this whole movement, from its initiation in 1833 by Keble's protest against the abolition of the Irish bishoprics, assumes a peculiarly contemptible guise in this letter of Pusey's. When one remembers the rationalist bent of Pusey's mind fifteen years before, one cannot feel convinced even of the genuineness of the writer's superstition, in de- scribing a piece of cord with five knots as being " of a very sacred character." One is only repelled by the solicitude for his own health displayed by this soi-disant anchorite, who wanted a " discipline " with limited risk, just as Newman aimed at a monastic order with limited liability.
In 1844 W. G. Ward, one of Newman's disciples, already alluded to, published a book called " The Ideal of a Christian Church," in which he avowed that he subscribed to the Twelfth Article of Religion " in a non-natural sense," and broke forth into the following rhapsody : " We find, oh most joyful, most wonderful, most unexpected sight ! — we find the whole cycle of Roman doctrine gradually possessing numbers of English Churchmen. . . . Three years have passed since I said plainly that, in subscribing the Articles I renounce no one Roman doctrine." This treatise was
1 This letter was written to James Hope-Scott, and appears in the " Memoirs " of that gentleman.
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only part of the general plan of campaign which had for its objective the capture of the university by the Anglo - Romanists. If one who believed in every Roman doctrine might subscribe to the university religious tests, it followed that the oflBcials of the university might practise Romanism under the name of Anglicanism, " without violation of conscience." Newmans Tract 90 in 1841 had paved the way for Ward's book in 1 844. To capture the decadent and immoral university ; through the university to capture the Anglican priests ; through the priests to capture the next generation of Englishmen and Englishwomen ; to be independent of parliament and public opinion, and secure for ever in their endow- ments and supernatural status — such was the grand ambition of the sacerdotalists.
In November 1 844 the vice-chancellor of the university sent for Ward, who was an ordained priest, and questioned him as to his authorship of " The Ideal of a Christian Church." Ward cunningly asked for time, consulted his solicitor, and refused to answer the vice-chancellor's interrogatives ! Gladstone came to Ward's rescue, with an article in the December Quarterly, in which, like a true Puseyite, he advised the sacerdotalists to remain in the Church of England, even "if their private judgment prefers the religious system of the Church of Rome to their own"! In February 1845, Convocation had the un- precedented courage to condemn Ward's book by a majority of 381 votes, as "inconsistent with the Articles of Religion of the Church of England, and with the declaration in respect of those Articles made and subscribed by William George Ward previously, and in order to his being admitted to the degrees of B.A. and M.A. respectively ; and with the good faith of him the said William George Ward." And, further-
WARD DEGRADED, PUSEY SHOCKED 203
more, by a majority of 58 votes, Convocation " degraded him from the said degrees of B.A. and M.A. re- spectively." It was also proposed to condemn Tract 90 at the same meeting ; but the motion was vetoed by the proctors, Messrs. Guillemard and R. W. Church. The last-named proctor had been so closely identified with the production of Tract 90, having been a tutor of Oriel College and a disciple of Newman's, that he had felt it necessary to resign his tutorship in 1841.
This strenuous action, partial as it was, and aimed at one of the private soldiers, when it should have been levelled at the general officers of the movement, split up the sacerdotal forces. Pusey regarded it as " shocking " ; though it really proved that the uni- versity statutes, as the Greek sage said, were like cobwebs in which small flies like Ward were caught, but which great flies like Pusey could break through. All immediate hope of capturing the university had to be abandoned. Hook, though he had voted against Ward's degradation, was freely criticising Pusey. He had no intention of endangering his tenure of the vicarage of Leeds, one of the most valuable parochial preferments in the Church ; and, following Gladstone and Manning, he declared himself an anti-Romanist. It is creditable to his prescience that he should have squarely told Pusey, in reference to the latter's scheme of Anglo-Catholic theology, that " the legendary Lives of the Saints will have the same eff'ect in England as the fanatical movement in France ; they will make men decided infidels."^
It must not be supposed that the degradation of Ward implied a disapproval of sacerdotalism on the part of the university. On the contrary, the sacer- dotalists continued to be the dominant party in Oxford, and Pusey to be the most influential person-
^ " Life of Pusey."
204 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ality in the university, down to 1882 — the year in which the canon died, and those new statutes, which we shall deal with in a later chapter, came into operation. The official position of the university was that there must be no repeal of the religious tests compelling all students to subscribe to the creed of the Church of England. Nonconformists, including genuine Roman Catholics, refused to subscribe ; and, for conscience' sake, sacrificed their rights and privi- leges, as Englishmen, in the national universities. The Puseyites were not slow to make capital out of the apparent fellowship thus established between " Ultra-Protestantism " and Romanism for the purpose of damaging the evangelical party within the Church. In 1839 ^ pamphlet appeared, in which the writer adopted Newman's policy of " saying to the Protestant section of our Church, ' You are the cause of this.' " " The Papists, as throughout the whole history of England from the Reformation to the present day," said the author, " are glad to mask their designs under a specious and false pretence of liberality, and of a common cause with Dissenters ; with whom, however, they have nothing in common except hatred to the Church of England. And thus, while Dissenters and evangelicals are calling out Popery against the great body of the Church of England, the whole moral and political influence of Dissent, much of which is derived from its amalgamation with the evangelical party, is virtually in operation to promote the daring and am- bitious designs of Romanism." ^
The publication of Tract 90 and " The Ideal of a Christian Church " had publicly placed the uni- versity in a dilemma by proclaiming the religious tests to be a sham. If Oxford tolerated such opinions
1 " True State of the Case Considered : The Oxford Tracts and the Evangelical Party " : London, 1839.
WARD SECEDES, NEWMAN FOLLOWS 205
from a favoured party within its gates, the certain consequence would be the compulsory abolition of the tests, and the admission of Nonconformists — the one catastrophe which the sacerdotal monopolists desired to avert. Oxford had to decide between maintaining the tests or publicly upholding the Anglo-Catholics ; it chose what it considered the lesser of two evils ; and disowned the favourites who, in vulgar parlance, " had given it away."
Ward left, or rather was forced out of, the Church of England, and joined the Church of Rome in Sep- tember 1845. Newman followed him a few weeks after, and became a Roman Catholic on the 9th of October ; being " received into the Church " by Father Dominic, a member of the Passionist Congregation ; but he remained at Oxford until February 1 846, when he broke up the monastic establishment at Littlemore and went to Bishop Wiseman's place at Oscott. He was ordained priest at Rome in October 1846, his Anglican orders being deemed invalid. All the sincere sacerdotalists, who regarded Rome as being hke Heaven, followed Newman into Roman Catholicism ; and, in doing so, performed the most respectable act which can be put to their credit. On Sunday, 1 6th November 1845, Faber preached his last sermon at Elton. He told his parishioners that " the doctrines he had taught them, though true, were not those of the Church of England ; that, as far as the Church of England had a voice, she had disavowed them, and that consequently he could not remain in her com- munion." Two servants and seven members of his monastic community made their exodus from the parish on the following day, and went to Northampton, where the Roman Catholic bishop of that place re- ceived them into the Roman Church. Newman's band at Littlemore also followed their master ; Bowles, Dal-
2o6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
erairns, St. JohD, Stanton, Lockhart, Christie, Browne, Oakeley, and others became Roman Cathohcs, and were subsequently ordained priests of the Roman Church.
In 1847 Newman was reported as having been seen in monastic uniform by Manning at Rome, and " dead to the world." But those who thought the fox dead reckoned without their hosts. We have used the adjective "bellicose" in describing Newman's char- acter. Let us illustrate our meaning by an incident from his subsequent career. When Pius IX. parcelled out England into a number of Roman dioceses in 1850, there was a general protest against what was called the " Papal Aggression " ; and the " dead " Newman, then returned to England, was ordered into the h&y. At that time a Dominican friar, named Achilli, had become a Protestant, and was bearing testimony in England to the vm- Christian character of the Roman Church. To rebut the damaging effect of Achilli's work, Newman delivered a course of lectures on " The Present Position of Catholics in England," which attracted widespread attention ; and in one of those addresses he did not scruple to descend to charges of personal immorality against the ex-Dominican — as if, forsooth, to prove the weakness of an individual friar were equivalent to establishing the divine mono- poly of the Italian hierophants since Damasus !
It was, as far as Achilli was concerned, a stroke below the belt ; worthy of the leader of that party whose conduct has attached to the adjective " Anglican " in the English language a meaning almost as sinister as that which the republican Romans attached to the Latin adjective " Punica." Newman would have kissed the feet of the most immoral man in Europe, if he only held the title of Pope of Rome, or cardinal archbishop of one of the four basilicas. Achilli brought an action for libel against Newman,
NEWMAN EXHIBITED IN IRELAND 207
which was tried before Lord Justice Campbell and a jury; and resulted, on 31st January 1852, in a verdict and ;:^ioo damages for the ex-Dominican, who successfully established his innocence. To such lengths had Newman and his party gone in employing detectives, and collecting evidence against the poor friar, that the costs of the action amounted to ;^ 14,000, which Newman's Roman and Anglican friends raised a subscription to defray.
In 1854, the Roman authorities thought it ad- visable to change the scene of Newman's operations, and to exhibit him as a hostage for the edification of the Irish. Accordingly he went to Ireland as rector of the " Catholic University " which had just been opened by the Irish-Roman bishops. It is almost unnecessary to relate how that university proved a dismal failure; how a sum of about ;^2 50,000 was collected for its endowment, mostly from poor Catholics at the chapel gates ; how no account was rendered of the money ; how the so-called university was never endowed ; and how it stands to-day in the same state as it was when Newman left in 1858 — save that it is conducted as a teaching college by the Jesuits, and supported by a Government subsidy of £6000 a year. Newman's dream was that, through its instrumentality Ireland would become " the highway of communication between the two hemispheres," and that European and American students would flock thither " from East and West and South, all speaking one tongue, all owning one faith." ^ It is hardly credible, but it is never- theless true, that in a parliamentary debate on 22nd March 1906, Mr. S. Butcher, Conservative member for Cambridge university — to make way for whom Sir John Gorst was ejected under circumstances to be mentioned in another place — gravely quoted this
^ " The Idea of a University," by J. H. Newman.
2o8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
aspiration of Newman's as an argument for voting a large capital sum to the Irish bishops for a sectarian university on the lines of that with which Newman was connected. Has Mr. Butcher satisfied himself as to what would be the " one tongue," Irish or English ; or has he realised the sinister meaning conveyed in the expression "all owning one faith"? Newman, having never succeeded in winning the confidence of Pius IX., opposed the enactment of papal infallibility — that audacious scheme for dis- tracting the attention of Catholics from the dethrone- ment of the Pope in 1870. He wrote a private letter to Bishop UUathorne, denouncing its promoters, of whom Manning was the most active, as " an insolent and aggressive faction " ; but, true to himself, as soon as the dogma was ratified, he addressed an open letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in which he declared he had always believed in it. When Pius IX. died, in 1878, Leo XIII., acceding to the pressure of the Duke of Norfolk, made Newman a cardinal ; and, such is the magical influence of a title in this country that everybody connected with Oxford sacerdotalism, those who retained their preferments as well as those who seceded, proclaimed, and asked others to believe, that Newman's promotion placed the worth and sin- cerity of the Oxford Movement beyond all suspicion ! Inasmuch as the sacerdotal party control the uni- versities and public schools, and, through them, the publishing trade, Newman became a great man in England thenceforth, so far as printed books can make a reputation ; his position being accepted by millions who knew nothing of his history, or of his views. He lived at Edgbaston, but occasionally came to London to visit his friend, Richard William Church, the ex-proctor, and, perhaps, advise him as to the decorations and services at St. Paul's.
A TRACTARIAN IN ST. PAUL'S 209
R. W. Church had started The Guardian newspaper in I 846, as a weekly organ of the high church party. Like Pusey, his tendencies were rationalist, and his able paper gave the fluctuations of the corn market as well as the latest fashions in Anglican and Roman ritualism. In 1869 he was offered a canonry at Worcester, which he refused, having hopes of a bishopric. In 1871 Gladstone appointed him dean of St. Paul's, a post which he accepted, describing it, in typical Anglican phrase, as " a sacrifice en pure perte " — a throwing away of his great abilities to no purpose. It was he who disfigured the interior of St. Paul's with the reredos or altar-piece containing life- size sculptures of Christ on the cross and the Virgin holding the child ; and for the removal of which Sir C. Robert Lighton, C. Godley, Robt. Fleming, and Richard Nugent unsuccessfully petitioned Bishop Temple, in I 890, while Mr. AUcroft and others were proceeding for a mandamus in Queen's Bench with the same object.
In October 1845, almost inunediately after New- man's reception into the Roman Church, Bishop Bagot had been translated to the richer diocese of Bath and Wells, to make way for a spirit more congenial to Oxford in the person of his egregious successor, Samuel Wilberforce. Though Mrs. Wilberforce was the elder sister of Manning's deceased wife, Wilber- force had kept out of the Tractarian movement, and had risen step by step in the scale of preferment, partly by the magic of his father's name, and partly by the unctuous plausibility to which he owed his nickname of " Soapy Sam." The last position he held before his appointment to the bishopric of Oxford was that of sub-almoner to the Queen, a post for which he is said to have recommended Manning, and which Manning declined to accept ; being unwilling to array himself in Samuel Wilberforce's cast-off garments.
o
2IO CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Pusey clung to his canonry and Keble to his vicarage. And, though the conversion of Newman and others was a great advertisement for the Roman hierarchy, Mastai Ferretti, who became pope on 1 6th June 1846, with the title of Pius IX., always regarded Pusey as a more useful friend to the Roman Church than Newman, whom he never trusted. " Puseyism," said a Roman official, " is a living testi- mony to the necessity of Catholicism in the midst of our enemies ; it is a worm at the root which, skilfully nourished by our exertions, will waste Pro- testantism till it is destroyed." ^
Pusey was busy founding nunneries and playing at asceticism. We find him writing to his confessor, Keble, at Hursley, on the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude, 1 846 : " Will you give me some peni- tential rules for myself ? I hardly know what I can do just now in a bodily way, for nourishment I am ordered ; sleep I must take when it comes ; cold is bad for me ; and I know not whether I am strong enough to resume the hair cloth." He was in a difficulty : " I am a great coward about inflicting pain on myself, partl3% I hope, from a derangement of my nervous system." He could not procure a hair cloth which was painful and painless at the same time : " Hair cloth I know not how to make pain ; it is only symbolical, except when worn to an extent which seemed to wear me out ! " Then he says in startling language, obviously open to mis- construction : " Lying hard I like best, unless it is such as to take away sleep, and that seems to unfit me for duties " ! He tried " real fasting," and " praying with his arms in the form of a cross." He appealed to Keble to command him to use " the discipline." " I think I should be bid to use the
1 Desanctis, "Popery and Jesuiiism " ; 1852.
HAMPDEN MADE A BISHOP 211
discipline," he writes, but he instantly adds, as if afraid of being taken at his word : " I cannot even smite upon my breast much, because the pressure on my lungs seemed bad. In short, you see, I am a mass of infirmities." Keble's reply was : " I still scruple about the discipline ; I could but allow, not enjoin, it to any one." It is highly discreditable to Pusey that he should have enforced the '' discipline " and other severe penances upon the credulous women who entered his nunneries, when he was so reluctant to inflict it on himself.
But in I 847 the Government of the day provided a discipline which had the same effect on the rationalist side of Pusey's nature as a military trumpet is said to produce on a warhorse. They appointed the hated Hampden to the bishopric of Hereford. All the sacerdotalists, who had sacrificed themselves for the good of the Church by retaining their prefer- ments, arose as one man. Manning, fresh from Rome with his story of the " dead " Newman ; as well as Merewether, dean of Hereford, Keble, and all the other outside sacerdotalists, joined with Pusey in protest against the "apostasy" of Hampden's ap- pointment. Bishop Wilberforce threw his Aveight into the balance against Hampden and with the canon. Merewether threatened to disobey the conni d'dire, ordering him and his chapter to elect the new bishop. A petition was prepared and presented to Lord John Russell, the prime minister, signed by all the leading Oxford sacerdotalists and thirteen bishops, including Wilberforce, supporting the threatened action of the dean of Hereford, and asking the Government to recall the nomination. Lord John Russell met the petition with a peremptory refusal. Alluding to the reference it contained to the vote of convocation condemning Hampden for his " heresy," Lord John
212 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Russell said lie refused " to make the prerogative of the Crown dependent on the caprice of a chance majority at one university, largely composed of persons who had since joined the Church of Rome." Of all the disciples of Pusey, Gladstone became the most eminent and the most powerful. Those who are perplexed at his tergiversations and endless inconsist- encies, his " vulnerable temper and impetuous moods," his pliability and his obstinacy, his Machiavellism, his greatness and his littleness, will find a clue to the mystery of his public life in the fact that he was a larsre-minded Scotsman chafino- under the incubus of a Pusey ite education, and restrained by the constant influ- ence of a comfort-worshipping, strong-minded, sensible Englishwoman. His " religiousness " and " love of power," which Mr. G. W. E. Russell rightly describes as the mainsprings of his moral force, are the essence of sacerdotalism, and have been the common attributes of ambitious priests in all ages. As a High Church- man and sacerdotalist, he should have detested the Nonconformists, yet he entered into alliance with them, and did yeoman's service to the High Church party by their instrumentality. He declared in after years that " the very first opinion which he ever was called upon to give in cabinet," in 1843, was to advise the withdrawal of a bill for educating factory children, which the Nonconformists opposed because its occult object was to give the Established Church increased facilities for proselytising. Yet in that year he was an active propagandist in the cause of sacerdotalism, and in 1844 voted with Pusey against Ward's degrada- tion. He resigned his office in i 845, the year Newman became a Roman Catholic, on the alleged grounds that he could not support the grant to Maynooth — the sugar wherewith Sir Robert Peel coated the pill ad- ministered to Roman sacerdotalism in Ireland by the
o .2 S
GLADSTONE A PUSEYITE 213
establishment of the non-sectarian and entirely admir- able Queen's Colleges. He soon afterwards supported, and delivered an elaborate justification of, the endow- ment of Roman Catholic theology as embodied in the same grant.
In 1847 tli6 Puseyite interest secured his return as member of parliament for Oxford university, a position which he held until 1865, the year in which Manning became Roman archbishop of Westminster. In that year Gladstone declared against the endowment of the Church in Ireland on the grounds that its ministry was only accepted by a fraction of the people. A general election took place immediately afterwards, and the university rejected him and returned Mr. Gathorne Hardy. Thus Gladstone's public connection with Oxford, which began in 1833 by his joining in the outcry of " national apostasy " hurled at those who abolished the ten sinecure Anglican bishoprics in Ireland, ended after thirty-two years with his own demand for the disestablishment of the entire Anglican Church in that country — a project which he success- fully carried out in 1869. Gladstone was now con- vinced that priestcraft was not the horse to ride if he meant to win and hold the popular favour; and thenceforth he did some splendid service in the cause of domestic reform, especially during his administra- tion of 1 868-1 874, by which the school boards were established, and the elementary education of the country placed on a proper basis for the first time. But his personal sympathy with sacerdotahsm was too ingrained to be got rid of, and he almost invariably promoted rituahsts to the episcopal bench and other dignities when it was his lot to make appointments.
After the secession of Newman in 1845, Manning became the chief leader of the sacerdotalists outside Oxford. Though he continued for a time to mould
2 14 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
his public utterances upon Gladstone's, he was drawn to Rome at the end of 1 847, remained there until the spring of 1848, and was received by Pius IX. in private and public audience. He knelt down one day in the public street, the Piazza di Spagna, when he saw Pius IX.'s carriage approaching him, and remained on his knees on the pavement until the Pope had passed.^ Never, perhaps, was there a more humiliating prostitution of mind and body than this Englishman's self-abasement before the Italian. A twelvemonth before Manning's public homage, namely, on 15th May 1847, Daniel O'Connell, the winner of Catholic Emancipation, whose agitation had revived Roman and Anglican priestcraft in these islands, died at Genoa while on a pilgrimage to " the tombs of the Apostles." Though the worn-out Irish fighter be- queathed his large Irish heart as a legacy to ungrateful Rome, I cannot imagine him kneeling on the public pavement as Manning did. The sinister significance of Manning's act was increased by the fact that he was archdeacon of Chichester at the time, and con- tinued to hold the post for nearly three years, until his resignation in December 1850. Speakmg of Manning to Purcell in 1895, three years after Manning's death, Gladstone, with all his life behind him, said : " I won't say that Manning was insincere — God forbid ! But he was not simple and straight- forward." Those who study the Anglican sacerdotal movement will not find simplicity or straightforward- ness in any of its leaders ; but Manning was far from being the worst of the reactionaries.
Waiting for the offer of perferment, as some think ; or casting about for a suitable ground on which to base his secession. Manning retained his archdeaconry until the end of 1850, the year in which the Pope divided
^ "Life of Cardinal Manning," Purcell.
MANNING KNEELS TO THE POPE 215
England into Roman dioceses ; and in which the Privy Council decided, in the Gorham case, that baptismal regeneration was not a doctrine in which Anglican priests were bound to believe. Manning took no part in the outcry against what was called the " Papal Aggression," but when Mr. Gorham was about to be inducted into his living, Manning wrote an open letter on the subject to Dr. Gilbert, bishop of Chichester, resigned his preferment in December, and joined the Roman Catholic Church in April 185 1. He in- gratiated himself with Cardinal Wiseman, archbishop of Westminster, as he had already won the approval of Pius IX., and he became Wiseman's confidant. When Wiseman died in 1865, the Pope, in defiance of the expressed wish of the most influential English Catholics, passed over three names submitted to him by the parish priests of the diocese, and appointed Manning to the archbishopric.
In the year following Manning's appointment, and as a counterblast to that event, Pusey, who had been corresponding for some time with the Russian patri- archs, brought about a conference in London for the purpose of uniting the Anglican and Russian Churches, at which were present, besides the canon, three Anglican bishops, and about seventy priests and laymen ; the Russians being only represented by Counts Orlotf and Tolstse and the ambassador's chaplain. Recent dis- closures have proved what an accession of strength the cause of anti-Christianity and untruth in the Anglican Church would have received if this Anglo-Catholic effort in theological diplomacy had succeeded.
Manning was now more ultramontane than the Duke of Norfolk, or than Wiseman had ever been. Figuratively speaking, he had remained on his knees before Pius IX. all the time since 1848. In 1870, during the discussion of Infallibility, his subservience
2i6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
outdid even the magnificent efforts of the Italians ; and he brought a special petition from Westminster in favour of the proposed dogma. In 1875 Pius IX. made him a cardinal, and Manning's highest ambition was satisfied. He occupied a public position in Eng- land superior to that of the archbishop of Canterbury, due in no small degree to the potency of his higher title — conferred by the same power from which the English sovereign received his defendership of the faith. His personal requirements being small, Man- ning suffered little from the want of a large salary ; and, though he did not sit in the House of Lords, he com- manded the respect of Mr. Gladstone, who relied on his moral support in disestablishing the Church in Ire- land. He was a militant teetotaller, which, in a man of his species, covers a multitude of sins ; but, since teetotallism with him was only used as a means for binding men to Rome, it is doubtful if his temperance work increased the sum of human freedom. His veneration for priestcraft seems to indicate some mental derangement; but, unfortunately for English- men, it was the natural outcome of his theological education.
In 1866, Keble, the nominal originator and father of the whole movement, died of paralysis ; having lived to witness, as the outcome of his protest against the imaginary "national apostasy" of 1833, a real and disreputable apostasy which undermined the founda- tions of that Anglican Church which he professed to love so devotedly.
" The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones ; So let it be with "—Keble.
Pusey survived till 1882 — the year in which those new statutes which freed Oxford from the stifling
PUSEY'S LAST SCHEME 217
grip of the priest first came into operation ; and he beheld the noble Angflo-Roman edifice of his own handiwork topped by those two English cardinals who detested one another so thoroughly " for the love of God." Pusey saw, towards the end, that the growth of the scientific spirit was becoming a greater source of danger than Roman Catholicism to the continued national subsidisation of a medieval Church. Accord- ingly, in 1878, we find him broaching a new plan for making friends with science, devised on the lines of his scheme, formulated forty-five years before, for killing Roman Catholicism with kindness. His old scheme might well have been styled " Christianity, not Catholicism, Adverse to Faith " ; this new scheme, cleverly developed in a carefully -written, but un- delivered sermon, he called by the name of " Unscience, not Science, Adverse to Faith " !
Newsman died in 1890, and Manning followed him in 1892, into that Presence where the mysteries of priestcraft cannot prevail over the simple virtues of honest men. Some future Mark Antony, reciting the funeral oration of the Established Church in England, may well paraphrase the words of Shakespeare as he metaphorically describes the fallen body of the Ecclesia Anglicana : —
" Look ! in this place ran Manning's dagger through ; See, what a rent the envious Newman made ; Through this the well-beh)ved Pusey stabbed, And, as he plucked his cursed steel away, Mark how the Church's life-blood followed it, As rushing out of doors, to be resolved If Pusey so unkindly knocked, or no."
Brodrick says the sacerdotal movement " was less important than Methodism in its purely moral aspect, since it was far less popular and practical, leaving no such profound impression on the religious life of the
2i8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
nation." That it ever had " a purely moral aspect " remains yet to be proved. All that is clear is that it was a professional movement by the Anglican priests, originating at a moment of professional crisis, which never enlisted any public sympathy outside those circles in which the scholastic monopoly of the priests was unscrupulously used to influence young people in its favour. Anglican sacerdotalism, as a whole, is more than tinged with rationalism. But Anglican sacerdotalism and rationaHsrn alike are in a state of arrested action. The one is not Huxleyan, the other is not Roman ; neither is genuine, but both are Puseyite. The double-minded AngUcans, like Lot's wife, seem always to have been impelled to turn round and look back upon Sodom and the endow- ments. The only decided convictions which they can be said to have held were (i) a hatred of the practice of ordinary Christianity for its simplicity and thorough- ness ; and (2) an implicit belief in the necessity for a medieval ecclesiastical system, with immense pecuniary endowments on a truly High Church scale.
The Tractarians cannot be said to have saved the Church from disendowment, though they helped ; for Earl Grey, Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Lord Aberdeen, Mr. Glad- stone, Lord Beaconsfield, and Lord Salisbury — to mention all the responsible premiers since 1829 — had no intention of disendowing it. And, without Government assistance, the milhons who disbelieved in the Church had no political organisation able to cope with the ecclesiastical forces. It was the cabinet ministers, the national apostates of 1833-40, and their successors at various subsequent conjunctures, who saved the Church, and not the leaders of the sacerdotal profession. The Government's cruelty was always kindness in disguise. The suppression of sine-
PUSEYISM AND ROMANISM 219
cure canonries, and the law agaiust pluralities, dis- tributed without lessening the existing endowments. The Discipline Acts did no harm to ritualists and allayed the hostility of evangelicals. The Tithe Com- mutation Act strengthened the priest's claim to tithe ; and nobody could have foreseen at that date that corn was ever destined to become a relatively unimportant product of English land.
The highest ambition of the Tractarians, or of such of them as looked farther than the prevention of immediate catastrophe, wa'^ to set up a species of local Romanism, exempt from the payment of tribute to Italy, which should make the Established Church an independent institution, regulated solely by ecclesi- astical law, and whose authority should be co-ordinate with, if not superior to, that of Parliament. What the Tractarians actually achieved was the formation of a new school of priests, imbued with those ideals ; but whose degenerate abilities, warped by the mental diet of Anglo- Catholic theology prepared by Pusey, have carried them no farther on the road to success than the purchase of Roman sacerdotal appliances, and the surreptitious practice of Roman rites. To one bred in Roman Catholicism, the modern Anglican or Puseyite ritual is to Roman ritual as lunacy is to sanity. Puseyite priestcraft seems to be priestcraft run mad. And, as compared with the well-ordered economy of a Roman convent, a Puseyite nunnery seems to be a depository for females afflicted with chronic hysteria.
To become an Anglo-Catholic, a Roman Catholic, or a Greek Catholic, is a feat which presents little difficulty to any one who has determined to do so ; but to persuade thousands or millions of other people, whose intelligences have outgrown sacerdotalism, to reject the simplicity, manifest truth, and utiUty of
2 20 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Christianity, and adopt any of those mysterious creeds as their rule of life, would be an achievement worthy of being called a miracle. The Pusey school of priests converted themselves and their excitable pupils to Romanism ; but they defeated their main object by forfeiting the confidence of the English people, in- creasing the number of Nonconformists, and thereby weakening instead of strengthening the Church.
It is to be hoped that England may never again be afflicted by such a movement as the Oxford revival of priestcraft, and that disingenuous men, like its leaders, may never again win the printed plaudits of this nation. We have seen what Bacon calls " the favour- ing too much of good intentions " in their case ; the pernicious example of their " conceits and novelties " has undermined the Christianity of the Anglican clergy and their pupils in the public schools and ancient universities ; and their teaching has undoubtedly done much to weaken the paramountcy of Englishmen in the United Kingdom. The sum of their lives con- stitutes the antithesis of that courage, simplicity, and fair-dealing which had heretofore been recognised by the world as the characteristics of an Englishman, and if they represented the nation, England should deserve no other title than " perfidious Albion." Everything that is sly, underhand, and mendacious is characteristic of Puseyism ; so much so that Romanism becomes re- spectable by comparison with it, and the Roman bishops and priests appear to be honourable and fair-dealing men when contrasted with their Anglican imitators.
But they did not, and do not, represent the nation, and the exaggerated importance assigned to them is due ( I ) to the position they occupied in Oxford, where one ill-disposed man can do more mischief and make more noise than a legion of kindred spirits scattered over the rest of the country, and (2) to their influence
THE EVANGELICAL PARTY 221 •
with publishers, duo to the sacerdotal party's authority in the universities and schools which gave them control of the market for school-books and coraate varieties of literature. Books in their favour were eagerly published, while those which ventured to criticise them could only be produced with difficulty.
But it is cheering to think that, despite all the laudatory volumes which they composed about one another, and which outsiders concocted about them, individually and collectively — a deluge of print which hangs like a mist over the literature of the nine- teenth century — the heart and conscience of the nation at large were never infected by their sophistry. Nay, the evangelical party within the Church, Avhich originated at the end of the eighteenth century, in sympathy with Wesleyanism and in protest against clerical indifference or misconduct, has developed an extraordinary strength in its opposition to the .Oxford sacerdotalists.
That the evangelicals have not ousted the sacer- dotalists from the control of the Church is attributable to a variety of causes which will be exemplified as we proceed :— ( i ) The evangelicals practise Christianity, and are therefore unwilling to take advantage of the sacerdotalists, who, on the contrary, do not feel bound by the main Christian precepts in advancing their own interests; (2) the dignitaries of the Church appointed by Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, both High Churchmen, or by the Crown, which usually prefers ceremonial to simple earnestness, are almost all sacer- dotalists— and, in some cases, evangelicals, when ap- pointed to dignities, have been changed by preferment into High Churchmen; (3) unreasoning subjection and reverence for officialdom, which are the dominant traits of Anglican as well as Roman sacerdotalists, make better material for party organisation than the
222 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
individualism and self-reliance which are the char- acteristics of the evangelicals.
There is no reason to expect the disappearance of the first of these causes, for the evangelicals would not give up the practice of Christ's teaching for the sake of gaining control over any number of salaried posts. As to the second cause, the epoch of the Gladstones and Cecils may be said to have passed away, inasmuch as rising politicians will not in future find ecclesiastical patronage of much benefit to them. In reference to the third cause, constant mental sub- jection to an unworthy authority will so enfeeble the rank and file of the sacerdotalists that they must eventually be overborne, as they were at the recent general election. They make an impressive display, because they hold the dignities and have a better organisation, but the evangelicals represent all that is best in the Church, and, moreover, are in touch with the masses of the people. Individualism and self- reliance suit the English character better than un- reasoning subjection; evangelicalism is therefore racy of the soil, as compared with sacerdotalism, which is an exotic transplanted from Rome.
The social and political results of Puseyism have been no less deleterious than the religious. The two great political parties have been affected by it in opposite ways. From 1868 to 1894, save for the brief interval of Lord Hartington's leadership, the Liberals were led by a man whose great mind was biassed towards the Puseyite sophistry, to which, however, the main body of the Liberals were utterly antagonistic. But with the Conservatives it was other- wise, and, while Disraeli was non-Puseyite, and despite the many Conservatives and Churchmen who remained true evangelicals, the majority of the party grew so infected by Puseyism that, smce Disraeli's death the
PUSEYISM IN PRACTICE 223
words " Anolican " and " Conservative " have been almost synonymous. Puseyism or Nevvnianism con- stitutes now, so to speak, the code of civil and religious morality taught in the universities and public schools controlled by the Anglo-Catholic sacerdotalisLs, and there is a large and increasing body of Anglican public school pupils, or ex- pupils, to whom the practice of NownianisHi in their daily lives has become second nature.
Who does not know the society Puseyite, who always assumes that non-Puseyites are foolish people, made only to be deceived, or cajoled, or managed, or humoured, or driven into doing what is best for the Puseyite interest ? By such people, to tell a lie is only deemed dishonourable when it is unprofitable. To be ashamed of a crime or a dishonourable action inflicted upon a respectable member of society is held to be as " low and slow " as were the fellows of Lincoln College when Newman and Pattison deceived them. To be sent to penal servitude for the grossest type of forgery and swindling, practised upon a confiding youth, and to brazen it out by writing a book on one's experiences, is in such circles to be a hero and martyr.
The Puseyite interest detests history, and learns nothing from its lessons. If a Laud were beheaded, or a James Stuart dethroned once in fifty years, the Puseyite would continue to issue fresh prospectuses and unblushingly solicit pubHc confidence. The Puseyite regards himself as a member of an '' im- perial race," and all other people as barbarians to be practised upon for his own benefit ; and he seems destined to bring down upon his race and country the fate which fell upon the '• imperial " Romans and their " imperial " Rome, when both Romans and Rome were handed over to the priests.
If the Puseyite is a clergyman, he will practise
2 24 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
every Eoman superstition in his church, will exact payment of tithe-money for his own support from Christian, Jew, and Atheist ; will act in the most un-Christian spirit towards Christians who disapprove of him, and will speak sanctimoniously in public about " working in cordial harmony with our Dis- senting brethren." If he be an archbishop, he will pass an Elementary Education Act which will send those " Dissenting brethren " into prison in tens of thousands at the opening of the twentieth century ; and, forging their fetters, he will faint in the House of Lords as he appeals to heaven and earth to let nothing be done to offend the susceptibilities of the Nonconformists. If he be a prime minister, com- pelled to retire, and desirous of appointing a relative to succeed him, he will precipitately resign his office, and secure the succession for his friend on the very day when his only prominent rival has been struck down by an accident, and lies dangerously ill in a public hospital. If he be a professional man, he will have a picture of Pius IX. over his mantelpiece for the edification of a Roman Catholic dientUe ; and while he cultivates the friendship of the High Church parsons, his wife Avill help to manage an evangelical charity. He will always be found assuming that he can in- definitely " manage " every one with whom he has to do by his tactics, dialectics, and diplomacy.
Two questions seem to have been vexing the Puseyite mind since the recent High Church defeat at the general election — (i) Failing tariff reform, where can a safe distraction for the popular energies be found? and (2) How can the Christians be bought over ? Already a new departure has been made by a sermon in praise of the long-neglected virtue of " Sincerity," in which Archbishop Davidson, the ablest chief of the Puseyites, acknowledged the existence of
PROBLEMS FOR PUSEYITES 225
" characters who were religious without being good, devout without any real piety of ordinary conduct," and said that the creed of the Church of England " ought to make them straightforward and absolutely sincere." ^ Such words are calculated to captivate Christians ; and the immediate future is likely to supply occasions for many deliverances in the best Puseyite style. The archbishop also suggested a conference of all creeds on Lord's Day observance, a step which was almost equal to an ex cathedra allocution entitled "Anti-Sabbatarians, not Sabbatarians, Adverse to Faith." Coming from a party which has always ridiculed the Sabbatarians, and whose demi-god. Laud, compelled all clergymen to read the Declaration of Sports at service every Sunday, the suggestion was particularly piquant, and well adapted to the temper of the times in which we have been living, Conside Balfoiiro. Bishop Gore, preparing the way for an Anglican triumph in Birmingham, has been flatter- ing Sir Oliver Lodge and Mr. Chamberlain, Rev. J. H, Jowett and the Christians. The able Free Church leader joined him in a request for signatures to a prayer for Christian unity; but Archbishop Bourne, who was also solicited to sign the Puseyite document, being the friend of the Duke of Norfolk, did not value the patronage of Bishop Gore, and declined to be exhibited as a captive. It is to be hoped that all sacerdotal snares may fail ignominiously, and that the artifices which seem to have silenced the scientist, the rationalist, and the socialist may never seduce the Christian into the camp of his Master's enemies.
Let us now see what was the educational and moral condition of the university, as testified by the findings of a Royal Commission, and the evidence of competent eye-witnesses, while this carnival of priestcraft was engaging its best energies.
^ Sermon at St. Edmund's, E.G., March i6, 1906 ; Tribune, March 17.
P
CHAPTER IX
" Hood an ass with reverend purple, So you can hide his two ambitious ears, And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor."
Ben Jonson, Voljwne.
The sacerdotal revival served one good purpose by concentrating upon Oxford the attention of parlia- ment and the public. Undeterred by the threats of Bishops Wilberforce and Philpotts and the heads of colleges, Lord John Russell appointed a commission in 1850, to inquire "into the state, discipline, studies, and revenues " of the university, and it was discovered,
( 1 ) that the university was vitiating the Church ; and
(2) that the colleges were nothing better than clubs or communities of self-indulgent celibates, bound by no vow of chastity or temperance, and making large profits, while the university starved for want of funds to appoint professors and keep abreast of the increasing requirements of scientific education.
" Important livings," they reported, " are claimed from generation to generation by elderly men w^ho have lingered in the colleges for many years, in hopes of the particular preferment which they even- tually obtain, till they are fit neither for the post which they have coveted, nor for any other " ! " The university itself has no large revenues," said the commissioners ; " it is to the colleges that large landed estates are confined." ^ The total income of the university and colleges was estimated — or, as we
^ " Recommendations of the Oxford University Commissioners," by John Heywood, M.P., 1853.
THE OXFORD COLLEGES IN 1850 227
now know, under-estimated — at ;^ 166,500, of which i^ 1 50,000 was at the disposal of the coUbates who ruled the separate colleges. The salaries of the heads of the colleges varied from <;^6oo to ^^3000 a year, the average cash salary being i^iioo. The university itself had only i^ 16, 5 00 a year at its disposal, made up of — corporate revenue, ;!o7 500; a parliamentary grant of i^iooo for public professors; and an annual profit of ;^8ooo from the sale of bibles and prayer books.
Each college was a close borough, to whose fellow- ships none but congenial spirits were elected. The great majority of the fellows were compelled to take holy orders, and the obligation of celibacy was almost universal. After the Reformation, heads of houses were allowed to marry ; but in some colleges — Wad- ham and Jesus, for instance — that liberty was still denied to them. There was " only a small fraction of college revenues which could be properly said to be devoted to students." " Nowhere had the number of fellowships been increased as the re- venues of the several societies had increased. In some colleges it had diminished, A surplus — some- times a very large surplus — in money was divided between the head and fellows, in addition to the allowance for food and clothing which was their statutory right ; and this dividend formed the prin- cipal portion of their emolument." The fellows had " ruled that no amount of income whatever, arisinpf from personal property, was to be taken into account for vacating a fellowship." Fellows appointed to bene- fices above a certain value had to resign their fellow- ships ; but in many colleges the livings were " estimated as valued in books of Henry VIII., or even in the earlier valor of Pope Nicholas, and thus livings of considerable value were sometimes held with fellow-
228 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ships." The commissioners, therefore, recommended the throwing open of the fellowships, declaring that " such a measure is absolutely necessary in order to render the revenues of the colleges available for the service of learning and education."
Scandalous mismanagement prevailed. New College, for instance, one of the most important foundations, " had the privilege of obtaining university degrees for its members, vnthout passing any examinations, until the year 1838"; and the commissioners discovered that, during fifteen years after this privilege had been with- drawn, 1838— 1853, "it only produced one first-class man " ! Christ Church Colleg^e, then as now the chief stronghold of clericalism, is described as having lost whatever intellectual activity it may once have pos- sessed. The studentships were bestowed, not upon deservinof men, but on the friends of the ecclesiastics who ruled the college ; and the commissioners suggested that " the dean and canons," of whom Pusey was the leading spirit, should " surrender their patronage and invite the best scholars in England to contend for their studentships." " It is not unreasonable to ex- pect," wrote the commissioners, " that something should be done by the chapter, whose own income is very large ; and, if not while the present vested rights subsist, yet on the occurrence of vacancies. The canonries, though belonging to a cathedral church, belong also to a college, and their wealth is derived from the surplus which remains, after a scanty allowance made to students, according to the rule of former times. The students do not participate in the increase of collegiate property."
The commissioners asked for an account of the revenues of the colleges. The president of Magdalen, the richest college, " declined giving information con- cerning property which he is not conscious of having
BALLIOL, MERTON, AND ALL SOULS 229
misused or inisapplicd " ! Tlio other colleges, except Balliol, Merton, Lincoln, and All Souls, also refused to give the required information. The commissioners estimated the profits of Magdalen at ;^i 3,450, of which £1000 was paid to the president, ;6^i 2,000 to the fellows, and only ^^450 to scholars. Balliol's profits were set down at £s8g6, 9s. iid. ; of which ;^3295, 2s. lo^d. was spent on keeping up the college or communal establishment, including pro- visions, servants, &c., and ;^26oi, 6s. 4d. in cash, divided between the master and twelve fellows, of which the master received two shares, in addition to the revenues of the rectory of Huntspill in Somer- setshire. Balliol also possessed a trust fund of -^10,000 for "the improvement of our small livings;" and another fund of ;^2 0,000, " an aogfregate of sums reserved on rents, coal-mines, &c., allowed to accumulate for the benefit of Domus." Merton re- turned its profits at £y22o; of which ^^1050 was paid to the warden, ;^33oo to the fellows, ^2870 in maintaining the establishment, and .^620 ex- pended in postmasterships — Merton's unique name for scholarships. The profits of Lincoln College were only ^^2353, 7s. 8d. ; of which £2016 went in salaries to its fellows, and ;^2 36 to its rector. All Souls admitted profits to the amount of ;^962 2; of which ;^5 3 29 went in keeping up the establish- ment, which, it was unnecessarily added, "included commons," ;^4293 in cash being divided between the warden and fellows. All Souls Colleofe is a unique institution, possessing no undergraduates, ex- cept a nominal bible- class of four students. It resembles one of the convents of Perpetual Adora- tion in the Roman Church, whose members perform no duties beyond the continual offering up of prayer before the blessed Eucharist, inasmuch as the only
2 30 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
duty imposed on its original fellows was that of offering up masses for the souls of the faithful de- parted. Of it, more literally perhaps than of any other college, might it be said, in Gibbon's words, that " the professors had given up the pretence of teaching."
Rejecting the plea " that the presence of a large clerical element in Oxford was very valuable," and " that the removal of the obligation to become a clergyman would in some degree at least diminish the closeness of the connection " between the university and the Church of England, the commissioners re- ported in favour of increasing the number of lay fellows. " The university has been at various times during the last three centuries," they said, " the focus of theological controversy. If it be desirable that moderation and a spirit of harmony with the institu- tions of the country should prevail amongst the ministers of the English Church, it is important that the zeal of its instructors in its chief seminary should be tempered by the calmer judgments of lay colleagues who would themselves imbibe the moral and religious tone of the clerical circle in which they lived." Al- though the closing words were evidently meant to soften the severe judgment passed on the clerics, the commissioners clearly intimated that sacerdotal ascendency was a bar to harmony between the university and the country.
While the fellows were drawing ^150,000 a year in salaries and for maintenance of their convivial establishments, the number of undergraduates in all the colleges was only 1300 — not much more than the number of pupils at Eton at the present day ; and each of those undergraduates, except the servitors, was spending from i^200 to ^2000 a year in frivolity and in special fees to fellows for helping him to scrape through his examinations — money which, of course,
OXFORD SYSTE1\[ CONDEMNED 231
does not figure in the accounts. It was about this period that Richard Cobden visited Oxford, and his experience was as follows : ^ " The best of fare, plenty of old port and sherry, and huge fires, seem the chief characteristics of all the colleges. As for education, it is, according to Dr. Heldumaier, the largest investment for the smallest return of all the Academies of the world."
Having revicAved all the facts, the commissioners indignantly declared : " If several of its richest colleges Avere swept away, the architectural magni- ficence of Oxford would be diminished and many excellent men would suffer, but little present loss would be sustained by the university, the Church, or the country " ! Speaking of the under- estimated revenues of the colleges (^^ 150,000), they said it " might be rendered a noble provision for learning and science ; but if those endowments were multiplied tenfold, and distributed to tenfold the number of fellows, elected without reference to their talents and acquirements, little would result but increased odium to the university " !
By the Act of 1854, which followed the report of the commission, religious tests were abolished for matriculation and the degree of Bachelor of Arts ; but retained for the higher degrees, which were indispen- sable for membership of Convocation.
The report of the commission, produced no im- provement in the moral atmosphere of Oxford ; and heads, fellows, and undergraduates continued to pursue their old courses : —
" They boated and they cricketed ; they talked At wine, in clubs, of art, of politics ; They lost their weeks ; they vexed the souls of deans ; They rowed ; they betted." ^
1 " The Life of Cobden," by John Morley. " Tennyson, "The Princess."
232 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" Some have lost all shame, and openly practise the vilest iniquities," writes one of the many who raised their voices in protest against the prevailing wicked- ness ; 1 " while others, in whose hearts the canker is spreading with hardly less virulence, keep up a decent appearance." Speaking of the colleges, he says : " What a picture have we here ! These are religious institutions, founded solely for the glory of God. Every college has a head and a number of fellows, most of whom are positively required to be in holy orders." Yet Oxford " is a place of awful temptation, where sin of every kind is veiled under the most attractive guise, and where half the ordinary etiquette of the residents is actual sin. . . . Disrespect for divine service is prevalent amongst the fellows and students alike in chapel. . . . The undergraduate is neglected by the head and tutor, and initiated fully into all the iniquities of ' wines,' and all those labyrinths of sin which are connected with them, and from which nothing but the strongest moral consti- tution can preserve him." Under such a regime one can sympathise with Walter, the home-sick under- graduate in Tennyson's " Princess," who
" Swore he long'd at college, only long'd, All else was well, for she-society."
" Oxford has a mighty influence," continues the writer of the Church Tract, " for it is one of the great channels through which the supply of ministers flow into the bosom of England's Church ; but can this be an influ- ence for good ? An influence bringing salvation ? "
Pusey and his bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, were now the bright, particular stars of Oxford in different spheres; the first bent on Catholicising the university, the second
^ Oxford Church Tracts, No. i ; "On the Present Deplorable State of the University," 1854.
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SAMUEL WILBERFORCE 233
ou Catholicising tho diocese aud reviving the meetings of Convocation, which had not been summoned since 1717. Carlyle had been closely observing Wilber- force's public conduct. " I look upon him," he said, "as a supple, clever, shifty fellow, who holds his head up and always lights on his logs. He has got all he has by pure soapiness, suppleness, and sycophancy ; but, as the Germans say, he does not hold his head down." ^ As if to compensate for the break-up of Newman's monastery, Wilberforce founded Cuddesdon College, close to his palace, in 1854, as a special training-place for Anglican priests ; and we learn the following facts concerning the ritualism practised therein : — " i . The chapel of the college was fitted up with fantastic decorations. 2. Its altar affected the closest approximation to the Roman model. 3, The service of the sacrament was conducted with genuflections, rinsing of cups, and other ceremonial acts foreign to the ritual and usage of the Church of England. 4. The service book in use was con- cocted from the Seven Canonical Hours of the Roman Church."^ It may be judged from this how little antipathy the High Church anti-Romanists entertained for Roman practices. The managers of Cuddesdon College have ever since been selected for their sym- pathies with medievalism ; some of the most ritualistic Anglican dignitaries have been chosen from its staff — Bishop King of Lincoln, Bishop Gore of Birmingham, and Canon Liddon of St. Paul's, for instance ; and hundreds of its students have gone forth to disseminate the superstitions of Romanism in English parishes.
Bishop Wilberforce threw himself con amore into the work of Romanising the system of diocesan govern-
1 " Mrs. Brookfield and her Circle," 1905.
2 "Thoughts on Church Matters in the Diocese of Oxford," by a Layman and Magistrate for the County ; 1856.
2 34 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ment and suppressing all individuality in the clergy. A contemporary protest against his policy is worth noticing : " The diocese by this means becomes one large parish under the care of one pastor, with many assistants to carry out his system. The old and close relationship of the pastor and his tlock is lost, and also the neighbourly feeling, which brought many a helping hand to the clergyman of the parish, when the clergyman has become one of a board and the parish has lost its identity." ^ The prescience of the writer was remarkable ; for the " helping hand " has been so rigorously withheld that the leaders of the sacerdotal party, evading their own responsibility, are now appealing for help for thousands of Anglican incumbents who are described as " insuflficiently fed " !
At a time when plain, sound, moral teaching was so sadly wanted, Wilberforce was revelling in sophis- tical deliverances calculated, like the lives of the saints, to make men infidels. The following Brobdingnagian sentence is taken from a Lenten sermon on " The Nature of Sin," which he publicly preached to the university ; and, viewed as an example of theological rodomontade, it equals the wildest oratorical flights of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops : ^ —
" Weigh but for a moment its effects, and you must appreciate something of its deadly character'; look what it has wrought in the heavenly world ; scan, so far as our feeble capacities and limited knowledge enable us to do so, those serried ranks of glorious spirits which surround the everlasting throne; think of the greatness and glory and blessedness, and number of the mighty angels of God's presence ; see them as clouds lit up with the sun's beams, which, drenched with the glory of its light, give back from their every
1 " Thoughts on Church Matters in the Diocese of Oxford."
- " Lenten Sermons Preached in Oxford in 1859"; Parker, Oxford.
EXUBERANT VERBOSITY 235
fold the brightness of its radiance ; sec them thus in the Ught of God's countenance, mark the great majesty of their might, gaze on the unstained blessed- ness which their whole being ceaselessly proclaims, and then estimate as best you can the multitude of their innumerable squadrons ; see them thus excelling in strength and blessedness, and countless in number — angels and archangels, thrones and dominions, cherubim and seraphim, all in their ranks, grada- tions, orders and degrees, filling like some ocean-tide of creature-life the empyrean over us ; and then re- member (if we deem aright) one-third part of those who were reckoned in that matchless host are now no more amongst their ranks, that they bask no more in the uncreated light, pour forth no more from golden harps the praises of the Highest, rejoice no more in the full and blessed exercise of every satisfied desire of then glorious nature, but are cast down in hell, reserved in everlasting chains unto the judgment of the great day ; lost, and lost for ever, without room for repentance, without the offer of atonement, without the gentle visitations of mercy, without the abundant dew of grace; remember that those natures, framed and fashioned according to the wise design and by the prevailing word of the All- Wise and the AU- Mighty with the largest capacities for blessedness with which created beings could be gifted, have all those vast capacities filled full of anguish inconceiv- able, unalleviatcd, never-ending, and then see what sin has wrought, and measure as you can in that awful shattering of God's great work of love what sin is,"
This was the medieval method of inculcating morality which had so egregiously failed Avherever it had been adopted. Most people will agree that the man who discharged his duty as State-appointed guardian of
2 36 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
morality in Oxford by such deliverances, and accepted ;j^5ooo a year and a palace in payment for his services, must have had a very sluggish conscience.
In 1868, on the appointment of the first Gladstone Government, a concession was made to those who wished to avoid the ruinous expenses of college life ; and non-collegiate students, resident in licensed lodg- ing-houses within a mile and a half of Carfax — the well-known square tower in the centre of Oxford — were admitted to university privileges and degrees. Mr. Gladstone being now no longer the protector of Oxford, having been ousted from its representation in 1 865, his Government passed the University Tests Act, 1 87 1, which broke down the barriers so long main- tained by the sacerdotalists, and admitted non-members of the Church of England to all degrees, except those in divinity, and made them eligible for most of the salaried positions in both universities, except certain headships, professorships, and other offices reserved for members of the Church.
When a friendly Conservative Government came into office in 1874, the occasion was seized to antici- pate a radical reformation by passing the Act of 1877, which still regulates the government of Oxford and Cambridge. " The revenues of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge are not adequate to the full discharge of the duties incumbent on them respec- tively," runs the preamble to this statute, " and it is therefore expedient that provision be made for enabling or requiring the colleges in each university to con- tribute more largely out of their revenues to university purposes, especially with a view to better instruction in art, science, and other branches of learning where the same are not taught, or are not adequately taught in the universities."
The Act appointed two bodies of commissioners;
THE UNIVERSITIES ACT, 1877 237
seven for Oxford — Lord Selborne, Lord Redesdale, Sir W. R. Grove, Rev. James Bellamy, Mr. Montague Bernard, Mr. H. J. Stephen Smith, and Mr. Matthew White Ridley ; and seven for Cambridge — Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Bishop Philpott, Lord Rayleigh, Mr. E. Pleydell Bouverie, Rev. J. B. Lightfoot, Mr. George Gabriel Stokes, and Mr. G. W. Hemming, K.C. The professional clerical element had, therefore, only three representatives out of fourteen ; and, as the commissioners were invested with plenary powers to command the production of all documents, the sacer- dotalists had every reason to think that, however friendly the Government might be, some substantial reformation was likely to be achieved. The com- missioners were to hold power until the end of 1880 ; and, if necessary, until the end of 1881, but no longer. They were given absolute power to make statutes for the government of the universities and colleges from and after the year 1878; all power for that purpose being taken from the heads and fellows.
A new body, named the Universities Committee of the Privy Council, was created, consisting of the President of the Council; the Archbishop of Canter- bury ; the Lord Chancellor ; the chancellors of both universities, if privy councillors ; and one or two additional members appointed by the Sovereign, one of whom must be a member of the Judicial Com- mittee. The new statutes were to be confirmed by this committee, before whom their ratification might be opposed, and by whom they might be amended or disallowed on just cause shown by the opposition. After I 8 8 1 , the right of amending, repealing, or sup- plementing the statutes was to become vested again in the university and college authorities, subject to the approval of the Committee of the Privy Council.
Convocation, which consists of all Masters whose
2 38 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
names are od the college books, irrespective of their place of residence, is the supreme legislative body in Oxford University, and it is noteworthy that its name corresponds with that of the sacerdotal legislature. A smaller body, with the religious title of Congre- gation, composed of Masters resident within a mile and a half of Carfax, passes the " graces " for degrees and does other business for which it is not neces- sary to summon Convocation. The congregation in 1905 consisted of the principal officials of the university and 508 masters; while there were over 6000 members of Convocation. The Hebdomadal Council, which is the cabinet of the university, con- sists of twenty-three members : — the chancellor, the vice-chancellor, and the two proctors; six heads of houses ; six professors ; and six members of Con- vocation. Next in importance is the Visitatorial Board, which has powers to admonish and dismiss any professor who is not satisfactorily performing his duties, and consists of the vice-chancellor, three members elected by the hebdomadal council, and three members elected by the congregation. There are special boards of curators and delegates charged with the superintendence of university institutions ; five boards of faculties, for theology, law, medicine, natural science, and arts; several boards of studies; and committees for the appointment of examiners.
The vice-chancellor, the chief official of the uni- versity, is always the head of a house, and holds office for three years. He exercises an independent legal jurisdiction over members of the university, and holds a court for the trial of offenders. There are two proctors, who have the right to veto propositions in convocation; they are assisted by four pro-proctors, and their duty is to look after the morals of the university. The soHcitors who practise in the vice-
THE NEW STATUTES 239
chancellor's court are also called proctors, but tliey are not university officials. Besides this independent legal jurisdiction, the university has the right to elect three aldermen and nine councillors to the ninnicipal corporation of the city of Oxford, and thirteen mem- bers to the board of guardians, and several members to the local education committees.
The chief reforms effected by the new statutes were ( I ) the improvement of the university professoriate at the expense of the colleges, and (2) the fixing of a compulsory rate of contribution by the colleges, out of profits, to the university.^ New professors were appointed at adequate stipends in branches of study hitherto neglected ; existing professors had their salaries enlarged ; and professorial lectures were thrown open to the whole university, instead of being open only to members of particular colleges. Further- more, as a check upon favouritism, the election of professors was vested in boards, some of whose members were public men unconnected with Oxford, or officials of Cambridge University. The professors were bound to reside in the university for a stated time, and to deliver a minimum number of lectures. Thus the position of the professor was greatly im- proved, and public respect thereby increased for those teaching duties which had been so neglected by the fellows.
The fellows had been, as we know, communities of parson-squires who happened to be in Oxford, but who admitted no responsibility for the conduct of the university. They professed a contempt for the profession of teaching; and, as Mark Pattison said, they did not even deem study a creditable pursuit.
^ See " Statutes made for the University of Oxford and Collctjcs and Halls therein by the Commissioners under the University Act of 1877 ' ! Clarendon Press, 1882.
240 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
If we except the niceties of Latin, Greek, abstruse mathematics, and metaphysics, they contributed little to any branch of useful knowledge. They pleaded the terms of their trusts against contributing to the uni- versity for the advancement of learning. While, in their opinion, it was quite lawful that each head and fellow should draw any sum, from ;^300 to .^^3000 a year, for his own benefit, it was totally illegal to spend as many pence on the advancement of learning in the university. The trusts of many of the old foundations bound the head and fellows to offer up masses for the repose of the souls of the founders; but, as the commissioners of 1850 had pointed out, " the legislature had prohibited what was, perhaps, not the chief purpose of the founders, but one of great importance in their eyes. Masses and prayers for the dead have not been said in the colleges since the days of Queen Elizabeth." The collegiate revenues were now being drawn by men who had declared the mass to be a blasphemous fable and dangerous deceit. One cannot admire the alleged conscientiousness of the heads and fellows, therefore, in standing upon their strict legal rights, while such men as Sir William Anson, for instance, warden of All Souls, paid secre- tary for the Education Board under the late Govern- ment, and holder of a number of ecclesiastical offices, continued to draw the large salary of his sinecure in defiance of Henry Chichele's original trust, which stipu- lated for the celebration of masses.
The fellows, as a body, were disposed to be " snobs," borrowing their manners and conversation from the aristocracy, to whom they humbled themselves. They scoffed at the professor, except when he was, like Pusey, a highly-endowed expounder of theology. The well-paid head or senior fellow was usually a man who could wax eloquent on such gentlemanlike topics as
FELLOWS AND PROFESSORS 241
pheasants' eggs, or the species of fly which suited the fish in British rivers, or Alpine climbing, or the re- spective advantages of continental holiday resorts, or racing, or theatrical matters, or pictures, or cookery, or ecclesiastical architecture, or the distinctive merits of vintage wines and cigars — in a word, on everything except matters connected with education. The new professor who was now to be evolved out of chaos for the reformation of the university, was to be a man who acknowledged it as his business to know everything attainable about a particular subject, and to impart that knowledge to those who required it.
But the Oxford theologians threw an obstacle in the way of the anticipated improvement which went far to divert and divide, without seeming to oppose, the scheme which may be entitled " Reformation by Pro- fessor " ; and they did it so deftly that it was received almost without protest or suspicion. Many of the colleges offered to pay their contributions to the pro- fessors, partly in cash and partly in fellowships ; that is to say, the fellows compelled the professors to come and live with them, to dine with them, and " wine " with them, and to be initiated into the pleasures and mysteries of fellowship. Furthermore, they paid the cash direct to the professors instead of paying it into the common university fund, which had the effect of dulling the edge of the professors' zeal by making them dependent on the upholders of the old rigime. It was like mixing good apples with bad in the hope of making the unsound fruit whole. A perusal of the following list will show how largely fellowships figure in the collegiate contribution to the university.
All Souls was to contribute part of the salaries, fixed at ;^700 each, of the rcgius professor of civil law and Vinerian professor of English law ; to pay the professor of political economy ;^300 and a fellowship; and to
242 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
pay the entire salaries of the Chichele professor of international law (^^700), of a new reader in Roman law (;i^40o), and of the Chichele professors of modern history (;^90o). Corpus Christi was to contribute, in whole or part, the salaries of Corpus professors of juris- prudence (;^70o), Latin {£yoo), Romance languages (;^300 and a fellowship), and comparative philology {£700 and a fellowship) ; and of White's professor of moral philosophy {£yoo and a fellowship). New College was to contribute ;^300 to the salaries of the Savilian professors of geometry and astronomy, fixed at ;^7oo each ; to pay the Wykeham professors of physics and ancient history £yoo each and a fellow- ship; and to contribute ;!f300 and a fellowship to the Wykeham professor of logic, to whose salary the university chest contributed ;^400 additional. Mag- dalen was to pay the stipends, fixed at £600 and a fellowship, of the four Waynflete professors of pure mathematics, chemistry, physiology, and moral and metaphysical philosophy ; to contribute, jointly with St. John's College, to the salary of the professor of applied mechanics, fixed at ;^5oo, rising to ;^85o; and to give ;^300 a year each and a fellowship to the professor of mineralogy, and the Sherardian professor of botany. Queen's was to contribute to the salary of the Sedleian professor of natural philosophy, fixed at ^^900, made up of existing salary (;^2 7o), and the proposed increase. Wadham was to contribute i^200 to the stipend of the Professor of experimental philosophy, fixed at ;^500, increasing to ;!^7oo, and eventually to ;!^900. Merton was to pay^the entire salaries of the Linacre professor of human and comparative anatomy, and the Merton professor of English language and literature, each being fixed at £yoo and a fellowship.
Christ Church College was ordered to contribute the salary of the regius professor of Greek, whicb
BENJAMIN JOWETT 243
was fixed at ;^5oo, to be augmented to jCgoo at the next vacancy, unless the holder happened to be a head of a house. When Rev. Benjamin Jowett, the well-known Platonic scholar, first held the professor- ship of Greek, 1855-1865, the stipend was only ;6^40 a year. Jowett, as a junior fellow, had supported the com- missioners of 1850, and did not oppose the admission of non-members of the Church of England to the university. A cabal was formed against him l)y the sacerdotaHsts, and his candidature for the mastership of Balliol in 1854 was defeated. He was accused of heresy by Pusey and the priestly party in 1863, and was subjected to a persecution similar to that which had been meted out to Dr. Hampden. Clergymen came up from all parts of the country to vote in Con- vocation against the emoluments usually attached to his professorship. Though he was a powerful preacher, the university pulpit was rigorously closed against him. But his sterling character enabled him to triumph over his enemies ; he became master of Balliol in i 870, helped in the passage of the Test Act in 1871, and became vice-chancellor. He had the respect of Tenny- son, as may be judged by the preface to Oenone, one of the great laureate's last poems : —
" Dear Master, in our classic town, You, loved by all tlie younger gown
There at Balliol, Lay your Plato for one minute down."
Jowett was, perhaps, the most respected of the Oxford celibates, and that he should have been pro- fessionally persecuted in the seventh decade of the nineteenth century ; and that the important chair of Greek shoidd have been starved because of the re- ligious opinions of the holder, proves at once the
244 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
indifference of the sacerdotalists to the interests of learning and the precepts of Christianity.
Balliol was to contribute to the Boden professor of Sanscrit ; St. John's was to pay the Laudian professor of Arabic ;^400, and, jointly with Magdalen, the pro- fessor of applied mechanics. The prefix " Laudian " is meant to perpetuate the memory of Archbishop Laud, once president of St. John s, and for whom Lord Macaulay " entertained a more vmmitigated contempt than for any other character in our history." Jesus College was to pay ;^400 to the salary of the professor of Celtic, fixed at £600. Brasenose was to pay the Camden professor of ancient history. Oriel was to pay ;^400 to the regius professor of modern history, whose salary was fixed at ^^700, and its provost was to transfer his right to the emoluments of a canonry in Rochester cathedral to a new professor of interpretation of Scripture. The university chest, besides the contributions already mentioned, provided a professor of Anglo-Saxon, and a professor of geology at ;^400, rising to ^900. The regius? professors of divinity and Hebrew, the last-named being Canon Pusey, and the Margaret professor of divinity were specifically made subject to the Visitatorial Committee as well as the other professors; but the regius pro- fessor of medicine continued to hold his post on the same terms as before the Act.
This was the entire scheme for rehabilitating the university professoriate at the expense of the colleges. The appointment of the twenty-eight professors men- tioned was vested in electoral boards, each consisting of five, six, or more members. The list of outside electors included three lawyers, two Cabinet ministers, two medical men, one engineer, seven Cambridge pro- fessors, a pulilic librarian, and the President of the Royal Society ; but they were always in a small
CLERICAL "HISTORY" 245
minority. The boards appointed for ten of the professors, including three important chairs of liistory, did not inckide a solitary independent outsider ; the boards for a number of other chairs only contained one outside member ; and, as we have seen, the regius professor of modern history was made dependent for his salary on Oriel College, the associations of which were so redolent of sacerdotalism. Perhaps the gravest intel- lectual injury which is being inflicted on Englishmen in the name of the University of Oxford is the suppres- sion or misinterpretation of historical fact. The laity might well say to the priests, as the lion in the fable said to the man, that if they had the painting of the picture, or the telling of the story, it would differ materially from the histories favoured in Oxford.
Bishop Stubbs stepped straight from tho post of librarian to the archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth into the regius professorship of modern history at Oxford in 1866. His previous writings were almost entirely sacerdotal — " Hymnale Secundum usum Sarum," " Tractatus de Sancta Cruce de Waltham," " Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum," and " Memorials of Saint Dunstan." It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if his " Constitutional History of England " places the most favourable construction on the con- duct of the clergy, and effectually conceals the opposi- tion of the Church to every enlargement of human freedom. The writer's position, supported by the influence of the sacerdotal party, has caused Stubbs' treatise to be accepted as a final authority, superior to Hallam and all others, in most schools and colleges.
Professor Gardiner is one of Oxford's heroes, largely because of his strictures on Puritanism and Protestant- ism. Last year my attention was drawn to a school history of England bearing his name, in which is to be found an apology for the morals of Pope Alexander
246 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Borgia and Leo X., entirely uncalled for by the con- text. " The popes," says this school book, " became as other Italian princes, no better, no worse " ! Martin Luther is described for English youth as " a Saxon friar " who " had been disgusted by the pro- ceedings of a hawker of indulgences, who extracted small suvis from the ignorant by the sale of the remission of the pains of purgatory " ! The false inference for the child is that the highly-respectable popes did not profit by the sale of indulgences.
The book is full of ritualistic illustrations, one of which is described as " A Portrait of Warham, Arch- bishop of Canterbury, i 503-1 532, showing the ordinary Episcopal dress, with the mitre and archiepiscopal cross; from a painting belonging to Viscount Dillon, dated 1527." The object obviously is to familiarise chil- dren with the pre-Reformation vestments, and imbue them with respect for the sartorial elements of priestcraft. There are large, highly-flattering portraits of Thomas Wolsey, the statesman-hero of Mandell Creighton, the late bishop of London ; of Catherine of Aragon ; of the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, " built by Cardinal Wolsey and finished in 1529"; of Thomas More ; of Thomas Howard, duke of Nor- folk ; and of Queen Mary ; as well as a portrait of Fisher, bishop of Rochester. While Edward VI. is flippantly described as " a precocious youth taught by much adulation to be confident in his own powers," Mary is thus held up to childish admiration — " She had grieved over the separation from Rome as a sin burdening her own conscience, and she believed with all her heart that the one path to happiness, temporal and eternal, for herself and her realm, was to root out heresy in the only way in which it seemed possible, by rooting out the heretics " ! Mary was an admirable character, more sinned against than sinning. " It was
SACERDOTAL ENGLISH HISTORY 247
not only Mary who thought it meet that heretics should be burnt " ! And " she died sad and lonely, wondering why all she had done, as she believed, on God's belialf, had been followed by failure on every side " ! Pole, too, was an injured innocent, for whom English children are asked to shed tears — " Happily for himself, Pole too died two days afterwards."
The pictures of the English reformers are few, small, and unprepossessing, consisting only of Protector Somer- set, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer. English children are informed that " Cranmer's heart was as weak as his head was strong, and he six times recanted, hoping to save his life " ! And it was only on " finding his recantation useless " that " he recovered his better mind and renounced his recantation " ! Coming from such a man as Gardiner, this is Puseyism in excelsis. Bucer and Peter Martyr were " foreign preachers in- troduced to teach religion to the English as foreign soldiers had been introduced to teach them obedi- ence " ! John Knox was " a foreigner " and " a Scot." And it is recorded with an air of playfulness that " Ridley and Latimer were burned in the town ditch in front of Balliol College." Latimer was merely a man who denounced the court of Edward VI. for " its greed and oppression " ; and children are told that " the courtiers became tired of his reproofs." Bishop Hooper was an eccentric whose behaviour, when he was offered the bishopric of Gloucester, is thus described — " For some time he hung back, refusing to wear the episcopal vestments as being a mark of antichrist, but at last he allowed himself to be con- secrated in them, though he cast them off as soon as the ceremony was over " ! The children are thus induced to take a sartorial or superficial view of the Reforma- tion ; to regard Hooper, for instance, as a whimsical personage who objected to a particularly handsome dress.
248 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Even Professor Freeinau, despite his great ability, also had to subserve the interests of the clerical profession.
In Bishop Gore's opinion/ the Church's " real cause for intellectual anxiety " now lies, not in the attacks of science, but " much more in the region of history." So thoroughly have the sacerdotalists done their work, however, that it is impossible to find a school history of England — especially amongst those prepared for the very young — in which Pope Gregory, Augustine, the Anglican bishops, abbots, abbesses, monks, and nuns, do not figure as the chief benefactors of the country.
The statutes further enacted that every college should " make a contribution out of its revenues for university purposes " ; and, so that the head and fellows might not absorb the entire profits, their salaries were settled by statute. There was to be an initial payment of ;^2 per cent, on all net revenue ; an additional ^3 per cent, on net revenue above ^5000 ; and an additional ;^io per cent, on revenue over ^10,000. Only £1 per cent, was payable on all revenue, irrespective of amount, for 1883-4. The additional assessment was to be levied gradually ; one- fourth being payable annually for 1 88 5-1 889 ; one-half for 1 890-1 894; three-fourths for 1 895-1 899; and the whole assessment in 1900 and thenceforward. But these provisions have, as we shall see, been almost nugatory ; and the contributions of the colleges still remain exceedingly small in proportion to their revenue.
The accounts of the university and colleges were ordered to be kept by professional accountants practis- ing in London or Westminster, to be laid before Con- vocation and published within the university, and abstracts up to December 31st were to be delivered to the vice-chancellor before March 24th each year.
1 Birmingham Diocesan Conference, November S, 1905. — Daily Express.
CHAPTER X
Oxford — " Keligion, Learning, and Education " — Penalties on Marriage — Priest-Fellows — Wealth of the Colleges — Costly estal)lishments — Salaries of Heails and Fellows — Enormous outlay on religious worship — Review of the Colleges — Christ Church — Secret Trusts in Hertford College — Non-collegiate Students— Keble College and Ritualism — Clerical iniluence — Extravagance and frivolity — Poverty of the Universities — Discreditable Reports from the in- stitutions— Loans — Total revenues.
Each college is defined in tlie statutes as " a place of relitrion, learuinq-, and education," the reliyion of its members being placed tirst, the learning of its fellows second, and the education of its students last. Each college is governed by a head and fellows, the head being elected by the fellows, while the fellows elect each other ; and a trade is carried on, not only in land, houses, stocks, rent-charges and advowsons, but also in provisions, tenements, and furniture ; and profits are made on buttery and kitchen, room-rents, domus dues, and furniture hire. Thousrh marriacje is less generally prohibited than it used to be, all the statutes still contain penal clauses against the marriage of fellows. For twelve months a new fellow is on pro- bation, and if his social qualities do not give satis- faction, he may cease to be a fellow at the end of the year, which proves that scholarship is not the qualification desired so much as " clubbable " qualities ; but the professor-fellows are appointed ex officio on business grounds. It is stated that candidates for fellowship are to be " examined " before election, but no course of study is prescribed, and, as the fellows themselves are the examiners, they may appoint
2 50 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
any one they wish, except where it is specified that candidates for election must be graduates. As a general rule, the fellows' fixed salary is ;^2 00, with free commons and other perquisites, but the added income from tuition fees and other sources may double or treble this amount. They usually hold office for seven years, and are eligible for re-election.
All statutes provide ( i ) where there is not a priest- fellow, a priest in orders must be " elected without notice or examination" to a fellowship, and (2) for divine service in each college, according to the rites of the Church of England. There is a general proviso for the dismissal of the head for "grave immorality or grave misconduct " — a souvenir of sacerdotal times when such a measure would have been frequently desirable. A head who holds the vice-chancellorship, may draw the salaries of his headship and vice-chancellorship, irrespective of amount. A minimum sum of money to be expended on scholarships and exhibitions for students is speci- fied in the statutes of each college, thereby insuring a fair proportion of the revenues for scholars.
I have prepared a series of tables from the latest official publications.^ The first shows (i) the number of undergraduates in each college, the most intelli- gible test by which one may discover its value to the country; (2) the gross revenue; and (3) the contribution to the university. The reader cannot fail to be struck by the small number of under- graduates, in no case reaching a total of 300, and in many cases falling below 1 00 ; the proportionately immense amount of the gross revenue which is derived (a) from lands and tithes, {h) from college fees, (c)
1 "University of Oxford, 1904; The Accounts of the Colleges": Clarendon Press, 1905.
COLLEGIATE REVENUES
251
from trust funds ; and the small contribution to the university, amounting' to less than one-twentieth of the total revenues. Of this contribution, only £66y2, I OS. I d. was paid in cash to the university, the balance being paid by the colleges in cash or fellowships to the professors, whose independence, as I have already explained, was thereby impaired. Such were the dis- appointing financial results of the statutes framed under the Act of 1877, from which so iiuich was expected.
|
Name of College. |
No. of Undergra- duates. |
Gross Revenues. |
1 Contributions to Universiiy. |
|||
|
University Balliol . Merton . Exeter . Oriel . . Queen's . New . . Lincoln . All Souls Magdalen Brasenose Corpus . Christ Chui Trinity . St. John's Jesus . . Wad ham Pembroke Worcester Hertford |
ch |
200 244 129 .65 136 138 290 98 4 186 130 100 298 192 151 134 I.Oj 97 92 121 |
£ s. d. 19,045 9 7 24,249 5 0 34,014 13 I 14,137 9 I 19,174 17 10 35,632 0 0 50,016 15 10 11,812 I 9 28,248 4 0 66,232 II 11 29,827 12 4 i8,79S 3 3 63,108 8 4 20,840 10 5 33,306 13 6 21,737 16 3 11,269 2 5 10,219 7 3 8,874 I 6 8,245 3 5 |
£ s. d. 217 18 II 210 13 0 2,773 17 3 92 5 10 561 7 3 788 2 7 2,347 19 6 262 II 5 4,394 2 0 5,794 19 4 1,474 19 0 1,824 13 7 2,828 8 6 382 0 0 775 8 10 754 9 II 181 3 II 60 13 8 36 8 9 13 9 7 |
||
|
Totals |
3,008 |
528,799 7 3 |
25,755 12 10 |
The second table shows the expenditure of each college arranged under four heads: — (i) External payments include not only rates, interest on loans, repairs and improvements to landed estates, and cost of management, but also payments to vicars and
252 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
donations to churches. New College, for instance, which only gives -^2347 to the university, pays ^3140 to vicars and churches; Magdalen pays ;^ 1 4 5 o for the same purposes ; Christ Church, ^1348; and other colleges less amounts. In some cases the fellows draw salary as managers of their own property. I am not prepared to fix any net revenue, therefore, as it is not proved that the estates are managed on the best business principles. Where there is a large expenditure on property one year, it usually proves remunerative in subsequent years ; where there is a heavy charge for loans, it may only prove the extravagance of former years. The colleges have the handling of the gross revenues, and it is obvious that the best energies of the heads and fellows are taken up with the management of property and trading operations, instead of being devoted to education; just as the energies of the bishops, deans and chapters are concentrated on similar objects rather than on Christian precept and practice. If a reliable central authority relieved the heads and fellows of the management of their estates, it might be better for the estates and for the fel- lows, as well as for the undergraduates who enter the colleges for educational purposes. (2) The inter- nal outlay does not include provisions or wine, which do not figure in the accounts, except in so far as a profit or loss may have been incurred in the buttery and kitchen ; nor does it include the salaries of heads and fellows. But it includes the civil list of each college, viz., college officers, repairs of buildings, chapel services and choirs, college servants, college entertainments, maintenance of establishment, table allowances, provision for tuition and pension funds, library, and sundries. The following items, taken from the internal outlay of New College, will
COLLEGIATE EXPENDITURE 253
illustrate the liberal manner in which this money is spent: — chapel services and choir, ;!^2202, 13s. 3d.; servants, ;^i838, 12s. 8d. ; officers, ;£^io48, lis. 4d. ; maintenance of establishment, £943, 5^- ; table al- lowances, £2'j2, 2s. ; entertainments, ^^249, 9s. 3d.; library, £\i\, 17s. 6d. ; tuition and pension funds, ^5369, 17s. 4d. The tuition fund is really a fellow's extra-remuneration fund. The small amounts spent on the college libraries remind one of the Anglican bishop who, on coming to Ireland, ordered one cart- load of books and twenty-four hogsheads of wine to be sent on before him to his diocese,^ University College, which contributes nothing to the professoriate and only ;^2 1 7 to the common university fund, set aside ^^400 for its dining-hall restoration fund in 1904. (3) The payments to the heads and fellows are arrived at by adding their admitted share of the dividend to their admitted drawings from the tui- tion fund, and allowing somethmg for their extra drawings under other heads. But the figure does not cover all their takings, for in many cases the fellows of one college draw from the tuition funds of other colleges. The total of the payments made out of the tuition fund in each college to tutors and lecturers who are not fellows of the particular college was iJ^ 1 1,469, 2s. 7d., and we may add a consider- able share of this to the salaries of the heads and fellows given in this table. Nor does this exhaust the profits of those gentlemen, for they draw pay as university officers and examiners, and receive con- siderable additions to income from outside sources by virtue of their position in Oxford. (4) In many cases the money spent in scholarships and exhibitions comes from special funds devised for the specific pur- pose, and out of the power of the fellows. With these
1 Clancy's " Memoirs," quoted by Lecky.
2 54 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
explanations, the reader will be better able to under- stand the following table : —
|
Heads |
||||
|
Name of |
External |
Internal |
and |
Scholar- |
|
College. |
Payments. |
Outlay. |
P"'ellows. Cash. |
ships, &c. |
|
£ s. d. |
£ s. d. |
£ |
£ s. d. |
|
|
University . . |
2,953 17 9 |
7,168 8 10 |
6,000 |
1,615 18 4 |
|
Balliol . . . |
1,383 13 10 |
6,213 3 10 |
6,250 |
3,643 3 8 |
|
Merton . . . |
14,410 5 I |
6,211 19 2 |
7,500 |
2,246 3 0 |
|
Exeter . . . |
963 10 8 |
4,142 3 11 |
5,500 |
2,587 13 3 |
|
Oriel. . . . |
5,564 13 10 |
4,777 16 5 |
5,500 |
1,523 0 3 |
|
Queen's . . . |
7'i94 7 I |
8,281 13 9 |
9,000 |
4,091 II II |
|
New .... |
13,462 14 I |
13,811 18 8 |
11,000 |
3,759 6 4 |
|
Lincoln . . . |
1,894 13 7 |
2,886 3 9 |
4,500 |
1,194 14 3 |
|
All Souls . . |
11,038 10 6 |
3,727 17 5 |
8,000 |
000 |
|
Magdalen . . |
28,522 12 ID |
13,035 6 5 |
14,000 |
3.013 13 0 |
|
Brasenose . . |
5,718 14 3 |
4,969 17 7 |
8,000 |
1,122 13 4 |
|
Corpus . . . |
4,177 311 |
4,085 3 4 |
6,500 |
1.953 13 II |
|
Christ Church |
15,548 14 II |
11,591 6 4 |
26,179 |
4,186 17 5 |
|
Trinity . . . |
2,098 10 3 |
3,985 5 I |
5,700 |
2,466 3 6 |
|
St. John's . . |
11,818 I 2 |
7,903 I 8 |
7,500 |
3,466 19 2 |
|
Jesus . . . |
6,267 12 5 |
3,485 13 9 |
5,000 |
5,515 5 7 |
|
Wadham . |
2,253 19 II |
2,390 9 I |
4,600 |
1,835 I 2 |
|
Pembroke . . |
545 811 |
1,653 12 II |
3,600 |
2,034 6 9 |
|
Worcester . . |
1,421 13 0 |
2,455 8 8 |
3,250 |
1,438 8 I |
|
Hertford . . Totals . . |
000 |
3,159 16 9 |
3,500 |
556 13 4 |
|
137,238 18 0 |
115.93s 7 5 |
151.079 |
48,251 6 2 |
The third table shows (i) the payments to vicars and donations to churches and their subsidiary schools in connection with the college estates ; ( 2 ) the internal outlay on religious worship; and (3) the number of benefices in the gift of each college. The total religious outlay is, of course, unparalleled in any academy in the civilised world at the present day ; and, when contrasted with the impecunious condition of the university's scientific institutions, may justly be styled a public scandal of the first magnitude. I have added by way of contrast the outlay of each college on its library, some of the figures being remarkable.
OUTLAY ON RELIGION
255
New College spent ;^5 343 on religious services and only ^^131 on its library; and Christ Church ;^ 1 5,952 on religion, as against -^638 on its library.
|
Name of |
Religious |
Outlay on |
No. of Benefices |
||
|
College. |
Worshi^j.^ |
Library. |
in Gift. |
||
|
£ s. |
d. |
£ s. d. |
|||
|
University . . . |
ffl |
227 14 |
5 |
loi 10 6 |
7 |
|
b |
135 10 |
2 |
|||
|
Balliol .... |
a |
55 15 |
8 |
359 18 10 |
16 |
|
b |
155 19 |
9 |
|||
|
Merton .... |
a |
413 19 |
0 |
196 0 0 |
19 |
|
h |
52 12 |
6 |
|||
|
Exeter .... |
a |
102 4 |
0 |
353 13 II |
8 |
|
b |
250 2 |
2 |
|||
|
Oriel .... |
a |
266 4 |
0 |
114 7 0 |
16 |
|
b |
104 6 |
0 |
|||
|
Queen's .... |
a |
180 10 |
4 |
190 14 0 |
20 |
|
b |
565 8 |
3 |
|||
|
New |
a |
3,140 12 |
I |
131 17 6 |
39 |
|
b |
2,202 i^ |
2 |
|||
|
Lincoln. . . . |
a |
'■'. 5 0 |
0 |
60 0 0 |
9 |
|
b |
75 0 |
0 |
|||
|
All Souls . . . |
a |
478 6 |
8 |
557 5 2 |
14 |
|
b |
141 14 |
0 |
|||
|
Magdalen . |
a |
1,451 12 |
0 |
'91 5 4 |
39 |
|
b |
3,063 7 |
5 |
|||
|
Brasenose . . . |
ffl |
327 14 |
8 |
235 4 3 |
20 |
|
b |
q8 2 |
0 |
|||
|
Corpus .... |
a |
287 10 |
10 |
III 8 2 |
16 |
|
b |
78 0 |
9 |
|||
|
Christ Church |
a |
1 ,348 8 |
10 |
638 10 4 |
86 |
|
b |
14,604 12 |
8 |
|||
|
Trinity .... |
a |
1^7 o |
8 |
58 8 10 |
8 |
|
b |
54 5 |
6 |
|||
|
St. John's . . . |
<i. |
105 3 |
10 |
201 18 0 |
35 |
|
b |
514 9 |
8 |
|||
|
Jesus .... |
a |
373 6 |
0 |
97 4 II |
20 |
|
b |
205 3 |
0 |
|||
|
Wadham . . . |
a |
55 9 |
0 |
45 0 0 |
8 |
|
b |
44 10 |
10 |
|||
|
Pembroke . . . |
a |
6 13 |
0 |
30 0 0 |
7 |
|
b |
84 7 |
9 |
|||
|
Worcester . . . |
a |
82 15 |
0 |
166 15 0 ' |
10 |
|
h |
100 13 |
10 |
|||
|
Hertford . . . Total . . . |
b |
86 18 |
7 |
26 10 0 |
10 |
|
31,684 7 |
0 |
3,869 II 9 |
407 |
I o, external ; 6, internal.
2 56 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
But the ;^3 1,684, 7s. thus ascertained, enormous as it is, does not constitute the entire yearly expenditure of Oxford on religious ceremonial, for we must add the cost of twenty-three priest-fellows at a minimum average salary, let us say, of i^300, namely ^6900. We must also add the salary of the master of Pem- broke College, who is bound to be a priest, ;^8oo, the present holder being Bishop Mitchinson, who also draws salary as a residentiary canon of Gloucester Cathedral. The upkeep of the fabrics of the twenty chapels, included under " repairs to buildings," must amount to a considerable sum annually, as they are the most important edifices in the colleges. If we allow ^3000 a year for this purpose, we find that the total yearly expenditure on religious worship taken out of the collegiate revenues of Oxford is ;^42,384. And who will gainsay the statement that the interests of Christianity would have been better served by one plain commodious chapel for the whole university, staffed by a few zealous clergymen, than by all the chapels and dignitaries maintained out of this large outlay ?
Some other aspects of collegiate finance worth noticing are: — (i) The caution money paid in by students, and held by the heads and fellows; (2) the amount of unpaid loans, mostly borrowed under Government sanction; and (3) the provision made for pensions. All Souls has no caution money, having no students. In Oriel, Queen's, and Hertford, all the caution money held is stated to be due for battels ; in the other sixteen colleges, the surplus, over what is thus due, amounts to the large sum of ;^57,32 8. This sum is so constant a quantity that in some colleges it is permanently invested ; in others, it is borrowed for various purposes by the heads and fellows. Oriel, for instance, owes £4600
LOANS. ORIEL HIGH TABLE 257
to its caution fund. There are no particulars as to loans given by Merton, Exeter, Jesus, Pembroke, Worcester, and Hertford ; but the remaining fourteen colleges are indebted to the extent of ^^429, 61 3. The largest debtors are Magdalen, ;£^246,76o ; Christ Church, £\2i,2C)7\ All Souls, ;^8 1,827; and St. John's, ;^ 3 9, 2 7 6. The vast majority of loans were raised for estate improvements, and some for im- provements of college buildings. So far as their object is specified, not one of them was raised for any educational, scientific, or philanthropic purpose. The largest invested pension funds are — Balliol, ^^36,690; University, i^i 5,676; and Magdalen, ;^ 1 3, 66 8; in St. John's the capital is, ^^445 9; in nine other colleges, the yearly produce of the pension funds varies from ;^8 5 in Merton, to ;^ii32 in Exeter; and in Oriel, Lincoln, All Souls, Jesus, Pembroke, Worcester, and Hertford, particulars are not given.
Some points with regard to special colleges chal- lenge attention. The Rhodes benefaction to Oriel College consists of a building fund, a loss of income fund, a supplementary income of resident fellows fund, a repairs fund, a high table fund, and a pension fund. The repairs fund alone figures in the general accounts as having yielded ^^278, los. 8d. in 1904. The high table fund yielded ;^2 7 8, los. 8d. also, which was spent thus — gaudies, £i\6, os. 6d. ; steward of the common room, ;^i5o ; additional gaudies, -^32, 13s.; allowances, ;^45, 19s. The "supplementary income of resident fellows fund," produced ^^1169, i8s. 5d., of which ;^932, os. 2d. was paid to the fellows; and the pension fund produced £60, 17s. 2d. It is worthy of note that the birthplace of modern Anglican priestcraft should have been provided with a special " high table fund," by a gentleman who helped the
R
2 58 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
cause of ritualism in South Africa in a thousand ways.
The provost of Queen's College must be " a person of unblemished character," the fellows must be " un- blemished and unmarried." Amongst the fellows of New College, " Monsignor Croke Robinson, domestic prelate to his holiness Leo XIIL," stands high on the list. Lincoln College, with a revenue of only ;^ii,8i2, gives £262, IIS. 5d. to the university; while Balliol, with a revenue of ;^24,249, gives only ;^2io. All Souls owed its wine-cellar account, ;^3i5, 5s. 3d. The college is a corporation of sinecurists, for whose continued existence there is no justifi- cation ; and an Act should be passed dividing its endowments amongst the needy scientific institutions of the university. Its warden draws ;^i5oo, its fellows about £6000, and its four undergraduates, or bible-clerks, are subsidised to the extent of £2,^$, I2S. lod. a year; while over ;£^3200 is spent on estab- lishment charges. In Magdalen College, there is a rule that one-sixth of the fellows must be theo- logians ; and one- sixth must be proficient in mathe- matics, or natural science, or medicine — a regulation which gives theology an importance equal to mathe- matics, natural science, and medicine combined. Two of its " official " fellows must be priests. Though its revenue is the largest in Oxford (;^66,2 32), it only spends ^^30 13 in scholarships, as compared with £■^64.2, and ^^5515, so spent by Balliol and Jesus, whose incomes are only ;^24,249 and ;^2 1,737 re- spectively.
Corpus is the only college which has the courage to publish a separate " cellar fund account." The amount available in 1904 was ;^I72 8, 7s. id., made up of battels, £177, 9s. 4d. ; stock at close of account, ;^i404, I 2s. 6d. — a considerable quantity of wine ; and
CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE 259
a balance of £146, 6s. id. The Corpus wine-cellar fund account must be small in proportion to those of Magdalen, Christ Church, and the other wealthy colleges.
Christ Church College, called, pa?' excellence, The House, is governed by the dean and six canons of the diocese of Oxford, of whom five are appointed by the Crown and one by the Bishop of Oxford ; and the college chapel is the diocesan cathedral. When Henry VIII, erected Oxford into a separate diocese, the new diocesan authorities annexed the college revenues, and continued to batten on them until they were censured, as we have seen, by the commissioners of 1850. The Christ Church Act of 1867 has been dealt with in a previous chapter. Canons Ince, Ottley, and Bigg hold respectively the regius pro- fessorships of divinity, pastoral theology, and ecclesi- astical history ; Canon Sanday is Margaret Professor of Divinity ; and Canon Driver is Pusey's successor in the regius professorship of Hebrew. Canon Houblon is archdeacon of Oxford, and, in that capacity, partly responsible for the ritualistic practices of the clergy in church and school in his portion of the diocese. The statutes enacted that fourteen non-official " students " should be elected by examination, probation, and co- option ; as the " fellows " are elected in other colleges. They must be unmarried, and hold office for seven years, the salary being p^200. There are fifteen official students, with salaries of ;^300 and extras from the tuition fund, who hold office for fifteen years ; and at least three of them must be priests.
After Magdalen, it is the richest of the colleges ; and I have prepared a table showing the sources of its revenues and how it is expended, which may be taken as typical of the accounts of all the colleges. It will be noticed (i) that its receipts from lands,
26o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
houses, and tithes exceed all other sources of income ; (2) that its internal revenue, or payments by under- graduates and graduates, which constitutes the legiti- mate earnings of the institution, only amounted to ^13,862, or £'] \2 less than the drawings of the dean and canons. In the official accounts the payment to those dignitaries, i^ 14,604, is concealed in a sub-title under the omnibus heading of " other internal expendi- ture " ! The amount spent in scholarships for under- graduates was ;^I329 less than the sum so spent by Jesus College, whose revenue is only one-third of the revenues of Christ Church. Its contribution to the university is considerably less than those of All Souls, New, and Merton, which have much smaller revenues. In keeping with the Puseyite shibboleth, " Unscience, not Science, Adverse to Faith," it has included in its contribution a grant of ^^1496, 8s. 6d. for readers in chemistry, anatomy, and physics in what is ostenta- tiously called " The Christ Church Laboratory '' — a policy calculated to distract attention from the many thousands which it expends on sacerdotalism. Sir Thomas White left a trust for a poor scholar, the dividend of which, in 1904, was ;^8, is., making, with a balance of £2^ . 3s. iid., a total of i^35, 4s. iid. ; but the dean and canons knew no young man poor enough to merit this trifle. The dean and canons do not publish a separate wine-cellar fund account.
The visitor to its dining-hall cannot fail to be struck by a remarkable portrait, the staring newness of which seems curiously incongruous amongst the staid old portraits by famous artists into whose company it has been thrust. It is the portrait of the present Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Paget, late dean of Christ Church ; and it is hung in the place of honour at the head of the hall beside a bust of the late Queen Victoria, as if to
JESUS COLLEGE
261
assert the domiuation of the sacerdotal party in this, the chief college of the university — " The House " which gives a lead to all the other houses in Oxford.
With these preliminary explanations the reader will be able to appreciate the details given in the following table : —
Christ Church College, 1904.
Revenue.
Lands at rack-rent Houses ,,
Tithe rent-charge Sundries Internal Revenue : —
College fees 530 Establishment
charges . Tuition fees Room rents Profits on
kitch en,
buttery,
and coal . Interest on
Caution
Money
£ s. 18,768 II
3,589 7 17,466 19
1,633 3
d.
4,394 I 4,669 2 3,698 17
432 10 n
138
Trust Funds Dividends and Interest
13,862 16 7 3,719 16 10 2,332 19 8
Total . -61,773 15 10
Balance at close of account 1,734 12 6
63, 108 8 4
ExrENDITURE.
Charges on Loans
Paid to Vicars .
Churches .
Repairing Chancels .
Other estate charges
The Dean and Canons
Student-Fellows
Tuition Fund .
College Officers
Library
Servants .
Entertainments
Table Allowances
Almsmen .
Special Police .
Stables
Poor Scholars .
Scholarships, &c.
University Contribution .
Miscellaneous, including rates, insurance, and re- pairs ....
|
£ s- |
d. |
|
9,263 14 |
7 |
|
906 2 |
4 |
|
247 I |
0 |
|
19s 9 |
6 |
|
4,936 7 |
6 |
|
14,604 12 |
8 |
|
5,280 12 |
0 |
|
4,968 10 |
0 |
|
1,986 II |
3 |
|
638 10 |
4 |
|
3.156 II |
10 |
|
177 9 |
0 |
|
226 7 |
6 |
|
384 0 |
0 |
|
67 10 |
0 |
|
65 0 |
0 |
|
0 0 |
0 |
|
4,186 17 |
5 |
|
2,828 8 |
6 |
6,214 II 9
Total . . 60,334 7
Balance forward 2,774 i
63,108 8 4
In Jesus three of the official fellows must be un- married ; and if a fellow marries at a time when there are only three unmarried fellows, he vacates his fellow- ship. Though Jesus is known as the Welsh College, the usual provisions exist for religious instruction by a priest-fellow, and religious service according to the rites of the Church of England. Of all the colleges, it spends absolutely the largest sum on scholarships.
262 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
lu Wadliam, the salary of the head in 1 904 auiounted to ;^i2 88, which exceeded by ;^88 the entire share of the dividend drawn by the fellows, not including the drawings from the tuition fund.
Hertford College is a " new foundation." Its special Act, passed in 1874, confers upon it "all such rights and privileges as are possessed or enjoyed or can be exercised by other colleges in the University of Oxford " ; but the promoters endeavoured to shirk their collateral responsibilities, and sought, as " a new foundation," to evade the Test Act of 1 871, on the grounds that the statute only applied to colleges existing at the date of its passage. The college only partially publishes its accounts, alleging that " there are considerable sums vested in trustees for the benefit of members of the college, but the college has no direct control over those funds, nor has it access to the accounts." While thus evading the general obligation imposed by the statutes of 1 878-1 88 1, it ostentatiously prints at the head of its accounts the words " printed in the form required by the university."
Its endowments, or " new money," as it is called, were principally supplied by Thomas Charles Baring, who provided for fifteen fellowships, thirty scholarships, seven lectureships, a dean and bursar. It is with special reference to the drawings of the fellows, college officers, and scholars, that the explanatory statement is made as to the partial disclosures of the accounts. There are over thirty scholars, the annual value of each scholarship being ;i^ioo; so that the yearly expendi- ture under this head must be over ;^3000 ; yet scholars only figure for ;£^5 56, 13s. 4d. in the general account for 1904. This would explain a statement made to me, when in Oxford recently, that candidates for certain Hertford scholarships were asked to state whether they subscribed to the creed of the Church of England
NON-COLLEGIATE STUDENTS 263
before being admitted for examination. Hertford's contribution to the university in 1904 was only £1^, 9s. yd. A site for a chapel has been purchased at a cost of £2^, and this college, which could only give so small a sum to the university, has set aside ^1000 for ecclesiastical building.
Extravagance on the one hand, and servitude on the other, have always been the keynotes of under- graduate life in Oxford under the monastic or col- legiate system; but since 1868 the non-collegiate students have given an example of what can be done on the lines of respectable independence. The students reside in certain lodging-houses licensed for the purpose, live according to their means, and get as much education as they can. The delegacy, or estab- lishment set up for them by the university, only figures in the chest account for £76, lis., received in its behalf; and ;^io8i, 3s. 8d. paid to it by the chest. Yet it provides for 207 undergraduates, a number only exceeded by three of the twenty col- leges, namely, Balliol, Christ Church, and New. The total receipts of the delegacy were ^2723, 8s.; of which entrance, delegacy, and tuition fees realised -^15 53' 15s- The money is spent on — censor's stipend and fees, £ss6, 2s. ; tutors, lecturers, and examiners, ;!^I2I9, 4s.; librarian and clerks, ;^22 5 ; provision for pensions, ^165, 17s. 2d.; establishment charges, ;^i5i, 13s. 4d. ; and balance carried forward, ^^209, I 5s. 2d. There is also a fund of ^^405 5, 7s. 2d., mainly caution money, of which ^3500 is invested in Consols ; and there is one prize, the Shute scholarship, ^^83, 6s. 8d., specially connected with the delegacy.
Besides the clericalism which pervades all the col- leges, the sacerdotal party have a special stronghold for themselves in Keble College, founded and endowed to perpetuate the memory of Pusey's confessor, in
264 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
1870-71, when the aboHtion of religious tests was about to throw open all degrees and most offices to citizens of all denominations. It is a hostel rather than a college ; is not incorporated with and does not contribute to the university; and is outside the scope of the statutes. Nevertheless, it was admitted by a special statute to all " the privileges possessed by the colleges and public halls within the university " ; it is a power in Oxford ; and the number of its undergra- duates (230) is only exceeded by New, Christ Church, and Balliol. Its buildings, locally called the Brickfields, are in the appropriate style of the Roman cathedral at Westminster, of tawdry red and yellow brick, dis- figured by vulgar statues. The quadrangle savours of foreign monasticism, and the immense chapel is be- dizened with stained glass and paint, with a Latin prayer for deceased benefactors engraved in brass within the altar rails : " Miserere fac cum Sanctis tuis gloria numerari."
Its warden, Rev. W. Lock, D.D., is university professor of scriptural exegesis, and a member of the Hebdomadal Council. The members of its council include the most aggressive ritualists in England — Lord Halifax ; Lord Hugh Cecil, M.P. ; Bishop King of Lincoln; Bishop Ingram of London ; Bishop Talbot of Southwark, late of Rochester ; and his nephew, Mr. J. G. Talbot, who represents the university in parliament. Canon Mobcrly of Christ Church, regius professor of pastoral theology, and Canon Newbolt, chancellor of St. Paul's cathedral, are also members. And, to crown the edifice, Arch- bishop Davidson, of Canterbury, is its visitor. There are thus six Ecclesiastical Commissioners responsible for the management of Keble College.
There is a prevalent misconception, fostered by the sacerdotal party, that the grosser practices of ritualism are not officially sanctioned, but, at most, only con-
1
KEBLE COLLEGE 265
doned, by the heads of the Church. Keble College, however, supplies us with the connecting link between the humble ritualistic parsons, on whom all the odium of ritualism is so unjustly cast, and the highest stipen- diaries of the Church, who keep in the background and eschew responsibility for the malpractices of their inferiors. Laymen, like Lord Halifax and Lord Hugh Cecil, are put forward on platforms to propound many egregious pretensions of sacerdotalism which Arch- bishop Davidson, Bishop Talbot, and Bishop Ingram have not the courage to proclaim ; humble clergymen on small salaries are deputed to introduce Roman practices in remote rural parishes, or impoverished urban districts, for the undoing of English character ; but the connection between the cat's paws and the monkey is frequently not in evidence.
In Keble College, however, we have Archbishop Davidson, Bishop Ingram, Bishop King, Bishop Talbot, Mr. Talbot, Lord Hugh Cecil, and Lord Halifax, all sitting on the council of an institution established to perpetuate the memory of Puseyism, Kebleism, Man- ningism, and Newmanism ; and, in that capacity, acting as patrons of forty-one livings. The first living which appears in their list of benefices is that of St. John the Evangelist, Bovey Tracey, Devonshire, which is one of the most notorious of the ritualistic churches. Attracted by all the allegations of ritualism made against it, I visited this sleepy Devonshire village, which is about four miles from the eastern edge of Dartmoor, and, from all I heard and saw, I concluded that the reports concerning it were not exaggerated. Dr. Robertson, the newly-appointed Bishop of Exeter, made a visitation of the parish in the summer of 1905, of which the fol- lowing brief account is taken from a reliable source.^
" After the single churchwarden, a lady, had been
^ The Record, June 2, 1905.
266 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
admitted to office and had taken the usual oath, the bishop requested her to take him round the church. This building is not the parish church of Bovey Tracey, but was a few years ago separated from it " — apparently for ritualistic work under the auspices of Keble — " and has since then maintained a type of worship of which the outward and visible signs are large foreign-looking images of the Virgin Mary and infant Saviour, the image of our Lord known as the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and in an inner chamber, approached by a some- what intricate vestibule, a tabernacle for the reserved sacrament, and a large crucifix. Over the chief holy table there is also a crucifix of smaller size, and under it another tabernacle. In front of the holy table there is a large brass gong or bell. These ornaments, the bishop, in his visitatorial capacity, ordered to be re- moved within six months, unless in the meantime a confirmatory faculty had been obtained for their reten- tion. Other directions bearing upon the subject of unauthorised services, such as the so-called festival of Corpus Christi, the bishop ordered to be discontinued, and all manuals and hymns in use in the church are to be submitted to him for perusal. The injunctions of the bishop were received with respectful silence, and the court was closed."
The vicarage of St. James, Plymouth, whose in- cumbent was censured for ritualism by the bishop at the same visitation, is also in the gift of Keble College. Knowing the powerful support behind him, the vicar of this church, we are told, " both at morning and evening service," on the Sunday follow- ing the visitation, " is reported to have said that they were not going to make any alteration whatever in the service, because they believed they were carrying out the strict letter of the Prayer Book." i It is not fair
1 The Record, June 9, 1905.
CLERICAL ASCENDENCY 267
to hold the incumbents entirely responsible for the ritualism of Bovey Tracey and Plymouth — of Worthing, Folkestone, and Paddiugton ; for it is the official, but unavowed, policy of the heads of the Church, con- cocted in Oxford. As the officer is to the private soldier, so the warden and council of Keble College stand with regard to the incumbents who carry out their instructions.
The lay fellows at Oxford are now in a large majority, and the number of lay heads is increasing. One regrets that it should be a subject of congratula- tion ; but one cannot forget the evils of the sacerdotal r(^gime, which, perhaps, has nowhere done more harm to humanity than in Oxford. Clerical influence, how- ever, is still predominant in Oxford ; and, in the words of the commissioners of 1850, the laymen there have " imbibed the moral and religious tone of the clerical circle in which they live." The connection between the university and the Church was too close to be broken by even twenty-five years of improvement. Bishops are, by right of office, the visitors of twelve colleges. Balliol is the only college which has the right of electing its own visitor, who is at present Viscount Peel. In the year whose accounts we have been examining, a majority of the heads of colleges were still Anglican priests : — Rev. J. F. Bright, D.D., University College; Rev. W. W. Jackson, D.D., Exeter College; Rev. J. R. Magrath, D.D., Queen's College, author of " A Plea for the Study of Theology in the University of Oxford ; " Rev. W. A. Spooner, D.D., New College; Rev. W. W. Merry, D.D., Lincoln College, vice-chancellor and public orator ; Rev. Thomas Fowler, D.D., Corpus Christi College ; Rev. T. B. Strong, D.D., dean of Christ Church; Rev. J. Bellamy, D.D., St. John's ; Right Rev. J. Mitchinson, Pembroke College, canon of Gloucester, late bishop of
268 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Barbados and archdeacon of Leicester; Rev. W. Inge, D.D., Worcester College, examining chaplain to the bishop of Lichfield ; and Rev. Henry Boyd, D.D., Hertford College. These and other ecclesiastics also hold other important university offices ; and, of the lay heads, not a few ecclesiastical office-holders, like Sir W. R. Anson, are more clerical than the clerics themselves.
The Hebdomadal Council, out of a total of twenty- one members exclusive of the chancellor, contains the following Anglican priests : — Rev. Dr. Merry, vice- chancellor ; Rev. E. J. Palmer, theological tutor of Balhol ; Rev. J. F. Bright, D.D. ; Rev. J. Bellamy, D.D. ; Rev. J. R. Magrath, D.D. ; Rev. W. Ince, D.D., regius professor of divinity; Rev. W. Lock, D.D., warden of Keble College and Ireland professor of exegesis ; Rev. E. M. Walker; Rev. J. R. Phelps; and Rev. T. B. Strong, D.D. Of the laymen on the council, Mr. J. L. Myres and Mr. R. W. Macan, are " students "of Christ Church, and subject to the headship of Dean Strong and his canons.^ The Visitatorial Committee consisted of six " priests " and one layman : — Rev. Dr. Merry ; Rev. J. Bellamy; Rev. W. W. Jackson; Rev. E. E. Moore, principal of St. Edmund's Hall ; Rev. Henry Boyd ; Rev. W. A. Spooner ; and Mr. J. C. Wilson, of Exeter College.
When Pusey died, and the new statutes came into operation in 1882, the undergraduate was still a gourmet as well as a rjourmand ; he breakfasted on " muffins and marmalade and lears of devilled chicken, a couple of plates of kedgeree, some kidneys and bacon, and a few cutlets, eating the latter with buttered buns, and just one turn at the cider cup before I go to lecture " ! 2 The most popular college was that which
1 " Oxford University Calendar," 1905.
2 There are a thousand books written in this strain. See inter alia, " Tales of Modern Oxford," 1882.
THE OLD SPIRIT DIES HARD 269
kept up " all its good old customs, its wines and its suppers, its bear fights and practical jokes, its sensible and gentlemanly dons, and its jolly old porter at the gate . . . always had a good eight on the river, with a crew trained to perfection ; a good cricket eleven in the field that could hold its own against any college in the university ; and first-rate athletes, who invariably distinguished themselves on the running path, in the boxing rooms, and in the gymnasium." The most popular head was " a provost of the good old school ; a man in whom immense talents and sound common sense were thoroughly combined " ; who " resisted every attempt at innovation which he thought would be likely to lower the prestige of his college, or cause it to grow like a school." " If a man could play cricket or row, he should never be plucked for his matriculation." It is related how a " celebrated cricketer " came up for matriculation, hut the, college authorities did not know him, and he was plucked ; whereupon a " cricketing don from another college" remonstrated, and the cricketer, being asked to try again, " passed without difficulty " !
A great improvement has taken place in twenty- five years, pari passu with the diminution of clerical infl.uence ; and though Oxford is still far from being the class of national university required by the country, we shall not join Bishop Ingram and the sacerdo- talists, who are being gradually ousted from authority, in traducing the characters of the present under- graduates. The university has been rescued from sacerdotal mismanagement and placed on a rational footing ; maladministration of funds and favouritism in the appointment of professors and examiners have both been made difficult ; and, in the words of Thackeray, written over sixty years ago, " if you consider, dear reader, what profound snobbishness the university
2 70 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
system produced, you will allow that it was time to attack some of these feudal middle-age super- stitions." If pettiness and frivolity have not ceased to prevail, one must remember that Oxford is still mainly a collection of dining-halls, chapels, gardens, and lodgings for celibates. The atmosphere is redolent of the unregenerate days ; and one is only too often asked to laugh at stories of the absent-mindedness of dons of profoundest learning, who, on returning from college banquets, or " gaudies," were positively known to knock at other men's houses, after ineffectual efforts to effect an entry with their latchkeys; and who, on being admitted, walked upstairs and tried to force their way into bed, being under the impression that they were at home. The obvious explanation of their absent-mindedness is never given, the cases being always cited in proof of the eccentricity of genius.
Such things are characteristic of sacerdotalism, which, while inculcating the deepest reverence for dignitaries and formalism, jests at every serious prin- ciple of morality and Christianity. Bishop Stubbs used to boast that he never refused a request to preach at a church in his diocese, because he made his sermons so dull that he knew he should never be asked again ; and when an obsequious curate offered to carry the episcopal hand-bag, replied — " No, thanks, it is not heavy ; my sermons are not in it."
" Sisters, life is full of yearnings and disappoint- ments," said one of the leading: Oxford divines, holder of one of the most important posts in the University, preaching to the fair students of Lady Margaret's Hall ; " which of you has not a half- warmed fish in her breast ? " He may have meant to say a " half-formed wish " ; but the slip is more likely to have been intentional. The same dignitary solemnly declared that the only " malapropism " he
WIT, LORDS, AND WOMEN 271
had ever perpetrated was not a verbal one. He had never cried " Three cheers for the queer old dean " instead of " Three cheers for the dear old Queen " ; had never called a local clergyman " a shoving leopard" instead of "a loving shepherd." His only lapse from rectitude had happened in this way : — His wife had come to see him off at the railway station, and he had a distinct remembrance of kissing the porter while he slipped fourpence into the hand of his astonished better-half.
The atmosphere of Oxford has been so unfavour- able to studiousness that the cry of the conscientious student who wished to study, and yet dared not to become an " outsider " by abandoning all dissipation, has always been " Anywhere, anywhere out of the 'Varsity ! " That is why undergraduates have been accustomed to form reading parties in " the long vacation," and why tutors have laid claim to im- mortality for organising expeditions, for purposes of study, into the Malvern Hills, the Welsh mountains, and the Lake district, Euclid told King Ptolemy that there was no royal road to geometry; but the university priests knew better than the sage, for they were accustomed to give a nobleman his degree in half the time which they required an ordinary mortal to spend in preparing for it.
In 1879 two hostels for female students were opened at Oxford, following up the movement for the higher education of women initiated at Girton College, near Cambridge, ten years before. Somerville College is non-sectarian, and under Nonconformist auspices. Lady Margaret Hall, though professedly open to all denominations, is known as the Anglican establish- ment. Both are well attended, and the constant presence of so many virtuous girls, bent on self- improvement, has done much to purify the moral
2 72 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tone of the university city. The terms of equality on which female students of all religions made their dibut in Oxford marks a beneficent change for the better, in contrast to the religious tyranny which so long excluded all male students except those of a particular creed, and there is every reason to hope that before long the ladies will be admitted to uni- versity degrees.
It now only remains to give the reader some account of the financial position of the university, as apart from the colleges ; and with that view I have prepared a table from the latest published figures.^ It will be observed that the gross revenues from all sources are only ;^ 10,000 a year more than those of Christ Church College, and ^7000 more than those of Magdalen.
The University of Oxford, 1904.
Revenue.
Lands, houses, tithe rent- charge, and sundries 10,259
£ s. d.
Clarendon Press
Internal : —
Matricula- £ s. d.
tions . 3,142 o o
Examinations 7, 743 2 o
Degrees 10,944 5 o
Dues . 12,068 12 6
Sundries . 1,651 15 2
Trust Funds From the Colleges Dividends, &c. .
5,000 o
-35.549 14
. 12,846 13
. 6,672 10
418 6
Total . . 70,746 9 5
Balance forward . 2,876 3 6
73,622 12 11
Expenditure.
Charges on estates . Internal stipends Institutions, &c. Internal loans, charges Transferred to Common
University Fund . Other internal outlay Sundries ....
Total
Balance
£ s. d.
4,052 2 a
21,560 12 2
22,243 5 5
4.499 5 "
5,082 19 4
9,807 o 10
385 15 6
67,631 I ro
73,622 12 II
Under "internal stipends" — £21, $60, 12s. 2d. — University officers drew ;^5i74, 8s. 2d.; professors
1 Abstract of Accounts of the Curators of the University Chest, 1904; Clarendon Press, 1905.
IMPECUNIOUS LIBRARIAN 273
and readers, ^10,575, is. lod. ; examiners, &c., ;^5389, 15s, 5d. Of this sum, a large proportion goes to tlae heads and fellows of the colleges, and must therefore be added to their cash salaries, given in a former table. The outlay on institutions and public buildings, ;^2 2,243, 5^. 5d., was thus divided — Bodleian Library, ;^7 593, 7s. 8d. ; Radcliffe Library, «^ii8, 17s. 4d. ; Taylor Institution, ^2244, 6s. 8d. ; Ashmolean Museum and University Galleries, ^1795, i6s. 6d. ; University Museum, ;^I422, 5s. 8d. ; Botanic Garden, ^^1070, i6s. 6d. ; new schools, ;^962, IS. 3d.; department of chemistry, ;6^8oo ; University Observatory, £601, 2s. 6d. ; departments of experimental philosophy, ^565 ; of physiology, ;;^5oo ; of ethnology, ^^440, 4s. 2d.; comparative anatomy, .^435; geology, ;^300; pathology, ;^2 5o; mineralogy, ;^22i, i6s. 3d.; zoology, ;i^2oo ; geo- graphy, .i^i35, 8s. 9d. ; and human anatomy, ;^ioo; park and university walks, ^^400 ; Indian Institute, £397, IS. lod. ; Clarendon building, ^^340, i8s. 7d. ; insurance, ;^239, 8s. 6d. ; Sheldonian Theatre, -i^239, 17s.; and St. Mary's Church, i^2ii, 3s. 4d.
The entire expenditure on the institutions and buildings, including all the scientific departments mentioned, the payment of the whole teaching staff of the university proper, its officers, examiners, and minor officials, all combined, is just equalled, save for a few hundred pounds, by the sum spent on religious worship out of the collegiate revenues ! The reports of the institutions are most discreditable.^ Bodley's librarian desired to make a collection of books on the British colonies and dependencies ; and " had for many years proposed organising rela-
1 " University of Oxford : Reports of University Institutions for the year 1903, presented to Convocation by the Cuiators, Delegates, and Visitors of the several University Institntions." Clarendon Press, 1904.
S
274 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tions with publishers and booksellers in every part of the British Empire outside the United Kingdom." " But," he writes, " it was useless to open com- munications without having a reasonable sum of money with which to give orders, and so the project was delayed from year to year." An outsider came forward and subscribed ;^ioo, and the difficulties of "many years" were solved. The report for 1905 laments " the permanent inadequacy of the Bodleian income to meet the normal day-to-day expenses." The illiberality of the colleges is complained of — " All Souls was unable to raise its statutory con- tribution above ;^2 00 ; the liberality of another college in granting £100 in 1903 found no imitators in 1904." The university, too, was ungenerous — " an application to the Common University Fund for a grant of £100 for fittings was unsuccessful." Internal mismanagement added to the librarian's troubles — " The bills of the booksellers were nearly £140 above 1903, largely owing to their discovery of defects in their previous supply ; and finally the librarian, in giving instructions to suspend binding, accidentally omitted to give them to all the assistants concerned. The result was a deficit of over £660 on the general fund " !
In the University Museum report, page after page is taken up with such trivialities as the following : — "In the secretary's office a long iron chimney- pot has been added to the chimney, and has effectually checked the down-draught which formerly brought much smoke into the room. A wire grating has been placed over the chimney of the room occupied by the Lee's reader in anatomy " ! " In the large lecture theatre four gas brackets with incandescent burners and shades have been placed on the walls, giving improved lighting at the back
MEDICINE IN OXFOED 275
and ends of the room. This alteration was made at the suggestion cof the conductor of the Bach choir " !
The following paragraph constitutes more than half of the report of one of the most important chairs in the university : — " The Regius Professor of Medicine did not lecture during Hilary and Trinity terms, having, as stated in the previous report, received a dispensation from statutory duties in this respect. In Michaelmas term he was prevented from lecturing by indisposition. He performed all his other statutory duties during the year." The professor retired shortly after the appearance of this report ; and, as Oxford was unable to produce a suitable Englishman to suc- ceed him, an American was appointed in the person of Dr. Osier, professor of clinical medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S.A. — an institution which was founded in 1876, is governed by a body of lay trustees, and does not recognise theology or divinity in its curriculum, but to which ancient Oxford nuist now appeal for enlightenment.^
Towards the end of 1905 the ex-professor's death was annoimced ; and an obituary notice contained many humorous tales of his absent-mindedness, under the inconofruous heading of " A Life Devoted to Science." ^ " He would often delight his class by stuffing one chalky duster after another into his pocket, and eventually using his pocket-handkerchief to clean the blackboard." Having to boil his own egg one morning at breakfast, and being told to give it three minutes, he was found shortly afterwards with the egg in his hand, staring intently at it, while his watch was boiling in the saucepan !
The meagreness of the attendance at important
^ " Register of Johns Hopkins University," 1902-3; Baltimore, 1903. ^ Daily Express, London, Nov. 25, 1905.
276 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
lectures is amazing. Out of over 3500 under- graduates, the number attending the Waynflete pro- fessor of physiology was only 47 in Michaelmas term, 6 1 in Hilary, and 5 1 in Easter. The attendance at human anatomy lectures was still smaller : — Michael- mas, 32; Hilary, 32; Easter and Trinity, 34. The attendance at the comparative anatomy lectures was reduced almost to vanishing point : — Hilary, general course of morphology, 7 ; variation, inheritance, and selection, 5 ; demonstrations on morphology, 5 ; com- parative anatomy, 28 ; in Easter the attendance varied from 4 to 6 ; and in Michaelmas from 5 to 23 students. The elementary morphology lectures secured an attendance of 28 in Hilary and 23 in Michaelmas term. The attendances in the laboratory were — Hilary, 7 senior and 28 junior; Easter and Trinity, 5. The professor of experimental philosophy reports the following small attendance at his lectures : — Hilary, 30; Easter, 35 ; Michaelmas, 35. His labora- tory " is in good repair, but it is desirable that the wooden lining of the roof, which, not being accessible without a scaffold, has not been examined since the laboratory was erected, should be refinished and re- paired if necessary. To carry out this work, however, the expense involved will be greater than the funds provided for the department can bear." The attend- ance at the lectures of the professor of physics was absurdly small: — Hilary, 10; Easter and Trinity, 8; Michaelmas, 10; the attendance at the demonstra- tions being — Hilary, 1 3 ; Easter and Trinity, 1 1 ; Michaelmas, i o. The professor says : — " It is to be regretted that nothing has been done to improve the teaching of elementary physics, although attention has frequently been called in previous reports to the un- satisfactory provision made by the university for giving instruction for the preliminary examinations in the
STARVED INSTITUTIONS 277
physical laboratories. Under the present system it will be impossible to do the work required by the new schedule for the preliminary examination in physics."
The attendances at the lectures of the Waynliete professor of chemistry were somewhat larger, but still very small compared with the total number of under- graduates : — Hilary, 7 1 ; Easter and Trinity, 7 1 ; and Michaelmas, 84. The professor of geology re- ports a very small attendance at his lectures — Hilary, 12; Easter and Trinity, 12; Michaelmas, 8 to 12. The attendance at the laboratory comprised only 8 students in Hilary, Easter, and Trinity terms; and 9 in Michaelmas. The attendance at the lectures of the professor of mineralogy were — Hilary, 1 5 ; Easter and Trinity, 3 to 5 ; Michaelmas, 2. Attendance at practical instruction classes, 4 to 5 students ; and i student was so extraordinarily diligent as to use the laboratory during the long vacation. The report of the department of botany says the laboratory was attended by only 1 9 students in Hilary, 2 1 in Trinity, and 5 in Michaelmas term !
The Hope professor of zoology says : — " The chaotic state of the partially catalogued Hope library has for long been a source of trouble, causing much unneces- sary waste of time, and even an entire failure to make use of opportunities for study which are on the spot, but unavailable." " A considerable amount of binding has been done in the course of the year, but only an inap- preciable fraction of the quantity which is required, and indeed urgently necessary for the preservation of valu- able property," The curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum says : — " The progress of the museum continues to be very greatly retarded owing to my having no skilled assistant. As I pointed out in my last report, the funds formerly expended in paying assistants have had to be assigned to the purchase and erection of exhibi-
2/8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tion cases, cabinets &c., for the protection of valuable specimens and series of specimens from the ruin caused by dust, the attacks of beetles and moths, and other causes, as well as by frequent handling by visitors. Some of the necessary cases have been erected, and a small sum of money has been saved towards pushing forward this work during 1904. The accumulation of this balance has, however, been effected at the cost of the greatest possible inconvenience, and I have been placed in an intolerable position through the lack of a skilled assistant. No other museum department is so stinted. A minimum addition of ;^ 100 per annum is required for the maintenance of the museum, it being impossible to keep up its state of efficiency with the utterly inadequate annual grant allotted to the purpose. An application for this increase was made but was rejected, and the unsatisfactory situation remains unchanged."
The report of the University Observatory is melan- choly reading. The Savilian professor says : — " I have for the present postponed renewal of the proposal for a residence at the observatory, in view of the fact that it is not easy to find the funds ; but I feel it my duty to continue to draw attention to the inevitable consequences of leaving the observatory unprotected." The professor records the completion of the astro- graphic catalogue, which he desires to get printed ; but he says : — " The University Press is unable to print the results of our ten years' work without an adequate subsidy." A committee of inquiry recommended the subsidy on the following grounds : — ( i ) that the uni- versity in 1887 accepted a special grant of £600 from Dr. de la Rue, and passed a vote of thanks to him for his liberal gift, recognised as made expressly to effect this object; (2) that the observatory has received £1000 from the Government grant of the Royal
NO HELP FOR SCIENCE 279
Society to carry on the work, which would be entirely useless outside Oxford unless published ; (3) that it would be to the credit of the University Observatory, by publishing these measurements, to put itself in a position to oifer something of value in exchange for the publications it is in the habit of receiving from other universities ; (4) that the publication of the catalogue would redound largely to the repute of the university; and (5) that it is an obligation on the university to carry on to completion a work on which a large portion of the time of its professor and his staff had been spent for a number of years.
The committee recommended speedy publication ; but, realising that " the university chest cannot at present find the funds," they suggested that attempts should be made to raise the money, estimated at i)20OO, from other sources. They suggested that the Royal Society, which draws no money from the uni- versity, should approach the Government on behalf of the observatory. But why did it not occur to them, before invoking outside aid, to approach the warden of All Souls and the dean and chapter of Christ Church ? The professor says : " The general poverty of the university is naturally felt by the observatory in many ways ; in the difficulty of getting our observations printed ; of formulating a scheme for a residence at the observatory, which remains an urgent need ; and of raising the salary of the second assistant to a living wage in Oxford. Recognising the existence of stress in other departments, I do not say more on these topics at present ; but to omit mention of them altogether might create a false impression."
The college, club, or community system, with its expensive establishments and high living, handed down by the Romans, is primarily to blame for this
2 8o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
inexcusable neglect of science. Moreover, the uni- versity itself has hitherto been managed by the heads of the colleges, and has, therefore, evinced no desire to raise money for the advancement of education. The largest loan (i^6o,ooo), raised in 1859, was for the New Schools, which are simply the buildings in which the university examinations are held; and ;^5 0,000 of it has been repaid. For the new Ashmolean Museum, ^i 1,000 was borrowed, of which £6<^66, 13s. 4d. has been paid off. The loans raised for scientific purposes were : — physiological laboratory, £, 1 0,000 ; morphologi- cal, ;^8 2 00; pathological, i^4 5 00; extension of chemical department, ;^i8i6, 2s. — total £2\,^\6, 2s., or less than half the amount expended on the examination halls. Besides this, i^ 12,165 "^^as raised for farm buildings and estate improvements. The total borrow- ings were i^ 107,681, 2s., of which more than half has been paid off, the amount outstanding being only ;^42,Ti9, 13s. 8d. The university, therefore, could well afford to borrow ^50,000, or even ^100,000, for the replenishment of its scientific institutions ; and, if it were under other management, this necessary step would be immediately taken.
Adding the university revenues, ^73,622, 12s. lod., to the collegiate revenues, ;^5 28,799, 8s. 3d., and deducting ,£^667 2, los. id., the cash contribution made by the colleges to the university — already included in the collegiate revenues — we find that the total revenues of the university and colleges of Oxford in 1904 amounted to no less than ^595,749, i is.
We shall now briefly consider the administration and endowments of Cambridge University.
King's College Chapel, Cambkidge
"The chiipul at Kiuy's not oulv dominates the collei>e, but the whole university ; and its interior yrandeur, iutcresting- as it is, is largely responsible for the excessive outlay of ^4203 on religion in 1904." (p. 289.)
St. John's College Cjiapkl, ca.mlkidge
"In St. Jolm's College, the chapel is more maguiticent than is necessary, and must have taxed the collegiate resources to an extent wliich can hardly be justified ; but, out of a total revenue of i;5i,996 in 1904, only £10(0, went on religion." (.p. 289.)
To face p. r.8r
CHAPTER XI
Cambridge Colleges and Universitj' — Their history — The new Statutes — Collegiate finances — Clerical influence — University finances — Summary and total Endowments of Oxford and Cambridge — The Public Schools Monoi^oly — Lampeter College — University of Wales — Owens College — Victoria University — Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham Universities.
The early foundations at Cambridge were all religious ; scliolarsliip meant the technicalities of priestcraft, and regular priests obtained degrees there, as of right. Peterhouse, Michaelhouse, and King's Hall, like Merton College at Oxford, are said to have been founded for the special benefit of secular priests, in self-defence against the pretensions of the regulars ; and a claim to public gratitude is therefore advanced on behalf of their founders. Some Cambridge merchants en- dowed Corpus Christi College in 1352 for the educa- tion of priests, and stipulated that a fixed number of masses should be celebrated annually for the repose of their own souls.
In the struggle between the regulars and seculars for supremacy over education, the ordinary citizen cannot sympathise with either side. Whatever learn- ing and abilities the best of those priests may have possessed, they were, as Macaulay says, " habitually devoted to the defence of tyranny and imposture." The regulars, as the Pope's henchmen and spies, maintained that the Pope's law was superior to the law of the land; and taught the people to look for guidance and inspiration to Rome, then one of the most degraded cities in Europe. But the secular priests also found it profitable to inculcate reverence for Rome ; although, when Bishop Bateman founded
282 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Trinity Hall as a school of civil aud canon law in the middle of the fourteenth century, the " eternal city " was inhabited by a brood of cowards and assassins, who traced their lineage up to the " imperial race " of Julius Cyesar, but whose knees trembled at sight of a German trooper. The " calm and subtle prelates " who founded those sacerdotal colleges were, as Mac- aulay puts it, " versed in all that was then considered as learning, trained in the schools to manage words, and in the confessional to manage hearts, seldom superstitious, but skilful in practising on the super- stition of others, false, as it was natural that a man should be whose profession imposed on all who were not saints the necessity of being hypocrites, selfish, as it was natural that a man should be who could form no domestic ties, and cherish no hope of legitimate posterity," more attached to their order than to their country, and " guiding the politics of England with a constant side-glance at Rome."
But, despite its Roman origin, Cambridge has never offended the public conscience of the nation, as Oxford has so often done ; and, on the whole, it has always been on the side of progress, and ever in sympathy with the popular desire for improvement in morals and education. The friends of humanity connected with the university have been too numerous to mention. Nicholas and Francis Bacon, father and son, Erasmus, Oliver Cromwell, Milton, Newton, Charles Simeon, Lord Macaulay, and Lord Tennyson are all represen- tative of the spirit which was uniformly fostered in Cambridge for three centuries. Macaulay proudly declared that " Cambridge had the honour of educating those celebrated Protestant bishops whom Oxford had the honour of burning ; and at Cambridge were formed the minds of all those statesmen to whom chiefly is to be attributed the secure establishment of the reformed
CLERICS AND LAITY AT CAMBRIDGE 283
religion iu the Nortli of Europe." When Oxford gladly accepted a Roman dean of Christ Churcli and a Roman president of Magdalen from James II., Cam- bridge refused to honour Francis and Farmer at his cojnmand. Cambridge was loyal to the Protestant succession in the reigns of the early Hanoverian kings, when Oxford was the chief centre of Jacobitism.
Though there were some Cambridge priests in active partnership with Newman and Pusey, like the Rev. H. J. Rose, the university, as a whole, was guiltless. Though clerical heads and fellows were as numerous in Cambridge as in Oxford, the laymen never occupied a position of subservience, but, on the contrary, rather gave the lead to the university. The theology at Cambridge was, of course, the same as at Oxford ; but the great laymen, who did honour to the place, escaped its withering influence. Cambridge was saved from the misfortune of having a diocesan dean and chapter permanently established as masters of its chief college, as was the case with Oxford ; but if Trinity College had been subjected to the headship of the dean and canons of Ely since the Reformation, there might have been little difference between the behaviour of the two universities. If the priests educated at Cambridge were not as bigoted as the Oxford priests in the practice of their craft, it was because they had not seen the clerical caste so ex- cessively honoured in their university. But of recent years, one regrets to say, many of the clerics of Cambridge are following in the footsteps of their Oxford brethren. It appears from a list published in 1903 that, out of ninety-nine "Catholic-minded" Anglican priests, all members of Lord Halifax's English Church Union, who have recently joined the Roman Church, fifty-one were Oxford men and twenty-six were educated at Cambridge ; the large
2 84 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
number from Oxford being mainly due to the in- fluence of Christ Church College, which, it is stated, " holds the palm for training the largest number of perverts." ^ It is true that the professional clerics cannot fairly be said to represent the university, any more than they represent the nation ; but if the present member for the university, Mr. S. H. Butcher, may be regarded as typical of his constituency, admirers of Cambridge had better not compare the present too closely with the glorious past.
The general effects of a Cambridge education have not, as yet, ceased to be noticeable. Making large allowance for exceptions, it may be said that the best type of Cambridge man, as a rule, should be simple in his ideas, plain in his language, and straightforward in his actions. He should not be a diplomatist in the Machiavellian sense of the word ; and he should attach less importance to the tones of his voice than to the substance of his words. He should be as free from impracticable ideals as he is from effeminate super- stitions ; should look the world straight in the face, and do to others as he would wish them to do to himself. He should not watch men out of the corner of his eye, as if they were dupes to be played upon ; nor estimate, before disclosing his purpose, how far he may impose upon them for his own benefit without fear of discovery. He should not develop that priestly faculty of " influencing others," on which Newman and Pusey set so high a value, the genius for inculcating superstition without being superstitious oneself He should be in favour of progress ; sincere, but not zealous, in religion, and always Protestant. As Macaulay says of the Cambridge statesmen of Eliza- bethan days, he should never proceed with the im- petuosity of the theologian, but rather with the
^ "Ritualistic Clergy List," third edition, Church Association, 1903.
GOVERNMENT OF CAMBRIDGE 285
deliberation of the statesman ; should not be a theorist or a pedant, but an accurate observer of the signs of the times, and a man possessing a practical acquaint- ance with, and a true sympathy for, human nature.
The Cambridge statutes of 1878-1881 ^ resemble those of Oxford. The legislative body is the Senate, consisting of doctors and masters whose names are on the register, and corresponding to Convocation at Oxford. The Electoral Roll consists of masters and doctors resident, for fourteen weeks in each year, within 2i miles of Great St. Mary's Church, and corresponds to the Congregation at Oxford. The senate elects the vice-chancellor, and the electoral roll elects the chancellor. The Council, which is a standing committee or cabinet of the senate, consists of the chancellor, vice-chancellor, four heads of colleges, four professors, and eight other members of the senate chosen from the electoral roll ; and nothing can be proposed for the confirmation of the senate without its previous sanction. The members hold office for four years, and half of them are elected at intervals of two years. The Financial Board consists of the vice- chancellor, three members elected by the colleges, two members by the General Board of Studies, and four by the senate. The General Board of Studies consists of the vice-chancellor and twenty members, seven of whom are elected by the senate, and one each by the following special boards : — Oriental studies, medieval and modern languages, divinity, law, medicine, economics and politics, history and archaeology, moral science, music, mathematics, physics and chemistry, biology and geology, and Indian civil service studies. There are nineteen special boards of studies.
^ " Statutes of the University of Cambridge and for the Colleges within it, made, published, and approved under the University Act of 1877 (187S-1S82)" ; CamViridge University Press, 1883.
2 86 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
There are two special tribunals for the trial of persons accused of breaking the statutes — the Sex Viri, for persons not in statu pwpillari ; and the Court of Discipline for undergraduates. The high -steward, like the vice-chancollor at Oxford, has a criminal jurisdiction over all scholars within the precincts of the university. The proctors and their assistants look after discipline, and are the custodians of morals.
The new statutes established twenty-four professor- ships at from £600 to ;^85o, the professors being appointed by electoral boards. There are now thirty- seven professors so appointed ; while only the regius professors of law, physic, and modern history are appointed by the Crown. Before 1881, a canonry in Ely cathedral used to constitute the salary of the regius professor of Greek; but this connection was abolished, and the salary of the professor of Greek was fixed at ;^65o, with a fellowship in Trinity College ; while the Ely professor of divinity now draws the emoluments of the canonry.
The seventeen colleges in Cambridge are described in the statutes as " places of education, religion, learn- ing, and research," their duty to education being considered of the first importance ; and the heads are elected by the fellows who co-opt each other, as at Oxford. The following table, prepared from the latest official publications,! shows (i) the gross revenue; (2) the cash paid to heads and fellows, calculated on the same basis as in the Oxford colleges; and (3) the expenditure on scholarships and exhibitions for the advancement of study : —
_ 1 Abstract of Accounts, published by authority, Cambridge Univer- sity Reporter, February lo, 1905.
CAMBRIDGE COLLEGES
287
|
Name of College. |
No. of Under- gradu- |
Gross Revenue. |
Heads and Fellows. |
Scholarships, &c. |
||
|
ates. |
||||||
|
£ s. |
d. |
£ |
£ |
.r. d. |
||
|
Peterhouse . . |
45 |
9,441 17 |
0 |
3.700 |
1,064 |
9 3 |
|
Clare .... |
190 |
22,521 7 |
4 |
8,500 |
1.915 |
I 0 |
|
Pembroke |
232 |
17,256 18 |
9 |
7.500 |
2,332 |
10 0 |
|
Gonville and |
||||||
|
Caius . . . |
241 |
30,916 10 |
2 |
12,000 |
2,447 |
10 0 |
|
Trinity Hall . |
158 |
12,315 16 |
II |
5,500 |
942 |
13 6 |
|
Corpus . . |
55 |
9,762 2 |
I |
3.640 |
611 |
0 0 |
|
King's . . . |
157 |
46,726 II |
2 |
13,000 |
3.464 |
19 10 |
|
Queen's . . . |
116 |
7,722 17 |
I |
2,300 |
631 |
19 8 |
|
St. Catherine's |
52 |
6,261 19 |
7 |
2,250 |
703 |
16 II |
|
Jesus .... |
124 |
14,220 0 |
0 |
6,000 |
56. |
10 0 |
|
Christ's . . . |
204 |
17.445 15 |
5 |
6,250 |
1,076 |
13 4 |
|
St. John's . . |
221 |
51,996 7 |
4 |
17.500 |
4,585 |
5 7 |
|
Magdalene . . |
42 |
4,612 10 |
5 |
1,900 |
324 |
7 5 |
|
Trinity . . . |
671 |
105,254 15 |
0 |
30,000 |
7.512 |
10 0 |
|
Emmanuel . . |
189 |
26,817 10 |
I |
9,000 |
2,345 |
16 8 |
|
Sydney- |
||||||
|
Sussex . . . |
76 |
13.924 4 |
10 |
4.735 |
1,654 |
0 0 |
|
Downing . . . Total . . . |
91 |
8,010 II |
9 |
2,500 |
700 |
0 0 |
|
2,864 |
405,208 4 |
II |
136,275 |
33,274 |
5 2 |
It will be observed that Trinity is richer than any of the Oxford colleges, and it is also said to be the richest collegiate institution in Europe ; while its undergraduates not only outnumber those of any Oxford college, but equal the combined membership of Christ Church, Magdalen, and Worcester. On the other hand, the revenue of Magdalene College, Cam- bridge, is not much over half, and its membership less than half, that of Worcester, the poorest Oxford college. The caution money held by all the colleges in 1904, so far as acknowledged, amounted to £$8,71 1 ; and the produce and balances of the trust funds were ;^44,248. If we put the year's produce of the trusts at ;>^2 0,000, it would brine: the total collesfiate revenues up to ;^425,ooo. The colleges contributed ^^28,293, 1 9s. to the university, of which only ^^6,961, 8s. i id. Avas
288 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
in fellowships, the rest being cash paid to the common fund ; whereas in Oxford, out of a total contribution of ;^25,75 5, only £6672 was in cash to the common fund. The statutes fixed the combined " contribution for university purposes" for all the colleges at ;^5000 to ^6000 for the year 1884; at ;^io,ooo to ;^i 2,000 for 1885, 1886, and 1887; at ;^i 5,000 to ;^i 8,000 for 1888, 1889, and 1890; at ;^2o,ooo to ;^24,ooo for 1891, 1892, and 1893; at ^^^25,000 to ^^^30,000 for 1894, 1895, and 1896; and thenceforward at ;^3 0,000 to ;^30,500 — a total not yet realised.
The richest three colleges in Cambridge — Trinity, St. John's, and King's — with a combined gross revenue of ^203,977, in 1904, contributed i^i 2,674, or six per cent., to the university. The richest colleges in Oxford — Christ Church, Magdalen, and New — Avith a total revenue of ;^i79,3 58, contributed £io,g6i to the university, being about the same percentage. But it is the poorest colleges in Cambridge that are most liberal to the university in proportion to their means. Magdalene College, for instance, with a revenue of only ^4612, gives ten per cent. (;^484) to the university; St. Catherine's, with a revenue of ^^6261, gives ten per cent. (^^650) ; Queen's, with a revenue of ^^^7722, gives nine per cent. {£667). This indicates a high degree of public spirit, as compared with the contributions of Oxford colleges like University, Balliol, and Exeter, with gross revenues of ^I9,045,;^24,249, and;^i4,i37 respectively, which only give £2x7, £210, and £gi to the university, or an average of less than one per cent.
A hostel for Church of England students of limited means was founded by Bishop Selwyn of Lichfield, in 1882, when the new statutes threw open so many university offices to laymen and non-Anglicans; it is called Selwyn College, and managed on somewhat similar lines to Keble College, Oxford, though the
RELIGION IN CAMBRIDGE 289
members of its council are not publicly identified with ritualism. It has 107 undergraduates. There were, in 1905, 83 non-collegiate students at Cambridge, making the total number of undergraduates 3054.
The expenditure on religious worship, so far as it is acknowledged, and including grants to vicarages, amounted to £1^,644. for the year. As the religious services are performed by deans and chaplains, who may or not be fellows, we need not add stipends for official priest-fellows ; but we may add i^2000 a year for the upkeep of the fabrics. Festivals and saints' days are observed like Sundays, being what is called " surplice days," and their vigils being " surplice evenings " ; and on litany days all " doctors and noble- men" must wear their robes, and proctors their con- gregation ruffs. The chapels are ornate and expensive, and hold a predominant place among the college buildings ; but in its chief college, Trinity, the chapel is far outshone by the college library, an institution unapproached by any collegiate library in Oxford. In St. John's College, the chapel is more magnificent than is necessary, and must have taxed the collegiate re- sources to an extent which can hardly be justified ; but, out of the total revenue of ^51,996 in 1904, only £1064. went on religion. The chapel at King's not only dominates the college, but the whole university ; and its interior grandeur, interesting as it is, is largely responsible for the excessive outlay of ^4203 on religion in 1904 — four times the amount spent by St. John's, whose revenues are larger, and exceeding even the religious expenditure of Trinity, whose income is more than double that of King's. The chapel in Jesus is also very elaborate, and in a lesser degree the chapels in Gonville and Caius, Queen's, Pembroke, and some other colleges. Emmanuel and Sydney-Sussex colleges used to be
290 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
called the nurseries of the Puritans, the latter being Oliver Cromwell's college ; while Christ's is famous as the college in which Milton graduated, living " ever in his great Taskmaster's eye," and earnestly wrestling with the problems of human existence : —
" Heu ! Qu&,m perpetuis erroribus acta fatiscit Avia mens hominum, tenebrisque immersa profnndis ffidipodioniam volvit sub pectore iioctem ! "
None of the headships, except that of St. Catherine's, or of the fellowships are now restricted to priests in orders ; and the restraints on marriage, though con- siderable, are less frequent than in Oxford. In St. Catherine's the Master must be a priest, and must be elected with prayer in the college chapel. Out of eighteen heads of colleges in 1905 nine were priests, namely, Rev. E. A. Atkinson, Clare ; Rev. A. J. Mason, Pembroke'; Rev. E. N. Perowne, Corpus; Rev. F. H. Chase (now Bishop of Ely), Queen's; Rev. C. K. Robinson, St. Catherine's ; Rev. H. A. Morgan, Jesus ; Rev. C. Taylor, St. John's; Rev. H. M. Butler, Trinity; and Rev. A. F. Kirkpatrick, Selwyn. The ecclesiastical patronage consists of 3 10 livings, distributed as follows: — Peterhouse, 1 1 ; Clare, 1 7 ; Pembroke, 1 2 ; Gonville and Caius, 19; Trinity Hall, 7; Corpus, 10; King's, 38; Queen's, 8 ; St. Catherine's, 7 ; Jesus, 1 6 ; Christ's, 1 6 ; St. John's, 49 ; Magdalene, 6 ; Trinity, 59 ; Emmanuel, 24; Sidney-Sussex, 8; Downing, 2; Selwyn, i.
Cambridge joined in the movement for the higher education of women in 1869 by allowing its professors to lecture at Girton College, which was established at Hitchin in that year. Newnham College for women was founded in 1 8 7 1 , and Girton College changed its quarters from Hitchin to Cambridge in 1873, the students of both places being permitted thenceforth to attend university lectures and to get most of the advantages without the disadvantages of a university education. University examinations were also thrown
RIDLEY AND WICKLIFFE HALLS 291
open to female students, and in 1882 Cambridge began to publish the honours lists for women in its calendar. Degrees are not yet conferred on women, but there is every reason to believe that this final concession will soon be made. It was not until 1879, ten years after the foundation of Girton, that women's colleges were established at Oxford ; and it was not until 1893 that the honours obtained by women at the university examinations were formally published, eleven years after Cambridge had led the way.
In 1 8 8 I Ridley Hall, a theological college uncon- nected with the university, was founded at Cambridge, for the training of undergraduates for the ministry of the Church of England in accordance with the principles of the Reformation settlement. In this respect, Cam- bridge, instead of leading the way, followed the lead given at Oxford, where Wickliffe Hall was established for the same purpose in 1878. Rev. R. B. Girdlestone, first principal of Wickliffe, and Rev. T, W. Drury, present principal of Ridley, in conjunction with Right Rev. H. C. G. Moule, Bishop of Durham, recently have compiled, at the request of the National Protestant Church Union, a short treatise called " English Church Teaching," which puts the fundamental doctrines of the Church in a form acceptable to true Christians, and clearly proves the local English Church to be as averse to sacerdotalism as was its divine Founder.
The expense entailed by the system of college life in Cambridge is almost as great as in Oxford, in all but the poor colleges. In Trinity College, for instance, it was calculated, at the date of the new statutes, that the outlay of an undergraduate who took part in all the festivities, but Avithout any special extravagance, came to at least £^60 a year.^ The undergraduates
^ "College Expenses," By E. V. Arnold, Fellow of Trinity College,
292 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
at both universities nowadays comprise a higher per- centage of working men, as opposed to men of gaiety, owing to the increased amount of money given in scholarships ; but pleasure still occupies too important a place in the curricula of Oxford and Cambridge.
The separate accounts of the University of Cam- bridge, as apart from the colleges, still remain to be dealt with, and I have prepared a table on the subject from the latest published figures.^ It will be noticed that while the gross revenues of the Oxford colleges, ;6"5 28,799, exceeded the total incomes of the Cam- bridge colleges, ;^42 5,ooo, by the large sum of ;^i 03,799, the revenues of the University of Cam- bridge, ;^79,098, exceeded those of Oxford, £7^,622, by ;^5476 — a result due to the proportionately larger contributions made by the Cambridge colleges for university purposes.
Cambridge University, 1904.
Revenue. Expenditure.
£ s. d. £ s. d.
Rents and dividends 1,955 H i University officers . 5,559 16 6
Capitation tax . . 10,729 7 o Examiners . . . 5,218 3 i
Fees, degrees . . . 11,831 10 o Professors. . . . 4,881 14 3
,, matriculations 5,054 4 o Library 5,107 lo II
,, examinations 9,540 12 o Museums and
Compounders' Fund 3,148 14 9 Lecture Rooms . 6,500 o o
Sundries .... 419 o 3 Rates and taxes . . 3,367 11 2
Balance forward . . 1,670 19 i Miscellaneous. . . 13,215 5 3
44,350 I 2 44.350 I 2
Contributions from
Colleges, cash .21,748 7 5 Buildings and Loans 7,159 9 i Rough estimate of Professors and
Revenues from Lecturers . . . 13,478 16 9
Trust Funds . . 13,000 o o Miscellaneous . . 1,110 i 7
Estimated expendi- ture on Trusts. . 13,000 o o
Total . . 79,098 8 7 Total . . 79,098 8 7
1 Abstract of the Accounts, published by authority. University Reporter, March 17, 1905.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 293
The total produce, and balances brought forward of ninety-three trust funds, in 1904, amounted to ;£'2 7,204, 2s. 4d. There is no separate account published ; but their actual yield in the year I estimate at ;^ 13,000, being 3 per cent, on the follow- ing investments held by the university : —
Government and Colonial Stock . 92,914 11 8
Municipal Stock .... 114J22 8 6
Railway „ 212,523 13 4
Miscellaneous 1,200 o o
Total. . . . 421,360 13 6
In Cambridge as Avell as Oxford there are many extra sources of income not included in the college or university accounts. The " local examinations " ac- count for 1904 shows a revenue of ;^2 2,i89, 13s. lod., of which ^18,629, 5s. I id. came from fees; and the rest from dividends, benefactions, and sundries. This amount was expended as follows: — Presiding examiners, ^3979> I2S. 5d. ; examiners in subjects, iJ^5 291, 17s. 5d.; secretaries and clerks, ^^"2740, os. iid. ; printing and stationery, ^^^1705, 14s. 3d. The balance went in travelling expenses, sundries, and in the purchase of stock. Local lectures brought in £6111, 8s. 6d., of which ;£"307i, 12s. was paid to lecturers, and a large sum went in travelling and clerical expenses — the " ex- penses of 1904 meeting" being ;^io5 5, i6s. 5d. All this business, and a great deal of other collateral work are independent of the university chest account.
Without including such lucrative but subsidiary work as local examinations and lectures, I have summarised the o-ross revenues of the universities and
O
colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, together with the ex- penditure on — (i ) Heads and fellows, deducting ^6900 the salaries of twenty-three priest-fellows, from the Oxford expenditure, as it is included under religious
294 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
worslaip; (2) scholarships for the promotion of study; (3) religious worship. There are several hundreds of pounds spent by each university on religion besides the large outlay by the colleges, which I have not included, as it is not an unreasonable amount, and might well suffice for all the colleges. As to the collegiate religious expenditure, most people will agree that the odd ^^"7644 ought to be enough for the purpose, and that the other ;!^5 0,000 per annum should be set free for reproductive work.
|
University and Colleges. |
Collegiate Religious Worship. |
Collegiate Scholar- ships. |
Collegiate Heads and Fellows. |
Gross Revenues. |
|
Oxford . . Cambridge . Total . . |
£ 42,000 15,644 57.644 |
£ 48,251 33.274 |
£ 144,179 136,275 280,454 |
£ 595.749 503.490 1,099.239 |
|
81.525 |
The vastness of the monopoly held at Oxford and Cambridge, since the Reformation, by the professional clerics of a particular form of religious belief may be best realised by comparing it with modern educational endowments of a similar nature. The London Uni- versity started with a capital endowment of i^ 160,000. Our later universities at Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and Wales have all been started by public subscription, assisted by donations from wealthy private citizens, varying from ;^iooo to ;^ 10,000, and occasionally by larger gifts, i^ 5 0,000 being considered colossal. About ;^20o,ooo or ;^2 5o,ooo, the capital sum required for endowing two new bishoprics on the poorest scale of pay, has always been considered a suitable sum to found a new university ; and, when established, the institution trusts mainly to the value
ENORMOUS ENDOWMENT 295
of its own work, as represented by students' fees, for the means of subsistence — improvements being effected by private generosity. Sometimes the Government, or the local numicipal authority, has given a grant in aid, but never for more than a few thousands a year.
But before private individuals or municipal authori- ties could hope to found a national university, endowed on the same liberal scale, and managed on the same irrational lines as the colleges of Oxford and Cam- bridge, apart from the universities, they would have to subscribe a capital of £i,g2 1,466 at 3 per cent, to produce the yearly sum expended on religion alone ; of ;^2, 7 1 7,500 to produce the money spent on scholar- ships ; and of ^^9,351,333 to produce the salaries of the heads and fellows — total ;^i 3,990,299.
I have made no estimate of a net collegiate revenue for the reasons already stated ; but I find that all disbursements, including charges in respect of estates, internal and external loans, quit rents, rates, taxes, insurance, agency, management, law charges, repairs, and improvements, for all colleges in both universities in 1904, amounted to ^^182,872. The only legitimate earnings of the colleges may be said to be the fees received from students for entrance, tuition, and graduation; and, in all the colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, these amounted to ^^118,814, 13s. id. in 1904. Assuming that a new university could rely upon the receipt of that sum, and deducting the other expenditure mentioned from gross revenue, it would still require a capital of i^2 1,743,833 to produce the total net revenues of the colleges of both universities. What other State in the world would now be wilhng to set apart this vast capital sum, or its equivalent, a revenue of £6^2,^1 S per annum, for the education of 6,500 young men of the upper class, which was the total number of undergraduates in both universities in
296 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
1 904 ? What other country except England, professing the reformed reHgion, would have endowed a body of celibate priests with so much national money nomin- ally to educate the rich, but really for their own use and to mis-spend upon sectarian purposes ?
The possession of the universities gave the clerics of the Church another monopoly no less important, namely, the control of the secondary, or, as they are commonly called, the public schools. "The wisdom of our ancestors," says Thackeray, " seemed to have determined that the education of youth was so paltry and unimportant a matter, that almost any man armed with a birch and a regulation cassock and degree might undertake the charge." Nearly every college in both universities has some special connection with one or more of these schools by way of fellowships, scholarships, and exhibitions. In Oxford, for in- stance, University College is thus connected with the Normanton, Wakefield, Swillington, Rochester, and Maidstone schools ; Balliol with Blundell's and Ludlow schools, and indirectly with Glasgow University; Mer- ton with Eton ; Exeter with Ashburton, Jersey, and Guernsey schools, with youths born in Devon and Kent, and sons of clergymen resident in Somerset and Devonshire : Queen's with the schools at Carlisle, St. Bee's, Appleby, Heversham, Kendal, Bradford, Don- caster, Giggleswick, Halifax, Hull, Leeds, Pocklington, Richmond, Ripon, Sedburgh, Wakefield, and York, with youths born in Cumberland, Westmoreland, Middlesex, Whitehaven, and Kirkby Lonsdale, and with clergy- men's sons in the dioceses of Carlisle and Manchester,
New College is especially connected with Winchester school and the county of Bucks ; Brasenose with Manchester, Marlborough, and Hereford schools ; Christ Church with Westminster and Charterhouse schools; St. John's with Merchant Taylors', Coventry,
THE CLERICAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS 297
Bristol, Reading, and Timbridge schools, and with Staffordshire ; Jesus with Wales and Monmouthshire ; Wadham with Gloucestershire, its Woodward of Dean Forest scholarships being reserved for natives of that county who are also communicant members of the Church of England. Worcester College is connected with Bromsgrove and Charterhouse schools ; and Hert- ford with Worcester grammar school.
The predominance of the Church of England clergy over secondary education in England is exemplified by the fact that, from the beginning of the Head- masters' Annual Conferences in 1 869 down to the year 1903, the chair was only once occupied by a layman, namely, in 1882, when Mr. W. H. Eve, of the London University College school, presided. In the year 1 902, a generation after the abolition of religious tests in the universities, and twenty years after the new statutes, the following sixty-two larger public schools — includ- ing the greatest prizes of the profession, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Haileybury, Wellington, Marl- borough, Cheltenham, Westminster, and Shrewsbury — were all in the hands of ecclesiastics : —
|
Schools. |
Headmasters. |
No. OF Boys. |
||
|
Aldenham |
Rev. A. H. Cook i8o |
|||
|
Bath College |
Rov. William York |
. 130 |
||
|
Berkhampstead .... |
Rev. T. C. Fry, D.D. . |
• 370 |
||
|
Bradfield College, Berka . |
Rev. H. B. Gray . . |
. 322 |
||
|
Bradford Grammar School . |
Rev. W. H. Keeling . |
• 500 |
||
|
Brecon, Christ's College |
Rev. R. H. Chambers. |
• 105 |
||
|
Brighton College .... |
Rev. A. F. Tipperington |
. 130 |
||
|
Cambridge, Leys School |
Rev. W. T. A. Barbour |
. 160 |
||
|
Canterbury, King's . . . |
Rev. R. J. Galpin . . |
216 |
||
|
Canterbury, St. Edmond's |
Rev. R. W. Upcot . . |
• 123 |
||
|
Carlisle Grammar School . |
Rev. G. H. Williams . |
. TIO |
||
|
Charterhouse |
Rev. G. H. Randal . . |
• 503 |
||
|
Cheltenham College . . . |
Rev. R. Waterfield . . |
. 610 |
||
|
Cheltenham, Dean Close's . |
Rev. W. H. Flucker . |
. 200 |
||
|
Chester, King's .... |
Rev. J. T. Davis . . |
(not given) |
||
|
Chigwell, Essex .... |
Rev. R. D. Swallow . |
90 |
||
|
Christ's Hospital, London . |
Rev. Richard Lee . . |
. 750 |
||
|
Clifton College .... |
Rev. M. G. Glissbrook |
. 600 |
||
|
Coventry, King Henry YIIL |
Rev. C. R. Gilbert . . |
. lOI |
||
|
Dover College |
. Rev. W. C. Compton . |
. 200 |
||
|
Durham |
. Rev. A. E. Hillard . . |
. 100 |
298 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Schools. Headmasters. No. of Bots.
Eltham, Royal Naval . . . Rev. A. E. Ruble .... (not given)
Epsom College Rev. T. N. Hart-Smith .... 250
T-,, ^ „ ( Rev. J. J. Hornby (Provost) . )
Eton College i Rev. E. Warre (Headmaster) . \'°^7
Felsted Rev. H. A. Dalton 245
Giggleswick Rev. G. Style 200
Haileybury Rev. Canon E. Lytteltun .... 500
Harrow Rev. J. Wood 6(X)
Hereford Cathedral .... Rev. W. H. M. Ragg 120
Harrogate Rev. A. E. Allcock 310
Ipswich Rev. P. E. Raynor 120
Isle of Man, King William's . Rev. E. H. Kenhard 186
King's College, Wimbledon . Rev. C. W. Bourne 270
Leamington College .... Rev. R. A. Edgell 95
Leeds Grammar School . . . Rev. H. A. D. Matthews. . . . 178
Lancaster, Wyggeston . . . Rev. James Went 400
T ■ inn f Rev. J. R. Lancelot, and )
Liverpool College j Rev. W. Webster [ . . 270
Liverpool, Great Crosby . . Rev. Canon Armour 300
Llandowry College .... Rev. W. W. Poole-Hughes . . . 130
Melbourne College .... Rev. S. R. James 480
Marlborough College . . . Rev. C. G. Bell 590
Oakham Rev. E. V. Hodge .... (not given)
Oxford, St. Edmond's . . . Rev. T. W. Hudson 125
Pocklington, Yorks .... Rev. C. F. Hutton 150
Portsmouth Grammar School . Rev. C. Darnell 300
Radley, St. Peter's College . Rev. T. Field 191
Reading School Rev. W. C. Eppstein 201
Repton School Rev. L. G. B. J. Ford . . . (not given)
Rossall School Rev. J. P. Way 353
Rugby School Rev. H. A. James 570
Sherbourne School .... Rev. F. B. Westcott 190
Shrew.sbury School .... Rev. H. W. Moss 294
Tonbridge School Rev. C. C. Tancock 400
Trent College Rev. J. S. Tucker 125
Uppingham School .... Rev. E. C. Selwyn 440
Warwick Grammar School . . Rev. R. P. Brown 100
Wellington College Barracks . Rev. B. Pollock 476
Westminster, St. Peter's . . Rev. J. Gow 230
„r- u i r. 11 i Rev. C. B. Lee (Warden) ) (not
Winchester College . . . . j ^^^^ ^ ^ g^^^^ (Headmaster) f given)
TT7- J cii. A/r 1 • ( Rev. Canon Gee (Warden) i (not
Windsor, St. Mark s . . . . | j^^^_ ^ ^_ ^^^^^ (Headmaster) f given)
Worcester Cathedral School . Rev. A. W. Chapel 100
York, St. Peter's School . . Rev. E. C. Owen 135
Those schools are managed, as nearly as possible, on the lines of the Oxford colleges. They are full of cliques which encourage snobbishness, expensive living, contempt for industry, tyranny to the weak, disrespect to those who are not rich, subservience to rank, and, therefore, selfishness and uncharity. The principles on which they are administered exemplify the curious truth that, though England is the greatest trading
THE "SPIRITUAL FACULTY" 299
nation in Europe, it is also the country in which the most open contempt is expressed for those engaged in commerce. When one of the largest of the new schools was founded some fifty years ago, the prospectus stated that the sons of all tradesmen, except bankers and wine merchants, would be inadmissible. Bishop Perceval of Hereford, an ex-headmaster of Rugby, was invited by the Nonconformist managers of Mill Hill School to distribute their prizes in 1903, and his remarks give us a clue to the ideal of life which is set before public school pupils. He told the boys that " if they were to live the life of the highest type of Englishmen, they must be inspired by intellectual ambition, by moral earnestness, by spiritual elevation, and, above all, by the spirit of reverence."^ Now, without impugning the bona fides of Dr. Perceval, it may be said that the four qualities named are, as a rule, mutually destructive ; for the " spiritual eleva- tion " and " the spirit of reverence " inculcated by the dominant Oxford sacerdotal party are fatal to any desirable form of " intellectual ambition " and cannot co-exist wdth " moral earnestness."
The " spiritual faculty," or " spiritual elevation " is a theme of constant eulogy with the Anglican hierarchy. Archbishop Temple, also an ex-headmaster of Rugby, gave the medical students of the London Hospital the following information respecting that intangible attri- bute ; " The spiritual faculty is one which essentially requires education much more than the senses do, and it has to be educated like the other faculties by exer- cise. The education of the conscience depends upon the exercise it receives from ourselves." " This state- ment contains an innuendo that conscience and the "spiritual faculty" are identical; whereas the " spiritual faculty," as understood by priests, means the capacity
1 Daily Neios, June iS, 1903. ' Times, January 13, 1898.
300 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of believing in the mystical powers of the priesthood, and, unlike the senses, has to be " educated " into exist- ence. The development of this " spiritual faculty " retards the growth of the mind ; because young people are misled into mistaking it for mental power. And the education given by the best-intentioned priests is not mind- training, but gross materialism, evidenced by the fondness for high living prevalent amongst the students, coupled with a certain superstition, or pre- tence of superstition, as in Pusey's case. Wherever priests have developed the " spiritual faculty " of the people to such a pitch that an unseen spirit-world is more realistically believed in than the visible world — in Russia and Southern Italy, for instance — there also is to be found the greatest lack of " intellectual ambition " and " moral earnestness." If conscience were the " spiritual faculty," the national conscience should have been developed to the highest pitch of activity in those unhappy countries, and should have resulted in a minimum of wrong-doing.
" When I went to Blundell's, a boy of twelve," said Archbishop Temple, in an after-dinner speech, on the evening following his address to the medical students,^ " I had an exceedingly passionate temper. The first evening I spent in school, a sixth-form boy, in a joke, pulled my hair, which was longer than it ought to have been. But the moment I felt my hair pulled, I turned round and hit the sixth-form boy as hard as I could with my fist, and tumbled him over."
This incident, recalled with pride and narrated impromptu, throws some valuable light on the character- training given in our great public schools. The sixth- form boy did not retaliate ; perhaps he was physically not a match for Temple, who was a large man, and remained a bully to the day of his death. But he said
^ Times, January 14, 1898.
CANE, CHAPEL AND CASTOR OIL 301
to Temple, " My lad, you will got it hot before you are done." And the archbishop admitted, " I did indeed get it hot before very long, but it was a good thing to have one's temper knocked out of one early in life, and I owed that to Blundell's."
Was not this a curious illustration of how the " spiritual faculty " may be developed in a sacerdotally- managed public school ? The record of Temple's public life does not prove his temper to have been " knocked out " of him at school ; he was the rudest of tyrants to those beneath him, and a toady to those above him ; and altogether, as a public character, he was by no means to be reverenced. The reminiscence shows the un-Christian ideals of conduct entertained by those who descant upon the benefits of a " spiritual faculty," by operating on which they make so much money.
" I felt that I could not have flogged a boy before this official presentation," said Canon Lyttelton recently to Mr. Scott, captain or head boy of Eton College, on being presented with a birch festooned with blue ribbon ; " I hope I may not have to use it more often than my predecessor."^ At some of the great public schools (I do not allude to Eton) not only is corporal punishment administered by the masters, but it is also officially inflicted by the boys upon one another. As another instance of how " spiritual elevation " or the " spiritual faculty " is cultivated at sacerdotal schools, and how the " spirit of reverence " may so often mean irreverence for all that is sterling and virtuous, I shall quote a story told by an Anglican cleric, Bishop Ingram's successor as head of the institution known as Oxford House in the East End. In speaking at the last Church Congress, " of the impossibility of compelling people to go to church, he greatly amused his audience by relating the story of a little public school boy who, to
1 Daily Mail, October 3, 1905.
302 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
shirk Sunday chapel, pleaded illness. The headmaster, having taken his temperature, said, ' Very well, castor oil or chapel.' He chose chapel ! " ^ The ornate, costly, and usually ritualistic chapel is always the most important of the school buildings. A recent advertisement of one of the new Anglican schools
runs as follows : — " College : Church of England
Public School of 300 boys. Beautiful situation. Large chapel and swimming-bath ; cadet corps, &c." ^
The playing-fields, with their stands, on which leisurely audiences gather to enjoy the cricket and football, come next in importance to the chapel. There is rarely anything worth seeing in the class- rooms, which seem to be regarded as temporary shelters for the boys when they are not at chapel or at play. Not only must the boys regularly appear and do duty in the playing-fields, the younger ones hunting balls and performing other services for the bigger boys, but they must also take runs into the country; and you will meet solitary boys in an exhausted condition running along the roads taking the exercise which they dare not forego.
If a boy displays a tendency to be studious and is anxious about his proper business at the school, he is marked down for extra discipline by the head boys, or prefects, of the classes. He is compelled to fag, to go on errands, and is otherwise interfered with at times when he would prefer to be engaged with his studies. And, if he dares to disobey the orders of his youthful tyrants, he is invited into a punishment room, Avhere he is put through a form of trial by the assembled prefects, cane in hand. If the decision be adverse to him, he is fallen upon and flogged, with the acquies- cence of the school authorities, though no master is
^ Daily Mail, October 3, 1905.
2 Daily Telegraph, September 14, 1905.
THE CHURCH AND THE ARMY 303
present to moderate the brutality of the young inquisitors. On more than one occasion boys have died as the result of trials in these juvenile courts of Star Chamber. What a muscular method this is for de- veloping the " spiritual faculty " in schools presided over by budding archbishops ! But, after all, such practices are not more opposed to the pious preaching of a clerical headmaster than is the acceptance by an archbishop of two palaces and ^i 5,000 a year, paid by struggling human beings, for ministering to mystical churches and invisible congregations of angels.
If there are faults to be found with the British army, no inconsiderable share of the responsibility must be laid at the door of the sacerdotal party in the Church of England, who have so long controlled all the principal schools in which our military officers receive their education. The number of officers trained in the public schools may be gathered from the regrettable fact that no less than 128 ex-pupils of one school, Eton, lost their lives in South Africa during the Boer War.^ Bearing in mind that " chapel parade " and display in the playing-fields constitute the chief business of the pupils in those schools, is it to be wondered at if our officers regard the ball- room, the polo-ground, the card-table, the race-course, and the cricket-field as their true spheres of duty, and eschew the drill-ground and the shooting-school, and all friendly association with the men they command ? Can the " ragging " and work-shirking amongst officers in the Guards, of which we have had such shocking disclosures recently, be described as anything but the natural sequel to the system of favouritism, flogging, bullying, and " fagging " which still prevails at the public schools in which most of them Avere educated,
1 Report of proceedings at laying of foundation-stone of a Memorial Hall, July 29, 1905.
304 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
where big boys systematically ill-use little boys, with the approval of the clerical authorities ?
And if the development of appetite, muscle, and " spiritual faculty," and an autocracy of brute strength at school, be injurious to military officers, a sacerdotal education is even more unsuited for commercial life, for the civil service, and for the professions. Indeed, it is becoming a subject of public comment that so few of our very best men in any sphere now were educated at the public schools. Neither do those schools any longer supply the material for good colonists, one notable result of which is that the Scotch, Irish, and Welsh elements of our colonial population are outstripping the English, " I have spent a good deal of time in England during the past few years," wrote a Canadian lawyer recently,^ " and have had sufficient time to compare the physique of the English and Canadian men and women. I cannot see that your people, for all the sacrifice they make at the altar of sport, are one whit more healthy or better developed physically than we are. Thousands of young English- men of the middle and aristocratic classes come every year to Canada. Do they succeed ? " His answer is, that " nearly all those youths make of themselves pitiable failures." He says : " They have been trained as sportsmen, not colonists or bread-winners. Their ideal of life is to have a ripping time. They have not the remotest conception of the value of money or its care. They have had no business training of any kind, and usually become the prey of the first rascal they meet, and eventually the companions of the idle and dissolute. That this should be said of the sons of a nation of shopkeepers, of men whose forefathers colonised the waste places of the world and carried
' Mr. George Lynch-Staunton, K.C., of Hamilton, Canada. The Standard, August ii, 1905.
SPORT AND DEPORTMENT 305
civilisation and industry to the utmost ends of the earth ! I have seen all this a hundred times, and, without hesitation, I ascribe it all to faulty trainiiuj cd school."
Is not the sacrifice made at the altar of religion the cause of the sacrifice made " at the altar of sport," as it is the explanation of the contempt entertained for shopkeepers in England ? " I do not call you ' gentlemen,' " said Archbishop Temple haughtily to a deputation of townspeople who once waited on him, " because you are not gentlemen " ! It appears to be assumed that every tithe-drawer is a gentleman, but it requires to be proved that a tithe-payer is one — just as the gentility of a beer-brewer is admitted prima facie, but that of a beer-drinker must be proved.
The feeling which is beginning to prevail at home finds partial expression in the following excerpt from a recently-published letter : " When my eldest son won his cap at Harrow I experienced a thrill of real pride and delight. When I found in his work a hopeless neglect of every single thing pertaining to his pro- fession, the fact that he had played for his county, and now is known to every leading cricketer in the country, was singularly little consolation to me, sound sportsman though I hope I am." ^
The English public school education seems best adapted for the production of Church dignitaries, showy men of grave, agreeable presence, with well- developed muscles which their profession forbids them to use except for the private amusement of their friends and patrons ; able to move gracefully at a garden-party, supply variety to a dinner-party, lend respectability to amateur theatricals, ornament a drawing-room at after- noon tea, dignify an altar by their deportment at choral communion services, and deliver gentlemanlike and
1 Standard, July 29, 1905.
U
3o6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
soporific sermons in a nicely-modulated voice ; men naturally prone to a ritualism calculated to exhibit the gracefulness of their figures and to hide the poverty of their minds. Bishop Ingram, the most typical, perhaps, of those latter-day Puseyites who have " crept along the hedge-bottoms " to a bishopric, speaking recently at Shrewsbury school, said that, " as a commander-in-chief, he looked for his recruits and sergeants to the great public schools." ^ That is not a good omen ; for, in the last quarter of a century the world has been revolutionised by the development of Germany and the United States, the enfranchise- ment of France from clerical intrigues, and the sudden creation of new Japan. England no longer enjoys that position of easy superiority which was formerly hers. America fights her with her own weapons, consider- ably improved upon by the most modern inventions ; while the Germans bring their own peculiar quali- ties of thrift. Protestantism, and rationalism into the struggle. In the four countries named, education is absolutely free from the control of the sacerdotalists, and the young citizens whom they send forth to compete with us in business, in every quarter of the globe, are men — less muscular, less " spiritual," less handsome, if you will — but men with " intellectual ambition," and " moral earnestness," capable of assimi- lating knowledge and promptly adapting their methods to every new experience.
Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, our public school system may have suited well the requirements of our upper classes. But now English- men have a two-fold change to provide against ; for, besides the amazing growth of foreign competition, they have to face the unpleasant fact that the clergy- men of the Church of England have become " priests "
^ Standard, July 26, 1905,
CLERICAL MONOPOLY IN WALES 307
rather than gentlemen. The days are gone when Anghcan clergymen believed, with Dr. Arnold of Rugby, that " priestcraft destroys the Church " ; they no longer revere the Christian Church re-established
o
at the Reformation, but aim at reviving the priest- craft of the Romans. If the uprise of great com- petitors has made a more practical and scientific education necessaTy for English youth ; then assuredly the present-day Anglican " priest " is immeasurably less fitted to give that education than the parson of fifty years ago was fitted to give the training which sufficed for that day.
Besides Oxford and Cambridge, the Anglican clergy also possessed Durham University, of which we have given an account already, and St. David's College at Lampeter in Wales. Lampeter well exemplifies the favouritism with which every educational project of the established clergy was supported by the Crown and Government, who were so undeviatingly hostile to all the efforts of the laity to provide themselves with genuine higher education unhampered by sacerdotalism. Lampeter College, founded by the bishop of St. David's in 1822, received a charter in 1828, while the fight for the London University was in progress. The Governments of Lord Liverpool and Mr. Canning gave it a grant of ^6000, and George IV. gave a personal subscription of i5"iooo. In 1852 the college was empowered to grant the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and in 1880 of Bachelor of Arts. It has always been under clerical control ; and its graduates are for the most part rectors, vicars, and curates in Wales and elsewhere, and a large percentage of them are navy chaplains.
Thus the clerics of the Church, in addition to their lands and rights of taxation, had the privilege of granting degrees in arts and divinity in Wales. But,
3o8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
keenly though the Welsh desired higher education, the sacerdotal college did not attract them. In 1872 a free University College was founded at Aber- ystwith, twenty miles north of Lampeter ; and in 1883 two others were founded at Bangor and Cardiff. The right to grant degrees, conceded to Lampeter, was denied to all these colleges, whose students were forced to graduate by examination in Ireland and Scotland ; until, in 1893, the three new colleges were incorporated by charter as the University of Wales, with the right to confer all degrees except the medical — each successive step in their foundation and incorporation having been taken when a Liberal Government happened to be in oflfice. Lampeter is not in the new university, which is a popular and highly flourishing institution, having representatives of all the county and borough councils on its governing body; and being quite free from the domination of Anglican sacerdotalism, though it confers an open degree in theology. Its students number 2750, or 1000 more than the number attend- ing the sacerdotal university of Durham which, with its affiliated college at Newcastle, has long enjoyed the privilege of conferring medical degrees.
The Lancashire and Yorkshire people, warned by the examples of London and Durham, resolved to keep their university education free from the sacer- dotalists ; and they also have succeeded. Twenty years after the foundation of Durham University, Manchester was enabled by the generosity of John Owens, a wealthy citizen who gave a donation of i^ 1 00,000, to provide itself with higher education. The Owens College was founded in 1 8 5 1 , under a non-sectarian, non-theological charter. It was an instantaneous success, and progressed so satisfactorily for a quarter of a century that, in 1877, the Privy Council was asked to grant it a university charter
LANCASHIRE REJECTS THEOLOGY 309
with power to confer degrees. Following the usual practice, the application was opposed and at first refused ; the plea being that certain Yorkshire people objected to the title " University of Manchester." For three years this pretext blocked the way, and it was not until the Liberal Government was coming into office in 1880 that a university charter was granted to the Owens College, under the title of the Victoria University, with power to confer degrees in science and arts.
During the generation which had passed since 1 85 i, its students had been compelled to go to Dublin and Edinburgh for their degrees ; and when I was at the Dublin University in the early 'eighties, there were still many Lancashire and Yorkshire men, students at the Owens College, who used to come over for the term examinations. Thus the Anglican clergy drove thousands of Englishmen out of England to seek the hisfher education which was denied to them at home. In 1883 power was granted to confer degrees in medi- cine ; and the new institution flourished under non- clerical management. Yorkshire College, Leeds, and University College, Liverpool, soon afterwards became incorporated with Victoria University, which was from the first a teaching as well as an examining body, consisting of a federation of colleges situated in the three towns. In 1900 the number of undergraduates was 2400. Quite recently University College, Liver- pool, and the Yorkshire College, have received inde- pendent charters, and are now known as the Liverpool and Leeds Universities ; both being popularly governed and locally endowed.
The Bishop of Liverpool made a strenuous attempt to have a chair of Anglo-Roman theology established at Liverpool. But, the request having been refused, he consoled himself with the folloAving reflection :
3IO CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" Althougli we must deeply regret that its promoters have thought it necessary to exclude theology, the queen of sciences, from the walls of the new univer- sity, yet they have allowed the foundation of two chairs of Semitic languages and ecclesiastical history, which will be of considerable value to the young student of theology."^ It is to be hoped that the university may not have reason to regret even this concession to " the queen of sciences." David Hume's verdict on theology should not be forgotten in Liver- pool, awakening, as it does, a thrill of sympathy in the heart of every believer in Him who denounced the Jewish scribes and pharisees : " If we take in hand any volume of divinity," wrote Hume, " or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask. Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number ? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; it cannot con- tain anything but sophistry and illusion."
In Birmingham the theologians were circumvented, and ousted from the control of higher education with unsurpassable thoroughness. In 1828, while the London University struggle was proceeding, an An- glican institution, known as Queen's College, was founded at Birmingham on somewhat similar lines to King's College, London, with departments of theoloffv, medicine, arts, and science. In 1843 it received a charter, and it was hoped it might ulti- mately be developed into an Anghcan university. Its arts and science were not patronised by the practical Birmingham folk, but the medical depart- ment became a considerable success; and it goes without saying that the theological department was
1 Speech at the Liverpool Diocesan Conference, October 1903.- Liverpool Courier, October 21, 1903.
NO THEOLOGY FOR BIRMINGHAM 311
in no danger of decay, as it was frequented by all the local candidates for the priesthood.
But the feeling of intelligent Birmingham was against Queen's College and its theology ; and in 1870 Sir Josiah Mason gave ^100,000 for the foun- dation of Mason College to promote " thorough sys- tematic education and instruction specially adapted to the practical, mechanical, and artistic requirements of the manufactures and industrial pursuits of the Midland district ... to the exclusion of mere literary education and instruction." The trust-deed permitted the trustees to vary the subjects taught, and even alter the provisions of the trust once in fifteen years, but it rigidly forbade them at any time to introduce the study of theology. Mason College starved out Queen's College, by first taking over its scientific teaching in 1882, and afterwards by taking over its whole medical department in 1892 ; in fact, by taking every wholesome branch of learning out of the grasp of theology ; and the subsequent history of Queen's College does not concern us.
In 1898 there were 666 students at Mason College; and Mr. Chamberlain, speaking there in that year, said : " Education is ' made in Germany,' and we are not ashamed to take the lesson to heart. Germany with forty-six millions has twenty-one universities ; Scotland with four millions has four universities ; England and Wales with thirty millions has only six universities."^ May we not add, paraphrasing the words of the Oxford Commissioners in 1850, that " if our universities and their endowments were mul- tiplied tenfold and distributed amongst tenfold the number of sacerdotal heads, fellows, and professors, little would result but increased ignorance and incapa- city to the nation"? In 1899 Mason College became
^ 7'nn,<5, January 15, 1898.
312 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the University of Birmingliam, with a capital of about ;!^3 50,000; and, mainly through Mr. Chamberlains influence, received a charter without opposition, em- powering it to confer degrees in arts, science, medicine, and commerce ; and thereby Birmingham secured for its citizens the privilege of higher education free from all danger of sacerdotal misguidance.
In contrasting the foundation of these new uni- versities with the old foundations at Oxford and Cambridge, and even with the later Anglican founda- tions at London, Durham, Birmingham, and Lampeter, one cannot withhold a tribute of admiration to the un- selfishness of such men as John Owens, Samuel Morley, Thomas Ashton, John Whit worth, Josiah Mason, and many others. They did not found those colleges for the aggrandisement of a particular craft in which they held a legal monopoly, as the old bishops did. They did not seek to fetter the minds of the students by forcing them to believe in the supernatural attributes of the Owenses, Morleys, Ashtons, Whitworths, and Masons for all time. They led no agitation against what they considered the heresy of the Church ; they did not seek to victimise individual theologians, however highly paid ; they aspired to no profundity of piety or learning ; they made no grandiose speeches in public ; they had no satellites to write flattering volumes about their pious sayings and doings ; and yet they built a barrier against clerical aggression in the great towns of England which will prove more enduring than laws or battles. To achieve this they gave their hard-earned money courageously and gene- rously, and without any arrUre j^ensSe, and thereby did more for their country than if they had won the victories of Cressy, Agincourt, and Waterloo.
CHAPTER XII
Compact between Church and State after the Reformation — The clerical caste more powerful in England than on the Continent — Its influence over literature — Tennyson, Browning, Thackeray, Dickens — The Church and Science — Huxley and Archbishop Thomson — Cobden and the Church — Elementary Education- Sir John Gorst and the aristocracy ^Bishop Creighton's pre- sumption— The so-called "National" schools. — Proselytism in school — Growth of Ritualism — The Board Schools of 1870 — W. E. Forster.
It is within the Hmits of the professional class for whom the State has done so much in England since the Reformation, that the reader must seek for " The Church " which is criticised or condemned in this book ; for Christians have no quarrel with that " visible Church of Christ" in England, described in Article XIX. as " a congregation of faithful men in which the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments be duly administered according to Christ's ordinance." Certain bishops and priests speak of " mystical " Churches, which are said to flourish independently of Christian people. " Men speak as if Christians came first and the Church after," said Bishop Temple sarcastically, " as if the origin of the Church was in the wills of individual Christians who composed it " ! Capitular bodies hint at angelic congregations for whom they conduct cathedral services. But as bishops and chapters leave no question of endow- ment to be settled on " mystical " principles, and insist on payment in current coin, placing no faith in collections taken up from the angels, such utterances can only be intended to deceive or perplex us.
314 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
In the sixteenth century the State could have deprived the bishops, deans and chapters, and paro- chial incumbents of their endowments, rights of taxation, and educational monopolies, for the same valid reason for which it stripped the monastic priests of their possessions. If the monastic properties were acquired by fraud, under the Roman dispensation, so were those of the hierarchy and secular priesthood. Nor has the State ever surrendered the right, so notably exercised by Cromwell and William III., of removing bishops, capitular bodies, and incumbents from their trusts and depriving them of their endow- ments. All ecclesiastical property, including the universities, had been acquired before the Reforma- tion ( I ) by " the Romish doctrine concerning Purga- tory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also Invocation of Saints " — which Article XXII. declared to be " a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God " ; and (2) by " the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead to have remission of pain or guilt," and which Article XXXI. pronounced to be " blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits."
Instead of creating a department for public worship, with an annual grant subject to parliamentary dis- cussion, as in other European countries, the State confirmed certain men as bishops in the palaces ; others as capitular bodies in the cathedrals, deaneries, and residences ; and others as parochial incumbents in the glebes ; and re-invested all with the right to possess " Roman " ecclesiastical lands and to levy relisfious taxation. But it was on the distinct under- standing ( i ) that they were to preach " the pure Word
A MARRIED CLERGY 315
of God"; (2) that they were to admmister the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper " accord- ing to Christ's ordinance"; (3) that they were not to reserve, carry about, hft up, or worship " the Sacra- ment of the Lord's Supper " ; and (4) that they were to refrain from all " fond " practices " repugnant to the Word of God," and above all, from those " sacri- fices " described as " blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits."
With these stipulations, clearly provided for in the Articles of Religion, the English State endowed its clergy with a generosity unparalleled in any country in which the reformed religion was adopted — en- trusting to them the cathedrals and other historic buildings, as the nucleus of a great religious business ; the glebes, episcopal and capitular landed properties ; the ecclesiastical patronage ; the monopoly of polite learning in Oxford and Cambridge ; and, above all, endowing them with the tithes. Never surely, in modern times, was any professional class treated with such immeasurable confidence as was implied in this monopoly of religious worship, including the sole right to give Christian burials, to perform valid marriage ceremonies, to admit young men to higher education, and to levy ad valorem duties on the produce of the realm.
The emancipation from celibacy, confirmed by Article XXXII., instead of weakening, rather strength- ened the clerical caste in England. A married clergy may not live so much apart from the general popu- lation as celibates, and, when entirely dependent on the voluntary otierings of those who accept their services, may be the most desirable form of professional religious ministry. But, when given permanent en- dowments and rights of taxation independent of lay control, a married clergy may become even a more
3i6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
formidable enemy to popular progress than a celibate priesthood. The sons and sons-in-law, daughters and daughters-in-law, and other relatives of the rich bishops, deans, and other dignitaries were enlisted by self-interest in the great cause of maintaining eccle- siastical prerogatives. For them, all the country not included in the society which frequented the palace, the cathedral close, or the rectory, were outsiders — rich outsiders to be pleased for the sake of their patronage ; poor outsiders to be snubbed and kept " in their proper station." And what unsurpassable opportunities of conciliating the rich outsiders did not the clerical caste possess — in the pulpit, in the public school, in the university, and, above all, in the right of approach and appeal, in the cottage and in the elementary school, claimed by them in Christ's name from those poor millions to whose cheap ser- vices the rich owed their comfortable leisure ?
They kept all higher education to themselves and their friends, by making submission to the pretensions of their craft a condition precedent to obtaining it ; and those of them who now ridicule non-Anglicans for an alleged ignorance of what is true culture and a disposition to admire the literary pyrotechnics of par- tially educated men and women, must be either hard- hearted, or forgetful of the past. Those who know the religious history of England in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries cannot help admiring the high degree of learning and culture attained by those who refused to be driven within the sacerdotal fold. It must not be forgotten that the clerical policy was supported by the ruling class, that is to say, by the sovereign and nobility, who believed that the Deity only intended the blessings of education, pecuniary competence, comfort, and leisure to be enjoyed by a small frac- tion of mankind in each country, and that universal
ENGLISH AND FOREIGN PRIESTS 317
prosperity or enlightenment would be contrary to human and divine law. Like the Jews, they imagined that Omnipotence cared only for themselves, and each law-o-ivin<'- modern Moses had a brother Aaron to teach the common people to believe in this comfortmg creed. There is no parallel elsewhere for the inexorable suavity with which this policy has been carried out in England since the Rebelhon of 1688, the soft word usually preceding the unjust deed, the plausible argu- ment justifying the most exclusive monopoly.
And if the people were not crushed ; if there was submission without slavishness, obedience without respect, dissent without revolution, continuous protest but no outcry ; was it not chiefly because the sacred Scriptures, written in homely, soul-stirring English, were in possession of the people ? Was it not because the humblest peasant derived consolation from their contents, and, more important still, believed that the richest bishop or priest knew nothing of God beyond what they contained ? And if the sacerdotal caste have had to compromise and dissemble in order to maintain their monopolies, it was mainly due to King James I.'s English Bible, which made Roman priest- craft impossible in England.
The hierarchy and priesthood held their supremacy by craft and force combined. Like those whom they oppressed, they bent without breaking ; but, on that account, they became more poAverful, and still con- tinue more influential, than the same caste in any other European nation. In France the priesthood enjoyed no such solid advantages, being isolated bachelors ; looked down upon by the intelligent ; frequently hooted in public; and subsisting on re- stricted incomes, voted annually by the Parliament, which also maintained the religious buildings. In Italy, the clerical caste found itself denuded of almost
3i8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
all its endowments ; in France as well as Italy, deprived of all power over education ; and, even in Spain, back- ward as it is, we have seen provision made for vesting the control of education in popularly-elected bodies.
In Protestant North Germany, bishops and digni- taries were abolished, and ministers of religion were stripped of all supernatural influence ; and when we now speak of Germany as a rival in world-politics, we always mean the Protestant North, and never mean divided Catholic Austria. Even in the " Roman" dis- tricts of Prussia, the bishops are paid by the State, the highest salary being that of the Prince Bishop of Breslau, who only receives £iyoo a year. Indeed, it is not improbable that religion costs less for the whole of Prussia, with its population of 36,000,000, than the State subsidies and voluntary subscriptions of the Established Church alone cost the seven millions who inhabit Greater London.
In Russia, where, as Pusey discerned, the State Church most closely resembles the Anglican establish- ment, alike in the official headship of the sovereign, in the revolt from Constantinople, in the married priests, and in the persecution of dissenters, the priests enjoy no such influence, valuable property, rights of taxation, or independence of lay control, as the English clergy. The entire expenditure of the Holy Synod in 1903, under the direction of Bishop Creighton's friend, Pobiedonostseff", upon the religious service of a population of 141,000,000, was only about ;i^2,75o,ooo.
The relatives and connections of the clerical caste, then, which has held this unexampled monopoly in Ensrland since the Reformation, are to be found on all sides. Indeed, so powerful is the caste, that it seems to have emerged triumphant from its encounter with the scientists in the 'fifties, 'sixties, and 'seventies.
THE VICTORY OVER SCIENCE 319
And liow was the victory achieved? Mainly by practising the medieval priestcraft revived by the Oxford sacerdotalists ; thereby at once disarming and exciting the ridicule of the scientists, and taking a small section of the people a stage backwards to medieval darkness, while the prophets of scientific truth led a larger section a stage forward towards the light. For twenty years now, the most formidable assailants the sacerdotal party have had to face have been earnest men who, content with proving sacer- dotalism to be alike opposed to the Gospel and the Reformation settlement, were prepared to leave the sacerdotalists in undisturbed possession of cathedrals, lands, and tithes.
With this exception, intelligent criticism now seems silenced by a variety of causes, of which the the first is new and the rest of old standing : — (1) By the hopelessness engendered at seeing the sacerdotal caste, which held the monopoly of learning in Eng- land for so many centuries, deliberately reverting to paganism from professional motives, and at seeing the bulk of the nation, despite all that has been learned, still ready to tolerate the deceptions of that caste ; (2) By a feeling of friendship towards individual clergymen and their friends; (3) By a prudent reluctance to interfere with the business of a numerous and moneyed class ; and (4) by the char- acteristic dislike of Englishmen to discomfort, and their unwillingness to relieve themselves of old- established burdens.
Most recent English writers have boon compli- mentary to the clerical caste ; others, like Kipling, have been as reticent as the all-observant Shake- speare, or as dumb as the gentle Cervantes ; though we are now beset by 'the same trouble which was brewing in England and the Continent at the opening
3 20 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of the seventeenth century. In some cases criticism has been veiled, as in the poems of Tennyson, who dealt heavy side-blows at the Church, of which his father had been a priest; but, as a rule, he only denounced priestcraft in scathing general terms : —
" When from tlie terrors of Nature a people have fashioned and
worship a Spirit of Evil, Blest be the Voice of the Teacher who calls to them ' Set yourselves
free ! ' Noble the Saxon who hurled at his Idol a valorous weapon in
olden England ! " ^
Browning had seen his father and mother leave the Church and become Dissenters, because they beheved the practice and ritual of its bishops and priests to be the reverse of Christian. Yet, full as he was of love for humanity, and hatred of priests, he seldom, if ever, struck a blow near home. It was into the mouth of an Italian bishop of the sixteenth century that he put those well-known lines which may be said to express the highest ideals of AngUcan rituahsts : —
"And then how I shall lie through centuries, And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long. And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste Good, strong, thick, stupefying incense-smoke ! " ^
And dreadful as his picture of hell is, how few there are who read it with any definite application to the dangers with which we are threatened at
home : —
" I gaze below on hell's fierce bed.
And those its waves of flame oppress, Swarming in ghastly wretchedness ; Whose life on earth aspired to be One altar-smoke so pure ! — to win ' If not love like God's love for me,
At least to keep his anger in ; And all their striving turned to sin.
1 " Kapiolani." "^ " The Bishop orders his Tomb."
HUXLEY AND THE ARCHBISHOP 321
Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white With prayer, the broken-hearted nun,
The martyr, the wan acolyte.
The incense-swinging child — undone Before God fashioned star or sun !
God, whom I praise ; how could I praise, If such as I might understand,
Make out and reckon on His ways, And bargain for His love and stand Paying a price at His right hand ? " ^
Thackeray, who broke a lance with every snob in England, prudently flattered the clerical profession before smiting the episcopal and university snobs.^ When Dickens wished to expose clerical hypocrisy and educational tyranny, though he was keenly conscious of the shortcomings of the autocrats of the Church, as evidenced by the lack of morality and education in the parishes, and by the proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts, he unchivalrously selected Stiggins, a poor, dis- senting minister, and Gradgrind, a tiresome, self-made philanthropist, for his butts.^ Even if an author were rash enough to risk an encounter, the publishers felt that the monopolists of polite learning, the caste who could make or mar the fortune of a book, were not to be lightly offended.
Broadly speaking, the scientists, while cutting the foundations away from the whole sacerdotal system, never effectively or specifically denounced the indi- viduals who lived by it at the public expense in England. When the Archbishop of York stated, in a lecture at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in 1868, that the new philosophy of Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer was deduced from the Positivism of Comte, whom he described as the founder of the philosophy of evolution, and thereupon proceeded to
1 "Johannes Agricola." ^ See his " Book of Snobs."
' Stiggins in " Pickwick Papers " ; Gradgrind in " Hard Times."
X
322 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
demolish Comte's theories, he was following the best sacerdotal precedents. Huxley, in the same place, soon afterwards, explained that Comte had no glim- mering of the doctrines of modern physiology, and added : " The most reverend prelate might dialectically hew M. Comte in pieces, as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt to stay his hand." He further- more pointed out that the archbishop had attributed doctrines to Comte which were in reality Hume's : " I cannot but marvel," said Huxley, " that the assembled wisdom and learning of Edinburgh should have uttered no sign of dissent when Comte was declared to be the founder of these doctrines. It was enough to make David Hume turn in his grave, that here, almost within earshot of his house, an instructed audience should have listened without a murmur while his most characteristic doctrines were attributed " to a writer " in whose dreary and verbose pages we miss alike the vigour of thought and ex- quisite clearness of style " of " the most acute thinker of the eighteenth century."^ But though an arch- bishop with a palace, an estate, a colossal minster, the patronage of a hundred benefices, and a monopoly over English elementary education north of the Dee, might be convicted of disingenuousness or ignorance, our scientist would do nothing to deprive him of the State-given endowments which alone made him for- midable and made his remarks worthy of notice.
The case of Richard Cobden, who was a politician and not a scientist, exemplifies how far Englishmen have carried their prudent unwillingness to array themselves openly against the clerical caste. Cobden did not believe in the apostolic claims of bishops and priests, yet he always announced himself as a Church- man, and thereby got many people to believe in his
1 See Huxley's " Physical Basis of Life."
COBDEN AND THE CHURCH 323
honesty who, he contends, would not otherwise have hstened to him. His friend, John Bright, who did not stoop to such artifices, had more hsteners than Cobden, but both equally failed to obtain the highest position. Cobden's prudent biographer, Mr. John Morley, though he does not announce himself a Churchman, warmly approves of his hero, of whom he says : " His sincerity was not of that cheap and reckless kind, by virtue of which men sometimes, in one wild outburst of plain speech, cut themselves off from chances of public usefulness for the remainder of their lives." ^ It is clear that the greatest bene- factors of humanity might come within the scope of Mr. Morley 's sarcasm ; for they have got themselves crucified, beheaded, poisoned, burned, and imprisoned for their love of truth and justice ; and have thereby " cut themselves off from chances of public useful- ness" and reward. But have they not opened the way to happiness and enlightenment for millions of their fellow-men by their self-sacrifice ? Mr. Morley sees all the advantages of siding with the clerical caste in this country : " However little we may admire the State establishment of religion," he says, " it is certain that when such an establishment happens to exist, those who have been brought up in it, and have tranquilly conformed to its usages, escape one source of a certain mental asperity and the spirit of division." ^ We all feel how widespread has been the desire to escape that source of mental asperity in England.
Cobden said : " The real obstacle to a system of national education has been, in my opinion, the State Church " ; and he added : " The main strength of any movement " for national education " must lie in the Liberal ranks of the middle class, and they are almost
1 " Life of Cobden," p. 130. 2 Ibid. p. 128.
324 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
exclusively filled by Dissenters." But nothing could induce him to assail the State Church's monopoly of education.
Statesmen nowadays, who are not afraid to attack the landed aristocracy in the abstract, are silent about the Church — perhaps because they think the Church has never been more than an implement in the hands of the aristocracy since the Reformation. When Sir John Gorst, for instance, was Vice-President of the Council of Education, he told a deputation which requested the Government to raise the age for com- pulsory attendance in elementary schools, that " a dislike to intellectual development is characteristic of a territorial aristocracy." ^ The report of the Committee of the Privy Council, issued at the time, had cautiously asserted that " in many of the rural districts there is a rooted belief that elementary edu- cation produces a disinclination among many of the more promising children to enter upon a life of agricultural labour." ^
Like Mr. Chamberlain, he said that Germany showed us how we ought to conduct our educational affairs, and he contrasted those German provinces where education is at its best with Pomerania, where it is as bad as in England, ascribing the backwardness of Pomerania to its " territorial aristocracy," and laying emphasis on the indisputable fact that, first, the aristocracy, second, the farmers, and, third, the rural labourers do not love or value education. It is true that the English territorial aristocracy were not obliged, like the Scotch heritors, to provide schools for their tenants' children. But Sir John Gorst must have known that he omitted a fourth fact which embraced all those he mentioned, namely, that the
' Times, March 3, 1898. 2 Eeport of Education Committee, 1897-98.
As Published by Church Association.
The Ritualism which Bishop Creighton Fostered
Here we have lour Church of Englauti priests vested and ready for service, attended by five acolytes, of whom two carry caudles, a third a ])rocessional cross, a fourth a censer ; and there are besides two bearers to hold aloft the banners of the Blessed Virgin, &c.
To face p. 325
BISHOP CREIGHTON AND CARLYLE 325
landlords could not have successfully retarded edu- cation in Ensfland without the assistance of the Church ; for the bishops and priests were the men in possession of the universities and schools — and were the tutors of the landlords themselves.
The immeasurable presumption of the Anglican priesthood has had no more candid exponent in recent years than the late Bishop Creighton, the well-remem- bered ritualist, panegyrist of Laud, Wolsey, Popes Julius II. and Sixtus IV., and M. Pobiedonostseff — who had been appointed Bishop of London just twelve months before Sir John Gorst's statement : " Liberty," wrote Creighton, when he was bishop of Peterborough, " is a tender plant and needs jealous watching. It is always unsafe in the world, and is only secure under the guardianship of the Church " — i.e. of Creighton and his friends — " for the Church possesses the knowledge of man's eternal destiny, which alone can justify his claim to freedom." ^ Here was an assumption by Creighton that he and his fellow-priests were a species of super-man, and had some special knowledge of " man's eternal destiny," which was not available to the world at large. And yet, like the audience at Edinburgh, when Archbishop Thomson was confounding Hume with Comte and both with the modern evolutionists, whom he pre- tended that he had demolished, nobody in England thought it worth while to protest. I have heard more than one Anglican priest relate with keen zest, as a sample of Creighton's caustic wit, how he had said that " there was nothing in Carlyle but his impudence and his Scotch brogue." But on one occasion an admirer of the genius, honesty, and hard work of Carlyle — who, unlike Creighton, never received a groat which he had not literally earned
^ " Hulsean Lectures," 1893-4.
3 26 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
by the sweat of his brow — condescended to stoop to a rejoinder, and said that Creighton was at best no better than Carlylc ; and, since Creighton lacked the Scotch brogue, there was nothing left to the episcopal mischief-maker but his impudence. It did not require any territorial aristocracy to egg on such men as Bishop Creighton to perplex the minds of the poor with priestcraft, and to retard the spread of enlightenment.
Sir John Gorst, however, sat for a clerical consti- tuency, the University of Cambridge, and that may, perhaps, explain his reticence as to the real opponents of popular education. The interesting parallel which Buckle drew between the Church and nobility be- comes full of meaning when we recollect that the words " religion " and " theology " always included secular education : " What the nobles are to politics that are the priests to religion. Both classes, con- stantly appealing to the voice of antiquity, rely much on tradition, and make great account of upholding established customs. Both take for granted that what is old is better than what is new, and that in former times there were means of discovering truths respecting government and theology, which we, in this degenerate age, no longer possess."^
The temerity of Sir John Gorst, himself a member of a Government of territorial magnates, recalls Benjamin Disraeli's sarcasm : — " What I admire in the British aristocracy is that they live in the air, that they excel in athletic sports, that they can only speak one language, and never read." But Gorst's bravery was followed by no such good fortune as Lord Beaconsfield's. After his abihty had been exploited by his superiors for the passage of the reactionary Education Act of 1902, he was removed from office, and his department handed
1 " History of Civilisation."
THE PSEUDO-NATIONAL SCHOOLS 327
over to a territorial magnate, the Marquis of London- derry, and to an ecclesiastical office-holder. Sir William Anson. The University of Cambridge condemned and disowned him, and he ceased to be a member of Parliament at the general election of 1906.
Now if the Anglican heirs to the disestablished and disendowed Roman priests successfully used their supremacy over higher education for their own ends, it is no more than the truth to say that they played havoc with the minds of the lower classes by their interference in elementary education. In 1870, when Mr. W. E. Forster introduced the School Boards Bill, the illiteracy of the masses who inhabited the rural districts and towns of England seems to us now like some nightmare, too horrible to have been true. As applied to the schools provided for the poor by the National Society, the word " National " was a mis- nomer— just as the word " Catholic," used by Romans and Anglicans, does not mean broad, general, universal, or free from bigotry, but rather sectarian, bigoted, and reactionary; and just as "Jesuit" means everything diametrically opposed to what Christians know and love in Jesus.
The Lancasterian system, which contained the germ of a genuine scheme of national elementary education, was stifled at its birth by the pseudo-national system ; and when, in 1834, the Government began to make grants for elementary education, the money was largely devoted to assisting the sacerdotal schools. In 1839 the Education Committee of the Privy Council was formed for the distribution of the annual State grant, which increased rapidly from i^2 0,000 in 1834 to i^8oo,ooo in i860. Meantime those who disap- proved of a sacerdotal autocracy in education were endeavouring, in the face of untold difficulties, to establish schools for their children — " schools for
328 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
all," as tliey were called by some of the societies — and to secure a little Government aid. And, if the well-to-do found themselves thwarted at every step in the effort to provide higher education for their sons by the establishment of free universities, how much more grievous were the difficulties of the poor who honestly disbelieved in the creed of sacerdotaHsm. When there was a " national " school in a district, or a school privately endowed by some local magnate, the Government was loth to give financial assistance to a second school. To procure a site was often absolutely impossible ; and it always involved risk and loss to be identified with the erection of a non- sectarian school. And yet it was necessary to face those perils; for almost all children attending the " national " schools were compelled to be present at religious teaching, under penalty of expulsion. In thousands of parishes, non-Anglican children were obliged not only to attend the Anglican church on Sundays, but also the Anglican Sunday school, in preference to the Sunday school of their own de- nomination, in return for the privilege of being allowed to attend the " national " day school. I have particulars of a number of hard cases in dis- tricts where the only provision for elementary edu- cation was the State-aided Church school, of which I shall quote one from the parish of Worplesdon in Surrey.
The rector, accosting the superintendent of the Nonconformist Sunday school, said : " Do they pay you anything for looking after the children in your Sunday school ? "
" No, sir," replied the superintendent ; " I never get any pay."
" Don't you ? " said the rector : " then, if I were you, I should give it up as an unprofitable job."
PROSELYTISM AND OBSTRUCTION 329
Shortly after this conversation, the rector ordered his schoolmaster not to allow any children to attend the State-subsidised " national " school unless they also attended the Church Sunday school. An appeal from the Nonconformist clergyman for a relaxation of the rule was refused ; and the minister indignantly relates how the rector, at a public dinner a few days after his refusal, protested that he was " most anxious to work in harmony with his dissenting brethren."
Mr. Birrell, the Minister for Education, introducing his Education Bill on 9th April 1906, described the condition of Liverpool before the School Boards, when " at least a quarter of its children were running idle, ragged, and uneducated about its streets," and said candidly that he, though the son of a Baptist clergy- man, had been obliged to go to a Church school, and had there learned the Church catechism, not having the strength of mind to make himself exceptional by claiming exemption from religious instruction, as his father had desired him to do.
In 1 86 1, the Education Committee, on the recom- mendation of a royal commission, endeavoured to secure some decrease in illiteracy by making the private and " national " schools serve a higher end than sectarianism and proselytism. They instituted the system of examination by inspectors, payment by results, and evening classes for adults, in all schools receiving State grants, the hierarchy and priesthood offering the bitterest opposition to the proposed reforms as an infringement of their own monopoly. And again in 1863, when the yearly State grant had risen to over ;!f 1,250,000, and when the Education Committee introduced the first conscience-clause, pro- viding that, in parishes with only one State-aided school, the children of non- Anglicans were to be admitted as of right, and were not to be compelled
330 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
to attend Church on Sunday, or to be present in the school during religious instruction, the proposition was denounced as " confiscation " of Church property.
Neither Christian nor Agnostic could be deemed unreasonable for desiring to save his children from the doctrines which were being taught in the ele- mentary schools by the new generation of Puseyite priests about this time. Canon Pusey was preaching the " real presence," and exhorting Anglican priests to " impress upon those who have hidden their sins " in auricular confession " the enormity of the crime they have committed in trampling under foot their Saviour's blood " ; and was advising people that they " must voluntarily submit themselves to a learned and wise confessor, obeying him as God Himself, laying all their concerns freely and simply before him, and never coming to any determination without his advice." A devotional book, published by a well- known clerical publicist, in the year the School Boards were established, boldly declared that "in Germany the Church was utterly rooted out, and a new religion, called Protestantism, invented by Luther and Calvin and other malcontents, was substituted in its place. But in Eno-land this was not so. The Church re- mained . . . but it was infected with Protestantism, which poisoned its blood, and diseased the whole body, yet without destroying its vitality." ^ The same book said : " The Sacrifice of the Altar is one and the same sacrifice with that offered on Calvary. It is not a different sacrifice, nor a repetition, it is the same."
The powerful society known as the English Church Union was agitating for the restoration of the entire Roman ritual as the most essential part of the Chris- tian faith. One leading Anglican publication had been calling for " the total abolition of the Thirty-nine
1 " The Golden Gate," by Rev. S. Baring-Gould, 1870.
A SIXTY YEARS' STRUGGLE 331
Articles " for many years ; and declaring that " the death of Edward and the accession of Mary " had been " the most fortunate circumstance for the Church." ^ Another was denouncing the Articles of Religion as " of all obstacles and hindrances to re-union with Rome, probably the greatest." ^ A third said " there were some Articles which, unless their language was duly weighed and carefully explained, sounded very startling in the ears of foreign Catholics, whether Greeks or Latins ; and did more to render the idea of corporate re-union impracticable than anything else." ^ A fourth suggested that the Articles should be " wholly withdrawn " or " quietly set aside." *
For sixty years, 1 8 1 i-i 870, the " national " schools did the work for which they were devised : ( i ) they prevented the State, in the interests of the Church, from making a suitable provision for the education of the poor ; (2) they subserved the ends of prose- lytism for the established religion. But, despite all the contrivings of the hierarchy and priesthood, the object for which the "national" system had been established was at length about to be frustrated. The day was at hand when they could no longer say to the people of this realm : " Unless you believe what we believe, and admit our supernatural power, you shall not learn to read or write; and, even if you should manage to get that elementary knowledge in spite of us, you shall neither enter the universities nor gain admission to the learned professions."
The small householders had now been given the right to vote, and the leading statesmen had decided that they had better " teach their masters how to read and write." The Liberal Government of 1868, there- fore, resolved to give the people the power to perform a
^ The Union Review. * The Church Review.
* Church Neivs. * Christian Remcmhraneer.
332 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
duty in which the Church had signally failed. Accord- ingly, they passed the Education Act of 1870, a notable landmark in English history, which gave the ratepayers of a parish, or the burgesses of a borough, irrespective of religious creed, the right to elect a body to be called a School Board, with powers (i) to provide the best possible elementary schools and teachers for their district ; (2) to levy a local rate sufficient, in conjunction with the Government grant, to defray the expenses thereby incurred, and to col- lect school fees ; (3) to enact a bye-law for the prose- cution of parents who did not send their children to some local school, or otherwise provide for their educa- tion ; and (4) to pay the school fees for poor parents, exempting persons thus assisted from the penalty attached to pauperism.
The hierarchy and priesthood gave the bill the most determined opposition, denouncing its proposals as confiscation of their own vested interests, especially the last-mentioned provision. Their schools had been drawing a considerable income from school fees, and, therefore, the proposal of free education was likely to induce thousands of poor parents to send their children to the board schools, unless the Church schools made a similar concession. It did not greatly concern the theologians that the new schools were certain to give a better class of education than theirs could possibly give, for they relied upon religious influence and the ignorance of their dienUle to combat everything but a reduction of school fees. The illiterates who obeyed the hierarchy could not differentiate between grades of education ; the " national " schools were popular because there was no compulsion to attend regularly, no interference with the desire of parents to make a little money by child-labour, no likelihood that the child would become superior to its parents because
FORSTER AND SHORTHOUSE 333
of any increased knowledge acquired therein. The new Act, on the contrary, with its powers of enforcing the attendance of children at school, was unpopular with the ignorant classes in town and country.
It was more than a coincidence that the cabinet
minister primarily responsible for the measure should
have been, like Joseph Lancaster, a member of the
Society of Friends, and also that he should have
typified in his own person some of those radical
changes in the social condition of the English people
for which the connection between Church and State
was largely responsible. Son of a Middlesex Quaker,
William Edward Forster had gone north in his youth
to seek his fortune in Bradford, the great centre of the
woollen trade, and, in doing so, illustrated the process
by which Dissenters, excluded from the land, had
sought and found a rich reward for their industry in
commerce, thereby obtaining control of the great
towns, and becoming a dominant force in English
politics. Having acquired a competency, he married
an Anglican Churchwoman, the daughter of Rev.
Thomas Arnold of Rugby, suffering expulsion from
the Society of Friends for his offence, and supplying
us with an object lesson in a second social process
almost as remarkable, though not so important, as
the first — namely, the tendency of wealthy Dissenters
to escape from that sphere of " mental asperity " in
which they or their fathers had achieved success, to
seek repose in the lap of the Church, and thereby
secure a footing in poHte society. Forster seems to
have found the tranquillity of orthodoxy so seductive
that if he were a literary man he should probably
have written a book like the " John Inglesant " of his
Birmingham co-religionist, John Henry Shorthouse.
Professor T. H. Green once said, " There were two great intellectual spheres in continual collision in
334 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
religion — the ecclesiastical and the agnostic." True Christianity is outside both ; but Mr. Green lamented that " the sons of some of the best and wealthiest " Nonconformist families, " sent to Oxford every year, accepted the agnostic simply because they could not accept the dominant ecclesiastical position and they could see no other alternative in religion." ^ Forster and Shorthouse were examples of men who, without a university education, had made money in trade and had " accepted the dominant ecclesiastical position " because of its social attractions.
There was far more in the " mental asperity " of Dissent than mere sectarianism. To reject orthodoxy was to acquire mental freedom at the cost of some personal sacrifice ; to resist its allurements afterwards was a continuous moral tonic, calculated to arouse a man's best energies, develop self-reliance, and awaken ambition. Outside the Church a man's " proper sta- tion " became whatever place he could win for himself in the Avorld by his own ability. Within the Church it meant the position occupied by his father and grandfather. And if the ancestors of our wealthiest Dissenters had remained in the Church, might we not find their descendants, instead of being millionaire manufacturers and prosperous traders, probably oc- cupying the position of bailiffs, gamekeepers, butlers, or innkeepers under aristocratic patronage — unless, perchance, they had got into the universities as servi- tors and taken up the Church as a profession ? Is it not also doubtful whether without the Dissenters we should have any great towns, like Bradford and Birmingham, to vex the souls of bishops, capitular bodies, and incumbents, by establishing non-theo- logical universities, and allowing corn to be imported duty-free, thereby depreciating tithe rent-charge ?
1 Oxford University Nonconformist Union, 1881.
CHAPTER XIII
The fight against the Board Schools— The Conservatives and Com- pulsory Education— Home Rule checks educational reform — Lord Salisbury's advice to the Church — Ecclesiastical strategy — Training and pay of Church teachers— Anti-Christian religion in Church Schools— Masses and Missions— Proselytism.
After the School Boards Act, the struggle between Church and State for the control of popular education entered upon a new phase. The hierarchy and priest- ]iood — having been the paymasters of all teachers from time immemorial, their thumb on the educational wind - pipe of the people, so to speak, cultivating " spiritual faculty " and the " spirit of reverence " — denounced it as an impiety that the schoolmaster should be made independent of the Church and de- pendent on the State. The Church dignitaries had been preaching the poverty and self-denial of Jesus, while they practised the avarice and luxury of Dives ; teaching the poor and menial that it was their duty to be always submissive and to transmit the faculty of poverty and subjection to their offspring, while the spiritual lords saw nothing wrong in grasping at every emolument for themselves and their posterity.
This profitable monopoly, of which the Church seemed now about to be deprived, was worth fighting for; and the hierarchy and priesthood first directed their energy to preventing the establishment of school boards in every district over which they had influence. They posed as jealous guardians of the public purse ; and, claiming that the Church schools in each parish afforded all the education that was necessary, they
ZZ^ CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
denounced any proposal to put the ratepayers to the expense of providing new schools. If it were urged that the Church schools in a specific place did not give sufficient accommodation, were inadequately staffed, or were ill-constructed and unsanitary, they promised to improve their defects. They were ready to promise anything, provided the hated school board, with its plain Bible lessons, more subversive of sacerdotal pre- tensions than sheer atheism, was not set up in the parish. They succeeded by this method in preventing the establishment of school boards in thousands of parishes not only in the country, but in the towns; and in such parishes one may trace the results in the astonishing ignorance prevalent amongst the old residents and their children. In the parish of Wimble- don, where I have lived for two years, and from which the school board was thus excluded, I have found illiteracy as prevalent amongst the children of old residents as in any Irish district with which I am acquainted. Of a number of servant-girls, born in the parish, whom we engaged from time to time, almost all were illiterate, and all were nominal members of the Church of England.
Where it was found impossible to exclude the school board, new Church schools were built or old ones enlarged, to hamper the board schools, whose sup- porters were described as anarchists, nihilists, secular- ists, atheists, and infidels; and compared with the French Revolutionaries. The fears of the people were worked upon in a thousand ways; and the poor had been so long accustomed to look up to the parsons, because of their superior social position as tithe- drawers, justices of the peace, chairmen of vestries, and friends of the territorial magnates, that they could not disbelieve all the untruths they heard of the reformers. The Church, on the one hand, had 25,000
TORY GOVERNMENT, 1874-1880 337
educated, well-paid men distributed over the country, each with his own circle of friends, who were all united, in defence of their livings, to prevent the success of any scheme of genuine national education. Those who desired to improve the system of popular education, on the other hand, had nothing to gain personally by so doing ; and had no standing organisa- tion of professional men whose livelihoods were bound up in the success of their cause. The Church stood in the same position as compared with the education reformers, as the licensed trade has always occupied with regard to the temperance party. The brewers, distillers, wine merchants, and licensed victuallers are fighting for their livings, resisting to the death the extinction of their profession ; while the temperance men have no such motive for united action. Hence it is that, though successive Liberal Governments have come into power pledged to reform the licensing laws, they have never succeeded in realising their object, being always outwitted by the liquor trade, which emerges scatheless from every ordeal, with its vested interests not only preserved, but increased in value, as if it were under supernatural protection.
The hierarchy and priesthood were compelled by the example of the board schools to improve the character of the education in the " national " schools ; but before the new school boards had been three years at work, a Conservative Government came into office with a small majority in 1874, and remained in power for six years, during which the Education Committee of the Privy Council assuredly did nothing to facilitate the establishment of school boards, and missed no opportunity of assisting the Church. Numbers of new sectarian schools were built and old ones enlarged ; and, wherever a board school was opened, a Church school stood within striking distance to hamper its
Y
338 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
operations. But, in spite of all these measures, the number of Church people continued to decrease year by year in proportion to the population ; while the number of non-Anglicans was constantly increasing, owing mainly to defections from the Church. The hierarchy and priesthood, therefore, accepting the offer of their political friends, consented to an extension of the compulsory powers exercised by the school boards, so that parents might be forced to send their children to school in districts where the Church still had an educational monopoly and no school boards had been estabUshed, their chief object apparently being to enforce a larger attendance at religious instruction.
The Church could not ask for parliamentary powers to compel people to attend service and participate in its seven sacraments ; but a friendly Government, having estimated the extent of country in which school boards were likely to be elected, might endow it with the power to compel the children to come to the sacerdotal school. This seems to have been the ex- planation of the hierarchy's consent to the passage of the Compulsory Education Act by a Conservative Government in 1876; but it is not too much to hope that if the House of Commons thought the measure would have been employed for surreptitiously forcing the children of the poor to attend Anglican masses and be instructed in such dogmas as the real presence, confirmation, extreme unction, and auricular confession, the statute would never have been enacted. Under the manipulation of the bishops and priests, however, the Act has become in reality a religious penal law ; and, were such an eventuality foreseen, the legislature would surely have preferred the children to work at some practical occupation during infancy, and acquire a literary education afterwards, as opportunity should offer. A healthy and industrious illiteracy is always
COMPULSORY EDUCATION ACT 339
better than superstition i^lu^ the " mechanical form of bookish instruction " given by the Church in " inferior schools staffed by inferior teachers."
The position of the sacerdotal party was a dishonour- able one. The children were forced into schools kept by the Protestant State Church of England, in order that they might learn reading, writing, arithmetic, and other secular knowledge to enable them to make a living and become intelligent citizens. The bishops and priests, having thus got the children into their schools by the aid of the police, took advantage of their helpless position to overwhelm them with mysti- fying dogmas of priestcraft, which had been discarded at the Reformation, and which all European experience had proved to be a fatal bar to intellectual progress. Not only did they cram the children in school with the technicalities of priestcraft, but they took them to church during school hours, and compelled them to participate in rites condemned as illegal by the highest tribunal in the realm. That is why the sacerdotal party attach so much importance to religious teaching in the day schools. They had failed to induce people to learn the dogmas of Anglo-Catholicism without the aid of the policeman and magistrate ; and it was only where they could not rely on their day schools that they encouraged Sunday schools. " Failing a day school, the priest must do his best with the Sunday school," says the author of " The Children's Eucharist " ^ — which proves that the Church has little confidence in the value of the religion it teaches.
When the Liberals returned to power in 1880, the Irish land agitation effectually crippled the efforts of those who desired to improve popular education and revise the relations of the State to the Church ; indeed Mr. Gladstone's unintelligible zeal for Home
1 See p. 352.
340 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Rule may possibly have had the same origin as Cobden's devotion to Free Trade, which he playfully said he took up as a light diversion in preference to agitating for a genuine system of national education. The Unionist party, which came into power with an im- mense majority in 1886, was pledged only to oppose Home Rule, and may be said to have remained in office until 1 906 ; for during the three years of Liberal Government, 1892-95, the Liberals reigned but did not govern.
During the Church party's long tenure of political power, after 1885, they arranged the system of school inspection on a religious basis; the inspectors being selected in certain proportions so as to represent rehgion rather than efficiency, the Anglicans, of course, predomi- nating. A system of inspection carried out on sectarian principles is almost worthless ; for the inspector knows that if he condemns a particular school, he excites the anger of the entire party to which the school belongs, and interferes with his own prospects of promotion. There- fore, one rarely finds an individual voluntary school censured in the inspectorial reports; the Roman Cathohc inspector always having honeyed words for the Anglican or " national " school ; the Anglican inspector for the Roman school.
In 1895, Lord Salisbury, who was about to return to power, addressed the " National Society for Pro- moting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church,"^ and frankly said to the hierarchy and priesthood, identifying himself with their cause : " It is your business to capture the Board schools. That is the aim we should always keep in our minds " ! The obstructive policy of the bishops and priests had been threefold : (i) They opposed the first establishment of a school
' June 12, 1895.
THE NONCONFORMIST POSITION 341
board in every parish or borough; (2) if their opposition proved ineffectual, they built new schools, or enlarged old ones, to thwart the efforts of the board schools; (3) they actively interfered at school board elections, making the religion of the candidates a test question. Anghcans and Romans always joined ! forces against the general public, of whom the Non- I conformists thus became the spokesmen.
The Nonconformist leaders in the fight for a genuine system of national education represented the millions of poor Englishmen who were anxious to improve their position in life by legitimate effort, but who had been excluded from all possibility of useful education by the ecclesiastical monopolists. Britishers of every rank and creed, except those pecuniarily interested in the Church, or indirect gainers by sacerdotal ascendency, can endorse the Nonconformist view of education without committing themselves to the peculiar tenets of any special denomination. What could be more statesmanlike, more reasonable, or better calculated to express the views of the dis- interested public, for instance, than the policy outlined by Rev. Albert Goodrich, chairman of the Congrega- tional Union, in his inaugural address at the annual assembly held on May 10, 1904? "The justice of our two main positions is being increasingly realised," he said, " first, that there must be effective popular control of all schools supported by rates and taxes ; and, second, that there must not be upon teachers any imposition of religious tests." The State must give the education, and must control it. " The young must be religiously trained. . . . But who is to give the children the religious training ? The Church or the State ? Our reply is, what it has ever been, Not the State, but the Home and the Church." Herein lies the strength of the Christian position. Those who
342 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND ^
had left the Church, because of its anti-Christian practices, were not afraid to depend exclusively upon their pulpits and Sabbath schools for giving religious instruction to their children, and willingly burned their boats, so to speak, by discarding the aid of any compulsory statute. That their confidence was well founded is evident from the fact that the number of children at their Sabbath schools and adults attend- ingf their churches far exceeds the attendance at the Sunday schools and churches of the established religion.
The priesthood frequently succeeded in " capturing " a school board which had been primarily founded to release elementary education from their control. An Anglican clergyman, Rev. Mr. Diggle, presided for nine years (1885-94) over the London School Board, the most important educational body in the country, at a time when the parliamentary representatives of London were almost entirely Conservatives. In many districts the boards were prevented from building schools by the strategy of the Church. The London School Board, for instance, announced its intention of building a school in Streatham, the Church school being insufficient for the population. The vicar, instead of welcoming the proposal, wrote asking the board not to build a new school, as the Church was prepared to supply the necessary accommodation ; and, on the faith of that promise, the board amicably but weakly consented to abandon the idea of building the new school. When over three years had elapsed, the matter was again brought before the board on a complaint that the pro- mised school accommodation had not been provided ! The low esteem in which the theologians hold secular education is well exemplified by this case, in which a proposal to provide improved elementary education for a populous district was wilfully obstructed for three
STREATHAM AND IRISH PRIESTS 343
years, and might have been altogether prevented, to the injury of thousands of children, if the board had not at length reminded the vicar of his promise. When asked for an explanation, his reply was that, " owing to arrangements necessary with the Ecclesi- astical Commissioners, the incumbents, and patrons of two parishes, to carry out an alteration of the parish boundaries," it had been impossible to do anything towards redeeming his pledge.^ The school board, of which Mr. Diggle, who had relinquished holy orders, was now no lonQ-er the chairman, declared that it was " unable to consider the vicar's excuse as a valid reason for delay in building," and said it should " pro- ceed to build its school forthwith;" and, the sacer- dotahsts having divided the board, the resolution to build the new school was carried by 23 votes to 14.
The insistence with which the Anghcan priesthood made the technicalities of priestcraft the first essential of elementary education, shows how closely the Estab- lished Church adheres to the Romanism of pre- Reformation times, and induces me to quote an Irish case exemplifying the position of inferiority to which the Roman priests relegate secular instruction. The administrators of the estate of an EngUsh landlord, in a midland Irish county, built well-appointed schools for the children of their farmers and labourers, as well as a stable and coach-house for the animals and vehicles of children from long distances. The com- pleted buildings were presented to the Board of National Education, and the parish priest was made the manager of the schools. Having got possession of the buildings, the priest converted the schools into a chapel-of-ease ; adding two transepts, so as to give the structure a cruciform shape ; and it is now the Roman Catholic chapel for the district. He made the
1 Report of the Committee on Education, 1897- S.
344 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
stables and coacli-house serve the purpose of schools, and they now constitute the National schools for the locality.
In districts where they had to compete with the board schools, the inferiority of the sacerdotal schools was glaringly manifest. The theologians, in self-justi- fication, used to make it a charge against the school boards that their administration was extravagant, that their schools were too expensively built, and their sanitary equipment too good for the pupils who used them. But, if we consider the matter, we shall be forced to conclude that, apart from their inferiority, there must have been gross financial mismanagement in connection with the Church schools ; the cost of main- tenance per pupil in them, in 1900, being £2, 6s. 4jd., as against £2, 17s. 7|d. in the board schools. Yet despite this large expenditure, the teachers only re- ceived what may be described as starvation salaries. In the Metropolitan district, in 1897, the average salary of 353 masters in Church schools was £\S7^ is. 3d.; whereas the average salary of 4 3 5 masters in board schools in the same year was ^^291, 6s. id. Only seven masters in voluntary schools had incomes of over ^300 a year, while 254 masters in board schools had that sum and upwards. In the case of school- mistresses, the difference in pay was even more strik- ing. The average income of 780 mistresses in Church schools in 1 897 was ^93, 19s. 9d. ; whereas the average income of 874 mistresses in board schools was ;^207, 4s. There were only five mistresses in voluntary schools in 1897 who had a salary of ^200 a year, whereas there were 527 mistresses in board schools who drew that amount and upwards.^
Seeing that, in addition to the Government grants, large sums were collected in subscriptions from the Church laity, and in fees from the children, does it
^ Keport of Committee on Education, 1897-8.
THE BOARD SCHOOLS WIN 345
not bespeak mismanagement to find so little money left to pay the teachers ? It was in the rural districts that the Church schools predominated chiefly, and the Committee on Education, in their report for 1897-8, cautiously referred to them as follows : — " A mechanical form of bookish instruction is the cheapest kind of instruction. It tends to prevail in inferior schools stafted by inferior teachers. Of all kinds of education it is the least fruitful of permanent good. Nowhere is its influence more obviously mischievous than in the rural schools." It stands to reason that the best teachers, men and women, went to the schools which paid the highest salaries and demanded the highest qualifications — a process which left only the second and third-rate teachers to the voluntary schools. Besides possessing better teachers, the board schools, erected at public expense, were, as Ave have stated, better built, better placed, and better equipped than the voluntary schools. Their superiority, however, is not apparent from the inspectorial reports, which contain columns of adulation for some of the worst-constructed and worst-maintained of the sectarian schools ; but it made itself manifest, nevertheless, despite all the diatribes of the bishops and priests. The more intelligent Church people, therefore, sent their children to the board schools in increasing numbers, wherever it was possible ; and when Lord Salisbury dwelt on the urgency of "capturing" those schools, he was actuated by a well-founded fear lest a new and wider conception of their duties as British citizens should induce the children of Church folk to for- get their obligations to the hierarchy and aristocracy.
The proceedings carried on in thousands of those Church and " national " schools, under the name of education, help to explain the low qualifications con- sidered necessary in the teachers. The episcopal and clerical managers were as little concerned for the
346 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
improvement of secular education as their predecessors who founded colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. The following is a typical advertisement for an Anglo- Catholic schoolmaster : — " Headmaster required for Micklefield Church School. . . . He must be a thorough Catholic who will teach the faith fearlessly ; no other need apply. ... If a good organist, able to accompany masses well, this will be a distinct recommendation. Organist's salary extra." ^ We may unreservedly accept the statement made by Dr. Macnamara, M.P., himself a school teacher, and ex-President of the National Union of Teachers, " that numerous teaching appoint- ments depended upon the help given on Sunday in playing the organ in church, or assisting in the Sunday schools."^ The Church required its teachers to be better acquainted with the technicalities of priestcraft than with the rudiments of scientific knowledge — a position which carries us back to the schools estab- lished by the priests in the sixth and seventh centuries, the period which Hallam calls " the nadir of the human mind." The schools of the Empire which had been attended by the primitive Christians, used to give an exclusively secular education ; but the schools of the priests taught only the theological system which had been laboriously evolved from their inner con- sciousness by the " Fathers of the Church," and depreciated secular learning of all kinds.
To revive this system of education seems to have been the misanthropic aim which the sacerdotal party kept in view in training the teachers of their elemen- tary schools. In every diocese one or more clergy- men were set apart as inspectors of schools, and these gentlemen concerned themselves altogether with the religious teaching imparted by the teachers. The
^ Yorlskire Post, March 7, 1896 ; cited by Church Association. ^ Parliamentary Debates, Standard, August 2, 1905.
THEOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 347
priesthood were firmly resolved on two points — ( i ) that they would compel the State to supply them with lay deputies to undertake the drudgery of giving religious instruction to children; and (2) that the lay deputies, or schoolmasters, should be compelled to make religious instruction the chief item in the school curriculum, and to assist the parson in Church and elsewhere. In the diocese of London, for instance, the schools were under the control of an Anglican priest, known as the in- spector of the diocesan board of education, who was also archbishop's inspector of training colleges. This official, with the sanction of the highest authorities in the Church, " impressed on teachers the necessity of beginning the religious education of children by teaching them what they were to believe." He had therefore ordered the "Apostles' Creed" to be taught before the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments, " because some simple knowledge of its meaning was necessary before the others could be rightly under- stood. . . . The children must know whom they are to obey," he wrote,-^ " and to whom they are praying, or they will not understand why those acts are required." To no purpose, it appears, had Jesus said : " But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them, for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him. After this manner therefore pray ye : Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." The sacerdotal party only followed the Church catechism in thus officially deciding that the sublime prayer of Jesus, so satisfying in its simplicity, cannot be understood without mastering the intricate dogmas of a creed whose authorship may only be assigned to the Apostles by that species of literary forgery which
i Times, February 5, 1898.
348 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ascribed another creed to Athanasius ; and which Dr. Swainson describes as " an intentional and dehberate attempt to deceive." -^ This supplies one of many in- stances showing how Christ and Christianity are thrust aside to make way for the priest and his theology, and how the stupid Anglo-Catholic priests go farther than the Romans; for, as I can testify from experience, the Roman Church taught me the Lord's Prayer before all others. The inspector, through whom the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London issued this order to the teachers, was also the author of a " Hand- book to the Prayer Book." ^ Having set himself to the task of improving on the Lord's Prayer, it is not unnatural that he should have undertaken to improve the work of Cranmer and his colleagues. In this handbook he directs the teachers in the Church train- ing colleges " to write Apostolical Succession on the blackboard, and explain that our present clergy can trace their spiritual genealogy up to the time of the Apostles in an unbroken line as certainly as any natural genealogy; can trace their predecessors name by name up to the ordination on the evening of the first day of the week when the doors were shut " ! He defines the word " ordination " thus : " Ordination in England is to a sacrificial priesthood, as is evident from the service itself. . . . The word priest carries with it the idea of an altar " 1 This is untrue ; for the authority given at ordination is simply " to preach the Word of God and to minister the holy sacraments in the congregation, where thou shalt be lawfully appointed thereunto." The future teachers are further told that the word "mass" means "something sent up or offered to God ; " and that " the presence of Christ's body and blood is in the elements themselves " !
1 Swainson on the " Creeds," 1875. * Church Intelligencer, January 1904.
As Published by Church Associatimi.
An Anglican High Church of To-Day
lu this English State church, we behold the altar, with its baldacliino, crucifix, candles, tabernacle place, &c., exactly as in a Koman Church. The Inspector of the London diocesan board ol education and archbishop's inspector of trainino- collenes holds that " ordination in Euolaud is to a sacrificial priesthood. The word priest carries with it the idea of an altar." (p. 348-)
To face 2'- 348
ANGLO-ROMAN PROPAGANDA 349
The inspector approves of " elevation curtains, censers, crucifixes, lights before the reserved Host, holy water vats, sprinkles, torch staves," and other Roman appli- ances, in the liturgy of the Church of England. Ignor- insr the decision in the Gorham case, he recites it as an article of faith that in baptism " the child is put into the water ' a child of wrath,' it is taken out a child of grace. . . . The child is given a lighted candle at baptism, which can show the way to the gates of heaven." Of confirmation he says : " A custom, of which frequent mention is made in English diocesan synods, was a band round the head of the newly- confirmed, a band of new white linen; this was a symbol of the cloven tongues as of fire ; " and he adds that " anointing is still used " at confirmation. Of extreme unction he says : " It is still sanctioned by certain bishops, and has not been prohibited." He draws the following fine distinction, worthy of Bishop Gore himself, between the blessing of holy water and the consecration of the elements in communion : " The sanctification of the water differs from the consecra- tion of the elements in that it is not of divine origin, and, like the consecration of buildings, has no sacra- mental effect, i.e. there is no ' inward part ' with regard to the water." Absolution, he informs the future teachers, is an " actual conveyance of pardon ; " and he warns them against " the heresies of Calvin and Zwingle." He directs the teachers to " write on the blackboard the names of the Breviary, Missal, Manual, Psalter, and Pontifical ; " and he also says that the reading of the Gospel " has always been accompanied by ceremonial acts of reverence, e.g. processions, the use of lights, incense, &c." ^
The assistant inspector of the London Church
^ An excellent summary of the " Inspector's Handbook " will be found in The Church Intelligencer, June 1904.
3 50 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
schools, also an Anglican priest, was the author of " The Catechist's Handbook" — a work which directs cate- chists to " wear surplices and to light the altar candles before beginning the preliminary prayers, which are to be recited facing eastwards ; " prescribes the use of a processional cross with banners, and gives lessons on ornaments and vestments. Of the second command- ment the author craftily writes : " We have seen Jesus Christ, and so we may take a picture of Him, or a crucifix, because we are only making a likeness of His human nature, not of His divine nature " ! " All are agreed that we suffer greatly from want of priestcraft," he writes ; and he tells teachers that " it is more in- teresting to explain the nature of a sacrament, or the meaning of apostolical succession, than to teach the existence of God, the work of creation, the meaning of sin, the birth and early life of our Lord " ! ^
The Church Association states that, in the parish of Dorchester (Oxon.), the vicar boasted " that the Hail Mary had formed part of the school prayers for fifteen years ; " also that " there was a crucifix in each school," to which " the children were expected to bow ; " that " the children were expected to attend a children's mass on saints' days," which was held as " a substitute for the religious instruction " during school hours ! Furthermore, " the school children were all carefully instructed to bow to the altar at these masses ; " "a girl who refused to bow was caned on her return to school from mass ; " and " the schoolmaster admitted punishing boys in the day-school for misbehaving in church." A book called " The Holy Sacrifice," used in the parish church, contained prayers that " all Protest- ants in England, all Protestants abroad, the unbelieving, the lapsed, the careless, the sinful, the fallen, blas-
1 For an interesting review of this book see Church Intelligencer, February 1904.
IN BISHOP STUBBS'S DIOCESE 351
phemers, dissenters, &c., may be won back into living union with the Catholic Church " ! ^ As this benefice is in the gift of the bishop of Oxford, those practices must have had approval of Bishop Stubbs, who used to say that he did not regard the Reformation as in any sense " a reformation of religion." It would not be fair, therefore, to lay all the blame on the vicar for his misuse of the parish church and schools.
In another Oxfordshire parish, where the vicar was chairman of the boarding-out committee of the local union, mass was said not only on Sundays but on saints' days ; the seventy boarded-out children and the cottagers who boarded them "forming the great part of the congregation ; " and on such occasions nobody received communion but the vicar himself, in his role of sacrificer and transubstantiator. Some parishioners complained to the guardians, and also appealed to Bishop Stubbs : " We earnestly ask," they wrote, " that the children's eucharist may be stopped, and the teaching purified. They are now openly taught to pray to the Virgin." But " the Bishop did nothing to help them." In two other Oxfordshire schools " the children were taken to attend the Cowley Fathers' Church ; " and in one school " there were many crucifixes on the walls and over the mantel- pieces, with vases of flowers always kept before them." Not only were the children taken to mass, but, it is stated, they " were urged to go to confession before being confirmed." ^
It is stated on the same authority that in a York- shire parish the school children " were taken to children's mass during school hours, when the curate elevated the wafer after its consecration. The vicar stood in the aisle, and, addressing the children, said :
^ Church Association Statement, August ii, 1904. * Church Association, official publication.
352 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
' Bow your heads, children, and keep very quiet, Jesus is now on the altar.' " In another Yorkshire parish it was found, as the result of frequent visits paid to the schools in 1 900, that : " In the mixed schools there was a mock altar, with candles and a crucifix suspended over it ; " and also that " in the infant school there was another mock altar, with two pictures of the Annunciation and the Nativity over it, and a crucifix suspended over the fireplace, and that the children were taken to mass every Thursday at nine."
It is characteristic of the English temperament that the children did not willingly take to ritualism, except as a means of avoiding their legitimate studies. On the feast day of the saint after whom his church was called, a South London vicar lamented " the meagre attendance of young people." " ' Last year/ he said, ' the church was filled from end to end with children : ' how, then, was the meagre attendance to be accounted for ? Last year the festival fell on a school day, when all the children were oUigcd to come ; but this year it fell on a Saturday — ^a school holiday — when their attendance was purely voluntary, and what he called ' a mere sprinkling ' was the result." ^ In a Church school at Bovey Tracey, Devon- shire, an eye-witness reported that " the children were singing a hymn to the Virgin, and on looking in at the window he saw a hig map covering the wall with a naked figure of Christ wpon it." ^ An incident is re- ported from Bristol of where " boys were caned at the Church schools for not attending a ritualistic mission, although their parents — Nonconformist and Churchmen — had told them not to go." ^
A book called " A Plea for Children's Eucharist," written by a vicar in the diocese of York, with a
^ jf%e iZecorc?, January 1899. ^ Western Mercury, J auM&rj 2t„ 1902.
^ The Liberator, February 1896.
MISLEADING THE INFANTS 353
preface by Canon Douglas of Worcester, reveals the true motive of the bishops and priests in acquiring control over education of all grades. Referring to the regret expressed by Canon Gore, now Bishop of Birmingham, at the neglect of " definite religious teaching" in so many schools, the author says it is sad to have such a complaint made " when we think of the unjjaralleled opportunities the Anglican clergy have of gaining the ear of the young people." " Our public schools," he says, " our grammar schools, our elementary schools, ought to have made such a re- proach impossible of utterance. It is to be hoped that we shall awake to our opportunities and recover our lost ground." The author candidly calls the parish school " the nursery of the Church," declaring that the priest " still makes that nursery of the Church, the parish school, his base of operations." The secretary of the English Church Union, the most important society of the sacerdotal party, declared, in 1898, "that England could not be brought back to the truejworship of God unless a beginning was made with the young ; and the children must be taught all about the frequent offering of the Holy Eucharist in the day schools." At a meeting of the Society of the Catechism at Church House, Westminster, in 1902, Bishop Talbot presiding. Rev. Spencer Jones, founder of the society, " addressed the meeting as to the importance of dealing with children between the ages of five and seven." " At that stas^e," he said, " the sealing-wax is warm, and ready to be impressed ; afterwards it would get hard, and be more difficult to deal with."
In many rural districts, such as the dioceses of York, Chichester, Exeter, Winchester, and Oxford, the parents had never heard of the conscience-clause ; and, in an Oxfordshire parish, when they ascertained
z
3 54 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
their rights, thirty-four parents, most of them being nominal members of the Church, withdrew their children from religious instruction. In a Yorkshire parish the parents of 200 children, when they learned their legal rights, gave joint notice on July 3, 1901, that they desired to withdraw their children from religious instruction ; and until the following October their children were exempt. The vicar, having bided his time like a true priest, then instructed the school- master to send a verbal message by the scholars to their parents that, unless each parent sent a separate note, the children would be given religious instruction ; and, with the exception of two children whose parents sent special notes, all the others were henceforth compelled to join the religious instruction classes. The parents then withdrew 140 children; and, as the number on the rolls was only 256, we may con- clude how obnoxious the vicar's "definite religious teaching" was to the vast majority of his poor parishioners.
Where board schools were not available, many Non- conformist, and most Agnostic, parents allowed their children to receive religious instruction in Church schools, to save them from the unpleasantness in- volved in asking for exceptional treatment. In middle and upper class schools, it involves little discomfort to a pupil to omit religious instruction; but in schools frequented by poor children, with whom the priests take extraordinary liberties, it was, as Mr. Birrell said, most difficult to take advantage of the conscience-clause. Withdrawal from religious in- struction always caused unpleasantness, and something more. A case was mentioned in the House of Commons by Mr. Lloyd George, M.P., on May 28, 1 900,^ in which a Welsh rector " denounced from
1 The Christian World, May 15, 1902.
PROSELYTISM IN CHURCH SCHOOLS 355
the pulpit some labourers who had withdrawn their children under the conscience-clause, and wrote to the Prudential Assurance Company to complain tliat their local agent ' was interfering with politics ' by withdrawing his child."
Proselytism was in many cases openly avowed. A Lincoln diocesan dignitary, writing in the (Juardian in 1 897, said : " Our syllabus is always arranged so as to give distinctive denominational instruction. I always saw that it was given when I was diocesan inspector, and I always asked the children, chiefly the children of Nonconformist parents, questions bearing upon it. This is the case throughout Lincolnshire. Thus, in fact, we are training the children of Nonconformists to be children of the Church." A London vicar, speaking of his Church schools, boasted that " many a little Dissenter, so called, has been taught the Catholic faith in these walls. We know many an instance of these children, when older, coming forward by their own act for confirmation, entirely from the sound teaching they had received in their school days, and becoming very firm, good Church people." - Mr. R. W. Perks, M.P., who represents a division of Lincoln- shire, once cited an instance of proselytism m connec- tion with a young schoolmistress who, being a Wesleyan and anxious to become a pupil teacher, was asked by the rector to sign an agreement pledging herself to separate from the Wesleyan body and become a mem- ber of the Church of England, and never again to attend a Wesleyan service.^ The Primitive Methodists in 1 900 discovered eleven cases in which " young people had been compelled to sever their connection with the Primitive Methodist Church and join the
1 Parish Magazine, St. Mary's, Paddington, December 1901, quoted in Church Association pamphlet. * Speech at Theddlethorpe, July 1899.
3 56 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Established Church before being accepted as pupil teachers, and in seven other cases candidates had to change their faith before being allowed to enter the training colleges. '
How clearly all these facts disprove the interested protestations of such men as Mr. Cripps, K.C., ex-M.P., Vicar-General of Canterbury, Chancellor and Vicar- General of York, who, during the debate on the Education vote in 1905, "repudiated on the part of the Church of England any desire to promote sec- tarian animosity." ^
The policy of the hierarchy and priesthood in turn- ing the Compulsory Education Act into an engine for forcing children into school and church to learn the dogmas and assist at the rites of sacerdotalism, besides being a confession of failure and distrust in the people, directly tended " to promote sectarian animosity." When the legislature compelled parents to send their children to school, under penalty of fine and imprisonment, its object was to insure for the chil- dren a useful education, not to initiate them forcibly into the mysteries of media3val priestcraft ; and the conscience-clause enabling parents to withdraw their children from religious instruction proved that Par- liament did not regard any form of religion as a legitimate branch of school teaching.
'^ Standard, August 2, 1905.
EUfott it- Fri/.
William Edwaud Forster
" ForstcT seems to liave found the trauquillity of orthodoxy so seductive that if he were ii literary niau he sliouhl probal)ly liave written a booli like the 'John Inglesant ' of his Birmingham co-reliy ionist, Joliu Heury Shorthouse." (p. 333.)
Elliott ,b Fry
Mk. Augustine Bierell
" Ano-licans and Romans always joined forces aijainst the general public, of whom the Nonconformists thus became the spokesmen." (p. 341.)
To face p. 357
CHAPTER XIV
Financial distress of the Church schools — The Education Acts, 1902 and 1903 — Alliance between Anglicans and Komans — Ritualism persisted in — Protests by County Councils — Endorsement by Archbishop Davidson— Church school teaching in St. Albans — The Training Colleges— Education Bill, 1906 — The Bishops' agita- tion— Mr. Lloyd George denounces clericalism — The " ecclesiasti- cal laymen " — Bishop Talbot's metaphor — Bishop Ingram's threat — The Church and the unemployed — Mysterious demonstrations — The Church pecuniarily interested in reviving Protection — Extra- ordinary scene at St. Paul's — Resurrection of the unemployed.
After several years of trial, Lord Salisbury's scheme for capturing the board schools did not succeed as well as its promoters would have liked ; and, while the number of Church schools was increasing, a grow- insf unwillinmess to subscribe for their maintenance was becoming manifest. In 1897 Lord Salisbury had passed the Voluntary Schools Act for their assistance, under which, in 1901, necessitous sectarian schools were receiving a special grant of ;^640,ooo a year. But with fabrics falling into disrepair, accommoda- tion entirely inadequate, funds not forthcoming, and teachers ill-paid, even the most complimentary reports from religious inspectors could not sustain the " national " and other sectarian schools, in competition with the board schools, for an indefinite length of time. The extent to which the hierarchy and priest- hood had committed themselves in their desperate fight with the board schools, and their urgent need for financial assistance, may be gleaned from the fact that, immediately after the passing of the Act for their relief in 1902, they owned 11,658 out of a total of 14,170 sectarian schools, while only 1059 belonged to their Roman Catholic friends, and only 453 to the Wesleyans. Of this enormous number of
Church schools, thousands were erected for purely
357
358 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
obstructive purposes in the vicinity of board schools, though many, it is also true, were in thinly-populated rural districts. The result was a poor attendance, the number of pupils on the rolls being only 2,333,587, or an average of 200 per school ; whereas in the council or board schools, of which there were only 5965, the number of pupils was 2,875,709, giving an average of 482 per school.
After the Boer War election of 1900, the Church party, at the zenith of their power, decided on a grand effort to transfer their heaviest pecuniary liabilities for these schools, namely, the teachers' salaries and collateral expenses, from their own shoulders to the public treasury, without changing the sectarian character of the schools or relinquishing their control over them. To accomplish such a feat would, to any other body of men, have seemed im- possible; but, nevertheless, a Unionist Government managed to achieve it for the Church without any authority from the electorate, and in the confusion following a calamitous war. The clerical politicians had a close acquaintance with the county councils since their establishment by the Conservatives in 1888; Anglican clergymen in many cases being members of them ; while the dignitaries and wealthy rectors had always been potent in county administration. To quote one instance out of many, the Rev. Volmer Tanner, rector of Chawleigh in North Devon, was a justice of the peace, a deputy-lieutenant, and a county councillor in 1903. The friends of the hierarchy therefore believed that, except in county boroughs, it was possible for the Church, as the best organised interest in each county, to influence the decision of the county councils in any public question, like education, which directly concerned its interests. The councils dealt with so great a variety of business, that
EDUCATION ACTS, 1902-3 359
elementary education, if transferred to thorn, would bo " lumped in " along with sewerage, scavenging, roads, bridges, water supply, tramways, schemes for labourers' cottages, allotments, and open spaces; and delin- quencies which could not escape the vigilance of a school board would pass unnoticed. The items of the educational budget were not likely to be made a test question at elections, but might be provided for by personal influence, canvassing, and private neofotiation — a Gfame at Avhich the Church could safely challenge all competitors. In the country dis- tricts everywhere the ecclesiastics might count upon a controlling influence on educational committees appointed by the councils ; for the territorial magnates to a man would be with the Church; the farmers, for the most part yearly tenants removable at short notice, would follow the landlords ; and the labourers would follow their employers.
Under these circumstances Lord Salisbury's Govern- ment, which had secured re-election in 1900 without the remotest reference to education, produced, in conjunction with the hierarchy and priesthood, their famous Education Bill of 1902, which abolished the " uncaptured " school boards and transferred their duties to the county and borough councils. There was a loud outcry, but in England there is no limit to the power of a Conservative Government with a large majority ; and the school boards, after a useful existence of over thirty years, were abolished in Eng- land and Wales; and in 1903 a similar measure was passed for the county of London. Its promoters con- tended that the new Act increased the sum and scope of popular government, but its true results were — ( I ) to degrade elementary education from its position as a public question of the first importance, as it is in Scotland, managed by special Boards elected on a
36o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
popular francliise to deal with it alone, to a position of minor importance relegated to bodies elected for a variety of other purposes ; ( 2 ) to give an additional grant in aid to the Church schools by making the salaries of the religious teachers chargeable on the rates; and (3) to make it certain that the public mind should be no longer awakened by elections turning specially on education.
The county councils, assisted by the State, were to take on themselves the liability for the teachers' salaries in the " national " and other sectarian schools, if they were satisfied that the premises were suitable for use as public schools. At first there was great jubilation amongst the priests in London and throughout the country at the overthrow of the school boards and at being relieved of responsibility for the teachers' salaries, The Romans led the way, and pronounced the Act to be a " great apostolical opportunity : " " Stolid Dissenters, to their surprise, have found themselves within the walls of a Catholic school, compelled to tolerate images and to study Catholic feelings and modes of thought." -^ But difficulties soon presented themselves when many of the councils objected to taking over thousands of the sectarian schools on account of their disrepair, insanitary structure, and general unsuitability. Extra- ordinary pressure was brought to bear on the coun- cillors collectively and individually l)y the friends of the Church, and in most places the initial difficulty of getting unsound school buildings passed as suitable was settled by various devices. In some instances, the situation was not unworthy of Mr. W. S. Gilbert's brilliant pen ; for the priests, extolling their ram- shackle buildings, said in effect to the councils :
" There's a fascination frantic In a ruin that's romantic, Do you think they are sufficiently decayed ? "
^ Tablet, August 20, 1904.
AN ECONOMICAL BISHOP 361
But having taken over the buildings, the councils, especially in boroughs, insisted on their being properly maintained, a duty which devolved on the theologians, who, though relieved of the payment of the teachers, had elected to remain liable for the fabrics, so as to retain their rights as legal owners. The hierarchy and priesthood, Roman and AngHcan, finding themselves unable to evade repairs and improvements, bewailed and magnified their grievances in press and pulpit.
No feature of the long struggle between Church and State for control of the schools is, perhaps, more remarkable than the servility with which the Anglican bishops and priests followed the well-defined policy of the Roman Church, which is the same in England, France, and Ireland. The Anglican poHcy does not disclose a spark of originality, but was moulded at every crisis on the lead given from Rome. At the annual congress of the General Association of Church School Managers and Teachers, held in St. Albans on June 13, 1905, under the presidency of Bishop Jacob of that place,^ one priest candidly recommended the association " to follow the example set by the Roman Catholics and the Jews." Another said that " steps should be taken to come into line with the managers of non-provided schools carried on by Roman Catholics and Jews, as they were all threatened with the same danger." Bishop Jacob, like his predecessors thirty-five years before, who opposed the establishment of board schools, posed as an advocate of public economy, anxious to keep down the rates : "He desired to remind the general public that if the Church schools and the Roman Catholic and Jews' schools were treated un- fairly, and it were made impossible for them to con- tinue, the result would be an enormous increase in the rates." By this he meant to convey that if the county
1 Standard, June 14, 1905.
362 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
councils refused to take over the ill-staffed and badly- built sectarian schools, on the plea of their unsuitability, they should be compelled to build and staff new schools — a policy which would be true economy, and would assuredly hasten the realisation of the dream of an eminent Englishman who recently said he hoped " we shall be able to take teaching out of the hands of the clergy, and instruct the clergy in the fact that Christianity is a spiritual religion." ^
A candid avowal of the Church's difficulties was made in the annual report of the Westminster Roman Catholic education fund in 1905. "The crisis," it said, "which has lonsr threatened our Catholic schools seems to have reached an acute stage," which, it was explained, was caused by " the exacting requirements of the London county council for ' improvements,' in many instances of doubtful utility or questionable necessity, from our point of vieio, which, if insisted upon, will tax our resources to the utmost, if not beyond our powers." The Government obediently came to the assistance of the Church. " We have distinctly counselled our inspectors," said Sir William Anson, parliamentary secretary to the Board of Education, warden of All Souls College, and chancellor of the diocese of Oxford, " that they are not to urge upon local authorities expenses which are not necessary for the health, com- fort, and education of the children." ^
Though the county councils paid the teachers out of the rates, the Act allowed the Church to retain the management of the schools and preserve their sectarian character. Each school was to be governed by a body of managers possessing the right to correspond directly with the education committee of the Privy Council, or the Board of Education, as it is now called, and of
1 Mr. George Meredith. " Parliamentary Debates, Standard, August 2, 1905.
THE POPE INTERVENES 363
tliose managers the owners of the school fabric had the right to appoint two-thirds. All the incompetent Church schoolmasters, whose minds were surcharged with sacerdotal nonsense, were now raised to the dignity of municipal servants paid out of the public rates ; but in new appointments the councils had the invidious privilege of rejecting the managers' nominees on educational grounds. Some councils boldly de- murred to accepting men whose sole erudition con- sisted in a minute acquaintance with the " Handbook to the Prayer Book," " The Children's Eucharist," and "The Catechist's Handbook;" and, in this new diffi- culty, the hierarchy and priesthood began once more to cry aloud for public sympathy. " What with the i ever increasing demands for higher grade qtialijications for all who are to be allowed to take part in the teaching of our schools," said the Roman ecclesiastics of Westminster, " we are heing driven to the xoall, and may possibly be crushed " ! So grave was the crisis that Pope Pius X. was urged to write a special letter to " the CathoHcs of England," exhorting them " to safeguard and maintain their schools in conformity with the belief and profession of the Catholic faith." And he alluded to his Anglican allies as follows : " You will not, we are sure, fail to be helped by the approval and goodwill of many even who are not of the Catholic faith; for, though they do not demand all that Catholics must ask for, it is well known that they agree ivith you as to the religious education of the young." ^
The Government again intervened, and advised the county councils to be subject to the higher powers represented by the managers of the Church schools. Sir William Anson said : " I wish that local authorities would turn their minds to a free delegation of their
1 Standard, November i, 1905.
364 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
powers, to the creation of sub-committees of manage- ment of schools, so as to keep in touch with managers, whose interest it is all-important to sustain."^
Having got their teachers paid out of the rates, the hierarchy and priesthood gave ample proof that they did not mean to improve the secular education given in their schools in consequence, or to discon- tinue any of the superstitions which they dignified with the name of religious instruction. The following description of the proceedings in a London church during school hours, in January 1904, gives one a vivid idea of how ritualism was still being used to perplex the plastic minds of the young : " The children were taken to church every morning from 9 to 9.30, and generally occupied the whole nave. The side- chapel was devoted to the Crib — a large stable-like structure with a thatched roof, and lighted by four stable lanterns, the latter standing just over the Holy Child. All the figures were white and of large size, and the front of the Crib was barricaded with a row of Christmas trees. The high altar was fitted up with a crucifix and something that might be a tabernacle. There was a very elaborate rood, and, near the north- west door, an arrangement consisting of an arm-chair and a kneeling-desk, but with the inevitable surplice hanging ready. Notice of confessions appeared on the walls near." ^ On another occasion, described in detail, mass was celebrated : " The celebrant was vested fully, his alb had patches, and his chasuble was of red and gold. He was attended by four little boys as acolytes in black cassocks and surplices. The celebrant made his confession, kissed the altar, and then censed it. The Gospel was read to the accompaniment of incense
^ Standard, August 2, 1905.
- Church Association Publications, 1904 ; in which the names of the churches and clergymen are given in this and the other cases mentioned.
RITUALISM IN LONDON SCHOOLS 365
and li^-hts. After the elements were prepared, the celebrant kissed the altar and made many passes over the elements. During the singing of the Ter /Sandus he turned to the altar, and resumed his gestures over the wafer and cup in a most exaggerated form. The prayer of consecration was accompanied by extreme elevation and the ringing of the church bells, the celebrant afterwards bowing low over the consecrated elements. After the prayer of consecration his move- ments becan agfain, and his own communion was announced by the ringing of the sacring bell. There was apparently only one communicant." It is added / that " the children are marked late when the register is made up if they have not been to church."
The furniture of another London church, at which the attendance of the school children was compulsory durinsr school hours, is thus described : " Several cruci- fixes ; a high altar equipped with cross, tabernacle, and candles, and, hanging over it, seven red lamps lighted ; a side- chapel with gilded figure of Virgin and Child over the altar ; a second side-chapel with altar, crucifix, and candles, several confessional screens, various banners, pictures, and statuettes." On one side- altar is " deposited the reserved sacrament, as indicated by a red lamp and by the genuflections of the clergy and congregation." On February 2, 1904, the school children were all present during school hours at " a special candle-mass." " They were informed," we are told, " that they ought to present their time to God by coming to early mass, and their money, by giving their halfpence to the collection, instead of spending them on sweets ; and, like the Vii^gm Mary, they could p-esent Christ Himself to God when He came down on the altar at the words of consecration."
At a Westminster church the school children were
366 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
regularly taken to Tliursday mass, unless some lioly day occurred in the week. At a Vauxhall church revival services took place in January 1 904 ; at which a procession was formed in the street consisting of " a crowd of children with a few grown-up persons, accompanied by three clergymen in cassocks, surplices, and birettas. A crucifix, candles in swinging sticks, and lanterns, were carried by choristers, and the group was further completed by a nun or two." Inside the church, " the chancel was in darkness except for the glimmer of seven red lamps. Fixed on the chancel rails was a very large crucifix, and in front of it was an immense table covered with a red cloth to be used as a platform for the missioner," who was dressed " in a black cassock with a white knotted girdle, with surplice, tippet and hood, and black slippers." We can well believe the statement that " his discourse was stupid in the extreme, and punctuated by devotions to the crucifix."
In the same church, in February 1904, there was a large attendance of school children " at a perform- ance of low mass." The preacher " mounted on to a table at sermon time, and gave the children an address which lasted only a few minutes," on the subject of " Good Manners : " " He said that the celebrant wearing vestments, and his and the acolytes' bowing, were good manners to God, or, as it was called, reverence." " Our blessed Lord and our blessed Lady were the only perfect gentleman and lady who ever walked the earth. In fact, we speak of the Virgin Mary as ' Our Lady.' Catholics had a perfect example of good manners in the Virgin Mary, who showed them at a party by her thinking of others." Then the " priest " pointed to the crucifix and said that " Christ had shown good manners on the Cross."
All this vulgar superstition is supposed to be part
LADY WIMBORNE'S VIEWS 367
of a forward movement under Bishop Ingram to outwit the Roman priests at the new cathedral of Westminster. But it is in reality a lure for making Archbishop Bourne's path easy and bringing him converts; for those who enter the Anglican school will not be content until they graduate as full Romans in the red and yellow cathedral off Victoria Street. That such proceedings, at once so stupid and so much opposed to Christianity, should have taken place, not merely in remote rural districts but in London itself, under the nose of an unmarried bishop with ;^ 10,000 a year, within a stone's throw of the Houses of ParHament, and at the cost of the ratepayers and tithepayers of all denominations, is_surely_^ a scandal which calls for the notice of the Government. Writing of such proceedings, in a strain of righteous indignation, a distinguished English Churchwoman thus described the position of the Anglican bishops and priests : " Their sin against the Church in which they find themselves is a sin of disloyalty and de- ception. . . . They hold masses for the dead. . . . They pray to the Virgin and Saints. They teach the doctrine of the Mass, while using a communion office drawn up by men who died at the stake to reject it and banish it for ever." And she added : " The recent Education Act has conferred upon them immense facilities for their work."^ The deeds and words of the sacerdotal party in these cases enable us to understand why so many Christians of the Reformed Churches regard the Roman bishops and priests as immeasurably superior to their Anglo- Catholic imitators. It is not, however, on the un- happy vicars, curates, and missioners who thus mislead the children committed to their care that we should vent our mdignation, but rather on the highest and
^ Lady Wimborne in the Nineteenth Century, October 1904.
368 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
richest dimitaries of the Church, who have trained those " priests " in their theological colleges, and who inspire and encourage them by resolutions — and by- grants from those diocesan funds which are now the mainstay of ritualism.
The patient sturdiness of the British character was never better illustrated than by the behaviour of the Christians of all denominations after the passage of the Education Acts of 1902—3, which they rightly regarded as a new State endowment for the sacer- dotalists. While the Agnostics made no protest, opposed though they must necessarily be to priestly superstition, the Christians refused to pay the educa- tion rate, allowed their goods to be seized and sold, and in thousands of cases went to prison rather than subscribe to the support of priestcraft in the schools. Unfortunately, many of the men who went to gaol, rather than pay the trifling amount demanded as education rate, were paying large sums annually in tithe rent- charge for the support of the ritualists whose teaching they objected to in the schools. A friend of mine had a silver teapot seized for an education rate of five shillings, but paid five pounds without protest soon afterwards to the rector of the parish as tithe rent-charge on his house, lawn, and garden !
Many of the councils formally objected to having the children taken to ritualistic churches. In the diocese of Bishop Sheepshanks, for instance, the Norfolk educa- tion committee passed a resolution : " That holidays must not be given to secure the attendance of children at any place of worship during ordinary school hours, nor must children be taken from school during lesson time to attend special services at any place of wor- ship." In West Yorkshire the council rightly refused to pay the teachers in Church schools for the time devoted to religious instruction.
- '= Ts
!5 Z-=z
DR. DAVIDSON ON RITUALISM 369
These symptoms of popular dislike for priestcraft were a grievous trouble to the hierarchy ; and, we are told, " the question of taking children to church has caused considerable anxiety and difference of opinion throughout the country,"^ The Archbishop of Canter- bury, presiding over the standing committee of the " National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church," gave voice to this latest sacerdotal grievance in a resolution declaring " that it is desirable that managers of Church schools, while safeguarding every conscien- tious objection on the part of parents, should retain as far as is possible whatever opportunities they now possess in the matter of the attendance of children at church." He suggested that " the attendance of children at church should be outside the compulsory school hours, so that the religious instruction given in the church may not be subject to the operation of the Education Acts of 1902-3." This was an endorse- ment by the highest authority in the Anglican Church of all the proceedings at Westminster and Vauxhall, and thousands of other churches throughout the country. It was also an admission that the hierarchy and priesthood desired to give surreptitiously a class of religious instruction which they knew would be disapproved of by parliament, by the local education authorities, and by the British public, being opposed to the terms of the Reformation settlement.
The report of the Church Schools Managers' con- ference at St. Albans took the same line, and depre- cated the " disposition to rest and be thankful, under the mistaken impression that the fight for Church schools had been won." One of the many priests present moved a resolution that " in all cases the managers of Church schools should recognise their
i " Church of England Official Year Book," 1905.
2 A
370 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
right to maintain definite religious teaching under the provisions of the recent Education Act." " When asked to accept board school religion," continued the speaker, " as an equivalent for the thing they desired, he would reply, ' We do not think it will do, because it is a creation of the last thirty-five years, and we prefer that which has nineteen centuries of experience at its back.' "
The ignorance of history disclosed in such a state- ment should confirm the public in their objection to prolong the sacerdotal party's monopoly over educa- tion. Europe's experience of nineteen centuries of priests' education was that it left men more ignorant of scientific truth and devoid of what we call Christian virtue than they were three centuries before Christ. The self-sacrifice of Socrates, the philosophy of Plato, the scientific discoveries of Hippocrates and Aristotle, Archimedes and Euclid, instead of having been im- proved upon during the nineteen centuries which preceded the Reformation, had come to be regarded as divine utterances which it was impious to contradict. From the time of Galen, in the second century after Christ, down to the days of our own Harvey, who lived shortly after the Reformation, no advance was made in medical science ; and Galen, as well as the Greek philosophers, was regarded as infallible ! The board schools, on the contrary, during their thirty-five years' existence, banished illiteracy from England, and that was a marvellous achievement.
Within a fortnight after Archbishop Davidson's resolution, the public received a startling object lesson in the class of " definite religious teaching " given by Church schools from a case which occurred in Bishop Jacob's diocese. The Stratford magistrates, one of whom happened to be Dr. Jacob's assistant, known as the Bishop of Barking, were trying three lads charged with stealing fowls and rabbits ; when the brother of
A CHURCH SCHOOL PUPIL 371
one of tho accused, " a boy of fifteen, was put into the witness-box to give evidence, but on being interrogated by the clerk, he stated that he did not know what an oath was." ^ " He was equally ignorant," we are told, " about the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular, although he admitted having been in the habit of attending a Sunday school, as well as the day school of St. Mary's, Walthamstow. As a result, the justices refused to accept the testimony of the lad." Besides the bishop on the bench, there was also present a "police court missionary appointed under the auspices of the Church authorities in the diocese of St. Albans," and this functionary undertook to explain the extra- ordinary occurrence for the newspapers. It is not stated whether the lad knew " the nature of a sacra- ment," tho value of " elevation curtains and holy water vats and sprinkles," the dogmas of the Creed, or the other fundamental points on which children are grounded in Church schools. Perhaps, if the magis- trates had tested him on those subjects, his answering might have been satisfactory, but the Bishop of Barking does not seem to have sugforested that course of ex- amination, though so much importance is attached to it by the hierarchy. The bishop shifted his respon- sibility for the boy to the vicar of St. Mary's, who, in his turn, transferred his liability to the schoolmaster, who was put forward to allay the public astonishment. The first line of defence was found in the statement that, " owing to the operation of the Education Act, St. Mary's day school, in October last, passed from the control of the Church authorities to that of the Walthamstow education committee." The expression " October last " should be translated as meaning " a few days ago," or, at furthest, " a few weeks since." The second line of defence was that " the religious
* Daily Telegraph, November 25, 1904.
372 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
instruction at the old scliool was exceedingly thorough, while at the new school the syllabus had been pre- pared by the education committee." From this it might be inferred that the boy had accumulated his colossal ignorance under the new syllabus ; but we learn, subsequently, that he had never attended " the new school," having left " the old school " in the preceding June, after a fifteen months' course of its " exceedingly thorough " religious instruction. The schoolmaster, on whom the bishop, the assistant bishop, and the vicar threw all the responsibility, said " he remembered the boy perfectly well, and he re- garded his statement as absolutely incredible." The boy could not have been so ignorant after the " exceed- ingly thorough " religious instruction he had received ! But, almost in the same breath, he apparently deserted that position, and said that the boy had " often played the truant, and generally came to school late — usually after scripture lessons."
The teacher had been a faithful servant of the Church for twenty-eight years; and he is not likely to be held responsible by the thoughtful public. He chivalrously rushed into the breach to save the char- acters of his evasive superiors, who write " apostolical succession," " breviary," and " missal " on the black- boards of the training colleges, while leaving teachers and children alike ignorant of civic duties and moral obligations. Bishop Jacob, in his speech at the Church School conference, gave the theologian's view of what an ideal schoolmaster ought to be, and also the Church's object in establishing teachers' training colleges : " The success of our strenuous conflict for definite religious teaching will depend," he said, " upon the closeness of the union between the school managers and teachers. I am thankful to say that the teachers come mostly from training colleges, where they have
THE CHURCH TRAINING COLLEGES 373
been trained in connection with the Church. . . . It is not possible to exaggerate the vahie of these colleges in reference to religious instruction in England generally. They supply the teachers not only to the Church schools, but to many other schools." And, finally, he made a candid avowal of the Church's only interest in education, declaring that " so long as they could keep the training colleges, they had very largely the key to the situation. What they were anxious for was to get their children taught by religious people " !
Bishop Jacob was right in boasting that the hier- archy and priesthood still hold " the key to the situation," in spite of the School Boards Act, the Compulsory Education Act, and the alleged transfer- ence to the county councils of the control of the schools ; for their domination over the training of teachers in State-subsidised colleges is even more pronounced than their authority over the pupils. Out of 5,967,868 pupils attending public elementary schools in 1904, 2,333,587, or 39 per cent., were under the control of the Church ; whereas, out of 6449 young men and w^omen who were being trained as teachers, 303 5, or nearly 50 per cent., were imbibing the mysteries of " apostolical succession " and culti- vating an admiration for breviaries and missals in Church training colleges. The official comment of the hierarchy and priesthood on their own mastery over the training colleges is audacious in its candour : " It will therefore be observed," they say,^ " that it is a mistake to suppose that there are not abundant facilities for those who desire to be trained as teachers, but who do not desire to enter a residential college held by the Church of England. The grievance so often paraded is really non-existent " !
Such being the difficulties under which elementary
1 " Church of England Official Year Book, 1905 " ; issued by authority.
374 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
education has been carried on in England, the present Government, possessing a clear mandate from the country, produced a conciliatory bill which may prove to be the beginning of a genuine settlement of the question. It proposed that the system of dual con- trol by sectarian managers and non-sectarian county councils should cease, and that every rate-supported school should be under the absolute control of the county or borough council, in so far as it was used for public education. It empowered the county councils to take over the existing sectarian schools on lease at a fair rental for the five school days of each week, and made them responsible for the maintenance and improvement of the fabrics. It gave liberty to the owners of the fabric to resume 'possession on Saturdays and Sundays, and use the buildings on those days, if they so desired, for religious or theological purposes. The bill was a voluntary one, and did not propose to prevent the owners of sectarian schools from still con- ducting them on their own principles, if prepared to do so at their own expense. It made all religious tests for teachers illegal, and justly proposed to relieve schoolmasters, whose salaries are paid by the State, from all obligation to teach religion ; but it adhered to the policy of the school boards by allowing Cowper- Temple or undenominational Bible lessons before the regular school work ; liberty being reserved to pupils to absent themselves from the school premises during such instruction, while getting full credit for attend- ance. In their bargain with the councils for transfer- ring their schools, sectarian owners of the fabrics were given power to demand and councils were permitted to concede liberty for sectarian religious teaching on two out of the five school-days; but such teaching was not to be given by State-paid teachers. As a further concession to the theologians, it was proposed
EDUCATION SCHEME, 1906 375
that whenever the parents of four-fifths of the pupils of a public school should petition for teaching in dog- matic theology in contravention of section 14 of the Act of 1 870, which forbids any " religious catechism or formulary distinctive of any particular denomination," the local council might grant the petition and permit its teachers to give sectarian instruction, but without payment from the public treasury for the time spent in such instruction. An additional grant of £ i ,000,000 a year was to be given to assist the councils in carrying out the provisions of the measure.
The bill did not deal with the question of teachers' training colleges. In 1839 Lord John Russell, con- vinced that the first thing necessary to secure a return for the education grant was to train the teachers, introduced a statesmanlike bill for establishing a national training-college, on the lines of David Stow's Normal Seminary founded at Glasgow in 1826. It was to be open to all denominations, but was to have a resident Anglican chaplain. Non- Anglicans, however, were not to be compelled to accept this chaplain's ministrations, but might make arrangements for separate religious instruction. Bishop Blomfield of London, then the most influential prelate in the Anglican Church, denounced the measure, indignantly askinof what was the use of having^ an Established Church if all denominations were to enjoy equal privileges ? The bill was defeated, and the rational proposal was never afterwards embodied in legislation. The sacerdotal party, having thus prevented the State from undertakincr the training of the teachers, have ever since been building sectarian training-colleges for themselves in London and the provinces, and receiving liberal pecuniary assistance in their project from suc- cessive Governments.
The cost of elementary education in exchequer
376 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
grants and local rates — estimated by Mr. Birrell at ^19,379,633 for 1904-5, and ^^20,891, 135 for 1905-6 — is so enormous that the theologians should not be allowed to undermine the efficiency of the teachers. Seeing that the voluntary contributions for elemen- tary education in 1904 were only ;^876,36i, of which the Church claimed that ;^62 3,4io had been collected by its priests/ it would not be just to permit the collectors of 3 per cent, of the outlay to thwart the intentions of the public who subscribe the 97 per cent. It is therefore to be hoped that the Government will pursue the scheme foreshadowed by Mr. A. H. D. Acland,^ and make building grants " to enable local authorities to organise proper training- colleges free from all religious tests," the State paying 75 per cent, of the interest and sinking fund on loans incurred for the purpose by county or borough councils. The moderate proposals of the bill, as we have seen, were received with vehement opposition, perhaps because the sacerdotalists interpreted their moderation as timidity. Once again we beheld the Anglican and Roman priesthood making common cause, the Romans as usual leading the way. On May 5, 1906, the Roman hierarchy opened the campaign with a demon- stration of London Irish at the Albert Hall, when the Roman bishops of England, the Roman nobihty headed by the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, and the Roman members of Parliament headed by Mr. John Redmond, Mr. Dillon, and Mr. Healy (M.P. by the grace of Cardinal Logue) — no unformidable array of force — marched in religious procession to the platform. The Irish Nation- alists, despite all the sacrifices made by the Liberal party on their behalf, joined with the Conservatives in a common effort to turn the new Liberal Govern-
1 Official Year Book, 1905. ^ Speech at British and Foreign School Society, May 18, 1906.
THE BISHOPS' AGITATION 377
ment out of office on the issue nearest to the heart of the Liberals. The truth is, that Mr. Redmond's effective services in Parhament are not his own to dispose of, and a Government wishing to secure them must first purchase the goodwill of the Roman ecclesiastics.
The Anglican Church, with a craftiness in keeping with its history, had carefully divided its forces so as to be in touch with every source from which it feared opposition. First, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on his own initiative and completely ignoring the laity, called a meeting of bishops at Lambeth Palace on April 10, 1906, the day following the introduction of the bill, just as Cardinal Logue would have done if the measure had applied to Ireland. No fewer than ninety- two " spiritual lords " having responded to his whip, he issued a condemnation of the bill ex cathedra ; while the laity, who are alleged to be so intensely anxious for theology in the elementary schools, took no spon- taneous action. But the country, like Gibbon after the appearance of his History, could " rejoice that if the voice of our priests was clamorous and bitter, their hands were disarmed from the powers of persecution."
An " evangelical " bishop. Dr. Knox of Manchester, had been put in the forefront of the fight, while the sacerdotalist bishops remained comparatively in the background — his willingness to fill the breach proving the truth of Ben Jonson's statement that " preferment changeth any man," and of Calvin's, that all priests " live by the same pot." He fought a preliminary battle for the sacerdotalists with a success which they themselves could not have equalled, obtaining a hearing — in Wimbledon, for instance — in opposition to the bill, from lay Churchmen who would not have listened to a Gore, an Ingram, a King, or a Talbot. Bishop Perceval of Hereford, also an evangelical, Dean Kitchin and Dean Fremantle, came forward as supporters of
378 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the bill, thereby keeping the Church in contact with Liberals, and doing yeomen's service for the preserva- tion of ecclesiastical endowments and rights of taxation. And, lest the sacerdotal party should be out of touch with the dominant Nonconformists, Rev. H. Russell Wakefield, patron of St. Mark's, Mary-le-bone, Canon Hensley Henson of Westminster, in whose parish the Houses of Parliament are situated, Canon Jephson of Southwark, and a number of other priests — all of whom figure in the " Ritualistic Clergy List " pub- lished by the Church Association — signed declarations in favour of the bill sent to them by the Tribune, a journal semi-officiel of the Government. The many- sidedness of this scheme of defence — showing how the Vicar of Bray, so far from being an exception, represents, perhaps, the commonest type of Anglican priest — gives a fair idea of the diflSculties which reformers have to face in their struggle against a hierarchy and priesthood who divide themselves at every crisis, so that, whoever wins, ecclesiastical privileges and emoluments may be preserved.
Many of the supporters of the bill were confused by the uproar ; and, instead of recommending the use of legislative rifles to end the din of the extra-parlia- mentary tom-toms, an able Liberal paper ^ contem- plated the omission of the Roman Catholic schools from the scope of the bill, as the result of Archbishop Bourne's demonstration. This is perhaps due to the many personal friendships formed between Liberals and Nationalists during the Home Rule alliance. Another spoke of the elementary education question as " an appalling problem " ^ — a phrase reminiscent of Cobden's terror, but added, shrewdly, that " if you give a priest an inch he will take an ell." Instead of proudly Emitting the impeachment, the same journal recoiled
^ Morning Leader, May 7, 1906. ^ Star, May 7, 1906.
ECCLESIASTICAL BLUFF 379
from Mr. Balfour's description of the motive of tlie bill as " a deliberate intention to crush the Church of England." ^ Those who know the facts are aware that education cannot be set right without dislodging the bishops and priests of the Church from the undue influence they wield over teachers and schools intended for secular instruction. Mr. Balfour had anticipated, somewhat bombastically, long before the Education Bill, that he should be called upon " to protect the Church, the constitution, religious education," and even " the rights of the working-classes and public health," ^ against a Government returned to power by the elec- torate of England with a majority unsurpassed in modern constitutional history ! It was surely a time to remember that Mr. Balfour, Archbishop Bourne, Arch- bishop Davidson, Bishop Ingram, Bishop Talbot, the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Halifax, and Lord Hugh Cecil, on a direct issue, do not influence the ballot-boxes any more than their noisy clerical colleagues influence them in France. They are past masters in the game of political bluff, but they do not hold a good hand, and rely solely for success on the conscientiousness of those earnest Christians who are endeavouring to do right without injuring their enemies, and who have no per- sonal interests to preserve or advance.
Meantime, we saw the face of a thousand news- papers agitated with the old turbulent outcry about " confiscation," " irreligion," and " secularism." " The Church in danger " was the battle-cry of Mr. A. J. Balfour, resorting to an oft-tried device of his uncle on such occasions. The most preposterous statements were made by the sacerdotalists. Mr. G. Wyndham, for instance, in moving the rejection of the bill at its second reading, on May 7, 1906, said it was "the
1 Speech at Cambridge, May 5, 1906. 2 Speech at Merchant Taylors' Hall, February 12, 1906.
38o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
natural and inalienable right of the parent to see that the child received from the State teaching in the religion which he holds." No such right was ever admitted in this country. The fundamental policy of successive English Governments, from time imme- morial, has been that no parent, except he were an Anglican, had a right to expect from the State either religious or secular teaching. The hierarchy and the Government excluded the children of non-Anglicans from the universities, the public schools, and the " national " elementary schools, when it was in their power to do so, on the express ground that no British parent had a right to say what religious instruction his child was to receive — that being a question ex- clusively within the province of the theologians. The State endowment for rehgious teaching in England and Wales — drawn by the Church in tithe rent-charge, glebe-lands, episcopal and capitular endowments — is about i!^6, 000,000 a year, a sum equal, until recently, to three-fourths of the exchequer grant for elementary education. If each parent had the imaginary right claimed for him by Mr. Wyndham, the Church should be compelled to assign a due share of that endowment for the support of the ministers of the religion in which each parent believes. Mr. Wyndham's pro- position, if admitted, would establish the title of the clergymen of every recognised denomination to a proportion of the national religious endowment now absorbed by the Anglican hierarchy and priesthood — a right which was acknowledged in France as long as religion was endowed, and is still acknowledged in the leading European countries.
Mr. Lloyd George's reply to Mr. Wyndham marks an era. Speaking as a cabinet minister, on behalf of a Government elected by an overwhelming English and Welsh majority, he declared that " the bill was
CLERICALISM THE ENEMY 381
part of the great movement of democracy wliicli had come to the conckision that clericaHsm was the enemy." On May 10, 1906, the second reading was carried by the immense majority of two to one — 4 1 ofor, and 204 (including all the Irish Nationalists) against.
Bishop Ingram's " demonstration," which was held on May 1 1 , met under the shadow of this great defeat. It was modelled on Archbishop Bourne's, as closely as the difficulties of the Anglican situation would permit. The evangelical party had refused to be decoyed even by Bishop Knox into joining the ritualistic agitation ; and consequently, whereas the Catholic meeting spoke for the united Irishmen of London, the Ingfram demonstration, with some clerical exceptions, only represented the Anglican sacerdotalists, and attracted a much smaller attendance. The Duke of Somerset was secured as an inadequate set-off to the Duke of Norfolk. As Dr. Bourne was supported by a Scotch Catholic bishop, Dr. Ingram had a Scotch Angli- can bishop on his platform, the childish object of both being to insinuate that Scotland was against the bill. As Dr. Bourne was assisted by the Catholic bishop of Southwark, so the ritualistic commander-in-chief of North London was joined by Dr. Talbot, the ritualistic Anglican bishop of Southwark. A study of the list of laymen present proves the truth of a statement made on the preceding night by Mr. H. W. Paul, member for Northampton, who declared that " he had been a member of the Church of England ever since he was born," " absolutely denied that the Church of England was opposed to this bill," and said that the opposition " came from a small knot of High Church clergy- men and of ecclesiastical laymen who would Romanise the Church." ^ All the unordained ritualists, headed by Lord Halifax, Mr. Athelstan Riley, Mr. George
^ Tribune, May 9, 1906.
382 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Wyndham, and Lord Robert Cecil, were there ; but the Christians were conspicuous by their absence. Con- trary to the teaching in the AngUcan training colleges, the meeting said the Lord's Prayer before the Apostles' Creed ; and Bishop Ingram, in fine Puseyite style, opened the proceedings by stating that his demon- stration represented the " united Church of England " ! Bishop Talbot flippantly said " the Church had ever been the great teacher, and when people talked to him about simple Bible teaching, he felt inclined to tell them, in the language of the old adage, that their grandmother was quite able to look after her own eggs." The reader will admit that Anglican benefice- holders do not require to be taught how to suck eggs ; they have been sucking other people's eggs from time immemorial ; but Bishop Talbot's metaphor was more suggestive than elegant. The cuckoo, it is said, sucks the eggs of hedge-sparrows, robins, wagtails, and other birds smaller than itself, and deposits its own large egg in place of those it has destroyed. It is more than a match for any one of the small birds ; but, in combination, a number of them often prove too strong and chase it from their vicinity. But if the cuckoo effects an entry into the nest, surreptitiously or forcibly, it can dupe the small birds first into hatching, and afterwards into exhausting their best energies in rear- ing, a foreign interloper which kills the legitimate off- spring of the foster-parents. Now the small birds may be said to stand in the same relationship to the cuckoo as the , Christian denominations, within as well as outside the Church, bear to the sacerdotal party. The com- bined Christians, who are stronger than the sacer- dotalists, nevertheless maintain the sacerdotal party ; and get as bad a return for doing so as the robins and sparrows get from the cuckoo. And, as it would be hard to convince the sparrows or robins that the
WISE MEN FOLLOW FOOLS 383
cuckoo is their grandmother ; so, we think, it would be impossible to find any representative section of British Christians prepared to admit the claim of Bishop Talbot and his friends to be deemed the grandmothers of the nation. At a meeting in the City a few days afterwards, Bishop Lang, adopting the expression of an East End cockney, said it was " rot " to say that the opposition to the bill was " engineered by the bishops and priests." Such are the leaders that " wise men " follow and that fools have placed on pedestals to be worshipped as gods ! If the sacerdotal party, including the " ecclesiastical laymen," had not led the agitation, the bill would have been passed without opposition. A " laymen's meeting," held at the Albert Hall in Whit week, was admittedly organised by Lord Halifax, Mr. Athelstan Riley, and the English Church Union, supported by a holiday excursion from Man- chester arranged by Bishops Knox and Casartelli.
Bishop Ingram said " the Church of England was entirely neutral at the last general election, but now they would fight." The public seems to be ready for him ; and Christians are no more prepared to admit the Church's neutrality than his other statement that he spoke for a " united Church of England " in opposi- tion to the Education Bill, The clerico-political cam- paign in London is worthy of a little attention, a projjos of Bishop Ingram's statement.
On November 30, 1905, Bishop Ingram held a " litany of intercession " at St. Paul's, accompanied by rites which were quite at variance with the spirit of the Reformation settlement. The litany was offered for an incongruous combination of objects, namely, for Anglican missionaries abroad, for " afflicted Russia," for " the persecuted Christians of Macedonia," and lastly, for " the unemployed of England." ^ " How sad it is
^ Daily Express, December i, 1905.
384 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
to tliink of workmen who want to work but cannot find it," said Bishop Ingram oracularly; "and how easy it would be to adopt a solution which might land us in worse difficulties still." " Then there is Russia," he went on ; " we are watching a great nation in the throes of a terrible convulsion. What are we to do ? Then there is Macedonia. . . . We are met here not to preach or to hear a sermon, but to pray." ^ Ritual is easy ; and it is easier to pray with " vain repetitions, as the heathens do," than to preach to the point.
We are told " the choir, clergy (with the exception of the venerable dean, who remained in his stall), and the bishop, then moved eastward and stood round the high altar. The bishop stood before the altar, and behind him were the canons ; then the prebendaries, and then the cross-bearer, and the four minor canons who sang the litany. The opening sentences having been sung, the procession left the sacrarium by the golden gates on the south side, and turning eastward reached the great west door, and advanced up the nave to their places in the choir ; " ^ " the procession, slowly moving through the vast building," presenting a "striking spectacle." " The customary high celebration of the Holy Communion " followed. Archdeacon Sinclair, " as is his custom when in residence, celebrated, singing the office with the appointed inflections." The sacer- dotahsts believe in the "real objective presence" of Christ's body in the bread and wine ; and therefore the reception of the sacrament by the officiating priest and others, as part of a ritual, converts the communion service into a sacrifice, or carnival of priestcraft, at which Christ's alleged body is butchered, as it were, to make a Roman holiday.
This was Bishop Ingram's official contribution to a
1 Guardian, December 6, 1905. '^ Ibid.
CHURCH CENSUS FICTIONS 385
settlement of the " unemployed " question in the diocese of London, in which he insinuates that every man, woman, and child of every nationality is a sub- ject of his. He manipulates the figures of London's births, deaths, marriages, and population without an acknowledgment that there is any spiritual provision made for the metropolis beyond what he supplies. The census fictions of the sacerdotalists reach their highest point of absurdity, perhaps, in his boasts about the size of London. At a meeting held recently in Lord Cadogan's house, he had asked a puzzled auditory " what St. Barnabas would liave done if he had a diocese in which the population was increasing by 40,000 a year " — the innuendo being that the entire annual addition to the population of Middlesex re- quired and desired Bishop Ingram's ritual. If Barnabas had taken a territorial title and called himself Bishop of Asia, the population of his diocese would have been greater than Bishop Ingram's, and the rate of increase no less. But never were two men more unlike, than Barnabas the Levite — the son of consolation who, " having land, sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the apostles' feet" — and the bishop sent forth to Oxford House, London, by the " prophets and teachers " of Keble College.
Soon after his litany and ritual an opportunity was presented to Bishop Ingram not only for proving that his influence over the population meant something more than an ability to dress up census figures, but also for convincing West End folk, who subscribe to East End ritualism, that priestcraft " hath charms to soothe the savage breast." The "unemployed" gave notice that they intended to attend afternoon service at St. Paul's on Sunday, 17th December. If the real originator of this unique proposal could be discovered, it would go far to explain a bewildering business in which,
2 B
386 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
as Bacon says, "arguments were fitted to practice in reversed order." The visit was apparently to be a grate- ful acknowledgment of the fourth share in the proceeds of the litany ; and it promised to give the sacerdota- lists a chance of displaying the magic influence of altar lights, incense, vestments, crucifixes, holy water, and processions upon the discontented denizens of the East End, who, to use their own expressive verb, have been " fed up " on ritual.
All the evidence goes to show that these timid, scolding crowds of " unemployed," with their begging- boxes and amateur theatricals, whether on the march from Leicester to London, or from the East End to Downing Street and Belgravia, were pre-eminently, though not exclusively, " Church " mobs. They repre- sented the most helpless section of England's poor, a leavening of " rice Christians " and a mass of people who have scarcely ever been in a church, except to be baptized ; and thousands of whom are unbaptized ; but who describe themselves, if questioned as to their re- ligion, first, as "Nothing at all" and, on second thoughts, I as " Church folk," They are too stupid for Dissent, ! having never had the energy to think about religion or i futurity. They are the sort of people who sell or swop their wives and children ; illiterate, or educated at sec- tarian schools on religious theatricals. There is no evi- dence that the Free Church ministers of any persuasion, even the Roman Catholics, or their congregations, had any part in those disgraceful scenes. It was an Anglican priest who blessed their unmanly orgies on the march from Leicester to London. He was " their Father Gapon," one of the newspapers said. It was " the Church " which suggested tea and cake and resting-places for them on the way from Whitechapel to Whitehall on November 6th, when the women with their babies surrounded the bachelor premier in Downing Street,
A MENDICANT REGIMENT 387
and unquestionably contributed to bring about his resignation within a month — at a time when his majority in the House of Commons was almost double that with which Mr. Disraeli held power from 1874 to 1880. The time was one of " raving politics, never at rest — as this poor earth's pale history runs." The descriptions of the march of the " men " of Leicester to London to see the King were humiliating. A publican on the roadside "felt the magic touch of sympathy," sat down on his doorstep, " whipped off his boots," handed them to the " general " of the unem- ployed, and " departed silently into his bar parlour " ! " In the sweep of the roadway the army were slowed down, and informed that just on ahead were King Edward, the Prince of Wales, and his aide-de-camp in real life. The King was just our Father Gapon (Mr. Donaldson), and the two great people were London correspondents, but they were saluted magnificently. The Guards couldn't have done it better. . . . Last night the Luton Town Council discussed for some time whether they should let the men have straw, or whether they should refuse it. Three prominent members were against the vote for straw, and one was a magistrate." ^ The " men " got free food and lodging in Plait Hall, and begged from the factory girls in the streets — " the fair things gave us generously of their pennies." One's symjDathies are all with the three councillors who voted against the straw.
When the mendicants reached London they " re- ceived an invitation " from Rev. W. Carlile, rector of St. Mary-at-Hill, and of the Church Army, " to sleep at the temporary iron buildings at the corner of Kings- way on Saturday and Sunday." The Church Army's emissaries, in white surplices, may be seen under the Reformer's Tree in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons
1 Dally Chronicle.
388 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
competing for public notice with the other peculiar people who foregather there. O Christianity, to what a depth, from what a height, hast thou fallen ! The Rev. W. Carlile's name figured almost as largely in the newspapers at this time as that of his generalissimo, Bishop Ingram. He was returning from or going abroad; exhibiting to newspaper correspondents a carefully-preserved sovereign received from a man who had been helped by the Church Army ; ^ invent- ing lozenge cures for alcoholism; publishing letters from crowned heads ; but always appealing for money — more money for the Church Army. " Hungry and Homeless," was the heading of one of the Army's advertisements,^ " Thousands are imploring the Church Army for help in this wintry weather, h.m. the queen's free labour depots are saving from crime and suicide respectable unemployed with starving wives and families. . . . h.m. the king's labour tents : open ALL night and DAY, give food and bed in return for piecework at trade rates." Not a few of the unem- ployed must have thought the Church Army a depart- ment of State, and felt that suicide was commonly resorted to by " respectable " Churchmen in difficulties. The Army's business was so flourishing, amidst the prevailing unemployment, that it had been advertising for hands: "Young men wanted (19 to 30); earnest Churchmen ; to be trained in the Church Army Training Homes and Mission vans ; salary guaranteed ; free board and lodging during the whole period of training."^ Meanwhile the newspapers were describing what they called the " work-haters' invasion " of the metro- polis. " Every highway leading into London is crowded
1 " See," said Mr. Carlile, " thi.s is a sovereign given to me by a man who has spent thirty years in gaol. This coin is a comfort to me ; I have replaced the amount by a cheque," &c. — Standnrd, August 8, 1905.
2 Times, December 9, 1905.
3 Daily Mail, October 21, 1905.
J = -
THE CHURCH AKMY 389
densely Avitli hosts of loafers who arc eager to join in the festival of charity."^ The Church Army " could, if they had the means and the time, distribute their soup and lodging tickets three times over." The regular union poorhouses, however, felt no pressure ; one of the officials explaining that " the stone yards had something to do " with that phenomenon. A meeting of London unemployed at Tower Hill on 4th December passed a resolution " condemning the Salvation and Church Army methods."^ On 25th November, at a similar meeting in Battersea, presided over by the Mayor, a resolution was passed, amid cheers, condemning " all forms of charity for dealing with the unemployed, and particularly the Church Army." ^ " Of all the cunningly- devised designs to rob the working-classes of their spirit and independence," said a Mr. Lloyd, " organised charity was the most cruel."
On 20th November eight thousand "unemployed" marched to the West End, some of them bearing banners with the inscription " curse their charity " ; while they solicited alms by presenting collection-boxes to the public. The King, on his way to the railway station, encountered the procession, and the royal brougham was stopped until the cortege had passed, giving his Majesty an opportunity of seeing the bur- lesque revolution as comfortably as if it had been a play by that quizzical Socialist, Mr. G. B. Shaw — while the processionists remained in ostensible ignorance of his presence ! A demonstration was held in Hyde Park, at which direct incitements to crime were uttered, unchecked by the police, and apparently without any intention to translate them into action. " They tell us that we take their charity though we curse it," cried one speaker. " Certainly, take all you
1 Daily Express, December 9, 1905.
" Reynolds Newspaper, December 10, 1905.
^ Ibid., NoTember 26, 1905.
390 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
can get, and demand more." Another said that " if the crowd had his feelings towards the people of Mayfair, they would not let them remain in their houses forty-eight hours" ! "Shall we starve, or shall we sack a city ? " he shouted. But not a word was said against the endowments and privileges of the Church. The genuine workers were submerged by the impostors. Bogus socialists and republicans, supported by Tory funds; hangers-on of clerical charity organisations; touts, adventurers, gaol-birds, paupers, religious sneaks, black- mailers, criminals ; all joined the hurly-burly. A police sergeant in Oxford Street, asked for his opinion on a procession which had just passed by, said to me : " I don't believe there is one genuine case amongst them." Even regular workers were dazed by the commotion ; a Wimbledon contractor told me one day that " three of his men had just left work and joined the unem- ployed." The large mendicant processions through the city were imitated in many of the suburbs. On Saturday afternoons numerous bodies of men, well-fed and well-clad, might be seen marching, like droves of cattle, under enormous banners with legends demand- ing " justice for the unemployed ; " scouts with collec- tion-boxes hanging about the van, flanks, and rear of the herd, while uniformed police-constables, like black collies, kept the demonstrators moving briskly. The general opinion was that many of the processionists were employed men, who went out after work and got a share of the collection ; but it is probable that there was also an intention to intercept the money of the charitably- disposed and save it from the middle-men, and that many employed workmen joined the processions, with- out payment, to help their unemployed brethren.
In Tottenham and Wood Green it was suddenly pro- claimed, late in December 1905, by one of the eleven vicars of the ancient parish, that there were thou-
THE NEW GOVERNMENT 391
sands of people starving. Lord Rothschild sent ;6^200, which was spent on free dinners in the houses of the poor. Revolting accounts were given of meat and vegetables eaten raw by famished householders, who would not wait to have them cooked ; and one of the eleven vicars and his curate dominated the ghastly scenes described in the newspapers. " All day yester- day," we were told, " the vicarage of St. John's Church and the house of the curate were besieged by eager crowds." ^ Up to a few days before the discovery, the district had been apparently enjoying its usual felicity. In the Wood Green police court, a woman had sum- moned her husband for persistent cruelty, and swore that " he had sold their baby to a man for two shillings . . . and on another occasion set the house on fire, and she had to jump out of a window with her clothing ablaze " ! ^ The senior vicar, whose living is a profit- able one, had so little to trouble him that he engaged counsel, at the beginning of December, to apply for a summons against a parishioner for having " sung in a high falsetto voice, and continued after the rest of the congregation had ceased " ! ^
On 1 1 th December, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's cabinet took office ; and Mr. John Burns became Presi- dent of the Local Government Board. On the i 3th, a deputation of " unemployed " called at the new premier's house, where they were received by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Burns. There was a procession through the streets and a demonstra- tion in Hyde Park. One of the speakers sarcastically quoted Mr. Burns' youthful speeches, in which he had suggested that " Ministers might be sent to heaven by chemical parcels post," and that the police should be so maltreated that " next morning they should have to
1 Daily Express, December 29, 1905.
^ Ibid., Novemi)er 17, 1905.
' Reynolds' Neivspaper, December 3, 1905.
392 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
use a shoe-horn to get their helmets on " ! The orator had nothing but flattery for the police, who did not interfere with him. " As to charity," he said, " curse your charity, damn your charity ; but if we cannot get what we want, we shall get as much as we can by charity ! " -^ Another speaker said that " instead of demanding the right to work, the unemployed might well have demanded the right to leisure — a right too long monopolised by one class." A third called on his hearers to vote for Tory candidates at the approaching general election. They were denouncing the leisured class, and at the same time canvassing for the party which represented it ! They were demanding political power for the labourers, and in the same breath denoun- cing the new Government in which, for the first time in English history, a labourer held cabinet office ! It was like a revival of the bedlam of pre-Reformation times. Almost the first visitors to Mr. Burns were Bishop Lang of Stepney, one of Bishop Ingram's assistants, and Rev. H. Russell Wakefield, one of his incumbents, an alumnus of Cuddesdon College, and Mr. J. Keir Hardie, M.P., who accompanied the bishop and priest — the three representing the " London Central Workers' Committee." Mr. Hardie is connected with the Inde- pendent Labour Party — a socialist body, founded in opposition to the Trade Unions, which has usually worked with the Conservatives, and now approved of Mr. Chamberlain's scheme of protective tariffs ! The tactics of the Independent Labour Party would not be unworthy of Canon Pusey himself. In one of its mani- festoes the members are said to have been urged to " get into the trade unions ; " and to make " special endea- vours to get on the Lil)eral Associations — not of course with the foolish idea of trying to stiffen the Liberals up, but in order that the I.L.P. may have a firm body
^ Times.
TRADE FLOURISHING 393
of friends in the enemy's camp. . . . Socialists could prevent a Liberal candidate from being brought out to oppose a labour man when fighting a Tory seat ; or, failing that, they could vote for the most reactionary can- didate, and then, by resigning in a body a few days before the election and publishing a manifesto, could surely annihilate his chances. ... Of course this requires a considerable sacrifice of principle, but the Socialist who is troubled with scruples of conscience is not worth his salt and is better out of the way." ^ This was the party with which the sacerdotalists now seemed to be in alli- ance. Never, perhaps, had more unblushing political dishonesty been avowed in print ; yet it only provided a true parallel for the position of Anglican bishops and priests who join the Church of Rome, or practise its rites, while holding preferments in the Church of England.
During all this " charitable " riot, trade flourished marvellously, if an increase of exports be a true test. In October 1905 our exports exceeded those for the same month in 1904 by ;^4,498,3o6; and for the ten months ended 31st October 1905, had exceeded the total for the same period in 1904 by ^30,974,526.^ The mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire were all busy : there were no complaints from the black country, or the potteries ; the shipbuilding yards had more work than they could do ; Wales was revelling in prosperity ; and even in Catholic Ireland the usual winter cry of distress was conspicuous by its absence. Under such circumstances Mr. John Burns, the new President of the Local Government Board, gave warning that " the pushful philanthropist, the economic amateur, the indus- trial quack, the purveyor of social nostrums and charit- able schemes would have a stern critic in him." ^ He
1 See the genesis of the Independent Labour Party in licynolds' Ncu'spaper, Docemher 31, igo^.
- Board of Tiade Returns, October 1905. ^ Speech at Battersea, December 27, 1905
394 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
also said that " the unemployed were being exploited by advertising and rival religious leaders, while real and permanent remedies were being pushed aside by social freaks, economic charlatans, and settlement quacks, each with his patent pill." ^ One of the leading labour news- papers expressed its approval of Mr. Burns' " denuncia- tion of the egotistical self-advertising adventurers, with no mandate from anybody, who are seeking to exploit the unemployed question, well knowing that the average of unemployment is no higher this year than for many years past." ^ What was the power behind the " egotistical self-seeking adventurers " ? In the words of Tennyson, the sincere, thoughtful citizen could discern nothing but
" Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence mourned by the Wise, Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies."
Now the serious question remains to be considered : Who gained by these demonstrations of the unem- ployed ? Mr. Chamberlain had been painting lurid pictures of the destitution of the working- classes since October 1903; had been describing English manu- factures as crippled by Free Trade, and had been advocating a tariff on imports to prevent the " dumping down " of foreign sfoods and the underselling of native manufactures. The prosperity of trade and the abund- ance of employment told heavily against the tariff reformers. Large crowds went to hear Mr. Chamberlain, it is true, but at all the by-elections since he began his campaign, the voters had decided against him by overwhelming majorities. There was no special distress or unemployment to prove his case, but these demon- strations of the "unemployed" manifestly went to prove the truth of the assertions of the tariff" reformers.
Now the only concrete proposal of Mr, Chamberlain,
^ Municipal Journal. ^ Reynolds' Newspaper.
THE CHURCH'S STAKE 395
so far, had been to put a protective duty on foreign corn. All the declamation about the decay of the glass, tin, leather, wool, iron, and many other trades materialised, as the Americans say, in this one proposi- tion. Now a duty on imported corn should at once raise the price of native corn. It was said that the new duty would be so trilling that the consumer of bread would not feci it ; but if it were to produce no adverse result for the consumer, foreign corn should come in as plentifully as before ; and to impose a duty would be nonsensical, unless it helped to keep out foreign and thereby raise the price of native corn. The value of tithe rent-charge depends, as we know, on the price of corn. In 1878 a tithe rent-charge of ;^ioo was worth ^^"112, 7s. 5|d., but in 1905 it had fallen to £6(^, I2s. oJd.^ The reason was that, in the seven years preceding 1878, the average price of corn had been — wheat 46S.-58S., barley 35S.-44S., and oats 23S.-28S. per quarter ; whereas in the seven years pre- ceding 1905, the average price was — wheat 25S.-34S., barley, 22S.-27S., and oats i6s.-20s., representing a fall of 24s. in wheat, 15s. in barley, and 7s. 6d. in oats. The clergy of the Established Church, therefore, would be the first class to benefit by the policy of the tariff reformers, so far as it has taken practical shape. If corn could be got back to its price in 1878, the total of commuted tithe drawn by them would rise from about ;^3, 500,000 to ;^5, 700,000 per annum. It was a stake worth playing for, the produce of iJ^ 100,000,000 at 2^ per cent.
Mr. Chamberlain, therefore, was fighting the battle of the Church, and the hierarchy and priesthood were at his back. They would reap the first fruits of his policy; they had all to gain by those mysterious
^ In 1906 the tithe rent-charge fell to ;{^6S, I2s. ojd. Willich's " Tithe Commutation Tables."
396 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
demonstrations of the " unemp]oyed " which perplexed the real friends of labour.
Accordingly, amidst a scene of fictitious turmoil, a Conservative premier was hustled out of office, and an appeal was made to the constituencies to elect a Pro- tection parliament to extirpate an " unemployment " which did not exist ; to revive the national trade which was never so prosperous, and to produce an additional revenue of over two millions sterling a year from English land for the Anglican Church. All the High Church politicians had their lingers in the pie, just as their predecessors had at the time of the Corn Law agitation. They exaggerated the prevalence of distress and unemployment, and even made collections in their churches, animated by an earnest desire to raise the price of corn. In 1842 Cobden, who was a Church- man, asked Bright, who was a Nonconformist, to " write an article upon the subject of the Queen's letter to the parsons, ordering collections in the churches for the distress," and went on to say : " The Church clergy are almost to a man guilty of causing the present distress by upholding the Corn Law, they having themselves an interest in the high price of bread, and their present efforts must be viewed as tardy and inefficient, if not hypocritical." ^
We are now able to form some idea of the com- ponents of the crowd of " unemployed " who were demonstrating in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, 17th December, singing revolutionary hymns, and carrying flags of gory hue. Summonses had been issued to them to muster " for a march to St. Paul's Cathedral," and nothing could have been more in keeping with the antecedents of the agitation. The demonstrators were eagerly expected by the priests, and thousands of chairs, with special prayer leaflets, were specially
1 Letter to John Bright, May 12, 1842 ; Morley's " Life of Cobden."
HE WHO FIGHTS AND RUNS AWAY 397
set apart for their " better accommodation and com- fort." ^ " Half the space under the dome and the whole of the nave had been reserved " for them.^ Canon Newbolt had " adapted " a well-prepared sermon " in order to meet the needs of a large contingent of the unemployed, who signified their wish to attend the service on this Sunday." ^
When the procession started, it was seen that the response to the muezzins had been " not very impres- sive," to quote a trustworthy eye-witness.* Many of the onlookers and even participants do not seem to have known their objective ; and, when they discovered it, numbers began to drop away, so that only an attenuated contingent eventually reached Ludgate Hill, There had been much wavering on the route; but the obliging priests postponed the service, and, for over a quarter of an hour, waited like so many fond fathers, or " grandmothers," as Bishop Talbot would say. The spectacle inside the cathedral was remarkable. Was Bishop Ingram there holding his tremendous crosier, as he has been presented to the public in a hundred pictorial papers, and supported by Bishop Lang, Bishop Turner, Bishop Ridge way. Bishop Barry, Archdeacon Sinclair, and his other highly-salaried coadjutors, drawing between them nearly ;^2 5,000 a year ? No: he Avas absent. Wore the appliances for some high ritual in readiness ? No : the empty chairs and leaflets were the only materiel, except the statues in the reredos, to be seen in the desolate cathedral. The aged Dean Gregory, about to celebrate his eighty-seventh birthday, was put in the forefront of battle. The ritualists appear to have had intelligence that the occasion had melted away, so to speak, and that the anticipated act of homage was destined to end in fiasco ; and they
^ Dailij Express, December iS, 1905. " Times.
' Guardian, December 20, 1905. * 'fimes.
398 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
received the charge, not with the ghttering vestments of episcopal dignitaries in the prime of Ht'e, or Hke men confident in their cause, but with the grey hairs of the old men.
The aged dean seemed a living appeal to the pity of East Londoners who have been, and are being, more wronged by priestcraft than, perhaps, any other section of the population of England, The emptiness of the cathedral, with its litter of leaflets, recalled Spurgeon's sarcasm on the hypocrite's interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount : " I was an hungered, and ye gave me — what ? good advice ; yes, but no meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me — what ? a tract and no drink, I was naked, and ye gave me — what ? your good wishes but no clothes." " The glory of young men is their strength ; " but this was not strength, neither was it glory, " The beauty of old men is the grey head ; " and we shall not deny his beauty to Dean Gregory,
As the visitors did not arrive, service was at length begun ; the organist made thunderous sounds, and the " white-robed choir " began to chant. But the even- song had not proceeded far, when " the vanguard " of the unemployed, " raucously shouting a revolutionary song, burst in upon the quiet of the great church." " No one who witnessed it," says an eye-witness, " will ever forget the shame and pity of the scene." ^ " The various detachments marched up the steps to the door singing their favourite refrain — a satiric parody of The Union Jack of Old England, in which the starving poor is sub- stituted for the Union Jach , . . The sound of it came through the doors and mingled incongruously with the opening prayers," ^ The wrong detachments seem to have got in front, or perhaps the vanguard were mis- informed as to the intentions of the organisers, who evidently were not in touch with their men. An eye-
1 Daily Express. - Times.
THE "UNEMPLOYED" AT ST. PAUL'S 399
witness says : " Some took off their hats, but some kept them on. All the front ranks were singing to the tune of the Marseillaise, in strident voices, a song called The Red Flag." The anticipated act of homage became an insult. " A grey-haired inspector of police rushed forward," we are told, and appealed to the leader, who " at once held up his hands and shouted " — a second curious instance of the efficacy of grey hairs on this remarkable day ; " but it was some minutes before the singing ceased." ^
The mob soon got out of hand : "a large number apparently finding the unaccustomed restraint of their surroundings irksome, withdrew from the service, which they had insisted on attending, before it was half over, so that the anthem was sung amid a continual shuffle of feet along the nave." ^ The leaders called for silence. " The men retorted loudly that they did not want the singing, and that they ivere fed up vnth sermons. They were no good to them." The exodus continued, and hundreds departed, as if from a trap into which they had been decoyed. There was " booing and confusion " at the door ; " cheers for the social revolution went up, and came ringing up the nave." The grey-haired in- spector, who seemed to think that the " unemployed " had a high reputation to live up to, said " in a friendly way that brawling in a church was not the thing."
The number of demonstrators who remained in the cathedral were estimated at 700.^ These apparently comprised the actors who knew their parts ; but even they made mistakes, for they remained seated when they should have stood, and stood up when they should have sat down. The barriers, which had been erected to exclude the crowd from the priests' ornate quarter of the cathedral — the pulpit, choir, high altar, and sac- rarium, or holy of holies, with its golden gate, on which
1 Daily Express. * Times. 3 ibid.
400 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Sir William Richmond has expended so much labour — were now withdrawn ; and the remnant of the visitors who had been " standing about like sheep " trooped up to the chancel steps. " They looked curiously and quizzically at the white-haired Canon Newbolt," when he appeared in the pulpit — a third instance of the preference for grey hairs in this extraordinary melo- drama— but they showed scant respect for the place or the proceedings. Despite the adjurations of their managers, they frequently interrupted, not knowing apparently that silence during sermon is the rule in churches. If they were a body of earnest Christians, let us say the late Mr. John Kensit and his friends, who had come, animated by the purest motives, to protest in the most respectful manner, in the name of Christianity and English law, against the pagan rites practised in St. Paul's, no " grey-haired inspector " would have been specially selected to remonstrate with them " in a friendly way ; " but they would have been con- temptuously hustled out by the most able-bodied constables in the force.
" The kinofdom of heaven is at hand," said Canon Newbolt, whereat, an eye-witness says, " the faces of the men fell. But," he adds, " the expression of the faces changed when the white-haired preacher boldly spoke of a new kingdom having come in the shape of a new Government " ! ^ The report in the best of the High Church journals ^ shows that the discourse began with an allusion to the social condition of the Roman empire in Christ's time, when John the Baptist was preaching the coming of the kingdom of heaven. The presence of gladiatorial shows and the degradation of women were expatiated upon. " There were public evils and private wrongs to be adjusted and righted," said the preacher, " and now here is a new Government pro-
1 Daily Express. ^ Guardian.
CHARTREUSE FOR THE UNEMPLOYED 401
claimed : The kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " This was a doichle ente7idre which might have referred to ancient Rome or contemporary England, to Christ's Kingdom or Sir Henry Campbcll-Bannerman's Govern- ment. The audience construed it in the latter sense, and the priest had the advantage of their interpretation, which Avas signified by shouts of " Hear, hear," cheering, and hand-clapping. " Here in this England of ours," he went on, " here in London, Jesus Christ claims an absolute sovereignty over it all." If he substituted " Bishop Ingram " for " Jesus Christ " the sentence would embody a truth ; for our Saviour has no hand, act or part, in the ritualism of London's cathedral and churches. The canon spoke of a visit he paid to the Grande Chartreuse " in the days when it was still occupied by its devoted band of religious men ; " and described " the solemnity of the night offices and the suggestiveness of those solemn intercessions " — but he said nothing about the green and yellow intoxicants, the production of which in wholesale quantities he con- sidered to be no blemish on the priestly character.^ " I heard the murmur of the solemn petition," ho ex- claimed, " which had gone up to the throne of grace night after night for many centuries " ! Neither did he tell how our friends in France had grown weary of carrying the burden of those sanctimonious brandy- distillers and tens of thousands of other priests and nuns ; had just severed that connection between Church and State which had kept their country in trouble for centuries ; had taken education out of the hands of the sacerdotal caste who had abused that solemn trust ; and had even erased the words ' altar," '' church," " angel," and the word " God " itself from the school grammars,^
1 Canon Newbolt is the author of a brochure called ' ' Priestly Blem- ishes."
^ M. Tavernier in the Univcrs, October 1905.
2 C
402 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
so loathsome to them had been the priests' conception of the Deity and the future life.
" Destitution and hunger and want ought to be, and must be, attended to at once by wise remedies," said Canon Newbolt, at which there were loud cheers, " Bad as they may be, things are improving," he continued, " and I fearlessly deny that the heart of the nation, or the vast majority of our countrymen are insensible to the needs of those who are now suffering. . . . Quite recently an outbreak of cholera in Plymouth was attended with scenes of misery and horror " — it was in 1 849 — which " could never be paralleled in these days of sanitary and hygienic conditions " ! Many of those who heard this alDSurdly inconsequential anti-climax must have remem- bered that hygienic and scientific discoveries were made not only without the aid of the theologians, but in the face of their organised opposition. The Church, he said, was still working hard in the old way, the dean and chapter of St. Paul's especially, pulling the labour- ing oar like galley-slaves : " Here in this cathedral, only two weeks ago, with our bishop at our head, we supplicated God, in a solemn act of prayer, and we have been praying again to-day ! "
During the sermon, " the sound of singing and cheer- ing came intermittently through the western doors," ^ we are told, from the general body of the demonstrators, who had indignantly left the cathedral, and were stand- ing on and around the steps. " Collected in a dense mass just below the portico, with their red banners unfurled, they joined in singing their favourite refrain and in cheering and booing."^ It was now growing dark, and an immense force of policemen gathered at the western door ; and when those who had remained for the sermon issued forth, the constables formed up four-deep and ejected the entire body from the steps
1 Times. ^ Ibid.
^,..|H« TiilJiiMSBSfK!
imiiiuiiiiiimiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiMliimiiiMiiiBBUi™^^ iiiwjiiiiiinniiiiiuiiipn'iiiiiiiii'i'nl'i''*™''''''''"™'*'!
ijmaiii|iiiiiiiilflimilllllllllllllllflllllllliliMllllllll'^^ I
The Idolatkous Keueuos in St. Paul's Cathedkal
This altar was put up at immense cost while Newman's friend, R. W. Church, was dean of St.
Paul's, in defiance of the protests of the Anglican Christians, and was the subject of a lawsuit
in Queen's Bencli. (p. 209.) ^ ,
vf ^^ ' q'o face J). 403
COMMUNION AND SANDWICHES 403
and precincts ; and " the whole crowd was quickly moved on amid cheering and booing." ^ If it had not been for the police, inside as well as outside the cathe- dral, the decorations of the reredos would probably have sufiercd severely.
This was how the Church prepared the public mind in October, November, and December 1905, for the general election Avhich took place in January 1906. We do not think it has much reason to be pleased either with the outcome of the melodrama in London, or with the vote cast by the British electorate. The mys- terious " unemployed " demonstrations were curiously revived in the week following the second reading of the Education Bill — three days after Bishop Ingram's threat that he meant to fight. On May 14, 1906, a proces- sion, accompanied by a number of Bishop Ingram's and Bishop Jacob's priests, and provided with sandwiches in brown paper parcels, marched to Hyde Park. One detachment bore a banner with the following suspicious legend : " The Church in West Ham : In the name OF Christ, we demand that all Men should have THE RIGHT TO WORK ! " — a Sweeping demand which, if granted, would entail some unprecedented consequences for bishops and cathedral dignitaries.
A St. Albans priest, calling himself " Father William," in monastic costume and wearing sandals, boasted that, of his contingent of 200, there were 180 "present in St. Philip's church, Plaistow, for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist " that morning, to " ask for the blessing of God upon the demonstration." We are informed that the communicants had " obtained a packet of food from their clergy friends, and were subsequently con- veyed by train to Fenchurch Street." - The London Central Workers' Committee, and other bodies, are said to have organised the display ; but the treasures of the
* Times. '^ Tribune, May 15, 1906.
404 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Church must also have been drawn upon for so colossal a picnic. Bishop Lang and Rev. H. Russell Wakefield do not seem to have joined the procession ; but their fellow-triumvir, Mr. Keir Hardie, M.P., is reported to have delivered a vague, fiery harangue, declaring that " if he were to be ruled outside the law, he would take the country at its word and act the part of the lawless." The public cannot withhold their admiration from Mr. John Burns, M.P., who must thoroughly understand the " unemployed " question, for having refused to receive a deputation of these Anglican " Gapons " and their sandwich-munching followers.
It is to the credit of all classes of Christians, especi- ally of the Salvation Army, and of the Irish and their Roman Catholic priests, that they took no overt part in these squalid exhibitions. While foreigners and poorest Britishers of every denomination are working them- selves to the bone all over East London, our priest- led Anglican partakers of fasting communion are not ashamed to spend their time marching through the West End with begging-boxes and sandwiches, shouting for the " right to work," which seems to be the Puseyite way of asking for the " right to loaf." If these spirit- less men and women be the product of " Church influ- ence " in the East End, then assuredly the Church ought to be disestablished and disendowed at once ; a drastic measure of moral and secular education should be enforced ; and all good citizens should cease to subscribe to episcopal or diocesan funds for the coddling of these Anoflo-Catholic lazzaroni.
CHAPTER XV
How the Laity are church-outed by the Clergy — Growth of Noncon- formity at home and in the colonies — The Church Patronage system — The Benefices Act, 1898 — The case of St. George's, Botolph Lane — Preferments given for political services — Arch- bishop Davidson on workhouse chaplains — The Bishoi^ of Kensing- ton— Queen Anne's Bounty — Active traffic in Church patronage still prevalent.
The weakest point in the constitution of the Estab- lished Church — the cause which hardens the laity against the clerics at every crisis, and leaves the bishops entirely dependent on their aristocratic patrons — has always been the want of representative government. Under the medieval Anglican system, the parishioners have no effective control over the parson, who is still " the Church " in each parish, being the old Norman " persone," in low Latin the " persona ecclesiai," the " one person " representing the " mvisible Church " and holding a special communication with the spiri- tual world from which the laity are excluded. After the Reformation, although the public ceased to believe in this parsonical assumption, the old method of Roman Church government was preserved ; the Prayer Book still spoke of the clergyman as a " priest " as well as a " minister " ; an unhappy contradiction of terms, for the word " priest " implied mastery and leadership, whereas the word " minister " implied only help and service.
The indiscriminate use of " priest " as synonymous with " minister " was a concession to old Roman usasre at the Reformation ; but " priest " was also aggressively introduced into the prayer book by the French party in England after the Restoration. There is only one
4o6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
priestly act retained in the morning and evening service of the Established Church, namely the " absolution " or forgiveness of sins. It was retained, I think, to show that henceforth open confession, as being more con- V. sonant with scripture, was to take the place of particular I or auricular confession. In the last Edwardian and \ Elizabethan prayer books, the order was that this absolution should be pronounced by the " minister " — the use of the word " minister " depriving the act of the priestly or sacramental character attached to it by the Romans, who held that it was an exercise of personal power by the priest as mediator between God and man. When James I. revised the prayer book in 1604, " presbyter " was substituted for " minister " after the Scotch fashion. But at the " merry monarch's " re- vision in 1 66 1, the Anglo-Catholic party erased "pres- byter" and substituted "priest." The actual erasure may be seen in the late Dean Stanley's photographic edition of the exact copy of the black-letter prayer book of 1636, which was used by the revisers in 1661, and contains all their corrections. Since that time the order has been as follows : — " The Absolution, or Remission of Sins, to be pronounced by the Priest alone, standing, the people still kneeling." At the same time the prayer in the litany for " bishops, pastors, and ministers of the Church" was altered to one for " bishops, priests, and deacons ; " the two changes con- stituting a notable triumph for sacerdotalism. This grievous confusion of words was studiously avoided by the Scotch, who anglicised " presbyter," or used its equivalent, " elder." The anxiety of the primitive Christians to dissociate themselves from priestcraft is proved by their use of the word irpea-ISv^, or presbyter, instead of the Greek lepevs, or the Latin sacerdos, which are the classical words for a sacrificing priest, and correspond with the Hebrew cohen. To " sacrifice,"
SACRIFICERS AND PRESBYTERS 407
derived iTom sacer and facio, docs not mean to slay, but to " make sacred." The victim might be slain by any one, but it was the priest who made certain portions sacred, and thereby converted them into an offering or oblation to the deity ; the rest of the victim being eaten. Our word " sacrificer " and the French " sacri- ficateur " are accurate translations of cohe^i, lepevi^, and sacerdos. Although " priest," like the French pretre, is merely a contraction of the Latin j^'^'^sbyter and the Greek TrpegBvrepo^, and meant simply a presbyter or elder, the word had come to be popularly used in England to denote a sacrificer; for the anti-Christian conduct of the Anglo -Roman presbyters caused the word to acquire the same meaning as sacerdos and to lose its true meaning of presbyter or elder, being used indifferently to describe the Druidical and Jewish sac- rificers as well as the ministers of the Roman Church.
The word " priest " has a discreditable history, and Avas only retained in Edward's prayer books from a desire to deal gently with the superstitious. The public do not like the word, but the sacerdotal party revere it; for it recalls the time when the theologians and sacrificers ruled over mankind. When the British legislature last dealt with the status of the Anglican "priests," in the Clerical Disabilities Act of 1878, it shattered the Roman and Anglo-Catholic theory that a man once ordained was " a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek," by enacting that " any person admitted to the office of minister in the Church of England " — minister being defined as one in priest's or deacon's orders — might, by executing "a deed of relinquishment," cease to be a clergyman and be freed from incapacity to sit in the House of Commons and all other disabilities attaching to Anglican orders.
Nor are the words " laity " and " laymen " less un- christian than the word " priest " in its Roman signifi-
4o8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
cation. The Latin word " laicus " occurs first in Ter- tuUian about the close of the second century after Christ, and is an adaptation of the Greek XaiKo?, which is found only in the Septuagint, or Alexandrian Greek version of the Old Testament. It is an adjective manufactured from the Homeric noun Xaog (laos), meaning the mob, the common soldiers as opposed to the generals,-^ the subjects as opposed to the princes. In the Septuagint, Aao? is used of the people as opposed to the priests ; ^ and in the New Testament, of Jews as opposed to Christians — so as to show that all Christians were priests alike, and that the distinction between priest and layman was at an end. The pre-Christian priest was always a master. For instance, the Hebrew cohen meant a prince, or a principal officer, or a chief ruler, as well as a priest, and is so translated in the Authorised Version. Melchizedek was king and priest ; and the high priest, as we know, ultimately became the ruler of Jerusalem. St. John had this in mind when he said that all Christians were made " kings and priests ; " and Peter, when he said all Christians were " a royal priesthood." " Laity " always conveys a sense of inferiority, and means the lewd 'people, as opposed to K\T]po(s (Jderos), or the clergy. The word KX'^po? means a " lot," or a person or thing chosen by lot ; and its ecclesiastical use implies a destined or chosen person, called to be a priest. Aristotle uses a word KXtjpos, meaning " a mischievous insect in bee- hives," perhaps a drone, which might, not inaptly, be said to be the origin of the word " clergy " as applied to those sacerdotal politicians who seek to revive the formal craft of the old sacrificers in this scientific age. Besides its connection with \a6?, the word " layman " may be also derived from the Dutch leeman or Anglo- Saxon lithman, which means a limbed-man, or jointed-
1 " Iliad," ii. 365. ^ Numbers and Deuteronomy.
THE MEANING OF "ECCLESIA" 409
man, a lay-figure, a puppet whose joints may be moved at will by its master ; and if one were to judge our modern laymen by the position they occupy in the Anglican, Greek, and Roman Churches, one would be disposed to derive their title from that source.
All this Roman and Anglican phraseology is un- christian. " Henceforth," said Jesus, " I call you not servants ; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth ; but I have called you friends." Representative government by its members, linked together in brotherly love, should be the first essential of a Christian Church ; and a well-known passage in the Acts of the Apostles illustrates the executive authority of the whole ecclesia or assembly, amongst the primitive Christians : " Then pleased it the apostles and elders, with the whole CHURCH, to send chosen men of their own company to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. And they wrote letters by them after this manner : The apostles and elders and brethren send greetings unto the brethren which are of the Gentiles in Antioch," &c.
The primitive Christian Churches were not gatherings of priests, or even of apostles, but of all the believers duly summoned ; and the nineteenth of the Anglican Articles defines the Church to be, not the parsons, but the " congregation " — of which the ministers are only items, however important may be their position. The New Testament word, eKK\t](Tia (ecclesia), which is trans- lated " Church," is classical Greek, used in the "Politics" of Aristotle and elsewhere, and alwa3^s means an assembly of citizens summoned by the public crier. The Eng- lish word " congregation," is a better rendering than "church," which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon " circe " or " cyrice." pronounced " kirke " or " k3'rike," the Scotch " kirk," and comes from the Greek Kvpia- Koi', the Lord's house. As " Church" is used of the buildings as well as the members, the Presbyterian
410 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" assembly," summoned by a " convener," is the most accurate English synonym for eKKXtja-ia. The Roman priests perverted the word ecclesia, so that it came to mean " the priests " exclusively ; and their example was followed in England, an abuse of the word which Henry VIII. criticised thus in a letter to the clergy of York : " The Church," he said, " that is the clergy of England ; which manner of speaking in the law ye have professed ye many times find." f I The modern Anglican sacerdotalists resemble their ' 1 predecessors before the Reformation in their contempt for the " laity." " The lay element too greatly prepon- derates in the Church of England, and no more of it is needed," said one of the clerical leaders of the English Church Union.^ " It is not that I undervalue the office of the laity," he continued, " whose high and noble prerogative it is to listen and obey ; but it is for the ministers of the Church, with all their respon- sibilities, to magnify their office, if so be that others will intrude upon it " ! " Fear the eye and voice of a priest " is the command of an Anglican monastic order which enjoys the apostolical benediction of Bishop Ingram ; " The priest, so far as his priesthood is con- cerned, is Christ Himself, the Sovereign and Eternal Priest .... permitted to share certain sorrows of Christ in which the layman has no part .... neither to be spoken to nor of, in any manner approaching to familiarity. Learn to perceive Almighty God concealed for you in his priests." ^
This absurd position of the Church, under sacerdotal leadership, is fast becoming untenable. Speaking at the convocation of York on " closer relations between convocation and the house of laymen," the late Bishop Moorhouse of Manchester, referring to a parliamentary
^ English CJiurch Union Circular, 1868. 2 " Exposition of the Beatitudes," by the Cowley Fathers.
CHURCH, CROWN, AND PEOPLE 411
motion for disestablishment, proposed in 1897 by Mr. Samuel Smith, M.P., and the introduction of the Bene- fices Bill of 1898 for the suppression of simony, im- pulsively declared that " parliament dare no more snub a Church that had got the tremendous force of lay opinion at its back than it dare snub the Crown." ^ This was an admission and a regret that the Church did not possess the confidence of the laity and there- fore could not defy parliament. The association of the Church with the Crown was not calculated to benefit the monarchy ; for if parliament is on friendly terms with the Crown nowadays, it is not because of any inherent divinity in the sovereign, such as the hier- archy claim, but because, unlike the Church, the Crown keeps itself in touch with the people and has become a popular institution. When the Crown acted foolishly in former times, at the instigation of the Church, its oc- cupants paid a heavy penalty for their misdemeanours.
Flagrant breaches of discipline, on the part of the clergy, and constant defections on the part of the laity, have been the main results of a clerical autocracy whose divine authorisation is not admitted by Chris- tians. Open hostility to the " priests," as in France, has been frequently evinced in poor districts where the people have not the energy to join one of the Free Churches. Speaking of such a region in the east end of London, where ritualism is the rule in Anglican churches, Mr. Charles Booth said : " Although there is no secularist propaganda, there is hostility to religion, carried to such a point that even church-goers and members of church clubs are almost afraid to recognise the parson in the streets."" "Not more than ten working men in the parish ever come to church," said
1 Times, Februarv i8, 1898.
2 "Life and Labour of the People in London," 1902; by Rt. Hon. Charles Booth ; not connected with " General" Booth of the Salvation Army.
412 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
one east end incumbent. " There is no hostility, simply utter indifference," said another. " Things are going steadily down " was the admission of a third. Nor do many of the women attend religious worship : " There are never a hundred adults at either morning or evening service," said a fourth incumbent.
The spread of enlightenment has only served to increase the desertions from Anglican orthodoxy. " I find people leaving the Church of England," said Bishop Chavasse recently, " because in the parish church there was such an excessive ritual that they could not worship, and the parish priest would not abate one jot of his extreme ritual."^ For many years now the English and Welsh Christians, who openly disbelieve in the medieval system of the Established Church, have outnumbered the professing Anglicans. In 1902, the year of the Conservative Education Act, the sittings provided in the State churches, Anglican chapels-of-ease, and mission halls only accommodated about 7,000,000 persons, and were by no means fully occupied ; whereas the sit- tings in Nonconformist places of worship accommo- dated over 7,500,000, and were, as a rule, Avell filled. These are the most reliable data for England and Wales ; but in the chief colonies, where a religious census is taken, we find the avowed Nonconformists in a large majority. In 1901, the Anglicans in Canada numbered 680,620; the Methodists, 916,886; Presbyterians, 842,442 ; Baptists, 316,477 ; Lutherans, 92,524; Congregationalists, 28,293; and miscel- laneous creeds, 206,821 ; so that, out of a non-Roman population of 3,084,063, the Church of England could only claim 680,620. In Australia there were 1,428,490
1 Diocesan Conference ; Liverpool Courier, October 22, 1903.
2 See, inter alia, the census of attendance at church on Sundays in London, taken by the Daily News in 1904.
THE FREE CHURCHES 413
Anglicans, and 1,196,989 Nonconformists; in Tas- mania, 83,812 Anglicans, and about 50,000 Noncon- formists; in New Zealand, out of 603,916 Protestants the Church claimed 316,814; in Cape Colony, omit- ting the Dutch, the Anglicans in 1891 were 139,058, and the Nonconformists 225,270. Thus we find that in the self-governing colonies, the Anglicans only number 2,648,794 as compared with 4,162,804 Pro- testant Nonconformists ; and in none of the colonies is orthodox Anglicanism established or endowed by law. We may take it that the religious policy of the colonies will be eventually adopted in England, and would be immediately adopted if Englishmen were free to make a fresh arrangement which did not entail the abolition of old-established endowments and ancient usages.
The Nonconformists have not only increased in numbers^ ]jQt~ln dignity and solidarity. They are no longer a collection of discordant sects hating each other more bitterly than the common enemy from whose fold they seceded. All denominations meet annually in friendship at those religious parliaments known as Free Church councils. It is the Anglican and Roman medievalists who have now become sectaries ; and, though they are united apparently in their distrust of the people, the Anglican man in pos- session and the Roman evicted tenant hate each other with a cordiality which is all the greater for being concealed. All the Free Churches, to quote the words of Rev. John Clifford, now maintain " the adequacy of Free Church principles to deal with the whole of the task that Christ expected to be accom- plished by the Christian Church." They had been " taunted with the fewness of their numbers and the lowness of their position in the social scale ; " but, he said, there were then 1 7,000,000 English-speaking Free
414 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Churchmen, "in addition to 3,000,000 who still be- longed to the Established Church of England ; " and " they believed there had been given to them the leadership of the spiritual life of mankind." ^ On the same occasion Dr. John Massie, who now repre- sents the Cricklade division of Wilts, said : " The battle is against clericalism. Free Church councils like ours are making the iron red-hot wherewith to sear the decapitated stumps of the clerical hydra. The decapitation is not yet, but we feel that it is not far off, and in our tussle we have some strong church- men and many clergymen on our side." Self-reliance, however, is the wisest policy. The position of all the Free Churches has now become one of quiet but firmly- sustained protest "against the connection between Church and State in this country," and " against the prevalence of sacerdotalism within the State Church as contrary to the Word of God, and subversive of the faith and principles of the Protestant Reformation." ^
The commercial nomenclature used in the Church of England assuredly does nothing to encourage the " High Church " ambitions of the sacerdotal party. The parish, with its tithe and other endowment, is called a " living," or a means of livelihood for the minister. And the power of appointment to this " living " — the advowson as it is called — may be acquired by anybody rich enough to purchase it in the open market. Advowson is an old French word meaning patronage or protection ; the minister being under the protection of the patron or owner of the advowson. The minister himself is called an " incum- bent," or person bound by contract to discharge the clerical duties of the parish in return for his living.
1 Times, March 8, 1898 ; Eeport of Free Church Convention at Bristol.
2 Congress of Free Church Ministers; Times, March 30, 1898.
THE PATRONAGE SYSTEM 415
The origin of the patronage system in England is attributed to a Cilician, known as Theodore of Tarsus, who was appointed archbishop of Canterbury by Pope VitaHan in 668 a.d., and his object was to encourage the foundation of parish churches, as opposed to monasteries, by conferring on each founder of a church the power of appointing the minister. The connection of the Church with the landlords is proved by the division of advowsons into two classes, namely, advowsons appendant, which are inseparably attached to the fee-simple of certain lands, and advowsons in gross, which are separate from land. Advowsons of both classes may be of four kinds : ( i ) Presentative, whose possessors have the right of presenting their nominees to the bishop for institution, the power of refusing to institute being reserved to the bishop ; (2) CoUative, of which the bishop himself is the patron, and over which he has absolute power ; (3) Donative, which give the patron the right of conferring the spiritual preferment without presentation to the bishop ; (4) Elective, usually vested in corporations, Avho elect their nominee by vote.
The Lord Chancellor's patronage is the largest held by one patron, including twelve canonries and about 700 livings — a legacy from the theological days when that functionary was always an ecclesiastic. The Sovereign, so far as ordinary livings are concerned, is not a large patron, much of his patronage being ex- ercised alternately with various bishops ; and the heir- apparent holds a very small amount of patronage. The hierarchy are the predominant body of patrons, and are, therefore, more directly responsible for the fersonnel of the ministry than any other class of the community, holding amongst them the constant right of presentation to 2800 livings, alternate rights in hundreds of other cases, and the power of appoint-
41 6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ment to a large number of lucrative dignities, such as deaneries, archdeaconries, and canonries. The deans and chapters present to about 900 livings ; and indi- vidual dignitaries to hundreds of others.
The more important patronage of the Crown, in- cluding the appointment of all the bishops and the English deans, and the patronage of the Lord Chan- cellor, may be regarded as vested in the public, and ought to be exercised in the public interest for the maintenance of the principles of the Reformation. We cannot ascertain precisely how far royal favour clashes with political influence in the appointment of bishops ; but there can be no doubt that the bulk of the digni- taries appointed during the premierships of Mr. Glad- stone and Lord Salisbury were ritualists who have been fostering ritualism and admitting sacerdotalists into the livings of which they are the patrons.
Though the Roman Catholic patronage was vested in Oxford and Cambridge by James I., many Roman Catholics still figure in the list of patrons, notably the Marquis of Bute (twelve Welsh livings), the Duke of Norfolk (five English livings), the Earl of Abingdon (four livings), Lord Gainsborough (six livings), the Earl of Denbigh, Lord Petre, and others. A Roman Catholic can only present to a living by deputy ; but, until the Benefices Act of 1898, it was comparatively easy for the Roman Catholic party to buy up advow- sons and present to any quantity of livings, through professional or friendly Anglican trustees ; and even still it is possible for them to do so legally, if they have sufficient money.
The Benefices Act of 1898 ^ was passed by the Con- servative party to prevent the scandalous scenes wit- nessed in the patronage sale-rooms from day to day. It was part of the general Church policy of preventing
1 61 & 62 Vict. c. 48.
THE BENEFICES ACT, 1898 417
disestablishment, or forestalling a genuine reformation by a Liberal Government. It was intended to make the sale of advowsons difficult, and to prevent the pre- sentation to livings of men of bad character; but it does not seem to have interferred with the appoint- ment of sacerdotalists, and has greatly increased the power of the bishops. The commercial view taken of a cure of souls is manifest in the first clause of the Act, which says that the transfer of an advowson must be registered within a month, unless the bishop thinks fit to extend the time, and must convey the whole interest of the transferor; except (i) in a family settlement, where the settlor may reserve a life in- terest, and (2) in a mortgage, where the right of redemption is reserved. No transfer shall be valid unless " more than twelve months have elapsed since the last institution or admission to the benefice ; " and the purchase money must be paid at, or within three months after, the transfer. Transfers of advowsons on marriage, death, bankruptcy, or " on the appointment of a new trustee where no beneficial interest passes," are not affected by the Act.
Public auctions of advowson are now illegal, except " in conjunction with any manor, or with an estate in land of not less than one hundred acres, situate in the parish in which the benefice is situate, or in an adjoin- ing parish and belonging to the same owner as the advowson " ; and the penalty for breach of this con- dition is fixed at ;^ioo. The Act also attempted to abate many other scandals connected with advowsons. It used to be a common practice for patrons to agree, in return for valuable consideration, to present a par- ticular person or his nominee to a benefice at the first vacancy. Any agreement to do so now is invalid. A right of patronage was often transferred for value received, on condition that, when it had been exercised
2 D
41 8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
once, it should be retransf erred to the original trans- feror. To do so was now made illegal. Poor clerics, university servitors and sizars, used to be presented to a livinof, on condition that when some relative or favourite of the patron was ready to accept, the warm- ing-pan should resign. A man who signs an agree- ment to resign in favour of another at a future date, cannot now be presented to a benefice. The purchase of presentations from patrons by young clergymen or their friends is illegal, so that holders of patronage may only make profit from that source in secret, and at the risk of penalty if discovered. Before being in- stituted by the bishop, the patron's nominee must make a declaration that he has not received the pre- sentation in consideration of money, reward, gift, profit, or benefit, given or promised by him ; and that he will not perform or satisfy any payment, contract, or pro- mise which he may have made in return for his pre- sentation to the living ; and that he has not entered into a covenant to resign in favour of another ; and if this declaration is found to be false, he may be prose- cuted for perjury.
The bishops may now refuse " to institute or admit a presentee to a benefice " on several grounds ; and are empowered to institute and admit in other cases where the Act forbids admission. A bishop may decline to institute a patron's presentee, who, in his opinion, " is unfit for the discharge of the duties of the benefice by reason of physical or mental infirmity, or incapacity, pecuniary embarrassment of a serious character, gross misconduct, or neglect of duty in an ecclesiastical office ; evil life, having by his conduct caused grave scandal concerning his moral character since his ordi- nation ; or having, with reference to the presentation, been a party to an agreement which is invalid under the Act." Although a year may not have elapsed
INCREASED POWER OF BISHOPS 419
since the last transfer of the right of patronage, the bishop may, nevertheless, institute and admit, if he is satisfied that the transfer " was not effected in view of the possibility of a vacancy within such year." All donative benefices were made presentative by the Act, so that no incumbent can now be appointed to a living anywhere without the bishop's consent. In addition to his other powers, a bishop can stay the operation of law and decree that a benefice shall not become void when an incumbent becomes bankrupt and his benefice is sequestered within twelve months after his institu- tion ; or when any sequestration, after that date, shall continue for a whole year ; or when two sequestrations occur within two years. These provisions make the bishop master of the situation, and endue him with powers over patrons and presentees which, in the hands of an avaricious man, might be made a source of considerable profit. They also saddle the hierarchy with the responsibility for the ritual disorders which are so prevalent amongst the incumbents.
Independently of this Act, a bishop can refuse to institute a man whose doctrine or ritual is, in his opinion, at variance with the tenets of the Church of England, and there is no appeal from his decision. If, however, the bishop of the diocese " refuses to institute a presentee to a benefice " on any ground " except a ground of doctrine or ritual," he is bound to " signify the refusal in writing, together with the grounds thereof " to the patron and the presentee ; but not to the churchwardens ; and either of those persons may appeal to a court consisting of the archbishop of the province and a judge of the supreme court appointed for the purpose. In this court of appeal, which takes no cognisance of doctrine or ritual, it is the province of the judge alone to find whether the facts alleged by the bishop are sufficient in law to
420 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
warrant his refusal to institute the presentee. If the judge thinks the facts do not justify the refusal to institute, he may direct institution. The judge alone decides " all questions of law and fact ; " but the arch- bishop delivers the judgment, Avhich is final ; and a person once rejected may not be presented again for the same benefice.
Except chapels royal, capitular preferments, chapels belonging to institutions, and private chapels, the Act applies to all benefices, including the patronage of the Crown ; but it left the general body of Churchmen, in other words, the laity, as completely " church-outed " as it found them. It orders the bishop to give a month's notice to the churchwardens of his intention to " collate, institute, or admit " a particular person to a benefice, and compels the wardens to publish the notice " in the prescribed manner," but gives the parishioners no voice in the selection of their minister.
The Act instituted a board of supervision consisting of certain commissioners appointed under the Plurali- ties Acts and two local members, who must be justices of the peace " for the county in which the benefice is situated, or barristers and solicitors of not less than ten years' standing nominated by the chairman of the last preceding quarter sessions ; " and if this body reports that " the duties of a benefice are not adequately per- formed," owing to " the negligence of the incumbent," the bishop may appoint a curate or curates, inhibit the incumbent, and deprive him of "any right of patronage attached to his incumbency." The incum- bent may appeal, within one month after inhibition, to a court consisting of an archbishop and a judge, as before mentioned, whose judgment shall be final. But the cumbrous legal machinery provided by the Act has not been put into operation to any extent.
The provisions of the statute give a sufficient insight
A PATRON IN THE POORHOUSE 421
into the objectionable nature of the commerce in ad- vowsons which had been going on. We may, however, mention two curious incidents, which occurred at the date of the passage of the Act, ilkistrating how " cures of souls " are dealt with in the State Church of England. The first shows how advowsons Avere publicly bought and the class of people who bought them. In 1898, an unmarried lady in Suffolk, who had come into a fortune, expended a considerable portion of it in buying an advowson; and, at the next vacancy in 1899, she chivalrously presented the living — worth about -^400 a year and a vicarage — to a favourite curate. She then left the locality and did not return until 1903, when she came back as a pauper, drafted from a London workhouse to the workhouse of the union in which her advowson was situated ; and it is stated that the local guardians requested the vicar to assist them in obtaining employment for her.^ Meantime her •protege had developed into a ritualist of the most " High Church " type, and was inhibited by the ecclesi- astical authority some time afterwards.
The second case shows the contemptuous disregard in which the parishioners are held by patrcns and incumbents. In March 1898, a most reprehensible, but by no means exceptional, instance of a derelict parish in the city of London was brought before the House of Lords by Earl Beauchamp, who asked Bishop Creighton whether he was " aware that the church of St. George's, Botolph Lane, had been closed for over five years, and that the rectory house had been let for business purposes," and, if so, " what provision had been made for the oversight of the parish ? " Earl Beau- champ, ignoring the bishop's responsibility, said " it appeared to be a case of gross neglect of duty on the
1 The names of the patron and incumbent were published in all the newspapers.
42 2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
part of the rector, who received ^600 a year, apart from the income derived from the rectory house let for business, for which sum he performed no duties whatever." ^ Bishop Creighton's reply recalls the ex- cuse given by the rector of Streatham to the London School Board : " The fabric of the church," said the admirer of Pobiedonostseff, " was some years ago re- ported insanitary and dangerous, and the church was closed. A scheme was set on foot for the union of the parish with the adjoining parish of St. Mary-at-Hill. He need not explain that such unions of parishes involved many complicated questions, and he was sorry to say that the point had not yet been entirely settled."
A few days afterwards. Rev. Malcolm MacColl, writing from " Members' Mansions, Victoria Street," informed the public that he was the rector of the derelict parish. He had accepted the living " with reluctance on the advice of Dean Church " — Newman's friend — " and Dr. Liddon." ^ Let us add that the patrons were the dean and chapter of St. Paul's ; and that R. W. Church and H. P. Liddon, first vice-principal of Cuddesdon College, were the two men, above all others, who trans- lated the sacerdotal theories of Newman and Pusey into practice, taking advantage of their respective positions as dean and canon of the metropolitan cathedral of St. Paul's to give a lead in priestcraft to the whole country. It was on the death of the previous rector, over sixteen years before, that the com- mission referred to by Bishop Creighton " had been appointed to unite the living with that of St. Mary-at- Hill." " It took a year to draw up the scheme," during which the living remained vacant; and it was then offered to Mr. MacColl, who accepted it after consultation with Dean Church, " one of the wisest as well as the
1 Times, March 9, 1898. * Times, March 12, 1898.
ST. GEORGE'S, BOTOLPH LANE 423
saintliest and most refined men he ever knew." ^ The previous rector " had been permitted to reside out of the parish on the certified insanitary condition of the rectory." " I found a dreary church," writes Mr. MacColl, " meanly furnished, with no choir, having service only on Sunday, and no evening service even on Sunday ; " but he strangely " determined to make no change until he had won the confidence of the parish." He does not say what action ho took to achieve that end, but he says, " the resident population was meanwhile dim- inishing so rapidly that I despaired of any opportunity of usefulness."
In 1882-3 the rector of this derelict parish gave voluminous evidence in favour of the sacerdotal party before the Ecclesiastical Courts commission ; and in the same year sent in his resignation of the benefice, which the bishop of London asked him to withdraw. " The raison d'etre of such a benefice as yours, as matters now stand," wrote Bishop Jackson, " is to support in leisure those who serve the Church with the pen. I do not wish that you should resign it, having as good a title to hold it for that purpose as any who would be likely to succeed you." The rector, in the bishop's opinion, was the only person whose interests Avere worth considering. In 1884, Mr. Gladstone rewarded Mr. MacColl's services with the additional prefer- ment of a canonry in Ripon cathedral worth ^500 a year, and Mr. MacColl held his rectory in London and his canonry in Yorkshire for fourteen years from that date until the question was raised by Lord Beauchamp. During twelve years of that period. Dr. Temple had been bishop of London, and was therefore responsible for what Mr. MacColl admits to have been " a grave scandal." Temple had been appointed archbishop of Canterbury in
1 Times, March 22, 1S9S.
424 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
1897, but he now supplied no answer to Lord Beau- champ's charge.
Mr. MacColl, in his letter to the Times, said he was not quite sure of the " produce of the living " ! " Crock- ford puts the value of the benefice at ;^2 29," he wrote ; " I think — writing on the spur of the moment — its value is ;^38o." In a subsequent letter "he thought it was £1^7." My clergy directory values it at ^49 1 . He says he had " called a meeting of Church- men and Nonconformists indiscriminately," told them of his intended resignation, and said he " would only withdraw it on condition of their joining to make structural alterations to enable us to have a decent chancel and a surpliced choir, with an attractive service." The audacity of asking Nonconformists to subscribe to a surpliced choir for an Anglican church — in which they did not worship, but for whose sup- port they paid tithes — seems incredible ; but nothing is impossible in the city of London. Although the necessary funds seem to have been obtained, the flick- ering flame of ritualism died out in Botolph Lane, and " the church was closed in 1893 by the Charity Com- missioners as being unsafe." When the church was closed, the incumbent continued to draw the " produce of the livmg"; he had "let the rectory at £^0 per annum for business purposes," and, while residing at Members' Mansions, Victoria Street, he repaired it and let it at " an increased rental in consequence." " But," the bachelor sinecurist naively adds, " never at a figure which covered my modest chambers ! "
Earl Beauchamp returned to the charge : " No ser- vice," he said, " has been held in the church for five years, and Mr. MacColl has taken no steps either to resign his office, perform his duties, or give up its income."'^ Arthur Inglesby, "citizen and haber-
1 Times.
CANON, CITIZEN, AND HABERDASHER 425
dasher," also joined in the discussion : " Canon MacColl receives a separate stipend," he wrote, " of £Go per annum for a curate under the City of London Parochial Charities' Act, in addition to his own income from the parish, and reaps the entire proceeds of his benefice without doing anything in return." ^ The aggrieved rector Avriting hurriedly, not from his " modest cham- bers," but from Bournemouth, said, " I am down here in the hope of throwing off some of the consequences of an attack of influenza," ^ and assailed Arthur Inglesby with influenzal desperation : " He signs himself ' Citizen and Haberdasher ; ' he is, in fact, a clergyman living in the country, whose only interest in the city is, I believe, the inheritance of the freedom of the Haberdashers' Company " ! The freedom of a city company, as most readers know, does not necessarily imply that one is a London merchant ; it was only eight days before Canon MacColl's letter that three daughters of a Fish- monger, triplets and Fishmongers, had been admitted to the freedom of the Fishmongers' Company. He described Mr. Inglesby as " a rural clergyman under the misleading alias of a Citizen and Haberdasher " — which was intolerable, for, as Canon MacColl added, " the clergy, like Ca3sar's wife, should be above suspicion " ! He hinted that Citizen and Haberdasher Inglesby would not have objected to the living of St. George's, Botolph Lane, if it had been oflered to him ; " Mr. Inglesby might have done better," as rector of St. George's, he said ; " but it is really no fault of mine that he was not nominated to the living instead of me ; nor would my resignation, I fear, have secured his succession to the office."
He corroborated, with the air of contradicting it, the statement that he drew a separate stipend for a curate : " Small as the duties were, I kept a licensed
1 Timci. 2 Ibid., March i8, 1898.
426 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
curate even before I became Canon of Ripon, because I was reluctant to employ a mere locum tenens during my six weeks' holiday. When the church was closed, I assigned the £60 to a clergyman to look after the handful of parishioners, and I employed my own leisure time in helping some of my brethren who needed help " ! He admitted that " the time that had elapsed since the closing of St. George's, Botolph Lane, was undoubtedly a grave scandal." But he said he knew of a case " where the interval between the closing of the church and the union of the parish with another was seven years " ! "I remain," he con- cluded, " like every other incumbent in similar circum- stances, the legal guardian of the rights of the parishioners and the vested interests of the church officials until the scheme of union has become law." The parishioners seem to have had no rights whatever, the only thing considered being Canon MacColl's leisure. For many years afterwards " the scheme of union " continued to vegetate; and it was only in 1904, I think, that I saw recorded the passage of an Act for the union of Botolph Lane with a neighbouring parish. Incidentally Canon MacColl threw considerable light on the political character of the services required from aspirants to Church preferment. " When Dr. Liddon and I returned from our visit to south-eastern Europe in the autumn of 1876," he wrote, "we undertook to enlighten public opinion on the horrors of Turkish mis- rule." In other words, Liddon, the Oxford Puseyite, and his follower MacColl joined Mr. Gladstone in the Bulgarian-atrocity campaign. Canon MacColl says " that having engaged in political controversy," he deemed it his duty, " as an obscure man, to prove his disinter- estedness by refusing all preferments." But he chival- rously writes of his fellow-campaigner, Liddon, that " his character was too lofty to need any such self-
PREFERMENT AND POLITICS 427
denying ordinance." The moral of this is not per- spicuous. May a Puseyite of lofty character do things which an obscure man would consider dishonourable ? Mr. MacColl had not been offered preferment when he made the resolution; and the Bulgarian atrocities did not float Mr. Gladstone into power until 1880; but, when the time came, Mr. MacColl was not forgotten. "Mr. Gladstone from 1880 to 1885 offered me pro- motion several times," he wrote ; " one of the value of £600 a year ; another of exactly double the value of the canonry I now hold." He says that he declined the canonry of Ripon when first offered to him in 1 884 by the Liberal premier, on the truly theological ground that he had refused a more lucrative preferment.
" Mr. Gladstone most kindly begged of me," he writes, " to reconsider my refusal, adding that he cx- pectcd to go out of office soon, and that he would be grieved to retire without my accepting anythirig from him. . . . He advised me to consult Dean Church, in whose judgment he had unbounded confidence." Mr. MacColl was in a desperate dilemma. Should he refuse the canonry, as he had refused a post " exactly double its value," and run the risk of seeing Mr. Gladstone's Government quit office before he had received any preferment ? Was his self-denying ordinance still binding ? Had his character grown as " lofty " as Liddon's ? Should he accept preferment from the premier whom he had helped into oflace by political controversy ? He decided to la}^ the responsibility on his friends, and " placed the matter in the hands of Dean Church, Dr. Liddon, and the Earl of Strath- more," whom he describes as " three of the best men and best friends whom it has ever been my privilege to know."
" We are just home, and I find your letter," wrote Dean Church. " Do not decline," urged the founder
42 8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of the Guardian and chief patron of St. George's; " Ripon is not what your friends would have wished for you. ... I have only just time to write and say that, with the full sense of the disadvantages of Ripon, I do not doubt about the right and wise thing. Accept ! " Dr. Liddon with equal briskness wrote : " I should certainly accept Ripon. . . . Before you make up your mind, do see Hutton of the Spectator. His judgment is likely to be truer than that of most men whom I know. Before you decide about Ripon, do see Hutton. . . . You observe what Mr. Gladstone says about the ' uncertainties ' of his remaining in power ? " It must have been an excruciating trial. Mr. MacCoU went to Mr. Hutton, and learned from him that his " plain duty " was to accept. Dr. Liddon supplied more balm for his perturbed conscience : " You must remember that when an offer of this sort is made to you without your seeking, there is as great responsibility in refusing it as in accepting it." The Earl of Strathmore also advised him to accept ; and, after what must have been an agony of perturbation, Mr. MacColl accepted a residential canonry at Ripon. What a catastrophe it would have been for him if, on the day after his acceptance, some preferment of " exactly double " the value had been placed again at Mr. Gladstone's bestowal ! How rudely this shifty transaction about the rectory of St. George's dissipates the fog of unctuous flattery, in which all the theo- logians concerned have enshrouded themselves — the " wisest, saintliest, and most refined " Puseyite, R. W. Church, dean of St. Paul's ; the " lofty " Puseyite, H. P. Liddon, canon of St, Paul's ; the evasive, domineering Temple, bishop of St. Paul's ; the Anglo-Russo-Roman Creighton ; and lastly, the celibate Canon MacColl, to be found in his " modest chambers " in the West End, or at Bournemouth " throwing off
A BISHOP-RECTOR 429
influenza," or at Ripon performing for the angels, or anywhere but in St. George's, Botolph Lane !
About the time that Canon MacColl's afHuent in- dolence was brought before the public, Archbishop Davidson, then bishop of Winchester, attended a meeting of the Farnham board of guardians, at which a workhouse chaplain was about to be ap- pointed.^ He said " that for ^80 a year they were hardly likely to get a tirst-rate man," and that it was only " men who could not get employment anywhere else, from unacceptableness in some way or old age, who were prepared to take workhouse chaplaincies, literally because they could not get anything else to do." It is clear that he did not anticipate that a workhouse chaplain might open a public-house as a means of augmenting his income. Having regard to this sordid view of the ministry enunciated by a dignitary, then drawing ;^7ooo and now drawing ;6^ 1 5,000 a year, what manner of curate could Mr. MacColl hope to procure as his deputy at £60 a year ?
Cases similar to Mr. MacColl's continue to occur from year to year ; but, as those concerned are too in- different to brave the unpleasantness of an exposure, they seldom attract public attention. The following recent case, however, is an exception to the rule, re- vealing, as it does, an unusual amount of earnestness and public spirit in the parishioners. St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, is the richest living in the city of London. Its resident population of all creeds is stated to be only 1660, the gross revenue of its rector is returned at -i^3090,^ and the bishop of London is the patron. In 1 900 Rev. F. E. Ridgeway, then vicar of St. Peter's, Kensington, was appointed to this lucrative sinecure, and was soon afterwards made an assistant bishop of
^ Times, January lo, 1898.
2 Phillips's and other Clergy Directories.
430 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
London, with the territorial title of bishop of Kens- ington. The bishops use their patronage freely in this way for providing themselves with assistants. If a parochial incumbent desires a curate, he has to pay him out of his own salary, or make special collections for his support ; or endeavour to get an annuity from some charitable fund, as Canon MacColl got his curate's stipend under the London Parochial Charities Act. But the bishops provide the salaries of their assistants by conferring rich livings on them whenever it is in their power.
Now an assistant bishop makes a bad parish minister, deeming himself above his work, and being always eager to live out of his district, so as to avoid the parishioners whom almost every well-endowed Anglican incumbent regards as his natural enemies. Mr. Ridgeway, having tasted the pleasures of Kens- ington, objected as strongly as Mr. MacColl to residing in the city of London, and almost the same procedure was followed in Bishopsgate as in Botolph Lane. A surveyor was engaged to inspect the rectory, and he declared it " not to be in a condition for habitation." The rectory house was thereupon sold for ^^4500, and it became as impossible for Mr. Ridgeway to reside in his parish as it was for Mr. MacColl. When a rectory house is found " not to be in a condition fit for habita- tion " in any ordinary parish, it is usually repaired or rebuilt, the funds being provided on the easiest terms. But in a rich city parish, of which a sufFragan-bishop is the incumbent, it is always straightway sold or let, and the incumbent poses as a homeless man, com- pelled to dwell " in modest chambers " in the West End, or even driven so far afield as Bournemouth. In this case Mr. Ridgeway posed as " having lost his house and gained nothing." " Not one farthing of the money," he is reported to have said, " went to me — it all went
ST. BOTOLPH'S, BISHOPSGATE 431
to Queen Anne's Bounty. The house sold for ;^45oo, and the purchase money went to the credit of the benefice." ^ And he added, " I appreciate the senti- mental feeling about the rectory, but the surveyor said it was worn out." Bishop Ridgeway is reported to have said thisjfrom the chair at a vestry meeting, held on April 3, 1906, at which Mr. Palmer, a parishioner, moved a resolution expressing indignation " at the action of the rector, in conjunction with the bishop of London, in selling rectory house, purchased by the parishioners out of the rates," and deciding to present a petition to parliament. He described the sale as " a standing disgrace." " Our rector once said he would live among his parishioners," said Mr. Palmer ; " he had not been here many months before he sold the rectory, and the parishioners were coolly told it was no business of theirs."
Mr. Evans, who seconded the resolution, declared that " not even the churchwardens were consulted in the matter." He accused Bishop Ridgeway of having " taken the chair almost unblu shingly " that night ; and taunted him with living in " a butterfly residence in Kensington." " Th*e bishop of London," he went on, "could not live on ;^ 10,000 a year, and he dumps down a man in a rich parish so that he will not have to pay a suffragan out of his own pocket." Another parishioner, Mr. Reeve, said : " We want sympathy and interest to exist between a rector and his people. We have a rector out of touch with his people," The resolution was carried by a majority of 13 to 3, and a satirical vote of thanks having been passed to Bishop Ridgeway for presiding, the meeting broke up.
The Nonconformist tithe-payers did not intervene, and nobody seems to have asked the chairman to explain the meaning of the words : " Not one farthing
^ Daily Express, April 4, 1906.
43 2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of the money went to me — it all went to Queen Anne's Bounty. The house sold for ;^45oo, and the pur- chase money ivcnt to the credit of the henefice."
Before the Reformation, a year's clear profit, called the first-fruits, of each preferment became due to the Pope on the occurrence of a vacancy ; and one-tenth of the annual net produce was always payable to Rome. Henry VIII. made these moneys payable to the Crown as head of the English Church ; and they were so paid, or payment was evaded, as the case might be, until the accession of Queen Anne, who surrendered her rights, by a charter which was confirmed by statute,^ and ordered that the money should thenceforth be devoted to increasing the salaries of the poorer incum- bents. The payments of tenths and first-fruits were then made to the governors of Queen Anne's Bounty fund, who are the archbishops and bishops, with a few ex officio members of the Government ; and, so deftly have the original intentions of the foundress been defeated, by legislation and otherwise, since 1703, that the annual income from first-fruits and tenths, instead of being about ;^ 5 00,000 or ;^6oo,ooo a year, dwindled down to about ;^ 14,000 a year — or less than the smallest of the special diocesan funds raised annually for mysterious ritualistic purposes in greater London. The capital accumulated by the governors amounts to about ;^4, 5 00,000, or thereabouts, the interest of which is, of course, available, in addition to the small yield from first-fruits and tenths ; and the produce of this capital is entirely independent of, and additional to, all the moneys held and received by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, or in any way previously specified in this book.
If the proceeds of the sale of the Bishopsgate rectory house were " placed to the credit of the benefice " in
^ 2 & 3 Anne, cap. ii.
TRAFFIC IN ADVOWSONS 433
the books of the governors of Queen Anne's Bounty, it is only natural to suppose that the incumbent was thereby relieved of some of his obligations, in the form of tenths or otherwise, to that bounty, though the purchase price may not have gone directly into his pocket. A sale was safer than a letting; for if the rectory had been "let for business purposes," as in Mr. MacColl's case, and the rental drawn by Bishop Ridgeway, living in Kensington, some inquisitive legis- lator, like Lord Beauchamp, might have raised the question in parliament. We may see from this pro- ceeding how contemptuously city parishioners, on whom such heavy religious taxation is imposed, and city churchwardens, on whom such penal responsibility for the realisation of incumbents' stipends was cast by the City Tithes Acts, are still treated by the bishops and priests who rule rather than serve, devour rather than feed, the flocks entrusted to their custody by the State.
The Act of 1898 put an end to the greater part of those auctions of advowsons which formed so unique a feature in English religious life. It is only when a manor or a hundred acres of freehold land is put up for sale now that a cure of souls is knocked down to the highest bidder with a rap of the auctioneer's ham- mer. But the traffic in advowsons still goes on, and there are several printed lists published, in the north as well as in the south of England, containing par- ticulars of " advowsons and next presentations for transfer by private treaty." In one of those lists, published during the present year, appear the ages of the holders of the livings, so that the purchaser may calculate when he or his nominee may hope to step into the dead man's shoes. The advowsons are said to be " for sale, with possession subject to the lives of the present incumbents in accordance with the require-
2 E
434 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ments of the Benefices Act." One living is thus described: "London, S.W. — a rectory. Net income about £gS^ from ground rents, tithe, &c., besides a very good residence. Population 16,500. Incumbent's age 51. Price ^4000. This is a very important benefice, and considered the most desirable in the South of London. It is favourably and very healthily situated, within seven miles of Charing Cross, and within easy access to all parts by rail and tram. A patronage trust would find this a very important centre for the dissemination of its infiuence." How unenviable will be the lot of the parishioners if the financiers of the sacerdotal party should see their way to purchase this iivinsr for the dissemination of their infiuence. Rec-
o
tories and vicarafires are offered for sale, in Oxford, Stafford, Norfolk, Somerset, Buckingham, Huntingdon, Lincoln, Cumberland, Surrey, Devon, Essex, Leicester, Berks, Hertford, Hereford, Middlesex, York, Bedford, Gloucester, Sussex, Montgomery, Shrops, Northampton, Hants, Dorset, Warwick, Derby, Durham, and several unspecified counties. The cures of souls are offered to investors with all the " puffery " used by auctioneers. They are described as " desirable preferments " insuring " the certainty of a valuable reversion both in income and capital at very low prices," and patronage trusts " both evangelical and high church," are assured that they will find the list " well worth consideration." It is one of the significant signs of the times that the evangelical party have had to combine to save a certain proportion of parishes from sacerdotal influence.
The particulars of land held in connection with these advowsons run thus for the most part : " good garden and about 1 2 acres " ; " nice garden " ; " good garden of nearly three acres " ; " large and well-stocked garden, with ornamental water of over an acre for boating, well stocked with fish " ; " large garden, small orchard " ;
ATTRACTIVE CURES OF SOULS 43 5
" grounds of about three acres " ; " very pretty grounds with excellent tennis lawn, good kitchen garden, good well and soft water." Out of over i 50 livings, specific parcels of land are mentioned in twenty. In one, we are informed, there is " a lay freehold of accommodation land, close to the rectory, between eight and nine acres let on lease." The number of acres of glebe land mentioned in nineteen cases are 200, 24, 30, 210, (all let), 36 (let), 72 (let), 70 (let), 74 (let), 6-] (let), 35 (let), 28 (let), 40 (let), 320 (of which all but five acres are let), 160 (let), 46 (let), 7 (let), 100 (let), and 42.
In 130 cases, in which no details are given as to land, the net income is said to arise from tithe, tithe rent-charge, endowment, rents, glebe, or from two or more of these sources. The principal source of income is " tithe and glebe," but in many cases the income arises from " corn rents and glebe," " glebe and endow- ment," and " the produce " of other livings. The point of view from Avhich the vendors regard their cures of souls is remarkable ; the only inducements held forth to purchasers being material comforts and social at- tractions, except in the case of the London rectory described as " an important centre for the dissemina- tion " of peculiar influences. We find such baits to purchasers as: "Net income ^210, mainly from tithe, besides a good, though not large, residence, containing three reception, five bed rooms, and usual offices. Nice gardens. Very pleasant and dry situation. Three miles from post town and railway station, population 200. Incumbent aged 68. Price ^1300 or offer." "Net income about ;^3 30 to ^^350 from tithe and glebe, besides a capital house, containing four reception, eight bed rooms and the usual domestic offices, capital garden and stabling. Population nearly 5000, of ivhicli a large portion is under the charge of a curate of
436 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
another parish. An important and extensive town parish in a high and dry situation, and the appoint- ment carries with it the ex officio patronage to another living of about ^260 per annum, where the present incumbent is aged about fifty. Fine church with tower and five bells. Good educational advantages. In- cumbent aged 68. Price, 1000 guineas."
Another cure of souls is thus described : " Net income about ;^3 50 from glebe (let on lease), besides a good house and garden, standing on nearly 3I acres. Very pleasantly situated one mile from railway station, and eighteen miles from London. Nice old church, containing a clock and five bells. Population 500. Incumbent aged about sixty- two. Price ;^I200." The tempting picture of another is as follows : " Net income about ;^5 50, from tithe and small glebe, besides an excellent residence in perfect condition, containing four reception rooms, eight good bed and dressing rooms, five attics, and good domestic offices. Large and well-stocked garden with ornamental water of over an acre for boating, well stocked with fish. Stabling for four horses, loose box and carriage house. Population 600. Very pleasantly situated with good surroundings, seven miles from nearest railway station. There are two good churches about a mile apart, well restored. Incumbent aged fifty-nine. There is also included in the sale a lay freehold consisting of a piece of accommodation land close to the rectory, of between 8 and 9 acres, together with a lodge suitable for a curate ! The land is at present let on lease. Price for the advowson and lay freehold, ^^4000." A vicarage with "net income about ;^iioo, derived from tithe (extraordinary tithe fixed), and small glebe, besides an excellent residence containing three good reception, five bed rooms and attics, and the usual domestic offices," is offered for ;^3 5oo, or about three
CLERICAL COMFORTS 437
years' purchase. It has " good grounds, its church has been restored ; it is in an important and desirable position, one mile from railway station, and close to important town, population about 1600"; but the incumbent is only " aged at least forty-three." The cheapest lot, perhaps, is a living with a net income of £210, "a good modern residence, containing three reception, eleven bed rooms, and good domestic offices, good outbuildings and coach-house, together with a garden comprising three acres of pleasure grounds " ; a church in good repair and recently restored ; the population of the parish only 250; the present in- cumbent aged eighty-five ; and yet the price is only ;^45o, or about two years' purchase of the net income !
Another vicarage — net income £22,S, "large resi- dence, containing three reception, six bed rooms, bath- room, &c., and domestic offices, garden, stabling for two horses, cow-shed, &c. ;" population of parish under 350; "two churches, but only one service in each ; " one close to the house, the other three miles off; incumbent aged eighty-seven — is offered for the low sum of ;!^i5oo. It is in a "very healthy situa- tion, high and bracing, commanding lovely views over land and water," and adjoins " a developing watering- place," the result being that " the land in the neigh- bourhood is becoming very valuable for building purposes, and the whole of the glebe could be dis- posed of in this way, being exceptionally well situated for building on." Here is a cure of souls of which almost immediate possession can be taken, with pro- spects of rich returns from speculative building, otfered for about six years' net income. A rectory, — "net income .^650 from tithe, and about one hundred acres of glebe, well built residence, ten bed and dress- ing rooms, good domestic offices, three acres of gardens
438 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and pleasure grounds, well timbered, stabling for four horses, coach-house, saddle-room, large and ancient church, also a cliapel-of-ease; " incumbent aged sixty- two ; population of parish only 600 ; " in a charming and luxurious part of the count}^" three railway stations within three miles ; " the soil a light loam, and sub-soil chiefly stone," — is offered for £^2500, or less than four years' net income. Another living, — incumbent aged eighty-nine, population of parish under one hundred, net income £igS^ "^ good residence, containing three reception, six bed and dressing rooms, three attics, and domestic offices, two gardens, and small orchard and stabling ; in a pleasant and healthy position two miles from a post town and railway station, and in the diocese of Oxford," — is oftered for ^5^8 00, or about four years' net income. A vicarage in Essex, net income ^200, incumbent aged seventy-one, population only 200, can be bought for £y$o. Another in Suftblk, net income ^180, population 350, incumbent aged seventy-one, may be had for ;^6oo. A rectory in East Yorkshire, net income £yoo, " besides a large residence and garden," population under 1000, "within easy access of two or three seaside resorts," incumbent aged seventy- two, may be acquired for ;^2 2 5o, or three years' net income. A rectory in Herefordshire, net income £i^S^ population under 200, "situated in the most charming part " of that delightful county, incumbent aged sixty-seven, can be bought for under £yoo. A vicarage in Leicestershire, net income ^400, " large roomy residence, three reception and thirteen bed rooms, good stabling, coach-house, and large garden, incumbent aged seventy-four, can be bought for £1600, or four years' net income. There is a draw- back to this preferment, for the population is 5000, and " is growing rapidly ; " but for a sincere minister
A UNIQUE PROFESSION 439
of the Word, what ploasanter prospect, what more easily-purchased mdopendence can bo iiuagiued ? A rectory in a midland county, net income ^970, good residence on 5 acres of ground, incumbent aged sixty- three, is offered for ^5000, or about five years' net income. A rectory, net income ^165 and a residence, population under 200, incumbent aged seventy- four, is offered at ;^6oo ; and intending purchasers are advised that " some adjoining land (lay freehold)" surrounding the rectory " can and ought to be ac- quired " at the price asked for it, namely, -£^400.
The variety of choice offered is so astonishing that it seems as if presentations to livings worth from ^100 to ;^iooo a year were literally going a-begging. It is a considerable inducement to a man to send his son into the Church as a profession, when for an investment of ;^iooo he may procure for him a net income of from ;^330 to iJ^3 50, with a capital house, garden, and stabling, and the ex officio patronage of another living worth ;!^26o per annum, which might also be made a source of profit. In what other profession could one secure such a valuable property on the death of a man aged sixty-eight for ;^iooo? There must be something wrong with an institution which offers such plums as these to men of moderate means, when it finds a dearth of candidates for its ministry. In many parishes the income from tithe and glebe amounts to ^i, and in some cases £2, per head for every man, woman, and child of all denominations in the parish. Besides the net income from tithe, endow- ment, rent, and glebe, the voluntary offerings at church services are at the absolute disposal of the incumbent, the offertory at the communion service being the only money in the expenditure of which the churchwardens have a voice. In what other walk of life could a speculative professional man find such investments,
440 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
with almost immediate possession, an assured social standing, and no duties beyond a pleasant service on Sunday morning ? There are numbers of vicarages and rectories, with populations under 200, which must be complete sinecures for the holders, affording opportunities to unbeneficed priests able to raise ^1000 to acquire a respectable competence in all parts of England. But the pecuniary attractions are insignificant compared with the power over humanity, which goes with the benefice. It is a position calcu- lated to arouse the anxiety of all who are concerned for the country's dignity and welfare, that any man, with a small amount of money, should be able to purchase the right to take up religious control of the inhabitants of a given area of British soil, as the accredited representative of the State, or to confer that authority on his nominee, with the prerogative of directing the education of the children of the poor. A Christian cannot help speculating as to how Paul and Barnabas, " the apostles and elders, and the whole Church " at Jerusalem should express themselves, if they revisited the earth and beheld the money- making traffic carried on under the pretence that the sacerdotal merchants " can trace their genealogy up to the time of the Apostles in an unbroken line as certainly as any natural genealogy." Never, assuredly, at any time in the world's history, could greater power over Avomen and children be purchased by a designing man or woman for so small a price.
Ii^lsseU ik Sons, Baker Street, W.
Bishop Chavasse
" If wc, 650 clergy present here to-day, representina' mII orders of the ministry, were only, like our forefatliers, ready to live out tlie Word of God as they did," &c. (p. 458.)
Bassano, 25 Old Bond St.
Bishop Jayne
"Bishop Jayne acted 'smartly' in selectinij- a tiuotation from John Wesley as a stick with which to beat the troublesome laity in Birkenhead." (p. 494.)
To face p. 441
CHAPTER XVI
The Churchwardens— The Convocations — Their ancient powers— Their suspension and revival — The Houses of Laymen — ^The Diocesan Conferences — A travesty of representative government — The Liver- pool Diocesan Conference, 1903 — Messrs. Black & Green, Limited — St. Paul versus Bishop Chavasse.
When the patron of a living has presented his nominee, and the bishop has instituted him, the patron's autho- rity ceases ; and, if the produce of tithe, glebe, and other endowment constitute an ample salary, the con- gregation possess practically no control over the new- incumbent. If he has to eke out his income by pew- rents and offerings, he must at least be civil to the laity ; but there are so many clerical funds now from ( which he may receive grants, if he be of the High Church party, that, in the matter of ritual he usually does as he likes. He is invested with the freehold of the church, churchyard, glebe, tithe, and other endow- ment, and it is his prerogative to hold the keys.
Ancient parishes, as a rule, are coterminous with the old townships which existed before the creation of parishes. The churchwardens, who are supposed to represent the parishioners, are two in number, except where peculiar customs exist. But where an ancient parish has been divided into new ecclesiastical dis- tricts, each new division has its own churchwardens, though the ratepayers in every division of the ancient parish can vote for the wardens of the parish church. The qualification for a churchwarden is that he be a resident or property-holder in the parish. In ancient parishes, he need not be a worshipper at the church,
442 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
or even a member of the Church of England ; but in
new districts and churches built under the Peel Acts,
Lord Blandford's Act, and other statutes,-^ the wardens
must be members of the Church of England. Prior
to 1604, both wardens used to be elected by the
parishioners, and it is a startling fact that the laity
V '■"'' I wielded more control over the parish clergy before the
^ I the Reformation than they do at present. In churches
^^^ built since 1604, the incumbent has the right of
0J4J1 appointing one churchwarden; and hence only one of
the two wardens is now elected by the laity in the
majority of Anglican parishes. The second, or people's
churchwarden, as he is called, is therefore the sole
representative of the parishioners ; and, being in a
minority as against the incumbent and his church-
I warden, the position confers no power, and is one
which not many respectable ratepayers are willing to
accept.
Not only Nonconformists, but even Roman Catholics, are eligible as churchwardens of ancient parishes, and, if elected, they are bound to serve by deputy. Even a pauper is legally qualified— an interesting remnant of the original Christian character of the e/c/cX>/o-/a, when all the saints were what we should now call paupers.
The qualification to vote for churchwardens is regu- lated by statute,^ and consists in being a ratepayer in the parish and in having paid the last poor-rate. In new districts the qualification is the same, and it is ex- pressly enacted that one warden is to be appointed by the incumbent. In churches built under i and 2 William IV., the second warden is elected by the renters of pews. When a new church has had no district assigned to it, and there are no rented pews, the incumbent appoints
1 I & 2 Will. IV. c. 38 ; 6 & 7 Vict. c. 37 ; 7 & 8 Vict. c. 94 ; 19 & 20 Vict. c. 104.
2 58 Geo. III. c. 85 ; 16 & 17 Vict. c. 65.
CHURCHWARDENS' DUTIES 443
both clnirchwardens until the sittings are taken, or the church has got a district. The election of wardens takes place annually at Easter, the incumbent having the right to preside at the vestry meeting. In ancient parishes the voting is cumulative, rising from one to six votes, in proportion to rating. The election is decided by the chairman on a show of hands ; but any voter present, who is dissatisfied, may demand a poll of the parish, the expense, if any, falling on the incumbent ; and one of the overseers of the poor must attend free of cost with the rate-books. Elections for churchwardens excite very little public interest nowa- days, and the more quietly they are effected, the better pleased are the parish priests.
The churchwardens are bound, in theory, to provide for the service of the church and due administration of sacraments ; to supply " fine white bread and good wine" for the communion; preserve order, and, if necessary, remove by force persons interrupting the service ; take charge of church goods and utensils ; provide sitting accommodation ; dispose of the ordinary offertory at the communion service in conjunction with the incumbent; and summon vestry meetings. The priest now frequently provides himself with wafers of unleavened bread, and " sacramental " wine, at the cost of the parishioners ; holds several services and disposes of the collections as he thinks fit, and has a number of sacerdotal vestments and appliances whose custody is not entrusted to the wardens. The management of the choir, which is such a theatrical feature in ritualistic churches, is vested in the incumbent. There are legal fictions (i) that the organ belongs to the church- wardens, but that they cannot control the incumbent's use of it during service; and (2) that the church- wardens have the right to use the bells, but the in- cumbent keeps the keys of the belfry ! A few years
444 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ago, when Lord Pirbright, or, as he was better known, Baron de Worms, died, the incumbent, who was at variance with the parishioners, is said to have refused to let the bell be tolled in deference to the memory of the deceased; and the parishioners were reported to have held " a meeting in the local hall," at which they expressed " their indignation and disgust at such outrageous and un-Christian conduct," and " called upon the incumbent to tender his resignation."
The churchwardens are bound to make a formal presentment of anything irregular in the management of church and parish before going out of office; but, as this unpleasant duty would necessarily devolve on the people's churchwarden alone, it is not frequently undertaken. Under the Public Worship Regulation Act, 1874, one churchwarden may make a representa- tion to the bishop if ritual illegalities have been com- mitted by the incumbent; but the bishop has the power of summarily dismissing the plaint ; and, if he allows proceedings to be taken, the process of trial is so tedious and costly that the responsibility could only be undertaken by a very earnest man, or by an associa- tion. From 1874 to 1898, only twenty-three repre- sentations were made to bishops, and in seventeen cases the bishops refused to allow proceedings to be taken. Six were in the diocese of Canterbury, and all were refused.^ Under the Church Discipline Act of 1840, any one may take criminal proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts against an incumbent for illegal practices, and the churchwardens have no special rights.
Holding such a position of independence, drawing his tithe under the same title as the lord of the soil draws his rents, knowing that he can rely on the sup- port of his bishop in every effort to enhance the im- portance of the clerical profession, it is no wonder if ^ Parliamentary Return, 1899.
TYRANNY OF THE CONVOCATIONS 445
the Anglican incumbent is restive under even the semblance of control exercised by the parishioners through the solitary churchwarden. Neither is it to be wondered at that the sympathies of the parishioners are so frequently dried up, and that they feel no re- sponsibility in those cases of clerical distress which form so unenviable a feature in the economy of the Church of England.
The church-outing of the laity in the parishes is but the natural consequence of their immemorial exclusion from the convocations. During the long reign of the theologians, when bishops and priests were wealthier than all the rest of the population ; and for more than a century after their privileges had been cut down by the Reformation, convocation was a legislature and an executive, and its jurisdiction was co-ordinate with, if not superior to, parliament. It fixed the amount of the subsidies to be paid by the Church to the Crown — in other words, it regulated the taxation to be paid by the members of the clerical profession ; and it made the ecclesiastical laws to which all manner of people were subject. The priests were strong enough to force the Crown to summon convocation by a formal writ simultaneously with the national legislature ; and to exclude laymen from membership, while maintaining their own title to sit in parliament. They successfully resisted the right of the State to tax the clergy, while triumphantly asserting the right of the clergy to tax the State. On the pernicious principle that " what's yours is mine, but what's mine is my own," the Church gave the State no voice in the management of ecclesi- astical property, though that property consisted chiefly of religious taxation imposed on the public ; or in the framing of ecclesiastical laws, although these laws affected the whole population. But, at the same time, the Church insisted on having a predominant voice in
446 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
managing the national exchequer, framing the national laws, and regulating the national taxation. To such advantage did the theologians manipulate the doctrines of hell and purgatory.
It was not until 1664 that the Anglican bishops and priests, chastened by the lessons of the Cromwellian revolution, surrendered the right of voting their own " benevolences " to the Crown, and of taxing them- selves. The execution of Laud had produced as wholesome an effect on his pupil Sheldon, as that of Charles I. had produced on Charles II. But, despite their pretended reasonableness, those who were in- terested in maintaining the divine right of Stuart kings and Roman priests never ceased to conspire for the overthrow of constitutional government. There- fore, after the expulsion of James II. and the death of his daughter Anne, and when the Hanoverians were established on the throne under the Act of Settlement, the pretensions of this priests' legislature became an offence to the nation ; and in 1 7 1 7 the Crown ceased to issue writs for its meeting. For 135 years after that date, the country took no notice of convocation, which lost all its former authority, and even ceased to assemble. About the year 1850, however, when the desertions of Ward, Newman, Faber, and the other Anglican priests were giving joy to the Pope of Rome, it seems to have occurred to Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, and Henry Phillpotts, bishop of Exeter, that a good way of advertising the Church and diverting attention from the " papal aggression " of that year, would be to revive the annual meetings of convocation and pretend to the world that the Anglican hierarchy and priesthood were still an executive authority co- ordinate with parliament. The puerile subterfuge, worthy of the Oxford platitudinarian, was hailed by the priests as an inspiration; and, ever since 1852, the
THE CONVOCATIONS REVIVED 447
convocations of Canterbury and York have come to- gether pretentiously year after year at the assembling of parliament ; though they have not power even to amend a canon, or other ecclesiastical regulation, without the permission of the Crown acting on the advice of the Government. In 1861, the Canterbury convocation petitioned the Clrown for a licence to amend the 39th of the canons of 1603, referring to sponsors at baptism ; and, the licence being granted, an amendment of the canon was agreed upon by both convocations ; but the Government refused to allow it, because, as Sir Travers Twiss put it, the amendment would " cause greater perplexity to the clergy than the existing canon."
Although the clerical legislature had thus been rightly deprived, in 1664 and in 17 17, of its imperium in. imjjcrio and of the dominion which it wielded over the rest of the population, it might have been utilised as a historical foundation on which to build up a genuine system of representative government for the Anglican Church. But Wilberforce and Phillpotts had no such Christian or statesmanlike design. In their opinion, the highest privilege of the Anglican laity was " to listen and obey " their own bombastic mysticism, and contribute to their enrichment at Oxford and Exeter. Wilberforce, from 1852 to 1855, out-Puseyed Pusey in the intricacy of his poKtical plots. He had acquired a " mastery " over Lord Aberdeen, and was intriguing, as Dr. Tait says, " for Gladstone's succession to Aberdeen in the premiership as the sure way for resisting Liberalism in Church and State " !
Convocation had always been an ohgarchy, and Wilberforce was too enamoured of Romanism to alter an iota in this typical relic of the days of theological supremacy. There were two convocations; for, after all England and Wales had been united into one king-
448 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
dom with mfinite dijfficulty, the theologians continued to regard them as two kingdoms, or provinces, held in fief from the Pope of Rome. York had its convocation separate from Canterbury, and its territory consisted, as it still does, of England north of the Humber and the Dee ; while Canterbury included, as at present, the rest of England and all Wales. When Wolsey was archbishop of York, as the reader knows, scandalous struggles for precedence used to take place between him and Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, the pride of the wealthy upstart being well calculated to destroy any lingering belief in apostolical succession. Each convocation consisted of two " houses," as the divisions were grandiloquently called, the " upper house " beiug the bishops of the province, the " lower " consisting of certain representatives of the clergy. All power was concentrated in the episcopal and capitular oligarchs ; for, instead of the clergy freely electing the representatives to the lower house, the following rigid custom was, and is, in force: — (i) All deans and arch- deacons are ex-ojficio members; (2) every chapter has the right of electing a member; (3) the parochial in- cumbents, however numerous, have only the right of electing one or two members for each diocese in Canter- bury, and two members for each archdeaconry in York ; (4) the unbeneficed clergy are not represented. In the " lower " house of Canterbury the deans, arch- deacons, and capitular clergy have always outnumbered the representatives, or proctors as they are called, of the parochial clergy; but in York, where the system of two members for each archdeaconry obtains, the proctors of the parochial clergy outnumber the ex officio dignitaries.
The sacerdotal party contend that all Church re- forms should be initiated in convocation, and they disown every statute passed by parliament for the
CONVOCATION VERSUS PARLIAMENT 449
discipline of the Church. The Church Disciphno Act of 1840, the Pubhc Worship Regulation Act of 1874, and other subsidiary Acts are all under their ban because they have been passed by parliament. The Anglican clergy, therefore, find themselves in a posi- tion as untenable as it is absurd. The convocations meet concurrently with parliament, and reassemble several times while the legislature is in session, pre- tending that they are supreme governing bodies ; the bishops and dignitaries by their bombastic acts and utterances giving the clergy to understand that they are above the law of the land. The clergy, deceived by this unfounded pretension, unscrupulously break the statutes for the regulation of discipline and public worship, and disregard the legal decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ; and at regular intervals parliament is compelled, without con- sulting the convocations, and in response to the com- plaints of the church-outed laity, to appoint a royal commission or pass an Act recalling the clergy to their duties ; while every " snub " thus administered to clerical pretensions widens the gulf of separation be- tween the laity and the large tithe-drawers — that is, the bishops, dignitaries, and wealthy incumbents. The annual assemblies of Samuel Wilberforce's make-believe convocations, therefore, have done much to perpetuate the cleavage between the State priests and the citizens of all denominations.
The convocations are composed entirely of clerics ; but, in 1886, Archbishop Benson decided to create a body, external to convocation, and which he called a " house of laymen." This body had no rights, and its duties were confined to expressing its opinion on topics submitted to it by convocation, questions of ritual and doctrine being expressly excluded from those on which its opinion might be invited. It could not even
2 r
4SO CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
assemble except on the summons of the archbishop. A sufficient number of subservient laymen were found to constitute this " house of laymen " ; and, Benson's example being followed by the archbishop of York, a similar " house " was created for the northern province. A brief examination of the proceedings of the houses of laymen shows the class of " ecclesiastical laymen " who are invited to attend those assemblies — retired civil servants and military and naval officers ; country gentlemen with little to do ; aristocrats who believe that the Church helps to keep up the decreasing supply of indoor and outdoor servants ; the relatives of the clergy ; and those who make money by, or derive some social advantages from the Church.
At the Canterbury convocation, in February 1904, Bishop Talbot moved : " That in any legislation for the strengthening of the authority of the bishops, the proper method of initiating procedure is that the matter should be submitted to the convocations to be dealt with by the canons or otherwise before any legislative enactment is admitted." The clergy endorsed, and the house of laymen slavishly re-echoed this resolution, the result of which would be to undermine the existing settlement between Church and State, and re-establish an episcopal dictatorship. In May 1904 the house of bishops resolved that " such amendments may be in- troduced into the licensing bill as will more effectually lead to the reduction of licences throughout the country on equitable terms ; and, in the opinion of this house, it is essential to impose a time limit to such arrange- ments as may be made for compensation." This re- solution, voicing the close alliance between the Church and the liquor industry, was passed without question by the clergy and re-echoed by the house of laymen. Broadly speaking, the sign of the Church dignitary is wine, that of the Nonconformist is water; for the
THE HOUSES OF LAYMEN 451
tithe-drawer may relax, but the tithe-payer, who for conscience' sake maintains two churches, must brace himself to work.
Besides re-echoing everything submitted to it, the house of laymen passed some abstract resolutions in- spired by their clerical superiors. Colonel Everitt moved, and Bishop Talbot's brother, Mr. J. G. Talbot, M.P. for Oxford university, seconded a motion, " That his grace the archbishop be respectfully requested to take such steps as may seem best to promote a more general observance of the substance of the rubrics con- cerning the ministration of public baptism." Every resolution passed by the laymen, that is not an echo of one already passed in convocation, is an appeal to the archbishop to do something. The archbishop seems to be in the position of an idol to whom these " laymen " are continually addressing petitions, and he appears to receive their appeals with equal placidity or indifference — which is the chief virtue of idols. One batch of laymen, or "lithmen," including Mr. T. F. Victor Buxton, Lord Clinton, Mr. Sidney Gedge, Sir John Ken- naway, M.P., Colonel R. Williams, M.P., and Dr. Edwin Freshfield, were elected members of the Canterbury board of commissioners. Another batch, consisting of Mr. G. F. Chambers (Chester), Mr. W. S. De Winton (St. David's), Colonel H. Everitt and Mr. Sidney Gedge (London), Sir Arthur P. Heywood (Southwell), and the Marquis of Salisbury (Rochester), were appointed "a committee to consider the question of restoring an order of readers, or sub-deacons, in the Church." Sir H. R. Fairfax-Lucy moved, and the Marquis of Salisbury seconded : " That in any proceedings instituted by a bishop in the interests of the discipline of the Church the prosecution expenses should be borne by the ecclesiastical commissioners." Everything they do is in the interests of the bishops and sacerdotal profession.
45 2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
They also passed a resolution proclaiming " the urgent need of a higher supply of duly qualified candidates for holy orders " ; lamenting " the further decrease in the numbers of those who present themselves " ; and de- claring " that in every diocese an organisation should be established under the direction of the bishops for the purpose of bringing before young men the needs of the Church in this respect, and making inquiries for suit- able candidates, and of providing assistance for those whose means are insufficient to procure the necessary training." Despite the excellent career which the Church offers to those who possess the peculiar quali- fications for success in the clerical profession, young men of talent cannot be induced to take holy orders, the spirit of the times forbidding them to submit to the mental deformation almost necessarily involved in an ecclesiastical education.
In the York house of laymen, over which Viscount Cross presided, Mr, W. Sheepshanks moved and Mr. Dart seconded : " That the attention of the archbishop be called " to the non-attendance of members, and that any member who did not attend for two years be struck off the list. Even this simple step, affecting the order of their own house, had to assume the form of an appeal to the archbishop. Mr. T. C. Horsfall, in the absence of Sir Francis Powell, M.P., moved a resolution expressing " an earnest hope that the Education Act of 1902 be administered in a fair spirit throughout the country," and deprecating " the existence of any scheme calculated to prejudice the condition of non-provided schools or such securities for religious teaching as now exist " — a clerically-inspired sentiment with which readers are familiar — and Mr. J. G. C. Parsons, supported by Mr. W. T. Fullagar, added a rider " urging Churchmen to furnish adequate financial assistance towards repairs, alterations, and building of Church
DOGMATIC THEOLOGY 45 3
schools." Mr. C. Tlodson Fowler moved thai " his grace the archbishop bo asked to issue orders " that " the election of members be conducted ou the same system in each diocese, and sliould be by voting pajiers." It seems incredible tliat such a farcical system of lay repre- sentation should exist in connection with an institution which receives such avast sum of public money as the Church of England. A committee was appointed to consider the mode of election of parochial representa- tives, subject " to the orders of his grace," and con- sisting of Lord Cross, Sir F. S. Powell, M.P., Lord Feversham, Sir William Worsley, Sir Edward Russell, and Mr. W. D. Hollis. Piesolutions were passed calling for more generous support to the Church training colleges ; approving of pensions for the clergy ; and declaring that " all branches of mission work form an essential part of the work of the Church," should get " adequate financial support," and be under the " systematic administration and direction of the Church as a body," — that is to say, under the man- agement of the bishops, for the " lithmen " have no status in the " Church," though they have a con- siderable voice in the management of many missionary societies of which it would be most desirable to deprive them. It was also resolved that an increased episcopate was " one of the most pressing needs of the Church of England," and parliament was " urged to pass the Southwark and Birmingham bishoprics bill."
Meantime the bishops, who hold the purse-strings, were busying themselves with dogmatic theology. At the Canterbury convocation Bishop Gore moved, " That this house (the bishops) is determined to maintain unimpaired the Catholic faith in the Holy Trinity and the Holy Incarnation as contained in Apostles' and Nicene Creeds and in the Qaimnquc Vult ; and regards the faith thus presented, both in statement and doctrine
454 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and fact, as the necessary basis on which the teaching of the Church reposes." But the resolution added, in Puseyite style, that, " believing the phraseology of the minatory clauses is open to serious objection," his grace the archbishop should be respectfully requested to appoint a committee to consider how the present use of the Quicunque VuU might be modified. The Athanasian Creed, or Quicimque VuU, is " the Catholic faith," and the necessary basis of Anglican Church " teaching " ; but the clause, " This is the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved," must be modified, so that the creed may be at once necessary and unnecessary to salvation, as Pasey's haircloth Avas required to be at once painful and painless. The house of priests passed a resolution : " That a committee be appointed to report upon the present methods of anti-Christian propaganda and the literature circulated in aggressive attacks upon the Christian faith and morals." This is one of the stereotyped resolutions passed at meetings of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops ; but many earnest Christians believe that the most damaging attacks made upon Christian faith and morals in England are those delivered by some of the bishops and priests who dominate the convocations.
There are a number of other so-called representative bodies connected with the Church, which elect the houses of laymen, and, like them, are in the nature of literary and debating societies. They pass abstract resolutions on subjects submitted to them for their employment by the bishops and priests, and they are called diocesan conferences. The same actors, whom we have met in convocations and houses of laymen will be found playing slightly different parts in these conferences, of which there is one for each diocese, composed of clerics and laymen, and presided
DIOCESAN CONFERENCES 455
over by the bishops. Just as the houses of laymen only exist by the will of the archbishops, so the con- ference in each diocese may only meet when summoned by the bishop. These conferences have no power over doctrine or ritual, Church government or finances, and do little more than debate the topics transmitted by the convocations. In 1904, for instance, the sub- jects dealt with were the increase of the episcopate and subdivision of dioceses ; education of candidates for holy orders ; reunion of Christendom ; home missions and evangelisation work ; foreign missions ; community life in sisterhoods and brotherhoods ; furtherance of the spiritual life and work of the Church ; elementary education ; catechising in Sunday schools; lay representation and co-operation; free and open churches ; social questions ; observance of Sunday and holy seasons ; church institutes for young men and women ; gambling and betting ; liquor traffic and native races ; purity ; pure literature ; deceased wife's sister's bill ; friendly societies ; spiritual provision in work- houses ; old age pensions ; emigration ; Church defence ; Church in Wales ; reform of convocation ; and Church patronage. Formal resolutions were passed, calculated to prevent rather than accelerate reform in any of the important matters mentioned.
If the houses of laymen are helpless and subservient, much originality or independence is not to be expected in assemblies composed of clerics and laymen. The process of appeal to the archiepiscopal idols is there- fore the rule. The Canterbury conference, for instance, passed a resolution " that the president (Archbishop Davidson) be respectfully requested, in concord with the archbishop of York, to form a committee for the consolidation of the education organisation in each diocese, and especially for the formation of a common fund for the alteration, repair, and enlargement of the
456 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
schools in each diocese." This was evoked by the objections made by county councils to the unsanitary condition of the Church schools.
The Oxford conference was held in the Sheldonian Theatre, and began with holy communion (fasting) at 8 A.M. in the cathedral or chapel of Christ Church college, and ended with a conversazione in the dining hall.
The London conference resolved " that the present disunion among Christians is a matter for deepest regret, and is a call to earnest prayer to the Head of the Church that all may be one " ; but it said nothing about St. Botolj)h's, Bishopsgate. Such a call to prayer is misleading ; for there must be antagonism between Christians and priests, and between diti'erent varieties of sacrificers ; but there is no disunion amongst Chris- tians who live the Christ-like life.
At the Truro conference, Bishop Gott, ex- vicar of Leeds, had a motion passed deploring " the fall in the country's birth-rate during the last twenty-five years," and suggesting to the Home Secretary " the importance of taking such precautions as shall make impossible the advertisement and sale of those immoral means by which the birth-rate is reduced."
In dioceses where evangelicalism is strong, and lay- men are likely to take an interest in Church matters, and, indeed, on many other pretexts, the annual diocesan conference is often omitted. If one of these conferences might be expected to be a reality anywhere, it would be in Liverpool, which contains a Protestant community full of energy ; and, chancing to be in the great seaport in October 1903, 1 attended the diocesan conference there. Invitations had been sent to almost all the representative men in the city, many of them, needless to say, not being members of the Church of England ; and most of them, including Messrs. David Maclvor, M.P. ; Charles M'Arthur, M.P. ; K
THE CHURCH IN LIVERPOOL 457
Pilkingtoii, M.P.; W. Watson Rutherford, M.P., lord mayor; W. Hall Walker, M.P.; Sir John A. Willox, M.P. ; Sir Edward Lawrence ; and the mayors of Bootle, Southport, St. Helens, and Warrington/ sent apologies for non-attendance.
The financial statement, submitted by Mr, T. F. A. Agnew, illustrates the unimportant character of these conferences and the wisdom of those who pleaded inability to attend. The conference had not met in 1902, because the bishop could not find time to pre- side; and, therefore, the financial statement for 1901 — 1903 was now presented. "The balance in hand in 1 90 1 was £2^, I IS. 6d., and during the two years the total receipts had amounted to ^128, 2s. 4d., and the payments to £6^, 17s. id." Out of the many hundreds of thousands of pounds subscribed for Church purposes in the diocese of Liverpool in those two years, this diocesan conference only handled a sum amount- ing to about a pound a week. Bishop Chavasse, who presided, opened the proceedings by saying that he did not intend to summon a conference in the follow- ing year, 1904, or in the next year 1905 ; and, there- fore, that he would not have the pleasure of seeing his auditors again for three years; and he candidly added that " those breaks were not, in his opinion, likely to diminish the usefulness of the conference " !
Bishop Chavasse, who, like Bishop Knox of Man- chester, was an evangelical before preferment, credit- ably took no part in the absurd Whit-week excursion from Manchester to London, in 1906, which so falsely posed as representative of all Lancashire, when in reality it was composed of the most insignificant human items of a single city that had shown its contempt for Bishop Knox's views on education, a few months previously, by dismissing Mr. A. J. Balfour and
^ Liverpool Courier, October 21, 1903.
458 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
its other conservative members. Before he became a bishop, Dr. Chavasse was, perhaps, the most effective speaker among the evangeUcal clergy. I remember once hoAv fittingly he censured the degeneracy of the Anglican '' priests," and gloried in being one of the many evangelicals who were overlooked by the dis- pensers of high patronage. " To-day cries are heard from our ranks," he exclaimed, " which would have sounded strange indeed in the ears of those mighty and unworldly men of old . . . complaints that prime ministers overlook us, that bishops ignore us, that society looks down upon us. . . . So long as this is our temper God cannot use us. . . . If we, 650 clergy present here to-day, representing all orders of the ministry, were only, like our forefathers, ready to live out the Word of God as they did, the English people might yet be won for our Lord Jesus Christ ! " ^ Within a few years after that speech, three of the evangelicals present at its delivery received the pre- ferment Avhich seemed hopelessly out of their reach ; Dr. Chavasse, then principal of Wickliffe Hall, Oxford, becoming bishop of Liverpool ; Dr. W. H. Barlow, then vicar of Islington, becoming dean of Peter- borough ; and Dr. Knox, then suffragan to the bishop of Worcester, becoming bishop of Manchester.
But it was almost as hard to discover the Mr. Chavasse of 1898 in the bishop of Liverpool of 1903, as it is to discover the Christian humility of the late suffragan of Worcester in the present bishop of Manchester.
Discussing the Education Act of 1902, which, it appears, he regarded as a monument to the legislative genius of Bishop Knox's predecessor. Bishop Moor- house, Dr. Chavasse said he " viewed with real regret the policy of passive resistance," which, he believed, was fomented by those who were " secretly aiming at
^ Times, January 12, 1898 ; speech at the Islington conference.
DR. CHAVASSE ON DR. TEMPLE 459
the disestablishment and partial disendowment of the Church of Enoiand." Here we find the same in-
O
criminatint; admission which runs through every speech made by the clericals against the Education Bill of 1906, namely, that if the control of the children of the poor be lost to the Anglican priests, the establishment and endowment of the Church cannot subsist. Having condemned the Noncon- formists and accused them of ulterior motives, Bishop Chavasse forsook his evangelical straightforwardness and took refuge in Puseyism. "We are to bear in mind," he exclaimed, " what I may call the dying wish of Archbishop Temple, Avhich he was about to declare in his last speech in the House of Lords, on December 5, 1902, when he was stricken for death, and which our present archbishop, then bishop of Winchester, brought as a last message from his death- bed." Dr. Temple had fainted while delivering his speech, and Dr. Davidson read the following message from him to the house : " The most reverend primate desires that the last word of his speech should be such an appeal on behalf of those who, while not belonofinu' to the Church, are as much entitled to their religious convictions as any of ourselves, any of your lordships, any of those who are sending their children to a Church school, being themselves Churchmen; and to beg that every possible endeavour might be made by us who are responsible in these schools, for removing difficulties whenever that can possibly be done." Such a message was as worthless as it was equivocal, and was no more than to say in efiect : "We, the sacerdotal party, are now strong ; our friends are in power ; we are passing an Act for our own financial relief and to confirm our supremacy over education ; let us profess consideration to those who do not believe in us, if that can possibly he donc^
46o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Bishop Cliavasse admitted the lack of rej)resentative government in the Church ; and, if mere speech could mend the matter, he should deserve the title of a reformer, anxious, in his own words, to " help forward the reform of convocation ; the admission of the laity to a more adequate share in the government of the Church ; and the abolition of the clerical and episcopal freehold." It is a pity that Bishop Chavasse does not devote himself to achieving all these blessings ; for he would, in doing so, accomplish more for Christianity in England than if he built a dozen cathedrals. He admitted the scandals connected with the sale of livings, but said they " could not remove anomalies " " nor abolish such scandals ; " and, as if the multiplica- tion of bishops would mend the matter, he exclaimed : " We cannot add a single bishop to our already over- worked episcopate without ruinous expenditure, infinite labour, and irritating delays."
Bishop Chavasse, instead of doing anything to help on the necessary reforms which he enumerated, was dipping deep into the pockets of Liverpool Church folk, and even soliciting money from Nonconformists for an architectural work of considerable cost ; and he reminded his audience that " the cathedral scheme had steadily advanced. The site had been purchased and the plans had been selected." The conference had not eifected the purchase or selected the plans ; and the bishop told the members their only privilege in plain words: "Once more," he exclaimed, "I would remind the faithful sons and daughters of the English Church that this great work can only be brought to a successful issue by a long, patient, and self-denying effort !" No less than ;^i 80,000 had been "promised or subscribed " ; but episcopal wisdom had decided that " an additional ;£^2 0,000 should be raised before the building was commenced." One of the reasons
THE LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL 461
was that thoy were living in " a time of waning trade, of falling dividends, of political uncertainty and un- rest." " To me it seems fitting," said the bishop, " that the Church of England should in such a moment declare her unshaken faith in God " ! " When loud and confident voices are telling us that Christianity is played out and that Christ is dead and gone, that the Church has had her day and that the age needs a newer and a more enlightened creed, we, by the building of this cathedral, affirm our belief in the only and eternal Christ, and raise a new witness for Him." This might well have been said by the Spanish or early Norman bishops ; but it is not the language of a Christian. Is a costly temple better than a good life ? Is it better to pile up stone and mortar at great cost than to " live out the Word of God " without importuning citizens for money ? Did Christ ever suggest that a temple should be built as a witness of Himself ? If temples were of any avail, the rehgions of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome should have been immortal. Was not Christianity a revolt against temples, and was it not by its virtue and simplicity that it conquered the Roman empire ? When it began to build temples for itself, did it not cease to be Christianity and begin to decay ; and wherever cathedrals are grandest and most numerous, is it not there that the Christian virtues are least practised ?
Bishop Chavasse has a " little Ireland " in Liver- pool before his eyes. Let him contemplate the magnificence of its monasteries and convents, filling up whole streets and districts, larger than the greatest factories and warehouses ; let him walk through the squalid districts inhabited by the constituents of Mr. T. P. O'Connor, and ask himself what has the archi- tecture of priestcraft done for them. If Bishop Chavasse has to lament the " divisions, difficulties, disappoint-
462 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ments, mistakes, failures, and falls " in the public life of the Church, he cannot say that these misfortunes were caused by any lack of ornate ecclesiastical architecture. His demands on the laity, who have no voice in the government of the Church, were considerable. After admitting that the recent census of attendance at Church on Sunday in Liverpool " was not pleasant reading for English Churchmen," he said he wanted " fifty-five additional clergy, twenty new churches, besides those which are at present being built, fifty vicarage houses, and twenty-five mission churches and parish halls " ; also ecclesiastical seminaries, in which to train up the class of parson who has been keeping so many sensible, respectable people away from church. " Our greatest need is a larger staff of clergy," he said, " and an attempt is being made to meet the need by establishing seminaries into which lads of humble birth are drafted early in their 'teens to be trained for the ministry." A larger hostel was now wanted to house them up away from the world. The respect- able youth everywhere are in revolt against priestcraft as a profession ; and the Anglican hierarchy labour under the same difficulties as their Roman colleagues, who are drawing upon orphanages, reformatories, in- dustrial schools, and even poorhouses, for their supply of priests. Having advocated the cause of theological seminaries conducted on the Roman model, he pro- ceeded to condemn them, just as Canon Pusey would have done ; declaring that such institutions tend " to create a clerical caste," " to rear a body of clergy who, isolated in their youth from the life of the world, are apt to grow up out of sympathy with the laity," " to narrow a man's outlook and to beget a species of forced and hothouse religion," and " in the long run to lower the ministry in the eyes of the people " ! That is the proved result of the theological seminary system in
"THE WHOLE-HEARTED LAITY" 463
Ireland and in Roman countries abroad, yet Bishop Chavasse proposes to adopt the policy in Liverpool, and seems to think that, by specilying its evil results, he is absolved from all the consequences. He suggested that a sectarian hostel should be founded for Church of England students attending lectures in Liverpool university, and " that a post-graduate theological course should be provided by this hostel " ; and said he trusted " the day will come when the authorities of St. Aidan's will see their way to affiliate their college to the university of Liverpool, and arrange an under- graduate and post-graduate course." St. Aidan's is a theological college across the Mersey near Birkenhead, in the diocese of Chester and under the control of Bishop Jayne.
Having thus given a resume of all the important Church business which was being done in the diocese without the co-operation of the diocesan conference, with its revenue of twenty shillings per week, Bishop Chavasse proceeded to make a brief reference to that useful chattel of the Church Avhich the divines call " the laity." " I believe," he said, " that no Church in the world has such a reserve of latent strength as the Church of England possesses in her laity ; and one of the Church's great hopes for the future lies in the wise and widespread use of the whole-hearted laity in the Church's work." The strength of the laity in the Church may, perhaps, exist as a " latent " force ; it assuredly is not visible. Indeed, the priest and the layman may be likened to two partners, one of whom absolutely controls all the business of the firm. He alone signs the cheques ; he alone can give a valid receipt ; he alone engages and dismisses the employes ; he alone directs the advertising department ; and, in in a word, is authorised to act as if he were the sole proprietor.
464 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Suppose the firm be called " Black & Green, Limited;" Black being the predominant partner and Green being the dormant partner. Let us imagine a scene in the office of such a firm, and we shall behold a perfect representation of the management of the Church of England. Behold Black, the ecclesiastic, luxuriously seated before his well-appointed desk, a telephone at his right, a phonograph at his left, numerous secre- taries, contractors, and aspirants to preferment, waiting deferentially for instructions. His right hand is busy in signing cheques in the intervals between directions to departmental heads, dictations into the phonograph, and conversations on the telephone. Let us imagine the other partner Green, the layman, occasionally ad- mitted into the office, but always conducted to a seat in a distant corner whence he may admire the general- ship of Black, who condescendingly offers him a copy of the Morning Advertiser, the Liverpool Mercury, or Ally Sloper, to employ his pigmy intellect when he grows tired of being astonished at the generalship of the predominant partner. Let us furthermore imagine that Green draws no profits whatever from the con- cern, but that half the revenue is being supplied by him, while the other half is compulsorily extracted from outsiders who disapprove of the firm, refuse to deal with it, and do not even read its reports. Let us suppose Green to be furnished with a yearly statement in which the robust vigour of the firm is dilated upon by Black ; but from which it appears that not only are all the profits absorbed in paying Black's salary and supporting all Black's relatives in luxury, but that more capital — as, for instance, for the Liverpool cathedral — is constantly demanded from Green for the maintenance of the business. And let us imagine that the concluding paragraph of the firm's annual report is couched by Black in the terms employed by
MR. BLACK AND MR. GREEN 465
Bishop Chavassc : " I buliove that no firm in the world has such a reserve of latent strength as the firm of Black & Green, Limited, possesses in Mr. Green, and one of the firm's groat hopes for the future lies in the wise and widespread use of whole-hearted Mr. Green in the firm's work " ! If we can realise Green's feelings on reading such a sentence from the pen of Black, we may understand how a thoughtful Churchman would take a bishop's encomium on the "' usefulness " of the laity.
It is evident that the most useful purpose fulfilled by diocesan conferences is to supply Mr. Black with a platform on which to proclaim his superiority over Mr. Green. On the second day of this conference,^ Mr. Black and Mr. Green indulged in some harmless conversation. Rev. T. K. Dickson read a paper on " Loyalty to the Prayer Book," in which he is reported to have enunciated the unscriptural doctrine that " there is a general priesthood of the laity and a special priesthood of the clergy." Archdeacon Taylor said, " it was notorious that they were suffering from un- happy divisions, which were lamented by all parties in the Church." Rev. John Wakeford said, " it seemed a remarkable thing that four speakers should have dealt with this subject of loyalty to the prayer book without having referred to his church, St. Mar- garet's, Anfield, as a place where they were absolutely loyal to the prayer book " — the naive statement being received with laughter and applause. Mr. Wakeford, whose name is " writ large " in the Church Associa- tion's " Ritualistic Clergy List," '" commended the direc- tions in the prayer book as to fasting, and " dared to say that an appeal from the Church's ruling to a State court was treachery to the Church of England, and appeal from the words of Christ to any courts
' Liverpool Courier, October 22, 1903. ^ Third Edition, 1903.
2 G
466 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of law was blasphemy " ! Bishop Chavasse did not dissociate himself from Mr. Wakeford's definition of " treachery," but "thought, for the credit of Englishmen, he ought to say that he did not think on any single occasion had an Englishman appealed from the words of our Lord Jesus Christ to a court of law." Mr. Wakeford said, " he was in entire agreement with his lordship."
Mr. Manning, curate of St. Chrysostom's, thereupon arose and solemnly asserted that " in St. Margaret's parish " — that is, Mr. Wakeford's parish, whose loyalty to the prayer book was made a subject of clerical jocosity — " a case had been brought under his (Mr. Manning's) notice of a young child being driven nearly crazy by being told that it could not be confirmed unless it was brought to confession " !
" I contradict that absolutely,' cried Mr, Wakeford.
" I must ask you, Mr. Manning, to withdraw that statement, and to abstain from personalities in future," cried Bishop Chavasse.
Mr. Manning said, " in obedience to his lordship's commands he at once withdrew the remark. . . . He did not wish to make a personal attack on any one, but he thought that, after what had been said, it was important to bring forward what had been asserted to him so solemnly and painfully just lately."
The subject was dropped, for " the Church" had no desire to discuss such professional business in the presence of laymen ; and the meeting passed on to other matters. Mr. Brighouse, a layman, said " they believed in the Bible notwithstanding all the critics," the declaration being received with loud clerical laughter. But the speaker, unabashed, went on to say that " the thirty-nine articles constituted the marching orders of the Church of England, and ought, therefore, to be adhered to." Rev. T. C. Brockman drew Bishop Chavasse into the net of sacerdotalism by
"CATHOLIC-MINDED PRIESTS" 467
saying, " he believed he was but speaking the truth when he said that Cathohc-minded priests of the Church of England in his lordship's diocese had never yet declined to accept his lordship's ruling in regard to any one of the services of the Church " — a state- ment which was received with cries of protest. Canon WilHs, " as a High Churchman, felt that the omission of weekly celebrations," coupled with " the practice of evening communions, exercised the minds of some so much that they were inclined to leave the union of the English Church for that of Rome." Councillor R. Dart, declared himself " strongly in favour of evening communion, which he earnestly trusted would not be abolished." Bishop Chavasse closed the discussion by saying something to please both sides. People were leaving the Church on the one hand, because there was too much ritualism, and, on the other hand, " because they could not obtain the provision which the Church of England said should be provided for them — because there w^as no weekly communion, no daily services, no saints' day services"! He seemed to be imbued with the commercial spirit and the desire to retain the support of the ritualists, rather than with the Christian spirit, or the anxiety to do what was right and leave the result to providence.
The subject of Sunday-trading being brought for- ward for discussion, the laity became interested, and a Mr. Roberts " strongly condemned Sunday riding in trams, especially on the part of clergymen, remarking that he thought it was just as bad for a clergyman to pay the corporation a penny for a tram ride as for a labourer's wife to pay a poor woman a penny for a cabbasre. He "svas also scandalised," he said, " to see the advertisements in the papers announcing the
CELEBRATION OF THE HOLY EUCHARIST, and the fact
that ' ALL TRAMS STOP HERE ! ' " After the explosion of
468 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
such a borab-shell, the clerics were forced to take up new ground ; and Rev. Mr. Bell referred to " the increase of Sunday labour at the docks. . . . He had seen a combine ship working with a full gang of men on a Sunday, the reason being that the combine found it difficult to make a dividend if they allowed any of their ships to lie up the whole of Sunday." No Christian will be found to support the custom of working on the sabbath ; but there are certain trades in which work must be done on Sundays ; and those who know Liverpool must be aware that such occur- rences cannot be avoided, as long as the casual labour system prevails. Droves of men will be standing idle to-day, sheltering themselves under the elevated rail- way, and to-morrow the same men will be working like galley-slaves. Under such circumstances men dare not refuse to work on Sunday ; nor, owing to the keenness of competition, can the shipping com- panies be censured. Masters as well as men must " straightway " pull their ox out of the pit even on the sabbath day ; the sabbath being made for them as well as for the rest of mankind, not they for the sabbath.
Bishop Chavasse intervened in the discussion, saying, " Our Lord gave two great utterances with regard to the sabbath." The first was that the sabbath was made for man. But that text, which might have suited the Dr. Chavasse of 1898, apparently was not sufficient to meet the case of a bishop. He, therefore, quoted Christ's famous sarcasm on the Jewish priests : " The priests profane the sabbath and are blameless " ! He admitted that he used trains and trams on Sunday, which he had never done until he came to Liverpool. But he — at one time an evangelical minister of the Word — was now a high-priest ; and he announced, in express terms for the second time, that " he sheltered
CHRIST AND THE PRIESTS 469
himself under his divine Lord's permission, ' The priests profane the sabbath and are blameless.' " ^ Not once but twice he ranged himself with Joseph Caiaphas and the other priests of that day who hated Christ, and to whom our Lord alluded. Now, to offer sacrifice on the sabbath day was not considered " profanity " under the old law. But our Lord is said to have called the sacri- ficial rites of the priests a profanation of the sabbath ; and, under the new dispensation, those profanities were abolished. It is noteworthy that the word " profane " does not seem to have been applied by Christ to any other work said to have been done on the sabbath, either healing, or pulling oxen out of pits, or letting cattle loose to exercise and drink, or doing good, or saving life."^ It was when speaking of the sabbath ritual of the priests that Jesus exclaimed with scathing irony to the Pharisees, " Have ye not read in the law how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple PFtO- FANE the sabbath and are blameless ? " That was His answer to those " whited sepulchres " ; and it clearly conveys His contemptuous estimate of the ritual of the priests. " Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision, and ye on the sabbath day circumcise a man," ^ said Jesus, in reference to another abhorrent sacerdotal rite which, under the Christian dispensation, has been dis- continued. It therefore seems inexplicable to me that a Christian minister should construe Christ's allusion to the Jewish priests as establishing a rule of conduct for himself.
Coleridge says of St. Paul that '•' his manners were the finest of any man's upon record " ; and the highest praise he could give an English bishop whom he admired was to say of him : " He seems to have been a thorough gentleman upon the model of St. Paul." This tribute could never be paid to a bishop who
^ Matthew xii. 5. - Luke vi. and viii. ' John vii. 22.
470 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
"sheltered himself" under the mantle of Jewish sacri- ficers like Ananias, " the high priest " who briefed Tertullus to prosecute the apostle before " the most noble " Felix, the governor, " We have found this man a pestilent fellow," ^ said the priest's advocate. St. Paul was absolutely free from the priest-vice, and a " gentleman " in the truest sense of that abused word. What Christian can ever forget the episode at Lystra ? He and Barnabas had fled from Iconium to escape the hostility of the " unbelieving Jews " and Gentiles, whose minds were " evil affected against the brethren." Those two early teaching ministers of the Christians were flying, as Dante said :
"Barefoot and lean Eating their bread, as chanced, at the first table." ^
They came to a place called Lystra, where Paul cured a cripple, and " when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, ' The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.' And they called Barnabas, Jupiter ; and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker." ^ Though Lystra was a small town, it was well supplied with priests ; and when it was rumoured that Jupiter had honoured the town with his presence, the chief priest of that deity at once put himself in evidence, and got ready to exercise his trade. Eagerly endorsing the popular infatuation that the strangers were gods, he prepared to offer sacriflce to them. If Paul were a shrewd rationalist or a mean time-server, he could scarcely have resisted the tempta- tion at a time when a little flattering incense, a brief term of physical comfort, would have been most grate- ful. But when Paul understood the object of the priest and the priest-ridden mob, he and Barnabas
^ Acts xxiv. 5. "^ "Paradise," Canto xxiv. ^ Acts xiv, 11-12.
IF PAUL NOW LIVED 471
" rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out, and saying, ' Sirs, why do ye these things ? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that arc therein.' " There is no act recorded of St. Paul which is more consoling to the Christian, or which shows the apostle in a finer light than this disclaimer of all sacerdotal craft.
We cannot conceive St. Paul attending this diocesan conference at Liverpool, and drawing a distinction be- tween himself as " priest " and the other Christians of the city of Liverpool. We may rather say assuredly that, if Paul now lived, there would be no such word in use amongst Christians as " priest " and no such word as "layman"; but all should be "brethren," provided only that they believed in Christ and lived virtuously.
From the foregoing sketch it is evident (i) that the servility which the patronage system breeds in aspirants for preferment tends to produce a correspond- ing amount of arrogance, when the coveted post has been obtained; (2) that, while the churchwardens pos- sess duties and responsibilities, they have no effective authority ; and (3) that the houses of laymen and diocesan councils do not participate in the govern- ment of the Church, being mere debating societies, and by no means entitled to be called representative assemblies — a deficiency for which a pretended remedy has been devised which will be discussed in the next chapter.
CHAPTER XVII
The Representative Church Council — Preliminary meetings — Excessive power of the archbishops— Helplessness of the laity — First regular session — Undistinguished attendance — Debates on the council's constitution — Revolutionary outbursts of Church dignitaries not followed by action — - Ineffectual protests by laymen — Triumph of sacerdotalists — The lay franchise fixed on religious basis — Bishops differ, but prelacy always wins — Revolt of the church- outed in Cheshire — Bishop Jayne mobbed at Birkenhead.
The houses of laymen having been tried for sixteen years and found entirely innocuous, a fresh suggestion was made in 1902 for a "Representative Church Council," consisting of clerics and laymen, it being admitted on all sides that the existing arrangements gave the laity no voice in Church government. When this scheme was broached, many students of Anglican politics believed that it meant the establishment of representative government in the Church ; but we now find we were mistaken. From 1902 to 1904 the pro- posal was brooded over by the bishops and dignitaries from whom it emanated. In 1903 there was a joint meeting of the convocation clergy and the houses of laymen, which outlined a constitution for the new body; and it was respectfully resolved : " That, with a view to providing a lay element in the proposed council, it is desirable that the archbishops should continue to summon houses of laymen pending any further legis- lation on the subject," which was a humble acknow- ledgment that the houses of laymen only existed by the grace of the archbishops. It was decided (i) that the lay franchise should be the same as that for vestry- men, namely, payment of the poor-rate : and (2) that the first meeting of the new council should be sum-
SOME ECCLESIASTICAL LAYMEN 473
monod, and even its agenda settled, by the archbishops. The committee which drew up the constitution of the council consisted of four bishops ; a dean ; an arch- deacon ; two " ecclesiastical laymen " — namely, Sir Lewis Dibdin, dean of arches, auditor of the chancery court of York, and master of the faculties, and Mr. P. V. Smith, LL.D., chancellor of the dioceses of Manchester and Durham; and one independent out- sider, Sir Edward Russell, editor of the Liverpool Fost. The joint committee declared that " the constitution of the house of laymen" in the representative council was " a matter which must be decided by the houses of laymen and the archhisJiojJs hy whose ivill they ccist " ! In February 1904, Archbishop Davidson, presiding over the convocation of Canterbury, moved a resolution " respectfully requesting " himself and Archbishop Maclagan to summon a meeting of the new council in July 1904, "if parliament be then in session." The resolution was also passed by the house of priests ; and the house of laymen re-echoed it. The official report says that " his grace, accompanied by some of their lordships the bishops, entered and addressed the house (of laymen) upon the subject of the representative church council, and, after they had withdrawn, Mr. P. V. Smith, LL.D., moved, and it was agreed, ' that the question put before the house by his grace be voted
urgent.
A body called the Central Council of Diocesan Con- ferences, met in June 1 904 ; and, on the motion of Sir Theodore Hope, a retired Indian civil servant, seconded by Mr. Athelstan Riley, one of the most active advocates of a reunion with Rome, passed a resolution " that the payment of rates was a qualifi- cation totally unsuitable as a basis for the initial church franchise in the proposed national or repre- sentative church council," the word " national " being
474 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
used in the sectarian sense already explained. The object of the sacerdotal party was to prevent the lay councillors from being elected on a genuine popular franchise.
The council met on July 7 and 8, 1904, a few- months after the appointment of the royal com- mission to inquire into the ritual disorders prevalent in the Church, and the gathering consisted of four contingents of clerical representatives, namely, the two houses of bishops and the two houses of priests of both convocations ; and of two contingents of lay representatives, namely, the two houses of laymen.
The agenda prepared by Archbishop Davidson con- sisted of resolutions on (i) the licensing bill then before parliament ; (2) a proposal to transfer glebe lands en bloc, not to the new council, but to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners ; (3) the admission of women to the initial franchise for the representative council ; and other subjects. Doctrine and discipline were excluded from the purview of the new body ; and, some of the independent laity having objected, the question was referred to a committee to he appointed by Archbishop Davidson himself! The only practical motion passed by the meeting was one declaring " that no action of the representative church council shall interfere with the exercise of the powers and functions inherent in the episcopate." The council wished to draw up bye-laws for its own future direction ; but, instead of appointing a committee to do so, they re- quested the archbishop of Canterbury to perform the duty for them. In fine, it would be hard to find a more complete travesty of representative government than all the proceedings connected with the origin and launching of this " representative " council.
The first regular session of the council assembled on November 22, 1905, and the names of those present
NEW COUNCIL'S FIRST SESSION 47 5
showed that, though the whole nation is interested pecuniarily in the Church, and though the rank and refinement of the country are supposed to belong to it, scarcely any eminent public men took part in the proceedings. The most distinguished laymen reported as attending were the presidents of the two houses of laymen, Lord Cross and Lord Ashcombe (formerly Mr. George Cubitt), a church estate commissioner during Mr. Disraeli's premiership ; Sir Lewis Dibdin, and Chancellor P. V. Smith, ecclesiastical office- holders ; Mr. J. G. Talbot, M.P. for Oxford university, brother of the bishop of Southwark : Mr. A. Griffith- Boscawen, M.P., honorary secretary to the Church parliamentary committee ; Mr. Eugene Stock, secretary to the Church Missionary Society ; Sir Francis Powell M.P. ; Lord Stanmore, a retired colonial governor, and son of the late Lord Aberdeen, who was premier during the Crimean war ; Lord Addmgton, son of the late Mr. J. G. Hubbard, a once celebrated champion of clerical privileges, writer of a " Vindication of a Fixed Duty on Corn," and an advocate of the payment of church rates by Nonconformists ; and Lord Hugh Cecil.
The meeting Avas jointly presided over by Arch- bishops Davidson and Maclagan, both Scotchmen. Archbishop Davidson threw a damper on the pro- ceedings at the outset by saying that " while what they carried during the sittings ought for the time to be final, the decisions arrived at Avere not unalterable."
Bishop Ryle, chairman of the joint committee, moved that the constitution as prepared should be adopted. Dean Fremantle of Ripon moved the follow- ing amendment : " That inasmuch as the purposes for which it is proposed to establish a Representative Church Council have not been defined, and that no statement has been made of its relation (i) to the national organs, (2) to the general well-being of the
476 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
nation ; it is premature to consider the details of its constitution till some clear and full statement be made on authority in reference to these matters." ^ Though the establishment of the council had been under con- sideration over three years, he asked, " By what authority they were gathered together that day, to do a stupendous thing which would revolutionise the Church of England ? He maintained that they were going to work blindly ; what they were doing was not forming a Church council, but a council for the estab- lishment of a sect." It is true that the Church has sunk to the position of a sect ; but a genuine Representative Church Council, with full powers, instead of narrowing the Church's influence, should widen it, and might restore the Church to any national position which it ever held. In Dean Fremantle's opinion the proposed council was not a representative body, but one " which would be entirely under the domination of the clergy, and that was contrary to the progress of the human mind." These were brave words, such as could never find utterance in a Roman assembly, but the amend- ment did not embody them ; and, if it were passed, it would prevent any reformation of the existing clerical autocracy. Mr. David Howard seconded the amendment ; and Lord Stanmore supported it for the contradictory reason that " the time had not yet come for the full consideration of the constitution of that body." Bishop Ryle said " the council already existed, and it would have to justify its existence by its wisdom and conduct," and, furthermore, that " its formation would in no way interfere with the privileges and rights of convocation," which was a candid expression of the powerlessness of the new council. The amend- ment was lost by an overwhelming majority, securing only seven votes.
1 Times, November 23, 1905 ; and following days.
NEW COUNCIL'S CONSTITUTION 477
The proposed constitution was then put clause by clause as follows : —
I. " The Representative Church Council shall consist of three houses. The members of the upper houses of the convocations of Canterbury and York shall con- stitute the first house, or house of bishops ; the lower houses of the convocations shall constitute the second house, or house of clergy; and the members of the houses of laymen shall constitute the third, or lay house," Archdeacon Dundas, author of " Self-Govern- ment in the Non-Established Churches of the Anglican Communion," moved an amendment providing for an enlarged representation of the clergy in the second house, which was lost by a large majority ; and the clause passed, constituting a " representative " council in which the clergy controlled two houses and the lay- men only one, and which " in no way interfered with the privileges and rights of convocation."
II. " The archbishops of Canterbury and York shall be joint presidents of the council. The archbishop of Canterbury, or in his absence the archbishop of York, or in his absence the bishop next in precedence pre- sent and willing to act, shall be chairman of the meet- ings of the council, and house of bishops when sitting separately." This clause vested the presidency of the whole council in the bishops, in addition to the cleri- cal monopoly of two of the three houses. III. Pro- vides for the presidency of the house of clergy. IV. Provides that the lay house shall be presided over by the chairman of the Canterbury or York house of lay- men." These three clauses were passed without debate.
V. " The council shall be summoned in such manner and shall meet at such times and places as the arch- bishops of Canterbury and York from time to time determine." This clause put the council as much in the power of the archbishops as the old houses of
478 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
laymen or diocesan conferences. A layman, Mr. W. P. FuUagar, had the temerity to move " that the council should meet at least twice a year, in February and July, and at such other times agreed upon by the standing com- mittee;" but this natural and reasonable proposition was scouted by the clerical party and lost by a large majority. VI. " The business at any meeting of the council, or at any house sitting separately, shall be limited by the chairman thereof." This gives the archbishop of Canter- bury the power to limit the business to be discussed by the whole council. VII. " Nothing shall be deemed to be passed by the council which has not received the assent of each of the three houses sitting together or separately, except in the case of a question relating only to the conduct of business which shall be decided by a majority of the whole council." This clause estab- lished the obnoxious system of voting by orders, and the power of veto conferred on the lay house was made useless by the preceding clauses restricting the nature of the business to be discussed. VIII. " A question proposed at a joint sitting of the three houses may be voted on by a show of hands, but a division may be required, when the votes must be taken by houses." IX. " The assent of a house shall be signified by a majority of the members present and voting." Those five clauses were also passed.
X. " Nothing in this constitution, or in any proceed- ing of the council, shall interfere with the exercise by the episcopate of the powers and functions inherent in them, or of the several powers and functions of the houses of convocation of the two provinces." It would have been futile for any layman present to object that the Representative Church Council was called into existence because the convocations gave no representa- tion to the laity, and as a means of giving the laity some voice in the management of the Church ; for,
SACERDOTAL REVOLUTIONARIES 479
even without this clause, the council had been already strangled, as it were, at its birth. Canon Henson, rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, professed to dis- agree with the words " exercise by the episcopate of the powers and functions inherent in them," saying that they " would take the theory of apostolic succes- sion out of the category of pious opinion, and elevate it into an essential belief, for the first time in the history of the Church of England." Was he not aware that teachers in the Church schools were being officially taught to regard apostolic succession as an article of faith, and were so instructing English children ? Canon Henson's bravery, like Dean Fremantle's, seems very encouraging ; but such exhibitions of revolt by large tithe-drawers are rather calculated to mislead the laity, and are never followed up by corresponding action. Even with this important drawback, however, it is heartening to hear an Anglican priest admit that there is no foundation in fact for the theory of apostolic succession. Canon Henson moved the substitution of the words "legally exercised by" for "inherent in," which was a good amendment. Archdeacon Kaye of Lincoln seconded it ; but Archbishop Davidson ex- plained that the clause involved no expression of opinion, laid down no dogma, so to speak; and the amendment was immediately withdrawn ; " his grace " apparently possessing the magic power of altering the effect of plain English on the minds of Canon Henson and Archdeacon Kaye. XI. " It does not belong to the functions of the council to issue any statement purporting to declare the doctrine of the church on any question of theology ; and no such statement shall be issued by the council." These two clauses, which struck a fresh and unnecessary blow at any remaining vitality of the council, were passed.
XII. " Subject to the two preceding clauses, questions
48o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
touching doctrine and discipline, and resolutions relating thereto, may be passed by the council, provided that any projected legislative measure touching doctrinal formulae or the services or ceremonies of the Church, or the administration of the sacraments and sacred rites of the Church, shall be initiated in the house of bishops and shall be discussed by each house sitting separately, and the lay house shall either accept or reject the measure in the terms in which it is submitted to them, and shall have no 2'>oiuer to propose any am.end'tnent thereof." Bishop Ryle said he " differed from his colleagues on the committee in regard to this clause, and was in favour of obtaining the fullest and freest expression of opinion from the laity." Mr. Reginald Bosworth Smith,^ fortified, perhaps, by his knowledge of Mohammedanism, proposed to omit the preposterous qualification that the laity should " either accept or reject the measure " in the terms submitted to them, and should have no power to propose any amendment. The Moham- medan and even the Russian laity have more autho- rity in religious matters that the Anglican prelates would concede to Englishmen ; but Mr. Smith con- tented himself with pointing out that " it was hopeless to expect parliament to delegate any of its powers to a Church council on which the laity were not fairly and fully represented," and he hoped that " that great move- ment might not be stultified at the outset." Mr. C. W. Proctor seconded the amendment ; Colonel Robert Williams, M.P., supported it; and a long discussion ensued, in which all the forces of the sacerdotal party engaged in defence of clerical monopoly. Sir Lewis Dibdin and Lord Hugh Cecil opposed the amendment. Bishop Gore threatened that if it were passed, " it would raise a spirit of opposition which the committee
^ Mr. Smith is author of a book callerl " Mohammed anrl Moham- medanism."
BISHOPS DIVIDE TO CONQUER 481
had hoped they had met in the resolution they had proposed " ! Having struck the hiity down and stunned them eleven times, this typical leader of the sacerdotalists " expressed an earnest hope " that no good Samaritan would seek to revive the victim by amending this twelfth clause, lest, in doing so, he " would raise a spirit of opposition " in the dominant sacerdotal party that had been quelled by their victories over the laity. The situation was becoming dangerous, and the bishops divided their force. Bishop Jacob of St. Albans and Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury supported the amend- ment, the first saying that " it was useless to try to gag the laity," and that " they would find that the more the clergy trusted the laity the more the laity would trust the clergy," This description of talk, like Canon Henson's and Dean Fremantle's, seems to paralyse the Anglican laity, and checks reform more effectually than the most overweening presumption.
The discussion had not closed when the first day's sitting terminated ; and the bishops took council dur- ing the night. On resuming next day, Bishop Words- worth moved a new amendment to omit the words " and the lay house shall either accept or reject the measure in the terms in which it is submitted to them, and shall have no power to propose any amendment thereof," and substitute the words " and the council shall either accept or reject the measure in the terms in which it is finally proposed by the house of bishops after that house has received and considered the reports of such separate discussions." The meaning of this was that the lay house would have the right of free discussion and amendment in the first instance, but that, when the bishops had considered their amend- ments and sent back the question a second time, the lay- men should either accept or reject without alteration. The sacerdotalists approved of this new amendment,
2 H
482 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
which conceded their claims at " the second time of asking," and it was seconded by Bishop Gore, Arch- bishop Davidson candidly said the Wordsworth-Gore amendment was " a very carefully thought-out pro- position ; " and the shrewd Scotsman pointed out that even if the power of final amendment were given to the lay house, that house could not carry anything " without the consent of the other two houses." Sir John Kennaway, M.P., a member of the commission on ritual disorders, successfully appealed to Mr. Smith to withdraw his amendment, as " it was most important that they should present a united front at this time." Chancellor Worlledge and Canon Hammond of Truro moved and seconded an amendment that no measure touching doctrine or discipline should be discussed " until a report defining the relations of the council and the convocations had been presented by a com- mittee consisting of members of the council and of convocation and appointed hy the archbishops." This was rejected, and the clause as altered by the episcopal amendment was passed.
XIII. " The council may from time to time make, revoke, and alter standing orders with reference to the meetings and business and procedure of the council, and any matters connected therewith, so as the same be not inconsistent with the provisions of the constitu- tion of the council for the time being in force." This liberty is of little importance, for the council cannot make any orders with reference to the calling of its own meetings or the defining of the business to be done. XIV. " No alteration in or addition to the con- stitution of the council shall be made except by a resolution of the council passed at a joint sitting of the three houses by a majority of not less than two- thirds of the members of each house present and voting:, after due notice, and confirmed in a similar
BISHOP GORE'S LAY FRANCHISE 483
manner during the session held next after the expira- tion of six calendar months from the passing of the resolution." Neither does this clause confer any authority on the Church members, for they cannot summon a meeting without the approval of the arch- bishops, whether to make or confirm an alteration in the constitution ; and no proposal can be carried without the assent of two-thirds of the bishops and priests.
The constitution being thus settled without diminish- ing the powers of the bishops and priests, or increasing those of the " church-outed " laity, the sacerdotalists proceeded to assert their authority in more practical matters. Bishop Talbot of Southwark moved the consideration of the standing orders drawn up by the committee. It was Bishop Gore, and not a layman, who had charge of the schedule dealing with the franchise on which the members of the house of laymen were to be elected ! It will be remembered that the joint meeting of clergy and lait}^ in 1903 had recommended that the franchise should be given to all Church members qualified to vote for churchwardens. But the ritualists changed all that, and Bishop Gore now proposed that every voter should be " a lay member of the Church of England Avho has the status of a communicant, that is to say, whether as an actual communicant or has been baptized and confirmed and is admissible to holy communion, and is a member of no other relicfious communion, and has signed the de- claration as to qualification contained in the schedule to this scheme." This proposal raised " confirmation," which Article XXV. says is " not to be counted a sacrament of the Gospel," but a practice which has grown up " partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles," to an equal importance with baptism and the Lord's supper, " the two sacraments ordained of
484 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Christ our Lord in the Gospel." Bishop Gore assured the council that this " was the only sort of franchise which was at all likely to commend itself to the general body of the Church." It was an exceedingly audacious proceeding that an ecclesiastic should have taken such an essentially lay question in charge, and that it should have been entrusted to an extreme sacerdotalist well illustrates the self-confidence of the Anglican prelates. The day may soon come when we shall see auricular confession and absolution added to the list of tests to be submitted to. In Russia, with whose State Church the Anglican sacerdotal party have more than once tried to effect an alliance, witnesses in legal proceedings are liable to be asked to produce a priest's certificate showing that they have been at their annual confession.
The sacerdotalist proposals, though destined to be passed in triumph, were not accepted without discussion. Lord Stanmore, as befitted a Scotsman, moved that " the representatives of the laity shall be the members of the two houses of laymen, elected in such manner and by persons so qualified as the houses of laymen may themselves determine." He said " they had been told that they ought to trust the laity, and it was only right that the laymen themselves should say what the proper qualification of a layman was." Bishop Jacob, who advocated the policy of " trusting the laity," curiously did not now intervene ; and the ritualists once more divided themselves. Mr. Cripps, vicar-general of Canterbury, who was then a member of parliament, but who, like most of the ritualists, lost his seat at the recent election, stepped into the breach to hypnotise the opponents of priestcraft, declaring that " if they wished to make the Church as consonant as possible with the requirements of the national life, it was a mistake to put unnecessary limitation upon the
Elliott it- Fry.
Bishop Perceval
"The bishop is Dr. Perceval, who has been considered for many years as the ojisisof evanuelicalism in the desert of sacerdotalism represented by the episcopal bench." (.p. no.)
John Campbell Colquhoun, First Chairman of the Church Association
"The costly suits against Alackonochie and others were undertaken by the Church Association at the suggestion of the archbishops and bishops, who said that, when the law had been ascertained, the ))ishoi)s would certainly enforce it; and, says the Church Association, 'THAT viiOMiSE HAS NOT bken kept'" <p. 530). To face p. 485
BISHOP DIGGLE'S LAY FRANCHISE 485
franchise of the laity." Bishop Gore opposed the amendment, and it was rejected.
Bishop Perceval of Hereford moved that the re- commendation of the joint meeting of 1 903 be adopted, namely, that a qualified voter should mean a person " entitled by ownership or occupation to vote at a vestry of the parish in Avhich he or she resides, and has signed a declaration that he or she is a member of the Church of Encjland and of no other reliefious community." Canon Lambert seconded the amend- ment, which was rejected by 142 to 66. The attend- ance was quickly diminishing; at the next division, on an unimportant amendment, those present only numbered 162; and the second day's session soon afterwards closed.
On the third day, the franchise was again considered. Bishop Paget of Oxford moved that it should be ex- tended to any qualified person who " does not belong to any religious body Avhich is not in communion with the Church of England " — a suggestion which was at once accepted, the innuendo conveyed by it being that there are several unknown religious bodies in communion with the Church.
Bishop Diggle of Carlisle moved, and Bishop Glyn of Peterborough seconded, an amendment defining a qualified voter to be " a lay member of the Church of England, that is to say, a person who has been baptized, and has signed a declaration that he is a lay member of the Church of England and not a member of any religious body not in communion with that Church," thereby removing the bishop's particular sacrament, " confirmation," from the list of qualifica- tions, and dispensing with the "communion" test which the legislature had abolished seventy-three years before for all public offices, because of the scandals involved in making the rite a necessary prelude to
486 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
secular preferment. Bishop Diggle said if Bisliop Gore's scheme were adopted " they would not altogether repel the morally unfit," but " they would disfranchise some of the most intelligent, enlightened, conscientious, and spiritual men, and some of the very fittest members of the Church of England." This is especially true since the Oxford sacerdotalists became the dominant party in the Church, for millions of respectable church-folk are repelled from taking the sacrament by the absurd ritual with which its administration is accompanied. In Catholic Ireland one often finds the most frequent communicants to be the least respected persons in the parish ; the bankrupt, the drunkard, the immoral, and the calumniator comminolinof with the virtuous and receiving the eucharist on every saint's day in the calendar. Bishop Glyn, in seconding the amendment, " appealed for an enlargement of the lay franchise." Dean Strong of Christ Church, Oxford, supported the confirmation and communion test. Bishop Ryle agreed with Dean Strong, not on grounds of personal convic- tion, but because " the resolution represented a com- promise in order to bring the greatest mass of opinion in the Church of England together " — that is to say, it was the ultimatum of Bishop Gore and the Puseyites. Mr. Laurence Hardy, M.P., and Colonel Robert Wilhams, M.P., supported the amendment, while Sir Lewis Dibdin, representing the ecclesiastical laymen, opposed it, and threatened that, if carried, it would " wreck the whole scheme upon which they were engaged." Bishop Talbot urged the council to insist on the confirmation and communion test for the lay franchise, and thereby help on " the scheme " of the sacerdotal party. Bishop Diggle's amendment was lost by a large majority; 17 bishops, 86 priests, and 49 laymen voting against it, while only 8 bishops, 2 1 priests, and 1 9 laymen voted for it.
A "CONFIRMATION" FRANCHISE 487
We may judge from these figures how the sacer- dotahsts predommated at this sham representative gathering, especially the bishops and priests, 1 3 2 in number, as against 68 laymen, of whom all but 19 followed the sacerdotal leaders. The franchise clause as devised by the sacerdotalists, was then carried, and stands as follows : " A ' qualified person ' means a lay member of the Church of England who (i) has the status of a communicant, that is to say, either (a) is an actual communicant, or (b) has been baptized and confirmed and is admissible to holy communion, and does not belong to any religious body which is not in communion with the Church of England; and (2) has signed the declaration as to qualification contained in the schedule to this scheme : ' I declare that I have the status 01 a communicant lay member of the Church of England.' " The status necessary for a communicant is defined as having been baptized and confirmed, and not belonging to any religious body not in communion with the Anglican Church. The franchise for this sterile council is not a possession to be coveted ; but, such as it is, it has been converted into a lure for enticing the- Anglican laity to participate in sacra- ments whose administration is accompanied by the worst sacerdotal rites.
All the amendments to the clause for the extension of the franchise to women were withdrawn, as the bishops and priests were complete masters of the meeting, and the clause passed as follows : " Parochial lay representatives of every parish or constituted group of parishes in a diocese shall be elected by the qualified persons of the male sex and of full age who reside in such parish or group of parishes, and by the qualified persons of the female sex who are entitled by owner- ship or occupation to vote at a vestry of the parish in which they reside if the same is an ancient parish, or
488 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
would be so entitled if the same were an ancient parish." Women who are rated and have paid their poor-rate, if they have the status of communicants, may vote for parochial representatives.
The " parochial representatives " thus elected for the several parishes in each rural deanery, or in several parishes grouped together in some other way, shall send delegates to each diocesan conference, the number to be specified by the bishop and the conference. The diocesan representatives thus chosen in each province — in other words, the lay members of the diocesan councils — shall elect the house of laymen for the province, only one representative in the house of laymen being allowed for every 100,000 persons resident in the diocese ; and the houses of laymen for York and Canterbury, so elected, shall constitute the lay house of the representative council. Lastly, it was decided that " all representatives, to whatever body they are elected, shall be lay communicant members of the Church."
Archbishop Davidson, replying to a vote of thanks, said enigmatically that " they had been, as it were, putting into shape the engine by which they meant to move forward to the work to which they believed they were called," gave his apostolical benediction to the remnant of the audience, and closed the session. Dr. Davidson and Dr. Maclagan, accustomed as they must have been to the independence of the Presbyterians, cannot fail to have been astonished at the subservience of the laity present at this gathering, and they must surely have contrasted the childish and fictitious posi- tion accorded to the Anglican laymen in this so-called representative church council with the supreme power enjoyed by the Church assemblies of the Presbyterians, in which there are no separate houses of bishops, priests, and laymen, but in which all elders, whether lay or
CHURCH DISENDOWMENT 489
clerical, and all delegates, possess equal rights of speech and vote.
Did the archbishops rejoice that the new council gave the laity no authority whatever, while it brought an increase of strength to sacerdotalism ? Did it please them to have it arranged that the two houses of lay- men, selected on sacerdotal tests, may now exhibit their powerlessness and subservience together in one house, in addition to doing so separately in their own provinces as heretofore ? It would be a libel on their nationality to think that this was so. Both archbishops must have known that a representative church council, to be genuine, should consist of one assembly in which the lay members should possess a large majority, or, if it were to consist of two chambers, that there should be a majority of laymen in both ; and that its business should include (i) all the work now done by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners; (2) the administration of glebe lands. Queen Anne's bounty, and every diocesan fund now controlled by the bishops and their satellites; (3) the distribution of the patronage now held by bishops and capitular bodies, with the object of ultimately vesting the right of appointment to all cures of souls in the Church members of each locality.
No such rational reform seems likely to be effected from within the Church. On the contrary, the present generation is more likely to see the abolition of the religious taxation, called commuted tithe, and the vesting of ecclesiastical lands and buildings in repre- sentative associations, adequate provision being made for all life-interests — thereby realising the shrewd Dr. Davidson's prophecy that " to the clergy individually disestablishment would probably be in some respects a financial gain." ^ The bitter and undisguised an- tagonism of the Anglican sacerdotal party to the
1 Daily Telegraph, November i6, 1904.
490 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Protestant religion and to the declared will of the electorate, so notably displayed in opposition to the Education Bill of 1906, can have no other ending than the dissociation of the State from the Church, and the discontinuance of the religious taxation on which the privileged malcontents chiefly flourish.
The indifference with which the majority of the Anglican laity regard the clerical autocracy which we have been describing is a remarkable feature of English religious life. To a large extent it springs from in- difference to religion and scepticism as to a future state. But it is also due to a feeling on the part of the Anglican laity that it is not their duty to make the first move in bringing about a reform. They do not equal in numbers the non- Anglican citizens ; they take a certain pride in having the Sovereign as the official head of their religion ; in having so many wealthy dignitaries and benefice-holders with their grandiose titles ; in the ceremonials and cathedrals. The Church is theirs, and to them alone belong whatever benefits flow from its establishment and endowment. Yet the majority of the citizens, who do not belong to the Church and do not share in its privileges, contribute to its support and pay a large share of the cost of maintaining the grandeur on which the Anglicans pride themselves. Under such circum- stances it is not the Anglican's duty to move for any effective reforms, tending to hasten the disestablish- ment or nationalisation of the Church, inasmuch as to nationalise the Church would be to give men and women of all beliefs a share of what the Anglicans now alone enjoy. This attitude of indifference and self-satisfaction may be said to represent the man of the world's view, and it is very widely entertained.
But there is a higher concept of the Church's duty held by the Anglican Christians, or Church evan-
THE CHRISTIAN ANGLICANS 491
gelicals. They are, happily, a numerous body, but, as I have said, are not organised as effectively as the j sacerdotalists. They are not bent upon making money by the Church as are the sacerdotal party, whose aim is to annex every desirable preferment and work the mfluence of the Church for their own gain in every sphere of life, as the Jesuits do in the Roman Church. The evangelicals firmly believe in Christ, and try to live out the Christ-like life. They are to be found in every rank of society, amongst the nobility, the middle- class, and the poor. They make no display, such as the sacerdotal party made at the meeting of this representative council which we have been consider- ing. They subscribe immense sums for charitable work of every description. They and the other Chris- tians of all denominations are the most reliable element in society, their constant aim being to act justly and do as they would be done by. They do not fear to stand up for righteousness, even at the cost of making enemies ; and they are blessed, inasmuch as the panders and men-pleasers of the day say all manner of evil against them falsely.
The Christian Anglicans are to be found in every parish in England, grieved by the errors of their priests, but keeping alight the flame of the Gospel and living vh'tuously. They are most bitterly opposed to Romanism, especially those of the labouring classes, because it was their forefathers who suffered the srreatest wrono-s at the hands of the Church when the priest-vice prevailed in England. The labour section of Anglican Christians are particularly strong in Liver- pool and Birkenhead, probably because of the object- lesson they have before their eyes in the numerous Irish Roman Catholic settlements on the banks of the Mersey. They are also unusually self-assertive in that district, though the strength of the Protestant party,
492 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
as a whole, does not lie in demonstration, outward show being the least important element in their move- ment. They refused a hearing a few years since to a ritualist bishop who appeared with a large gold pectoral cross suspended from a chain around his neck, and hissed him from the platform. They hold religious services in the streets, at which priestcraft is denounced in unmeasured terms, and in their marchings to and fro they have been frequently attacked by the Irish. They seem to be indignant at the perception of their powerlessness to reform the ritual abuses encouraged by their bishops and priests, feeling themselves, as Milton said, church-outed, and numbers of them seek congenial environment in one or other of the free Churches. I have found Churchmen in Liverpool systematically worshipping in Presbyterian, Methodist, and other churches, because of the ritualism in their parish churches. Having said so much of Liverpool, we shall devote a little space to the Protestant move- ment at the Cheshire side of the Mersey, in order to illustrate the effects of a clerical autocracy, premis- ing that, while violence is always to be deprecated, no other course than that adopted in this case seems open to the humbler class of Anglican laity.
The diocese of Chester is credited ^ with the follow- ing ritualistic practices: (i) Its bishop. Dr. Jayne, wears a mitre, which is said to be an " illegal orna- ment," though there has been no legal decision on the point. He has also been recently advocating the adoption of a special vestment to be worn by priests at the communion service, and, during the debates at the representative church council, he unnecessarily de- clared " his love for the holy communion." Bishop Jayne, besides twenty-five honorary canons, is provided with a highly salaried court, consisting of a dean, two
1 " Ritualistic Clergy List," Church Association, 3rd ed. 1903.
COWLEY FATHERS IN BIRKENHEAD 493
archdeacons, four canons, a precentor, four minor canons, a diocesan inspector of schools, an organist, commissioners, assessors, a chancellor, a proctor-general, a chapter-clerk, proctors of the court, three examining chaplains, three chaplains, three registrars, two secre- taries, and a surveyor of dilapidations. Not only have the laity of the diocese no control over this expensive establishment, but they cannot even admonish an incumbent or curate who outrages their religious convictions by the most offensive Roman practices. (2) -There are amongst the clergy of Chester, 334 members of one or more, or all, of the following sacerdotal associations, namely, the English Church Union, Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, Cowley Fathers' order of priests, and Society of the Holy Cross, or who practise illegal rites (a) by offering up incense in their churches ; (b) by affecting " the east- ward position " ; (c) by using the mixed chalice ; (d) by wearing mass vestments, and (e) by using lighted candles on their " altars."
The Cowley Fathers, otherwise known as the Society of St. John the Evangelist, have a settlement near Birkenhead, and one of their priests is reported to have openly said in St. Alban's church, Holborn : " I am Irish, I love Ireland, and all things Celtic, and, as a consequence, all things Roman " ! ^ I know an Irish- man, father of a priest, who attended service in St. Alban's church, and went away firmly convinced that he had been at mass. During the afternoon he pointed out " the church at which he had heard mass " to a friend staying at the same hotel in London with him, and was horrified to learn that he had committed a mortal sin by attending a heretical service. He used to tell the story afterwards to illustrate the dangers of London : " I went up to the man that was standing at
^ Church Times, June 26, 1896.
494 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
the door," he would say, " and I asked him if it was a CathoHc church, and he said it was, and in I went as innocent as the babe unborn ! "
The Protestants of Birkenhead have organised them- selves in self-defence against what they believe to be a priestly conspiracy to reduce them and their chil- dren to the condition of the Irish settlement under its Roman priests. They have not severed their con- nection with the Church, but have become a body of reformers, and call themselves the Kensit Crusade, in memory of Mr. John Kensit, who lost his life in Birkenhead in 1902, as the result of a blow received in an attack made ujDon him by a mob chiefly com- posed, I regret to say, of misguided Catholic Irish.
They hold the bishop of the diocese responsible for the ritualism prevalent in and near Birkenhead. Bishop Jayne, naturally indignant at such presump- tion in a body of " lewd people," mere laity, attended a Church meeting in the locality on November 17, 1903, a few weeks after the Liverpool diocesan con- ference ; and, referring to the local reformers, was reported to have said sarcastically, that, " with the exception of Liverpool, he knew of no place where there was more religious zeal running in the wrong direction than there was in Birkenhead." He quoted John Wesley's aspiration : " May God deliver us from reforming mobs ! " ; and, finally, he said that " reform- ing mobs were discrediting religion in Birkenhead."
As the Wesleyans and Primitive Methodists are a strong denomination in the neighbourhood, and as there are many other Methodists who still remain within the Church, Bishop Jayne acted " smartly " in selecting a quotation from John Wesley as a stick with which to beat the troublesome laity in Birkenhead. It is not recorded that the Catholic mob who assaulted John Kensit evoked any censure from
Mr. John Kensit
He stood up boldly against the spread of ritualism, particularly in Loudon, without fee or award, while each of his successive episcopal opponents. Bishops Temple, Creightou, and luyram, was drawing- a salary equal to the pay of two First Lords of the Treasury, or two Lord Justices, or two Field Marshals, or tive Admirals. The ritualists used to hire niohs to assail liim. aud he " lost his life in Birkenhead iu 1902, as tlie result of a Iilow from a chisel received iu an attack made upon him by a mob chiefly composed, I regret to say, of misyuided Catholic Irish." (p. 494.)
To face p. 494
BISHOP JAYNE HISSED 495
the bishop ; but, perhaps, that was because they did not come within the desio'nation of " reformino- mobs."
O o
On tlie morning of November 23, Bishop Jayne re- visited Birkenhead to preside at the Church Pastoral Aid Society. When the labourers had left work that evening, it was noticed that the stragorlina: thorougfh- fares of Birkenhead were filled by crowds who were converging towards the Y.M.C.A. hall, in Grange Road, the place appointed for Bishop Jayne's meeting. " Long before the time for the commencement of the proceed- ings," we are told, " the doors were besieged by crowds of people." ^ Wands were held aloft bearing pieces of white cardboard ; and " conspicuously raised above the heads of the crowds was an illuminated drum, Avhich bore the inscription ' The Kensit Crusade.' " When the doors were opened, the crowd rushed in and filled the hall " to its utmost capacity." The doors were then closed and guarded by police. Never, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, had such enthusiasm been evinced in the cause of Church pastoral aid.
The majority of the crowd, unable to gain admission, remained in the street "watching for the arrival of the bishop of Chester." And we are told that " two bands, preceded by energetic drum-majors, brandishing long staves, pressed their way through the crowds, playing Protestant hymns and airs associated with the Kensit movement." The police also were waiting to protect Bishop Jayne ; but the crowd apparently was not pre-informed as to the route by which he was to arrive, and they missed him. " His lordship," we are told, "made his entrance into the Y.M.C.A. hall unob- served," - and appeared on the platform accompanied by the Revs. F. S. Guy Warman, J. Inskip, and Lucius Smith, vicar of Macclesfield. He beheld a packed house ; but it must have astonished him to find him-
^ Birkenhead Nevjs, November 25, 1903. - Ibid.
496 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
self received with " a good deal of hissing." The vicar of Macclesfield said, " the Church pastoral aid society had been founded by Lord Shaftesbury in the reign of William IV. He knew there was a great indifference to religion in some parts of the country, and especially in many of the slums of the large towns." One of the audience called out that the indifference was " caused by priestcraft ! " The speaker admitted that priestcraft " might be one cause," at which there was " prolonged applause."
Passing away from current events, the vicar is reported to have said that " if they read the history of the eighteenth century, they would see that things were very much worse than was the case to-day." But his audience had come prepared to make rather than to read history. Adopting the device of the bishop at the previous meeting, the speaker ejacu- lated : " But God raised up a holy man, John Wesley ! " The artifice now failed, and Wesley's name was re- ceived with interruption and uproar. The quotation of Wesley on such an occasion was calculated to give the impression that John Wesle}^ was in [favour of Anglican sacerdotalism.
Bishop Jayne exclaimed that " the disturbers should leave the hall, or they would have to be removed." Commenting on the bishop's position, a local news- paper said : — " A chairman may justly claim to exer- cise his authority. The right in the abstract may be admitted, but to put it into execution there must be the power as well. On Monday evening that power was wanting."^ With the object of quelling the outburst, the speaker said " he was only referring to the noble work done by John Wesley, who was himself an attached member of the Church of England ; but there was one part of the Church system which
^ Birkenhead News.
A RITUALIST AT BAY 497
Wesley did not appreciate, and that was the parochial system " — a statement which did not convey even half the truth. If Wesley was attached to the Church, the Church was assuredly not attached to him. " Every Sunday," wrote his brother Charles, " damna- tion is denounced against all who hear us." ^ Wesley was averse to leaving the Church, for he was hopeful of reforming it. If he was " attached " to the Church in that sense of the word, so were the Birkenhead Protestants ; but neither he nor they were attached to its sacerdotal rites, or the medieval Roman system on which the Church is governed.
At this stage a man sitting close to the platform asked " if he might be allowed to speak."
" Who are you, may I ask ? " said Bishop Jayne.
" I am Mr. Thompson," was the reply, at which there were general cheers, for the speaker was the leader of the " reforming mob."
Bishop Jayne ordered him to sit down, at which there was renewed uproar. A volley of voices from the non-speechmaking crowd ensued : " On to the platform, Mr. Thompson." " Down with popery ! " " Good old pope ; we will go and kiss the pope's toe after that ! "
Mr. Thompson said : " I claim the right of hearing as chairman of the Protestant organisation, I wish to protest against your remarks in the Town Hall on Tuesday evening, because I consider there would be no necessity for a ' reforming mob ' in Birkenhead if you would do your duty by removing the ritualists. I will now leave the building as a protest against your ritualistic tyranny."
The vast majority of the audience, acting on the suggestion, rose and sang the hymn : —
" Dare to be a Protestant, Dare to stand alone."
Southey's " Life of Wesley."
2 I
498 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
They turned their backs upon the bishop, but many of them lingered and " gave vent to their indignation in a most uproarious and emphatic manner, the prac- tices of rituahsm being described in very abusive as well as dissonant fashion." A woman asked the bishop : " Don't you bow down to graven images your- self ? " And we are told that, " amid the general dis- order, an elderly man mounted a chair and, addressing the bishop, said, ' You ought to have been more cautious in your remarks.' "
When the hall was nearly empty, Bishop Jayne said : " Now, if those who are left would like to sit down, don't you think you would be more comfort- able ? " But even those who were left were not in his favour, and he was accosted with cries of : " Go on, Mister Jayne!" "What about All Saints', the candle-money, and the tapers to light them ? " This referred to the practice of buying and lighting candles before images. " What about the woman's washing ? " " Now then, lord bishop, hear your people ! " " You are the servant of the people." " You take Protestant money, and you teach Roman doctrine."
A Mr. Forsyth said he desired to ask one question.
The bishop : " I do not desire any question."
Mr. Forsyth : " Why did you appoint last year, my lord, two men in this diocese to officiate who had worn the mass vestments ? "
Bishop Jayne said "he was afraid that they had proved true to John Wesley's words, ' May God deliver us from reforming mobs ! ' " Whereupon some one cried : " Don't bring John Wesley's words into such a place as this ! "
Abandoning Wesley, Bishop Jayne said : " Let me remind you of a much greater and more solemn thing which ought to hush you into silence if any- thing will. We never read of Him encouraging a
BISHOP JAYNE'S ESCAPE 499
mob ! " But even this left the withers of the audience unwrung, for they hkencd themselves to the " mobs " who listened to Christ's preaching by the highways and byeways, by the lake shores and on the hillsides of Galilee. A voice called out : " We read of Him going into the temple and turning them (the traffickers in ritualist sacrifices) out." Others cried : " He was never a Roman Catholic ! " " You are our servant ! "
Reverting to the eighteenth century, the bishop said : ^ " Mr. Lucius Smith took us back to history, and he reminded us of "
A voice : " Oliver Cromwell."
Bishop Jayne said " he was coming to Oliver Cromwell in a moment ; " but he did not return to the subject. Recurring to the eighteenth century, he asked, " What was the cause of its indifference ? " The audience cried out : " Ritualism, confession, and absolution." He was proceeding to quote from Bishop Butler, when a voice cried :
" Do your duty."
" I am doing my duty," he retorted.
" Yes, to Rome, but not to Protestants," cried a man in the crowd. A multitude of voices cried, " You are the cause of this disturbance by not clear- ing the traitors out of the Church of England." " Why don't you turn the traitors out of All Saints' ? " " There is ^150 Avorth of vestments in All Saints'."
Bishop Jayne sought refuge in a quotation from Richard Baxter, but it was to no purpose. Each invocation of honoured names, whose bearers were bitterly opposed to sacerdotalism, was received with indignation; and Bishop Jayne desisted at length, saying, " I wish you all good-night."
We are told that the audience, " after shoutinsr
o
* Birkenhead and Cheshire Advertiser, November 25, 1903.
500 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
many uncomplimentary phrases, hooted vigorously the bishop of Chester, who finally left the meeting amid great disorder." " When he descended from the plat- form at the conclusion of the meeting," it was reported, " the bishop of Chester held a hurried consultation with the Rev. S. Guy Warman, and others, as to the best means of egress from the building. It was wisely determined not to attempt to depart by the main entrance, but by the rear entrance in Oliver Street. This necessitated a little groping through silent and unlit passages, but eventually his lordship and his companions found themselves in Oliver Street, the thoroughfare at the moment being practically deserted. Making their way to Conway Street, the little party walked quietly in the direction of the Woodside railway station, until they were overtaken by a car opposite the Theatre Royal." ^ The crowds, who " awaited the appearance of the bivshop of Chester " carried " improvised banners of cardboard, on which were printed such phrases as " No Popery in the Church of England," and "Down with the Priestly Education Act."
Another version of the closing scene says : " The crowd were greatly excited, and quite out of the control of those who had led them on ; and there was every indication that the bishop, on leaving the building, would have to meet a most hostile demon- stration. The procession kept up a parade past the Association hall, along Oliver Street, and back into Grange Road, thus making a complete circle round the building. It apjDcared to be impossible that the bishop could leave the place, either in Grange Road or Oliver Street, without encountering the crusaders, but by a clever ruse this was managed. While the procession was moving along Grange Road, the
^ Liverpool Mercury, November 24, 1903.
A REVOLUTION PREDICTED 501
eminent divine quietly left the building at tlie Oliver Street exit in company with one or two friends, without molestation." ^
Such an incident as the escape of a bishop from a large city in his ow^n diocese by " a clever ruse," fore- shadows the ultimate end of " the Church," if the sacerdotal party continue to have a predominant voice in its management. If Birkenhead were an industrial centre in France, and if Bishop Jayne were a Roman ecclesiastic, he could not have been treated with greater hostility by the public ; and, of all his officials, perhaps the one whose services were most needed next morning was the surveyor of dilapidations.
After Bishop Jayne's escape, we are told that " a crowd numbering several thousands was addressed at the Haymarket by Mr. Thompson, whom Bishop Jayne refused to hear." Mr. Thompson said, if the bishop had allowed him to speak, he " was going to propose to his lordship how he could have the means of helping him and the Church pastoral aid society in their efforts to obtain money. He was going to ask for permission to go inside the ritualistic churches and remove the crosses and candlesticks for the purpose of a jumble sale. By these means he would have guaranteed the bishop ;^iooo for the society." Mr. Thompson said " he intended going to every village and town in the diocese of Chester to protest, as he had done in Birkenhead." In his opinion, " the Pro- testant democracy was rising, and the day was not far distant when they would have in every town in Eng- land, if the ritualistic bishops were not removed, a terrible revolution. If the bishop of Chester and the rest of the ritualistic bishops were not removed and Protestants put in their places, their removal would have to be of a forcible kind."
1 Liverpool Courier, November 24, 1903.
502 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
At another street meeting, a speaker " questioned the power which Mr. Thompson said the bishop of Chester ought to exercise over " a particular " Father " in Tranmere and an incumbent at New Ferry, both of whom he named, because the patronage of one Hving belonged to the Cowley Fathers and the other to a private patron. The reader knows how great is a bishop's power ; and it may be confidently said that ritualism cannot exist in a diocese, as it assuredly does not exist anywhere, without the bishop's support. The patron has no power, as a rule, over the incumbent, but the bishop always has ; and Bishop Jayne, who was for eight years a tutor in Keble College, is not likely to discourage ritualism. The same speaker pointed out that " the only remedy was disestablish- ment, and, as this was in the Liberal programme, he urged those present to support the Liberal party at the next election."
Birkenhead is not the only place which has to endure the Cowley Fathers. The same newspaper which reported these proceedings recorded how one of the vicars of Cowley, the headquarters of the order, whose living is in the patronage of Christ Church College, Oxford, " was found guilty by the consistory court on four of the charges brought against him, and had been served with an inhibition " by Bishop Paget. " The vicar, however," it was stated, " officiated on Sunday. The question of an appeal was under con- sideration, and it is believed the verdict will be chal- lenged. In spite of any appeal, the inhibition will take effect fourteen days from the date of service." ^
In a new chapter we shall endeavour to analyse the growth, organisation, objects, and numbers of those ritualistic societies and communities which constitute the Anglican sacerdotal party.
* Liverpool Courier, November 24, 1903.
CHAPTER XVIII
History and analysis of Anglican ritualism — Society of the Holy Cross —St. George's "riots" — "The Priest in Absolution" — Pusey triumphant — Pusey and Gaume — Other ritualist societies — Sacer- -- dotalism in the Schools, the Army, and the Navj- — Anglican ■ ■" religious orders, male and female — Trade in ritualistic appliances — Legal decisions against ritualism — The Mackonochie, Purchas, and other cases — The Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, 1882-3.
The Cowley Fathers, who offended against Christian sentiment in Birkenhead, are now only one of several orders of Anglican priests who live under monastic rule. Although modern Anglican monasticism began with Newman's Coenobitium in 1840, the first secret association of ritualists, holding parochial cures of souls, was not founded until 1855, four years after Manning's secession. This was the Society of the Holy Cross, or Societas Sanctae Crucis, whose object was to spread a belief in the necessity of auricular confession, as practised by Keble, Pusey, Manning, and others. The society became very popular with the younger priests, and in 1866 and 1872 it issued a kind of liturgy in two parts, in the form of a book of instruc- tions to confessors, called " The Priest in Absolution," being a translation and adaptation of an obscene French work by a certain Abbe Gaume, the sale of which was exclusively confined to " High Church priests."
The ritualistic excesses of Pusey's followers having been outraging public feeling for many years, Lord Derby's Government appointed a royal commission in 1867 to inquire into the nature and extent of Anglican sacerdotalism. Bishop Wilberforce obstructed its operations; and in 1868 and 1871, a second and third commission, appointed by Mr. Gladstone, likewise
504 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ended m fiasco. In 1873 the Judicature Act deprived bishops of the right to act as judges in ecclesiasti- cal appeals brought before the Privy Council, and made them simply assessors. Lord Salisbury and Mr. Gathorne Hardy, Conservatives, and Mr. Gladstone and Bishop Wilberforce, Liberals, acting for the sacerdotal party, had advocated the total exclusion of bishops from the Judicial Committee. Archbishop Tait, puzzled by their policy, thought " there was something at the bottom of it " ; Disraeli called it " astounding " ; but the object of the sacerdotalists was to increase the antagonism between the clergy and the courts of jus- tice, with the ultimate hope of establishing purely ecclesiastical tribunals. Their opposition to the Public Worship bill in the following year proved that their action was not inspired by a wish to increase the authority of the State or the laity in the Church.
Meantime the Puseyites were increasing in strength and aggressiveness. In 1859 was founded the English Church Union, " pledged to work for the restoration of the eastward position, vestments, lights, mixed chalice, incense, and wafers of unleavened bread in the communion service ; " ^ and it soon had thousands of priests on its register. Its president is a layman, and its most sacerdotal propositions are usually made by laymen ; but that is only a Puseyite mask designed to convey the idea that the Romeward movement is a popular one. Of the many unfounded pretensions of the ritualists, this affectation that their movement emanates from the laity is the most untenable. In 1842 Bishop Blomfield declared " it is not too late for us to put fresh incense into our censers," and began the " Catholic Revival " campaign in London, by ordering all his clergy to wear the surplice in the pulpit. This was
1 These and other particulars of ritualistic societies appear in " The Ritualistic Clergy List " published by the Church Association.
BLOMFIELD BEGINS RITUALISM 505
followed up by the introduction of paid choirs, the chanting of the psalms, canticles, and litany, and the intoning of the whole service. Rev, Bryan King, rector of St. George's in the East, one of those abandoned city parishes whose history is such a record of disgrace to the Church, was one of the earliest to discover in Pusey's " Catholicism " an easier " path of duty " than the preaching of the gospel and the living out the word of Christ — a discovery made by the Romans a thousand years before. So antagonistic were the laity to his ritualism that, after sixteen years of it (1842-18 5 8), his congregation had dwindled away, until, out of a population of 38,000, the churchwardens, in their complaint to Bishop Tait, in 1858, said, "the attendance at the parish church was less than 150 at the most," while the regular attendants were " only about 40," and " in the mission chapels the united congregation consisted of only about 3 5 adults." Dr. Tait's reply to the churchwardens was in effect that, while he could deprive a curate of his licence, he had no power over an incumbent.
Two of King's curates became Roman Catholics in 1858; and King used to teach the children a catechism from which I take three questions and answers : —
" Q. Are all bishops equal ?
"A. All are equal in office, but some are higher in honour than others, as Archbishops, Metropolitans, and Patriarchs, of whom the first is the Bishop of Rome, the Patriarch of the West.
" Q. What is the fourth commandment of the Church ?
"J.. To confess our sins to our pastor or some of the priests whenever they troulile us.
" Q. What is the Holy Eucharist ?
"yi. It is the true Body and Blood of Christ, under the appear- ance of bread and wine."
The vestry of St. George's, under an old statute, had the right of appointing a lecturer, " who should be admitted by the rector to have the use of the pulpit,"
5o6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and they appointed Rev. Hugh Allen, an evangelical clergyman. King obstructed Allen's use of the church and pulpit ^ by holding ritualistic services at the hour formerly devoted to the lecturer's service. The parishioners, in defence of their limited rights, in- vaded the church in great numbers and interrupted King's ritual, Sunday after Sunday, in August, Sep- tember, and October 1859. King brazenly threatened the churchwardens to " hold them responsible to an ecclesiastical court " for not quelling the disturbances. Bishop Tait supported him by " calling on the church- wardens, at their peril, to do their duty." One of King's curates was Mr. A. H. Mackonochie, who after- wards became famous as a ritualist on his own account, and with whom Bishop Tait's relations were, as Arch- bishop Davidson says, " of the most cordial and friendly kind ; " and, it being deemed advisable that King should temporarily absent himself, Mackonochie was given charge of the parish. The " riots," as the sacerdotalists call them, still continued under Mackonochie, who persisted in King's ritualistic practices, and the church had to be closed. It was reopened in i860, and ritualistic service was again carried on under police protection, a phenomenon which one may witness at present in St. Paul's cathedral. King, acting on spiritual advice, left the country for a time. On his return he got a living in the congenial diocese of Sarum, and the riots were stopped.
When Rev. W. J. E. Bennett adopted the " Catholic Revival" rites in the parish of St. Pauls, Knights- bridge, in 1850, his church doors were besieged by crowds who entered the building and interrupted the service with groans and hisses." When Rev. A. Poole, a curate in the same parish, set up a confessional
' Davidson's " Life of Tait," i. 236.
2 " Memoirs of Bishop Blomfield," ii. 146.
ENCOURAGEMENT TO RITUALISTS 507
in 1858, several parishioners lodged a complaint with Bishop Tait, charging Poole " with habitually asking outrageous questions from persons who came to him to confession ; " and Bishop Tait was forced to withdraw Poole's licence.
Numerous other instances might be cited, proving that the ritualist movement was ah initio clerical and professional ; and one never meets with a ritualist priest whose character is not enveloped in flattering incense by the highest Church dignitaries, who were and are his principals and employers, and who never have a kind word for an evangelical clergyman. Arch- bishop Davidson describes Rev. Bryan King as " a man of intense earnestness, high courage, and unflinching principle ; " whereas, on his own confession,^ and as the state of his parish proved, King was one of those idle 'poseurs who coolly admitted that " beyond the refusal to give Christian burial to unbaptized children, and to permit the bodies of some who had died in open sin to be taken into the church for the burial service, he was never able even to make an attempt at anything like active aggression upon the seething mass of evil and sin by which he was encompassed." The archbishop also says of Bennett that " he was in- defatigable as a preacher and a pastor ; " whereas the facts show that he was merely a successful beggar who got money from thoughtless rich people to build the church of St. Barnabas, Pimlico, and equip it as a centre of the worst Anglo-Roman ritualism. Liddell, another ritualist, who succeeded Bennett, is praised for the " zeal and efficiency of his work." Dr. Davidson also talks of Poole as " a conscientious and upright man," for whom Bishop Tait had " a most sincere personal regard," though he found it necessary to deprive him of his licence ! It was shortly after the
^ "Twenty-one Years in St. George's Mission," Lowder, p. 227.
I^i3
508 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
St. George's " riots " that the Bishop of London's fund was started, by which, and other similar bishops' funds that followed it, the ritualistic churches in the East End have been made independent of their congre- gations, and from which they have ever since been receiving liberal subventions.
The bitterness of the sacerdotal party towards the Christians is evident from the language they use of those who dissented from the practices of the ritualists. Archbishop Davidson says of King's parishioners, who disapproved of him by absenting themselves from his church, that they were " old-fashioned," liked " slovenly services," and " were chiefly of the middle class." They seem to have stood for 37,800 out of a total popula- tion of 38,000 in the parish; they represented the backbone of England, from whom the ranks of Non- conformity have been continuously recruited ; and it would have been a happy consummation for the Church if it had won their support. If virtue and adherence to principle be " old-fashioned," if the plain form of service settled at the Reformation be " slovenly," if it be a crime to be " middle-class," then the sooner the nation becomes old-fashioned, slovenly, and, in one respect, criminal, the better will it be for posterity. The ritualists concentrated their energies and spent their money freely upon East London after King's suppression. Encouraged by the bishops, men like Charles Lowder and A. H. Mackonochie worked hard at propagating Puseyism, One does not question their hona-fides, but one everlastingly regrets that the bishops did not spend their money upon encouraging those earnest, active men to preach the gospel of Christ and live out the word of God. Had they done so, the East End would not be a plague-spot in the United Kingdom to-day ; but then, perhaps, they may have thought that, if they had preached Christianity
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The Machineky of Ritualism in all its "Crudity"
This collection of idols and otlier ritualistic appurtenances was removed from a State cliurcli iu Brighton, in 1903, by decree of the diocesan chancellor, at the suit of some parishioners. They are hy no means exceptional, hut the legal expenses are so heavy that proceedings can only be taken in a small number of cases.
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Wjiat England owes to Oxford
Here we have another photographic group of Anglican monastic priests, with shaven crowns and peculiar robes, who arc extending their order all over England, as the out- come of Canon Pusey's teaching, and with the approval of the bishops.
To face 2>- 509
ANTI-PROTESTANTISM 509
instead of ritualism, the religious taxation and landed properties of the bishops, chapters, and incumbents might not be monopolised now by a sacerdotal caste.
Archbishop Davidson's anti-Protestantism goes even further than the examples quoted. He says : " The keepers of the dens of drink and infamy, who reap their nightly harvest from the sailors and others in the neighbourhood of the London docks, were doubtless ranged to a man under the so-called Protestant banner in opposition to King. There is much virtue in the word " doubtless," when no proof is forthcoming. The keepers of the dens of drink and infamy were not the people to object to King's wearing a surplice in the pulpit, or a vestment at the communion service ; they knew nothing of him or his church, except that he kept away from them, and did not even " attempt " to save them, for which they must have been sincerely grateful. In the same spirit. Bishop Blomfield's pane- gyrist says : " The Protestant cause was taken up by those to whom all religions were equally indifferent, and all excuses for a riot equally acceptable." If one wanted to find those to whom " all religions are equally indifferent," one should seek them, not amongst the Protestants, but amongst the chief supporters of the so-called High Church party; and if one wished to discover those to whom " all excuses for a riot are equally acceptable," one should search amongst the Roman and Anglican Catholic mobs, who will with equal alacrity murder a John Kensit or demonstrate against an Education Bill by excursion or picnic.
The scenes in East London elicited a characteristic epistle from Pusey. Disowning his disciples because of their "crudity," he informed Tait, on April 26, i860, that he had " soon regretted " the ritual campaign, to which he had instigated Bishop Blomfield, apparently because, as he said, it " was defeated ; " and " altogether
5IO CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
he had looked with sorrow at the crude way in which some doctrines had been put forward." ^ The force of nature could not produce an indefinite number of Puseys, each with a method as devoid of crudity as the famous canon of Christ Church,
In resistance to the priestly agitation, the Church I evangelicals organised themselves in defence of the 'Reformation principles, and in 1865 was founded the ' Church Association. The struggle between the bishops and priests and their " ecclesiastical laymen " on the one side, and the evangelical or Christian laity and clergy, on the other, forms an interesting chapter in the religious history of England. The evangelicals, unwill- ing to abolish the episcopal and capitular establish- ments which caused all the trouble, made free use of the faulty machinery at their disposal, proceeding against ritualists in the diocesan consistory courts, in the Court of Arches, and carrjang their appeals to the highest tribunal, namely, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In this way they have procured at great cost, amounting to nearly ;^ 100,000, a definite legal decision against every practice of the ritualists, except, perhaps, that of auricular confession, which is of such a nature that it could not be made the subject of an action at law. We shall return to the legal battle between the evangelicals and sacerdotalists at greater length, but we must now take up the thread of the story of the Society of the Holy Cross and its book, " The Priest in Absolution."
On 14th June 1877 the late Lord Redesdale brought the book before the attention of the house of lords by a motion of which he had given notice. He said " he thought it high time that the laity should move in this matter. Hitherto it had been treated too much as one exclusively for the clergy, but he felt that the
1 Davidson's " Life of Tait," i. 249.
"THE PRIEST IN ABSOLUTION" 511
time had arrived when there should be a decided condemnation of such practices." He then read several extracts, which were suppressed by Hansard, and even by the newspapers, as unfit for publication. There was great consternation in the episcopal camp ; for Lord Redesdale appears to have acted mostly on his own initiative, having procured his copy of the book from another layman, Mr. Robert Fleming. Archbishop Tait, stung by the exposure, rose in his place and condemned the book unreservedly, saying that Lord Redesdale " had read quite enough to show that no modest person could read the book without regret, and that it was a disgrace to the community that such a book should be circulated under the authority of clergymen of the Estabhshed Church." He made no apology, however, for his dereliction of duty in having delayed his con- demnation until his hand was forced by an unsalaried layman, nor did the house of lords pass any censure on him. The book was a trespass on the good nature of the public, but it was a disgrace to the Church. A fortnight afterwards, on 28th June i 877, the council of the Society of the Holy Cross waited upon the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the bishop of London at Lambeth Palace. The " Master " of the society. Rev. F. L. Bagshawe, vicar of St. Barnabas', Pimlico, made a statement in which he assured the chiefs of the Church that the editor of " The Priest in Absolution," Rev. J. C. Chambers, " possessed the con- fidence of the bishops for prudence, learning, moral integrity, and purity of purpose. His experience was vast. Members of both houses of parliament, clergy, barristers, merchants, tradesmen, and costermongers were amongst his penitents." ^
^ Mr. Walter Walsh's " Secret History of the Oxford Movement," and Archbishop Davidson's " Life," of his father-in-law, Archbishop Tait, deal at length with this scandalous business.
512 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
The bishops knew everything about the Society of the Holy Cross, especially about Father Chambers; and, two days after the interview, Dr. Tait wrote imploringly to Bagshawe : " Let me, through you, urge upon the society the duty of at once repudiating the book which has caused so much alarm. This is due hoth to your- selves and to the Church " ! Convocation was to meet on 5 th July, and Dr. Tait wanted to be in a position to say that the Society of the Holy Cross had disavowed the book. It is not easy to see how Pusey himself could have done better for Puseyism, if he were archbishop of Canterbury. The society met on 5 th July, and the meeting was a stormy one. The idea of repudiating the book was scouted, and the majority of the members could not be got to do more than pass a resolution, " that the Society of the Holy Cross, while distinctly repudiating the unfair criticism passed on ' The Priest in Absolution,' and without intending to imply any condemnation of it, yet, in deference to the desire exj^ressed by the archbisliop of Canterbury to the representatives of the society, resolves that no further copies of it be sup- plied." Next day, Dr. Tait, in his place in convocation, condemned the Society of the Holy Cross ; but did so " with the greatest pain," and " with a full appreciation of the goodness of the men with whom we have to deal," calling them at the same time " a conspiracy within our own body against the Reformed Church." A guarded resolution was passed by the bishops, " that this house expresses its strong condemnation of any doctrine or practice of confession which can be thought to render such a book necessary."
Bishop Mackarness of Oxford, who had the advantage of Pusey's inspiration, contradicted Dr. Tait, and said he did not believe that the Society of the Holy Cross " had the slightest idea of any conspiracy against the Reformed Church." Bishop Moberly of Sahsbury said
PREFERMENT FOR RITUALISTS 513
" he could not doubt that confession and absolution were enjoined by our Lord Himself, and that they form a real part of the system of the Church." He only dis- approved of" carrying them to excess." And he added, in words which prove the dangerous power wielded by the sacerdotal party in the public schools : " I believe the practice of habitual confession to be mischievous in the highest degree, and I have a particular object in referring to it, for the greater part of my life, as that of others of your lordships, has been spent as a school- master, and I confess that there is not one thing in all the world which is deeper in my heart and conscience than the corrupting mischief of any such system as this getting into our schools."
This was the only action taken by the bishops against the Society of the Holy Cross, which, four days after- wards, held a meeting, at which it got some nebulous body, called " The Church of England Working Men's Society," to present it with an address of confidence ! Rev. F. N. Oxenham moved that the remaining copies of " The Priest in Absolution " should be destroyed. Rev. R. J. Wilson moved a negative, which was carried unanimously ; and Mr. Wilson was shortly afterwards promoted to the position of warden of Keble College, Oxford, where he had unexampled opportunities of in- fluencing the future of the Church, under the patronage of the archbishop of Canterbury and the leading ritu- alists, lay and clerical. Rev. R. Eyton said " there was a great tide of feeling in the country setting in towards Catholicism as the only safe ground. He hoped the society would not, by its policy at this great crisis, check that tide." Mr. Eyton was afterwards appointed to the lucrative sinecure of a canonry at Westminster.
Amongst the other speakers were Rev. N. Dawes, afterwards appointed to a colonial bishopric ; and Rev. T. Marshall, organising secretary of the English Church
2 K
514 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Union. Rev. W. J. Knox- Little, incumbent of St. Alban's, Manchester, was also a member of the Society of the Holy Cross ; and, preaching from his own pulpit, he told his parishioners that " his knowledge of the good and holy men who are leading members of it was inti- mate, and he believed, from all he had heard of it, that it was a noble society," Mr. Little was soon afterwards promoted to a canonry at Worcester and the vicarage of Hoar Cross. Another active member, Rev. W. H. Hutchings, became canon and archdeacon in the diocese of York. Rev. A. H. Mackonochie, who had meantime become vicar of St. Alban's, Holborn, was one of the lead- ing spirits of the society, and declared at the meeting held immediately after convocation " that, for those who are in mortal sin, there is no way generally of obtaining pardon save in the sacrament of penance."
In August 1877, the nobility of Great Britain and Ireland presented an address to the archbishop of Canterbury, signed by six dukes, five marquises, thirty- four earls, eight viscounts, and thirty-nine barons, expressing " their sorrow and deep indignation at the extreme indelicacy and impropriety of the questions put to married and unmarried women and children " in " The Priest in Absolution." The territorial aristo- cracy, in fact, relying on their power over the Church as the chief tithe-collectors and patrons, called the bishops to order for their want of good taste. The public at large, it appears, had no right of admonition, nor had their representatives in parliament the neces- sary courage to administer a rebuke to spiritual wicked- ness in high places.
In the next month the society held a synod, at which it was proposed by Rev. O. Shipley — who, like many other members, afterwards became a Roman Catholic — that " The Priest in Absolution " should be republished " in the ordinary course of trade." The proposal was
GAUME AND PUSEY 515
supported, and only lost after a long debate, the decision of the meeting being influenced by the official announcement that " Dr. Pusey was bringing out a work on moral theology " which would serve all the purposes of " The Priest in Absolution." Pusey did actually produce his " work on moral theology " the next year, 1878 ; and it proved to be " another adapta- tion of the same book from which ' The Priest in Absolution ' was translated " ! That was how Pusey, who was behind the scenes all the time, steered the society through its momentary troubles. " Chambers on Gaume " having been condemned, " Pusey on Gaume " was straightway put upon the market, and eagerly bought up on every hand. If the entire scene in the house of lords and convocation had been arranged to advertise auricular confession, and secure an enormous demand for Pusey 's book, it could not have achieved the ritualists' aim more completely. What was " rank blasphemy " in Chambers, the private, was condoned and approved when uttered by Pusey, the great captain of Christ Church College. It is evident that those who go to battle with the priests must not only screw their courage to the sticking-point, but sharpen their wits and hold fast to the principles of truth and justice ; for the priests are like hobgoblins who can change their appearance, as it were, to suit every emergency, while never altering their true nature or swerving from the real objective of their profession, which is the enslavement of the human mind.
And if one were asked to apportion the odium attached to the trade of writing text-books for con- fessors, one cannot help regardmg Pusey as more guilty than Abbe Gaume. There is a straightforwardness in Gaume which is wanting in Pusey. Gaume, for in- stance, could never be guilty of such hypocrisy as the following, taken from Pusey 's " Manual for Confessors " :
5i6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" It is a sad sight to see confessors giving their whole morning to young women devotees, while they dismiss men or married women, who have, perhaps, left their household aft'airs with difficulty, to find themselves rejected with ' I am busy, go to some one else ! ' so that,, perhaps, such people will go on for months or years without the sacraments," The man who could compose such a suggestion and invitation to sin, as is disguised in the grain of this lamentation; under the sanctimonious veneer of a prohibition, had nothing to learn from the immoral French, Italian, or Spanish treatises on " moral theology." " You may pervert this sacrament," he writes, " from its legitimate end, which is to kindle an exceeding horror of sin in the minds of others, into a subtle means of feeding evil passions and sin in your own mind." If Gaume wrote in this strain, it might at least be pleaded in his defence that he was condemning a notorious evil which really existed in France ; but Pusey was creating the very evils which he pretended to deprecate, for the practice of the confessional was almost extinct in England until he revived it. In considering the conduct of an influ- ential man, like Pusey, who led so many thousands of young men back to the sacerdotal heresies from which this country had been rescued by the sacrifices of their forefathers, one almost regrets the lenity of our laws.
In its annual report, issued at the time of the publi- cation of Pusey's adaptation of Gaume, the English Church Union advanced the sacerdotal standard a stage further, and advocated the " restoration of the visible communion between the Church of England and the Roman Church." The practice of auricular con- fession continued to grow thenceforward, and in 1896 it was claimed that from 1200 to 1500 Anglican priests continually heard confessions ; while in a single
SPREAD OF RITUALISM 517
church at Brighton it was estimated that 10,000 con- fessions had been heard in the year 1898.
Besides the Society of the Holy Cross, the ritiiahsts founded the Alcuin Ckib, so called after a Yorkshire theologian who made a great fortune at the court of Charlemagne ; with the object of re-establishing ( i ) the use of incense; (2) the elevation, reservation, and adoration of the host; (3) the use of the altar-lights before the sacrament ; and (4) the identity of the Anglican communion service with the Roman mass. This is the society to which is largely due the wide prevalence of choral communion services, at which the priest alone communicates, after the Roman manner. In 1903 there were three bishops on its roll of members, namely. Dr. Talbot of Rochester, Dr. WordsAvorth of Salisbury, and Dr. Randall, suffragan of Oxford ; while Archbishop Davidson and Bishop Browne of Bristol are ex-members. It is to be observed that priests who display great activity in these ritualistic societies usually cease to be members when they expect, or are about to receive, promotion ; thus leaving themselves free to con- demn officially what they personally support, if necessity compels them " in the interests of the Church."
The Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament is another influential ritualistic society, having no less than 1737 " priest-associates." Its object is to spread a belief in transubstantiation and the real presence, as taught in the Roman Church. It issues a special liturgy, called " Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament," from which I take the following excerpts — (i) a prayer, (2) a litany, and (3) a hymn of adoration to the sacrament : —
"I adore Thee, 0 Lord my God, whom I now behold veiled beneath these earthly forms. Prostrate I adore Thy Majesty. . . . Hail, most Holy Body of Christ ; Hail, Living Bread that cometh down from heaven to give life to the world ; Hail, most Holy Blood of Jesus shed for sinners," &c.
5i8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" Jesu, our Gracious God, who condescending to the weakness of our nature, coverest Thy glory under the familiar forms of bread and wine, and so givest Thyself to miserable sinners : Have mercy upon us."
" I worship) Thee, Lord Jesu,
Who on Thine Altar laid,
In this most awful service
Our food and drink art made.
I worship Thee, Lord Jesu,
Who, in Thy love divine,
Art hiding here Thy God-head
In forms of bread and wine."
The Guild of All Souls is another powerful society, founded for the purpose of disseminating a belief in purgatory and the efficacy of masses, or choral com- munion services, offered up for the repose of the souls of the departed. This society has published a special liturgy, called " The Office for the Dead, according to the Roman and Sarum Uses " ; and requiem celebra- tions for the dead are now offered monthly, under its auspices, in 328 State churches, while 734 Anglican priests are on its roll of members.
These four societies push forward everywhere amongst the young a belief in and veneration for the three leading articles of the Roman religion — (i) auricular confession and absolution, (2) the ritual and sacrifice of the mass, (3) the offering up of prayers and sacrifices for the departed. No society for the sale of indulgences has, so far as we know, been yet established ; but this is probably because there is no one bishop to whom the ritualists have agreed in attributing omnipotence and infallibility, and an absolute monopoly as sole agent of God on earth — or " sole vicar of Christ," as they say in Rome. Communities of monks and nuns have been increasing in the Church since Pusey's time, and are constantly at work inculcating the doctrines of the four societies mentioned. An important order owes
MONASTIC ORDERS 519
its foundation to Pusey's disciple, Rev. Cliaiies Gore, librarian at Pusey House, Oxford, vice-principal of Cuddesdon College, and now bishop of Birmingham. It is called the Community of the Resurrection ; and, in the advertisement,^ its members describe themselves as " celibate clergy living under a rule, and with a common purse." It is added that it "had its origin in 1892, at the Pusey House, Oxford," Mr. Gore being its first superior. When Mr. Gore became vicar of Radley, near Oxford, in 1893, he established the head- quarters of the order in his parish, where the com- munity remained till 1898, without evoking any censure from Bishop Stubbs, such as Newman's monastery had elicited from Bishop Bagot. Mr. Gore was appointed to a canonry in Westminster in 1894, and made an honorary chaplain to the Queen in 1898, whereupon he grew so confident that he established a branch monastery in Little Cloisters, Westminster, under his own direction. The headquarters of the order are now at Mirfield, Yorkshire; and there is a branch at Johannesburg.
It is interesting to observe how most of those Anglican monastic associations, mainly owing to the intimate connection between the Oxford sacerdotalists and the late Mr. Cecil Rhodes, have branches in South Africa, where it is not unlikely that the ritualists have done much to alienate the sympathies of the Dutch Christians.
The Society of St. John the Evangehst, founded by Rev. R. M. Benson, and commonly known as the Cowley Fathers, has its headquarters at Cowley St. John's, also near Oxford. The members take a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience ; and they have houses at Cape Town and Kaffraria, as well as in many parts of England, notably one at Westminster, which was recently in- augurated by Bishop Ingram. The Society of the
^ " Church of England Official Year Book," 1905.
520 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Sacred Mission lias its headquarters at Newark, and branches at Modderpoort and Ladybrand in South Africa. The Order of St. Paul is " a community for men — -priests and laymen — dedicated to the service of God and our merchant seamen in holy religion."
Besides those orders officially acknowledged, there are many other communities, as, for instance, the Society of the Divine Compassion at Plaistow, of which Bishop Jacob of St. Albans is the visitor, and of which Father William, alluded to at page 403, is a leading member. Moreover, the religious community system has been brought to bear upon secondary education. St. Nicolas College,and schools in union with it, belong to a religious order originated by an Anglican priest, named Nicolas Woodward, in 1848, and described as "a society of men (called the Society of SS. Mary and Nicolas), united as fellows of a college, to build, endow, and carry on schools with definite religious teaching, in accord- ance with the doctrines of the Church of England." ^ This society possesses important boarding schools at Lancing, Hurstpierpoint, Ardingley, Bognor, Banbury, Dunstone, Ellesmere, Worksop, Ablbots Bromley, .Brom- ley, Bangor, Scarborough, and Taunton. Of the secondary schools which are officially claimed by the Church, I can only find one which is partly under lay management, the South-Eastern College, Ramsgate; the president of the council being Mr. J. F. W. Deacon, of the well-known banking firm, with Lord Kinnaird and Viscount Wolseley amongst the vice-presidents, and the headmaster being a layman.
The system of celibate communities is also brought to bear on the teachers in Church elementary schools. The Guild of the Good Shepherd is described as being in connection with the community of St. Mary Virgin, Wantage. The object is " to form a bond of union
^ " Official Year Book," 1905.
ANGLICAN CONVENTS 521
between teachers in elementary schools who desire to do their work for the glory of God and the love of souls," and, let us add, to relieve the parson from the drudgery of catechising. It aims " as far as possible at giving help in two special difficulties felt by many teachers," namely, " the trial of loneliness and the strain of their own spiritual hfe "—for which, naturally, playing the church organ and dancing attendance on the parson are found to be most effective remedies. The warden is a Resurrectionist priest, to whom all teachers are invited to apply.
There is even a " Church Army and Navy Board," of which the archbishop of Canterbury is president, and the late First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary for War and Lord Roberts are vice-presidents. This society is not concerned with Rev. W. Carlile's " army,' nor with a " Church navy " conducted on similar lines, but with the British army and navy, and its object is " the promotion of closer relations between the Church and the services," by " the holding of quiet days " (called " retreats " by the Roman priests) " and special meetings to deepen the devotional life of all engaged in the work." Most people will agree that the comiection between the Church and the services — especially the army — was already closer than the advocates of efficiency thought desirable, without this sacerdotal innovation.
The female communities in the Church are more numerous than the male ; and we shall take them in the order of the dioceses. In Bristol the sisters of charity have twelve establishments. In Canterbury the sisters of SS. Mary and Scholastica lead a devo- tional life at St. Mary's Abbey, West Mailing, Kent. In Chichester are the sisters of St. Margaret, with their headquarters at East GrLnstead, and branches and schools in Cardiff, Isle of Wight, Devonport, and else- where ; the sisters of the Holy Cross, with their head-
522 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
quarters at Hayward's Heath, and branches in several places ; and the sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at St. Mary's Home, Brighton. In London there are the sisters of Bethany, with their headquarters at Clerken- well, and several branches, " offering persons living in the world an opportunity of spiritual retreat ; " the sisters of St. Margaret at Hackney Road ; sisters of St. John the Divine at South Kensington ; sisters of SS. Mary and John at Chiswick ; St. Peter's Home at Kilburn ; sisters of the Church at Kilburn, who con- duct "day schools in various parts of London;" St. Catherine's sisterhood at Fulham, near the episcopal palace ; the sisters of the Ascension at Portman Square, with branches in other parts of London ; the com- munity of the Holy Comforter at Edmonton, founded in 1 89 1 "to cherish a special devotion to the Holy Ghost, and to co-operate with Him in work for souls ; " and the community of St. Michael and All Angels at Hammersmith, whose members conduct several Church schools.
In Norwich there is the sisterhood of All Hallows, with its headquarters at Ditchingham, and branches in Norwich and Ipswich. In Oxford there are the sister- hood of St. John the Baptist at Clewer, with branches elsewhere, notably a penitentiary at Bovey Tracey with 90 inmates ; the sisterhood of St. Mary at Wantage, with several branches ; the society of the Holy Un- divided Trinity in Oxford, whose self-imposed work it is " to pray for the increase and preservation of the true faith " ; and the sisterhood of St. Thomas the Martyr, also in the university city, doing school and penitentiary work. In St. Albans there is the sister- •hood of All Saints, with its headquarters at Colney Chapel, St. Albans, and branches in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Leeds, and elsewhere. In Salisbury there is the community of St. Denys at Warminster, which
OVER 9000 RITUALIST PRIESTS 523
possesses schools and orphanages. In Southwell there is a sisterhood of St. Lawrence at Belper and Derby, and a branch at Scarborough. In Truro there is a community of the Epiphany doing penitentiary, laundry, and school work, a combmation characteristically Roman. In Wakefield there is a sisterhood of St. Peter, with its headquarters at Horbury, and branches at Rusholme, Manchester, Stafford, and Lavender Hill, London. In Worcester there is the community of the Holy Name of Jesus, who have their settlement at Malvern Link, and whose object is " to honour the holy name of Jesus in the strength of the union and in the fervour of a devoted life, by winning souls to Him." They have branches in Worcester, Wednesbury, Birmingham, Balsall Heath, and Hove, as well as at Kennington, in the diocese of Southwark. In York there is the community of the Holy Rood at Middles- borough.
In connection with those communities and the ritualistic churches, there is an important and grow- ing trade in such material as chancel screens, crosses, vases, chalices, cruets, candlesticks, altar-covers, stoles, veils, reredoses, robes, cassocks, and clerical vestments, as well as luxurious delicacies, such as matches which " do not flavour the tobacco." ^ There is also a flourish- ing business in stained glass, Venetian and marble mosaic, ecclesiastical fabrics, tapestries, silk damask, Roman sheetmgs, laces, cords, ribbons, appliques and ecclesiastical embroideries, and there are special schools for " the most elaborate and costly embroidery in figure work."
The professed ritualistic Anglican clergy now number over 9000; of whom 8852 are curates, incumbents, and dignitaries, 1 12 hold office in schools and colleges, 47 in the navy and army, 160 in workhouses and prisons,
^ " Church of England Official Year Book," 1905.
524 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
97 in hospitals, asylums, and reformatories. Of this number 3640 are members of the English Church Union, to which Bishop King of Lincoln and 2 1 colonial and assistant bishops also belong; Dr. King being an exception to the rule that the clergy retire from such societies on or before preferment. There are also 524 avowed ritualists amongst the Anglican clergy in the colonies and abroad.
From the date of Manning's secession in 1 8 5 i , the evangelical party in the Church had been fighting the ritualists, as I have said, in the ecclesiastical and common law courts. Before 1865, the leading cases of Faulkner v. Litchfield and Westerton v. Liddell decided the important point against the ritualists, that the communion table is meant to be a " table " in the ordinary acceptation of that word, and not an altar ; " table " being deliberately substituted for " altar " in the second prayer book of Edward VI. The first case was decided by Sir H. J. Fust, dean of arches ; and the second, in which his decision was confirmed, by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, who ordered the removal of a stone altar from St. Barnabas', Pimlico, and " the substitution of a communion table of wood." ^ In another case, Parker v. Leach, Lord Chancellor Westbury said : " In a Roman Catholic church there is an altar, or place where the priest offers sacrifice. In a Protestant church there is no altar in the same sense, but there is a communion table, on which bread and wine are placed, that the parishioners may come round to partake of the sacrament — tli& supper of our Lord." ^
After 1865, when the Church Association was founded " to uphold the doctrines, principles, and order " of the Church, and " to encourage concerted
1 Brooke, " Six P.O. Judgments."
^ Moore's P.O. Reports, new series, p. 180.
Captain A. W. Cobham, J.P., Chairman of the Church Association
" Bishop TlioroUl characterised it as ' very curious ' thtit the Church Associa- tioa should liave conseuted to revive a ])urely ecclesiastical court. But, as C;:iptaiu Cobham pointed out iu reply, there was the right of appeal to the Privy Council." (p. 550.)
Elliot & Fry.
Lord Halifax, Ecclesiastical Commissioner
This important member of the Ecclesiastical Commission is chairman of the English Church Union, which desires corporate reunion with Rome ; and he wants the ecclesiastical courts to be made "instruments" in the hands of the «lergy " for enforcing- discipline upon the laity." (p. 536.) To face p. 524
MACKONOCHIE'S CASE 525
action for the advancement of spiritual religion," the fight against the heresies of sacerdotalism took the form of an organised campaign. An exhaustive series of legal judgments against ritualism began in 1867 and 1868 with the prosecution of Rev. A. H. Mackonochie, St. Alban's, Holborn, and Rev. John Purchas, St. James's, Brighton. The first-named incumbent seems to have been thrust forward by the dean and chapter of St. Paul's, his patrons, to clear the ground for the ritualists in London ; the second by the sacerdotal party in Chichester ; and the cases against them constitute a considerable volume of the law of Anglican ritual.
Mackonochie was proceeded against in 1868 for four serious acts of priestcraft persistently practised during the communion service : ( i ) The elevation of the bread, or, as it is called, the host; (2) prostration or kneeling during the prayer of consecration; (3) the use of lighted candles ; (4) the use of incense. In the first case Lord Chancellor Hatherley, delivering the judgment of the Privy Council, said the court " could give no sanction whatever to any elevation whatever of the elements, as distinguished from the mere act of removing them from the table." Mackonochie, relying on the support of the Church, disregarded the judg- ment of the Privy Coimcil ; and an application being subsequently made to have the monition enforced against him. Lord Chelmsford, giving judgment, thus described the ritualist's method of procedure : ^ " Upon reaching the solemn words of institution in the prayer of consecration, he drops his voice so as to be nearly inaudible ; a bell begins to toll ; he then elevates a wafer, and, replacing it on the communion table, bows his head and remains for some seconds in this position ; he then elevates the cup and, replacing it on the table, bows down as before, after which the administra-
^ Law Journal Reports, Ecclesiastical Cases, xl. pt. iv. pp. 5-7.
526 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tion of the elements commences." The court con- demned Mackonochie to pay the costs, and suspended him for three months " from all discharge of his clerical duties and offices." In the second case, Lord Chancellor Cairns delivered the judgment of the Council, ordering Mackonochie " to abstain for the future from kneeling or prostrating himself before the consecrated elements." In the third case Mackonochie was admonished by Lord Cairns, who delivered judgment, to abstain from using lights as ornaments at the communion service. The fourth case was tried by Sir R. Phillimore, dean of arches, who decided that Mackonochie's use of incense " for censing persons and things in and during the celebration of holy communion " was " illegal, and must be discontinued." ^ The Church Association says that " being desirous to avoid the imprisonment of Mr. Mackonochie," it " had to initiate no fewer than three suits, which occupied sixteen years, and cost over ;^io,ooo" !
The proceedings against Purchas were even more numerous than those against Mackonochie. He was severally prosecuted for ( i ) elevating the chalice above his head while reading the prayer for the Church militant; (2) elevating the alms-basin, placing it on the communion table; (3) using incense generally, and censing a crucifix at ordinary services and at the celebration of communion ; (4) mixing water with the wine during the communion service; (5) wearing Roman vestments at morning and evening prayer and at the communion service ; (6) using wafer bread and administering it to the communicants; (7) using a sacring bell at communion service, and saying the Agnus Dei immediately after the prayer of consecra- tion ; (8) making the sign of the cross and kissing the gospel book at various stages of the service ; (9)
^ Law Reports, Eccl. Cases, II., 1867-9, pp. 211-15.
THE PURCHAS CASES 5^7
standing in front of the communion table witli his back to the people during the prayer of consecration and while reading the collects and epistle ; ( i o) being attended by altar-boys and a man bearing a crucifix while reading the gospel ; ( 1 1 ) singing the Te Dcum at the communion table at the close of evening service, surrounded by acolytes with banners and crucifixes; (12) holding processions with incense, lighted candles, and banners, the processionists being arrayed in vest- ments; (13) blessing ashes, candles, and palms, and distributing them to the people on Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and Candlemas Day; (14) holding mortuary celebrations, interpolating prayers not in the prayer book, and holding a special rite before service for the admission of choir boy; (15) having a crucifix on the communion table, or immediately above the table, on a ledoe fixed to the wall, which he covered and uncovered ceremonially at intervals, and another crucifix over the screen separating the chancel from the nave ; ( 1 6) having a statue of the infant Saviour decked with lilies over the credence table at Christmas, and a stuffed dove over the communion table at Whitsuntide.
These Purchas cases cover nearly the whole field of ritualism, and in every instance the courts decided against the rituaHst. In i, 2, 3, and 4, Sir R. Philh- more pronounced the elevation of the chalice and alms-basin, the use of incense, and the mixing of water and wine, as described, to be illegal. In 4, an appeal was taken to the Privy Council, and Lord Chancellor Hatherley, in giving judgment, upheld the decision. In 5, Sir R. Phillimore decided that it was unlawful for Purchas to wear a cope at morning or evening prayer, or albs, tippets, stoles of any kind, dal- matics, and maniples ; and Lord Chancellor Hatherley, for the Privy Council, held that a chasuble was also illegal. "Their lordships will advise her Majesty,"
528 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
said Lord Hatherley, " that Mr. Purchas has offended against the laws ecclesiastical in wearing chasuble, alb, and tiinicle, and that a monition shall issue against him accordingly." ^ Li 6, Lord Hatherley said the use of wafers was inconsistent with the obligation on the parish to supply pure wheaten bread, " such as is usual to be eaten," and was illegal. In 7 and 8, Sir R. Phillimore held the sacring boll, the singing of the Agnus Dei out of its proper place, making the sign of the cross and kissing the gospel book, to be illegal. In 9, Lord Chancellor Hatherley, for the Privy Council, held that " the priest is so to stand that the people present may see him break the bread and take the cup in his hands," and issued a monition against Purchas. With regard to the collects, Sir R. Phillimore held that the rubric clearly defined the priest's position when it said that he, " standing at the north side of the table, shall say the Lord's Prayer with the collect following." In most, but not all, of the Roman churches, the " altar " is at the east end ; hence the priest standing at the north side would have his face and hands clearly in view of the people. The ritualist churches are built on the Roman model, and the priest when looking " eastward " has his back to the entire congregation as in the mass. In 10, 11, 12, and 13, the same judge held that such "additional rites" as the attendance of altar-boys and persons bearing crucifixes, the singing of the Te Deum by the priest so surrounded, the holding of processions as described, the blessing and distribution of ashes, candles, and palms, were all illegal. In 14, Sir R. Phillimore held that mortuary celebrations, the interpolation of prayers, and the holding of a rite for the initiation of an acolyte were all illegal. The boy in this case was made " to kneel before the holy table," while Purchas " read some 1 Law Journal Reports, Ecclesiastical Cases, xl. pt. 6, June 1871.
SHEPPARD V. BENNETT 529
words out of a book, making the sign of the cross over him, and putting into his hands a candle and decanters or bottles of wine and water," successively. In i 5 and 16, the same judge held that the crucifixes on the communion table, or on a ledge immediately over it, and on the chancel screen, as well as the statue and stuffed dove at Christmas and Whitsuntide, were all illegal.
In 1872, the Privy Council delivered a lucid and far-reaching judgment, completely undermining the sacerdotalists' main position, and declaring that there is no " real presence " of the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine used in the holy communion. This was in the case of Sheppard v. Bennett, in which the defendant boldly put forward the full Roman view that " there is an actual presence of the true body and blood of our Lord in the con- secrated bread and wine, by virtue of and upon the consecration, without or external to the communicant, and irrespective of the faith and worthiness of the communicant." His counsel explicitly stated that by " the true body " the defendant meant " the natural body," flesh, bones, and blood. The Judicial Committee cited the Articles of Religion condemning the mass and defining the nature of the sacrament, and held that the doctrine of the Church of England is that there is a presence of Christ in the elements, but only " after a heavenly and spiritual manner ; " and that even such presence only exists when the sacrament is " given to, taken and received by a faithful com- municant." They held that there is no " sacrifice " in the holy communion ; " no offering of Christ which is efi&cacious, in the sense in which Christ's death is efficacious, to procure the remission of guilt or the punishment of sins." They held that there should be no adoration of the bread and wine, and cited the
2 L
5 30 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
28th Article declarmg that the sacrament "was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped."
In 1873, the year following this famous judgment, the bishops, convinced that some effort should be made to persuade the public that the hierarchy was not leading the sacerdotal party, produced a bill for the regulation of public worship, proposing to create in each diocese a board, consisting of five laymen elected by the churchwardens, and five clerics, with the bishop as president. This body was to consider prima facie each complaint of illegal ritual, and advise the bishop whether it should be entertained or dis- missed. If there was a trial, the bishop alone was to be the judge, and his sentence or monition was to have the force of law. The arraigned clergyman might appeal to the archbishop, but there was to be no appeal to the Privy Council, or any state court. Early in 1874 the Conservatives came into power, but the Government refused to take up the measure ; and, when Archbishop Tait introduced it in the house of lords, Lord Shaftesbury, who advocated the abolition of clerical judges and the substitution of laymen, carried the following doubtful amendments: i. The proposal for a diocesan board was dropped, and the bishop alone was empowered to veto all proceedings, ab initio. 2. The bishop alone was to be the judge, if both sides consented ; but, if either party objected to him, the case was to be tried by a practising barrister of ten years' standing, appointed by the arch- bishops, and from whose decision there was to be an appeal to the Privy Council. The bill also limited the right of lodging a complaint against a clergyman to (i) an archdeacon, (2) a churchwarden, or (3) three parishioners being members of the Church. Pusey had been denouncing the bill on a hundred specious
PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION ACT 531
pretexts from the start, his real antagonism being, first, to the status given to the laity in the diocesan board and, afterwards, to the rights given to church- wardens and parishioners. Many sacerdotalists wrote intimidatory letters to Dr. Tait, warning him that their party would become schismatics if the bill were passed — an empty threat. Evangelicals may join the Free Churches in thousands yearly, a few credulous poor or decadent wealthy may become Romanists ; but, as long as there are highly-endowed cathedrals and highly- salaried bishops, the " high " churchmen may be trusted to cling loyally to the Church. When the bill came down to the house of commons, Dr. Tait begged of Mr. Disraeli to accord it the support of the Government : " The agitation of the subject for another year," he wrote, " would, in my opinion, be injurious to the Church." The members showed themselves sym- pathetic, and, implicitly accepting Disraeli's statement that its object was " to put down ritualism," passed the bill with only one amendment ; despite the vehe- ment opposition of Mr. Gladstone, who was completely deserted by his party and seemed to be acting solely on behalf of Canon Pusey. They inserted a clause giving a right of appeal to the archbishop from the bishop's veto ; but the bishops refused to accept it, and the bill, as finally enacted, left the bishop of each diocese an unfettered right of vetoing all proceedings under the Act.
Thus the Public Worship Regulation Act was passed upon the unfounded assumption that the archbishops and bishops were eager to suppress ritualism if they had the power. The fallacy of that assumption is now a matter of public notoriety. The costly suits against Mackonochie and others " were undertaken by the Church Association," we are officially told, " at the suggestion of the archbishops and bishops, who said that
532 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
they did not know what the Imv was, and had no means of finding out ; but that, when the law had been ascer- tained, the bishops would certainly put it in force ; " but, says the Church Association, " that promise has NOT BEEN KEPT." ^ The history of Anglican ritualism appears to be one lamentable story of deception and untruth practised, or connived at, by the highest dig- nitaries of the Church, who thrust forward small men like Mackonochie and Purchas to bear the fire of attack, while they themselves " crept along the hedge- bottoms." Archbishop Tait, as a Scotsman, was prob- ably a Protestant at heart, but, as a practical man in receipt of a public salary equal to that of three Secre- taries of State, three Lords Justices, three Field Mar- shals, or seven Admirals, he felt bound to please all parties. The conduct of the sacerdotal party proved the wisdom of Charles James Fox's saying that " by being a good churchman a person might become a bad citizen " ; their contumacious violation of the law being audaciously justified by an imprisoned ritualist in a letter to Archbishop Tait on the following grounds : " i. It is incompatible with the very existence of a Church that any three persons [the three parishioners entitled to lodge a complaint] who ignore all their own religious responsibilities, should dictate to God's faithful people in matters as to which they have no concern whatever. 2. It is impossible for the House of Commons, which is officially ignorant of its God and Saviour Jesus Christ, to be in any sense whatever a source of eccle- siastical jurisdiction."
The next important case was Clifton v. Ridsdale, in which Rev. C. J. Ridsdale of Folkestone, in the diocese of Canterbury, was charged with wearing Roman vest- ments, using wafers for the sacrament, taking the east- ward position with his back to the people at the
1 " Illegal Ritual in the Church," 1900.
CLIFTON V. RIDSDALE 533
consecration of the elements, and erecting in his church the fourteen pictures known as " stations of the cross." The Judicial Committee decided against the vestments. Ridsdale's use of the wafers was held not to have been proved, but the committee confirmed its judgment as to the illegality of wafers. The judges modified their former decision as to the illegality of the eastward position, saying : " There is no specific direction " that the minister, while saying the prayer of consecration and ordering the elements, " is to stand on the west side " of the table looking east, or on the north side lookmg south. But he " must stand so that he may, in good faith, enable the communicants present to see, if they wish it, the breaking of the bread and the per- formance of the other manual acts." Lord Penzance, dean of arches, in his judgment delivered in 1876, ordered the removal of the stations of the cross from Ridsdale's church.
There were a number of other decisions against ritualism, but those dealt with, perhaps, are the leading cases. One trick of the ritualists is worthy of mention. It will be remembered that Purchas had a crucifix on a ledge of wood, just over the surface of the communion table, thereby craftily seeking to evade the prohibition against its being placed on the table. In 1876 the vicar of St. Margaret's, King's Lynn, had a movable wooden cross, about three feet high, placed " on a structure of wood called a re-table, consisting of a ledge " about eight inches wide and " within five-six- teenths of an inch of the surface of the communion table," so that it appeared as if the cross were actually on the table. The people's churchwarden boldly removed the cross, and the vicar took criminal proceedings against him in the court of arches for having done so without first obtaining a faculty, though the vicar him- self had not got a faculty in the first instance for erect-
534 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
ing the cross. The Judicial Committee, on appeal, held that the cross and re-table were illegal, and ordered the suit against the churchwarden to be dismissed.^ Throughout the whole of these proceedings, the aim of the ritualists was to set up " a one-man ministry " — the priest before the altar, with his back to the people, standing between them and God. The Christian view was well put recently by Rev. John Wilson, president of the Baptist Union, when he said that " the ideal of the Church was not a one-man ministry but a whole- Church ministry." ^
Feeling ran very high occasionally during this legal warfare, and more than one " priest " was committed to prison for open disobedience to the order of the courts. The sacerdotal party spoke insultingly of Lords West- bury, Hatherley, Chelmsford, Cairns, and other eminent judges, and vilified the evangelicals for invoking the aid of the law against the sacred persons of the priests ; forgetting that their own leader, Pusey, set the example of prosecuting when he took proceedings against Pro- fessor Jowett in the Oxford chancellor's court. " It would be an evil day for England," wrote Pusey, a few days hefore the trial, in his own peculiar style, " when it should be recognised that to appeal to the majesty of justice is to contravene truth and justice ; " ^ and the official organ of the English Church Union declared : " There is something noble in the learned professor's vindication of the law." * They wrote quite differently after the trial, when their prosecution had been dis- missed, and Jowett was acquitted.
In 1880, when Mr. Gladstone, with the assistance of Revs. Malcolm MacCoU and H. P. Liddon, returned to power, the ritualists pressed him to relieve them of the troublesome Judicial Committee and other ecclesi-
^ Marsters v. Durst, July 11, 1876. '^ Times, April 19, 1904.
^ Times, Feb. 19, 1863. ■* Church Review, Feb. 21, 1863.
CHURCH COURTS COMMISSION 53 5
astical courts presided over by laymen. Yielding to their solicitations, in 1882, the Liberal premier ap- pointed a commission to inquire into " the constitution and working of the ecclesiastical courts ; " he himself being in favour of abolishing the " Crown Court of Ap- peal," i.e. the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.^ The commission was packed with saccrdotalists, and included Professor Freeman, whom the Church Times dishonoured by calling " a high churchman whose ser- vices to the church are invaluable ; " Rev. W. Stubbs, the other Oxford historian ; Bishop Benson ; the Mar- quis of Bath, who led the Puseyites in the house of lords in opposition to the Public Worship Regu- lation Act, and the Earl of Devon, both active members of the EngHsh Church Union, the last-named being the father-in-law of Lord Halifax, its president ; Bishop Mackarness, of Oxford, who had just vetoed the proceedings taken against Canon Carter of Clewer ; Dean Lake and Prebendary Ainslie, who had promoted a remonstrance against the judgment in the Purchas case ; Sir Richard Cross and Mr. Whitbread, members of the High Church parliamentary party ; Messrs. Charles and Dean, counsel to the English Church Union ; Lord Blachford, one of the founders of the Guardian, who told Mozley that " Cranmer burned well"; and Chancellor Espin, the only clerical judge living. Against this array of force the evangelical party were only represented by Lord Chichester and Dean Perowne, while Archbishop Tait, who, though not an avowed evangelical, was also not a ritualist, died before the end of the sittings. An ex-Anglican churchwoman who, with her husband and five chil- dren, joined the Church of Rome in Tait's time, assured me that, when the archbishop attended church at Broadstairs, the service used to be evan- 1 " Life of Bishop Samuel Wiberforce," vol. ii. p. 288.
536 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
gelical ; but, when Mrs. Tait came alone to the same church, all manner of ritualism was practised.
The result hoped for from the commission's report was that the Church might be made independent of the State, and especially of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the legal embodiment of the Sovereign, who is the head of the Church, and who, in that capacity, represents, or ought to represent, the citizens at large. Twenty-four years before this commission, Buckle had proudly said of his native country that " the pride of men and their habits of self-reliance enabled them to mature into a system what is called the right of private judgment ; and this being quickly succeeded, first by scepticism, and then by toleration, prepared the Avay for that subordination of the Church to the State for which we are pre- eminent, and without a rival, amongst the nations of Europe." ^ Buckle unfortunately died too young to witness the growth of ritualism, and if he were writing at the present day it is to be feared he would speak of the subordination of the Church to the State as a blessing for which " we were pre-eminent."
Lord Halifax, who, as chairman of the English Church Union, was a leading witness before the commission, complained that " whereas formerly the ecclesiastical courts were employed by clergymen as instruments for enforcing discipline upon the laity, they are now utilised by the laity for persecuting and imprison- ing the clergymen " ! The aim of the sacerdotalists was to restore the old Roman system, which was con- tinued to a considerable extent after the Reformation, and is thus described in the commissioners' report : " Ecclesiastical jurisdiction in its widest sense covered the morality of the laity, their religious behaviour, their marriages, the maintenance of the doctrine of the faith
1 " History of Civilisation in England," ii. 137.
PRIEST-MADE LAWS REPUDIATED 537
of the laity and clergy alike, and the examination of all contracts in which faith is pledged or alleged to be pledged, the keeping of oaths, promises and fiduciary undertakings" — in fine, " no matter touching the govern- ment of souls should be tried by a secular tribunal." And the pecuniary profit realised from this jurisdiction may be gathered from the fact that " the penalties imposed were of a penitential character, and were capable of commutation for money at the discretion of the court." The sacerdotalists were not likely to succeed in reviving this regime ; but, as one of the shrewdest living students of Church history has observed, " if ecclesiastics could be substituted for judges, and the control of the Crown court of appeal could be got rid of or rendered illusory, it would need no fresh legisla- tion to revive the entire Roman code of spiritual dis- cipline." ^ The judgment of Englishmen has long been against the civil and canon laws which the sacerdotalists would revive. An Act of Henry VIII., passed in 1545, and which had been rejected by the bishops in i 542, after reciting that " the bishop of Rome and his adherents, in their councils and synods provincial, have made constitutions that no lay or married men might exercise any jurisdiction ecclesiastical, lest their false and usurped power which they pretend to have in Christ's Church should decay," empowers laymen and married men to be judges in the ecclesiastical courts, and it is by virtue of that statute that the lay and married chancellors of the various dioceses at present hold their appointments. In the eighteenth century Blackstone held that the civil and canon laws " were no more binding in England than our laws are binding in Rome ; " in the nineteenth, Lord Abinger said the only "ecclesiastical law of England" was that "which had been adopted by parliament or the courts of this country." 1 Mr. J. T. Tomlinson.
538 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Mr. Gladstone's commission recommended, amongst other changes favourable to the sacerdotalists, that the bishop of each diocese should be supreme arbiter in ecclesiastical cases, and sit instead of the lay chancellor when he pleased ; that the archbishop might sit instead of the dean of arches ; and that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council should be entirely subject to the bishops as a body. Of the witnesses and commissioners who favoured the sacerdotal view, Mr. MacColl got his canonry ; Dr. Stubbs got his bishopric ; Dr. Benson was promoted to the archbishopric on Dr. Tait's death in December 1882; and Lord A. Compton, who de- nounced the laity for " persecuting " the clergy in the law courts, was made bishop of Ely by Lord Salisbury in 1886. No legislation followed the report, Mr. Gladstone's enthusiasm for Anglo-Romanism being probably damped by his encounters with Irish Romanism. " Ultramontane priests will never be permanently on the side of the State," wrote his Roman Catholic friend, Lord Acton,^ to Miss Mary Gladstone on February 16, 1881 ; and, referring to the Phoenix Park assassinations and other murders, in a letter on March 21, 1883, Lord Acton said: " The best influence over the Irish people is the in- fluence of the clergy, and an ultramontane clergy is not proof against the sophistry by which men justify murder or excuse murderers. The assassin is only a little more resolutely logical or a little bolder than the priest."
With the year 1886, when Lord Salisbury entered on his long lease of power, may be said to have com- menced the latest phase in the history of Anglican ritualism, which we shall consider in a new chapter.
' " Lord Acton's Letters to Miss Mary Gladstone," 1904.
Bishop King
" Ou January 4, 1889, Dr. Kin<; was cited, ami iu an address to the pupils at the Chancellor's School, Lincoln, he openly declared that ' the struoo;ie was for the sacei'dotal character of the ministry, whether it was ordained by man or of God.' " (p. 548.)
To face p. 539
CHAPTER XIX
Ritualism under Salisbury and Gladstone — Queen Victoria's position — Deception of the evangelical party by the bishops — Ritualism favoured as before — The campaign of Bishop King of Lincoln — His trial by Archbishop Benson — Appeal to the Privy Council — — Lord Halsbury's judgment — Bills for Disestablishment in Wales, 1895 and 1894 — Sacerdotal party appeal to Rome — Parlia- mentary motion for disestablishment in England, 1897 — The Pan- Anglican bishops — Condemnation of ritualism by parliament, 1899 — Continued growth of ritualism — Archbishop Maclagan in- volved— Church Discipline Bill, 1903 — The Royal Declaration assailed by Archbishop Davidson.
Allowing for certain shades of difference, which do not concern the uninitiated, Lord Sahsbury was a rituahst and " high " churchman, as Mr. Gladstone was ; but he had that amount of courage in dealing with bishops and priests which always distinguishes the Conservative party when in power, and is so wanting in the Liberal party managers. His role was that of political physician to the Church ; and, in 1885, while he was intriguing for Mr. Parnell's support, through the medium of Lord Carnarvon, on condition of giving Home Rule to Ire- land, he was raising the demon of sectarian strife in English constituencies, by declaring that the Church was in danger. But his device failed, and the Liberals won the election ; the majority of the electorate evincing no disposition to come " to the rescue " of the rich tithe-drawers. A religious battle-cry was not necessary at the election of 1886, which was fought solely on Home Rule ; but it was had recourse to again as an auxiliary in 1892; with the result that the Liberals and their Irish allies were once more trium- phant. Although the cry of danger to the Church
540 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
was raised in 1895, the election was fought exclusively on Home Rule ; a clerical battle-cry was not necessary in 1900, the election turning entirely on the Boer War; but it was raised again in 1906, and failed signally. It may be safely predicted that if and when an election is fought on the sole issue, directly put, of the disendowment of the bishops, chapters, and incum- bents, and the discontinuance of religious taxation, a disendowment parliament will be returned by the largest majority ever recorded.
Lord Salisbury was on the friendliest terms with Queen Victoria. With Gladstone it had not been so, and the Liberal premier's Puseyism, which directly assailed the sovereign's position as supreme head of the Church, excited an added antipathy towards him in the mind of the Queen. The Judicial Committee and Archbishops Longley and Tait, who held the see of Canterbury during the hottest period of the strife between evanq'elicalism and ritualism, could always rely on Queen Victoria's support when Gladstone was in office, or at all events upon not exciting her disapproval, in their decisions or declara- tions against the worst excesses of Anglo-Romanism organised by the Puseyites. But now ritualism had an advocate whose fixed determination to avoid un- pleasantness and under-rate the importance of public questions endeared him to the throne, the aristocracy, and the Church. The sovereign and the new premier were of one mind in their desire for a quiet life — a mental state which does not make for earnestness, progress, or improvement. Hence we find that the influence of the evangelical party, as the party of reform, decidedly waned in the law courts, in the newspapers, and in parliament from the date of Lord Salisbury's accession to power.
Despite all the legal decisions, and despite the power
BISHOPS SUPPORT RITUALISTS 541
given to the bishops by the Act of 1874, ritualism continued to be practised as freely as ever, under the shelter of the bishop's veto and with the approval of episcopal and capitular patrons. When Mackonochie was removed from St. Alban's, Holborn, to St. Peter's, London Docks, his successor, appointed by the dean and chapter of St. Paul's, was the superior-general of the confraternity of the blessed sacrament. Nay, while Mackonochie had been suspended, his curates persisted in ritualism, and the bishop of London vetoed all proceedings against them ! His illegal practices were all continued by the new incumbent, with the approval of R. W. Church and his canons, includmg H. P. Liddon ; while Mackonochie acted in his new church and amongst an illiterate congregation, as he had done in his old one, ignoring the moni- tions of the sovereign in council. And when, in 1883, after sixteen years of lawsuits, he was finally deprived of his living by the Privy Council, the bishop of London gave him a licence to officiate in the diocese. When a second priest, named Edwards, was deprived of his living, Bishop Ellicott of Gloucester " hurriedly instituted " a successor " by whom every illegal practice was perpetuated." In a third case the deprived in- cumbent changed his name, and " received at once a licence from the bishop of Chichester, and publicly continued his lawless acts." A fourth incumbent, named Green, remained in prison for eighteen months, being unable or unwilling to secure his liberty by answering Archbishop Tait's plain question : " What is the existing ecclesiastical authority which, if released from prison, you would feel yourself able conscientiously to obey ? " On his release, this martyr incompris " re- ceived a licence from the bishop of London, under which he continued every one of the illegal practices."
In Archbishop Benson the sacerdotal party now
542 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
found a useful friend, to whom they could appeal with- out any of the distrust with which they approached Dr. Tait ; and for twenty years the sacerdotalists have had the sovereign, the premier, and the archbishop of Canterbury constantly on their side. Dr. Benson's suc- cessor, Archbishop Temple, was a pronounced ritualist, Avho had left a legacy of ritual trouble behind him in Exeter and London. He had been a protS[/S, first, of Mr. Gladstone — who made him bishop of Exeter for supporting the disestablishment of the Irish Church— and afterwards of Lord Salisbury ; and, though he had offended the sacerdotalists by his contribution to " Essays and Reviews" in i860, he became a hero with them after promotion. It is impossible to say what were the actual beliefs of Benson, Temple, or any of the bishops whose conduct is under consideration. We only know that they were all cunning men, who sedulously acted in the best interests of their profession. When they encouraged the evangelical party to spend tens of thousands of pounds in the law courts, on the assurance that, when the law was declared, the bishops would carry it out in the spirit and the letter, their professed ignorance was suspicious. If they had no clear conception of the Reformation settlement, they were unfit for their position, and were drawing their salaries under false pretences ; and they would not hesitate to dismiss an elementary teacher in a Church school who pleaded the same ignorance of the intricate dogmas of Anglican theology as they pleaded with regard to the Church law which it was their duty to administer. If their expectation was that the evan- gelical party would waste itself away, and disappear in the effort to clean out the Augean stable of cleri- calism, their breach of faith in refusing to enforce the law, when it had been declared, amply justifies the Church Ajsociation in solemnly protesting that " the
POSITION OF THE BISHOPS 543
bishops have made it perfectly clear that they are utterly undeserving of confidence." ^
In the opinion of most ordinary citizens the ex- ceptional treatment accorded to the bishops and the inordinate degree of notice they receive can serve no useful end, except, by advertising them, to enhance their capacity for mischief. The j^crsonnel of the hier- archy is not improving with the advance of the people. The bishops are men who, for the most part, have risen from poverty, vulgar or genteel, to what is for them riches, and find themselves in a position so incongruous that it can only be supported by the rarest ability. Like the costumes they wear in the street, in parliament, or at the cathedral altar, they have become anachronisms ; and their main employment seems to be a prolonged effort to prove their importance by organised self- advertisement. Unlike the successful barrister, doctor, or engineer, they do not rise by constructive ability and honest labour displayed in a useful profession, but by a process described by Tennyson as " creeping and crawling."
"Ay, an' ya seed the Bishop. They says 'at he coom'd fra
nowt — Burn i' traade. Sa I warrants 'e niver said haafe wot 'e thowt, But 'e creeapt an' 'e crawl'd along, till 'e feeald 'e could howd
'is oan, Then 'e married a great Yerl's darter, an' sits o' the Bishop's
throan." '^
The bishops no longer marry earls' daughters ; and, if they be born in trade, it is more frequently in the sacerdotal profession than in any of the legitimate branches of commerce. Many of them have been able and deserving men who had to struggle with adversity ; but neither their ability nor their struggles surpass
1 statement apropos of a new Church Discipline Bill, 1900.
2 " The Churchwarden and the Curate."
544 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
those of men in other professions who do not demand as a condition of their success that they should be credited with supernatural qualities, or draw abnormal incomes from imposts levied on fellow-citizens who demur to their pretensions. One may readily find thirty-seven men in the ranks of the clergy more gifted, more virtuous, better educated, better bred, wiser, and more enlightened than the bishops ; but let us hope that it would be very hard to find an equal number of men with such powers of dissimulation, or so sus- tained a faculty of untruth, as the bishops displayed collectively in all their dealings with Anglo-Romanism.
Up to 1886 the ritualists who disobeyed the moni- tions of the Privy Council were for the most part parochial incumbents and curates, secretly supported by the bishops and other dignitaries ; but now the country was about to behold the bishop of an important see openly fiouting the decisions of the sovereign in council, and actively encouraging his incumbents in all the worst practices of ritualism.
In 1885 Mr. Gladstone had appointed Dr. Edward King, ex- principal of Cuddesdon College, and then canon of Christ Church and regius professor of pas- toral theology in Oxford, to the richly-endowed bishopric of Lincoln. No Lincolnshire churchwarden could say that Bishop King was " burn i' traade," in the ordinary sense of the phrase, for his father had been archdeacon of Rochester ; nor that he sat on the " bishop's throan " by virtue of having married an earl's daughter, for he was, after the time-honoured fashion of Oxford, a sacerdotal celibate. Scarcely had this gentleman taken possession of the emoluments of his office than he began a campaign of ritualism which marked an epoch in the annals of Anglo-Romanism. Observing, apparently, that the courage of incumbents and curates needed a stimulant ; and being fresh from
BISHOPS ABOVE THE LAW 545
Oxford, the foimtain-head of sacerdotalism, where for over twenty years he had been directing the manufacture of clerical ritualists, and yearning for an opportunity of practising what he preached ; Dr. King began to defy ■: the law and set up all manner of Anglo-Roman rites in the cathedral and churches of Lincoln. He made a tour of visitation, encouraging the ritualistic incumbents, and teaching them all the secrets of priestcraft on which, since the death of his fellow-canon, Pusey, he was perhaps the loading Anglican authority.
When he had pursued this career for two years, to the distraction of all devout Christians in Lincolnshire, ^^ the evangelicals saw that, if he were not checked, all the ground they had gained from the sacerdotalists would be assuredly lost and the cause of Christianity irretrievably injured. The position was one of great difficulty ; for none of the ordinary diocesan or pro- vincial courts had jurisdiction over a bishop. Nor could a bishop be brought to justice under the Church Discipline or Public Worship Regulation Acts ; for the bishops, who were the framers of those and other absurd statutes, had taken care not only to make them- selves the judges, or the nominators of the judges, but also exempted themselves from the operation of the law — facts which were well known to Bishop King and the sacerdotal party.
Undaunted by these difficulties, the evangelical party resolved to strike another blow for the main- tenance of purity in public worship ; even if the only result were to expose the flagrant injustice of having one law for King, the rich bishop, acting on his own responsibility, and another law for Mackonochie, the poor incumbent, acting as the catspaw of the dean and chapter of St. Paul's. The courts of first instance being closed asfainst them, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council being also unavailable, inasmuch as
2 M
546 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
it is only a court of appeal, the Church Association acting for the Christians of England, had recourse to a tribunal which had not been appealed to since 1695-1701, when Watson, bishop of St. David's, and Jones, bishop of St. Asaph, were cited before Arch- bishop Tenison at Lambeth, and deprived of their bishoprics for neglect of duty. On June 2, 1888, they petitioned Dr. Benson as archbishop of the province, to cite Dr. King to appear before him and answer for the following offences : — (i) Mixing water with wine at the communion service, as the Roman priest does in the mass; (2) administering the mixture to the com- municants; (3) ceremonially washing the chalices or cups and drinking the ablutions, as the Roman priests do ; (4) taking the eastward position, i.e. with his back to the people, during the entire ante-communion service; (5) standing like the Roman priests, so that the manual acts of consecration were invisible to the people ; (6) having two lighted candles, after the Roman use, on a re-table over the "altar"; (7) sing- ing the Agnus Dei immediately after the consecration, for the purpose of emphasising the alleged miracle of transubstantiation, instead of towards the end of the service as ordered in the prayer book; and (8) making the sign of the cross, as the Roman priests do, at various times during the service and at the benediction. The offences were alleged to have been committed at the communion service in the church of St. Peter at Gowts — one of eleven parishes in the city of Lincoln in the bishop's gift — and at Lincoln cathedral, on December 4 and 10, 1887; and the complainants in the memorable case were Messrs. E. De Lacy Read and William Brown, inhabitants of the diocese, Felix T. Wilson and John Marshall, parishioners of Gowts.
Either the head of the Church, the sovereign in council, or the court of arches, had recently delivered
DR. BENSON REFUSES TO ACT 547
judgment against every offence committed by the bishop; but Dr. King, like his patron Mr. Gladstone, wanted to abolish the ecclesiastical supremacy of the sovereign, as represented by the Privy Council judges ; and held, like Rev. John Wakeford of Liverpool, that " an appeal from the Church's ruling to a state court was treachery to the Church of England." The policy of Bishop King and the English Church Union was ( i ) to infuse new energy into parochial ritualists, who were discouraged by the series of adverse legal decisions; and (2) to convert the communion service into a sacrifice like the Roman mass ; and they believed that such rites as mixing water with the wine, laboriously rinsing the chalice and drinking the ablutions, making the sign of the cross, and burning lighted candles, tended to overawe the credulous and build up a belief in tran- substantiation. Bishop King acted with a straight- forwardness which seems heroic in contrast with the behaviour of his episcopal brethren. But he ran no risk, for the situation was in every way an admirable one for the sacerdotal party. Lord Salisbury, while indirectly favouring Dr. King, could disclaim all re- sponsibility for his appointment ; and, in the words of the Church Times, a representative sacerdotalist organ. Archbishop Benson's sympathies " were entirely with the Bishop of Lincoln."
Archbishop Benson's reply to the petition resembled the former replies of the bishops to the evangelical party. Though the Church Association furnished him with precedents thick as leaves in Vallombrosa, he refused to issue a citation, on the grounds that he did not know whether he had the right to do so ; and until he received instructions from a competent court — of course at the expense of the petitioners — he declined to take action. There was obviously no court to instruct him except the Judicial Committee, whose
548 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
decisions Bishop King had knowingly flouted ; but Dr. Benson may have foreseen that, with Mr. Hardinge Giffard, then recently created Baron Halsbury, as its president, the final court of appeal was not likely to be formidable for the earnest Christianity or legal ability which signalised the judgments of Lords Westbury, Hatherley, Chelmsford, Kingsdown, Sel- borne, and Cairns. Those eminent judges were staunch upholders of the Established Church — Lord Selborne, in particular, who refused the lord chan- cellorship in 1868 rather than vote for Mr. Glad- stone's contemplated Irish Church disestablishment bill. They knew the Church law, as defined in the statutes of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth, James I., and Charles IL, in the prayer book and in the articles ; and wore convinced that Christianity, not sacerdotalism, was the groundwork and substance, the beginning and end, of the Reformed Church of England. They brought their legal knowledge and their loyalty to Christ to bear on each case submitted to them ; and their decisions are as remarkable for their clearness as for their strength. But they were now dead or retired ; and it was many years since Encrland had had a lord chancellor as subservient to his prime minister as Lord Halsbury was to Lord Salisbury.
On July 20, 1888, the complainants appealed to the Judicial Committee,-^ and on August 8, judgment was delivered confirming the right of appeal, and deciding that the archbishop had jurisdiction to cite the bishop to appear before him and to try the charges. On January 4, 1889, Dr. King was cited; and in an address to the pupils at the Chancellor's School, Lincoln, he openly declared that " the struggle was/o?' the sacerdotal character of the Christian ministry, 1 Under 25 Henry VIII. c. 19,
BISHOP VERSUS PRIEST 549
wlidli&T it ivas ordained hy mmi or of God." The I' Schola3 Cancellarii is a theological seminary founded by Dr. Benson, when canon and chancellor of Lincoln, 1872-6 — indeed it was the archbishop himself who had begun the ritualism which he was now invited to condemn, having also started the Novate Novale, or society of mission preachers, and organised a general mission in Lincoln, the first held there since Roman Catholic times.
On February 12, Dr. Benson and Sir J. P. Deane, vicar-general, sat at Lambeth palace, with Bishops Temple of London, Browne of Winchester, Stubbs of Oxford, and Wordsworth of Salisbury as assessors. Dr. King, ignoring the decision of the Judicial Committee, immediately became a protestant against being tried by any tribunal except the archbishop and all the bishops of the province of Canterbury ; and the hear- ing of his protest occupied seven days. On May 1 1 , Dr. Benson, following all the precedents unearthed by the evangelical party for the enlightenment of the Judicial Committee, gave judgment that he had jurisdiction to try the case alone, or with any assessors he thought fit to appoint. In July, Bishop King made a further objection, alleging that he was not a " minister " or a " priest," but a bishop, and that all the orders in the prayer book as to the communion service, were addressed to the minister or the priest ! The communion service clearly indicates that there is no exceptional status given to a bishop, but that he is subject to the same rule in regard to the sacrament as the " priest " or " minister," e.g. : " Then shall the Priest or the Bishop, being present, stand up, and turning himself to the People, pronounce this Absolution " ; " Then shall the Minister first receive the Communion in both kinds himself, and then pro- ceed to deliver the same to the bishops, priests,
5 so CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and deacons, if any be present, in like manner, and after that to the People " ; " Then the Priest, or Bishop, if he be present, shall let them depart with this blessing." The court, with the exception of Bishop Wordsworth, decided against Bishop King,
The year 1889 having been spent in these pre- liminaries, the case was tried in eight days between February 4 and 25, 1890. Bishop King admitted everything — nay, he gloried in his offences. The atten- tion of the whole country was attracted to the court of high-priests at Lambeth ; and the proceedings con- stituted a colossal advertisement for Anglican sacer- dotalism — ■ a result which, however unhappy, was unavoidable. Bishop Thorold of Rochester character- ised it as " very curious " that the Church Association " should have consented to revive a purely ecclesi- astical court," which might " finally rule in a sense opposed to the well-known principles and convictions of the promoters." But there was no other line of procedure open to them ; and, as Captain Cobham, the chairman, pointed out in reply, there was the right of appeal to the Privy Council from Dr. Benson's judgment.^ The evangelical party, relying on past experience, were as yet absolutely confident that the Judicial Committee would prove loyal to its own previous decisions. In common with all the rest of the country, including the legal profession, they be- lieved that the settled principle of " like case, like rule " applied to the ecclesiastical decisions of the Privy Council as well as to all other kinds of litigation in England.
On November 21, 1890, Archbishop Benson de- livered judgment, endorsing and justifying five of the practices with which Bishop King was charged, and dissenting from the other three.
1 Times, January i8, 1889.
DR. BENSON'S JUDGMENT 551
Disapproved by Dr. Benson Endorsed by Dr. Benson
1. Mixing water with the wine i. Administering mixed water during service. Dr. Benson quali- and wine to communicants.
fied his disapproval by going out- 2. Washing and rinsing the
side the case before him to pro- vessels ceremonially and drinking
nounce that mixing before the the ablutions,
service was legal. 3. Taking the eastward position
2. Concealment of the manual during the entire ante-communion acts at the consecration of the service.
bread and wine. 4. The use of lighted candles
3. Making the sign of the cross at the communion service, when during service. not required for giving light.
5. Singing the Agnus Dei as an act of adoration immediately after the consecration.
The archbishop furthermore declared that he would issue no monition expressing his disapproval of Bishop King, or pass any sentence on him for the practices, '- . pronounced illegal. This judgment, conveying even, -^--jp-lj^ more than it actually expressed, was received with unfeigned delight by the sacerdotalists. Although the extreme section, who advocated full reunion with Rome, cavilled at it as not going far enough, the sacerdotal party, as a whole, felt that they had the highest clerical authority in the Cliurch with them henceforth ; and, more important still, that circum- stances had so altered since Tait's death that the archbishop was no longer afraid to declare openly in their favour. The " sacerdotal character " of the ministry, contended for by Dr. King, now seemed in a fair way to being established ; and the deficiencies of the judgment might be made good in practice by the fervour of the ritualists, who now felt themselves enfranchised from the decisions of the obnoxious lay judges in the diocesan courts, the Arches, and the Privy Council.
The undaunted evangelical party determined to appeal to the Judicial Committee, representing the head of the Church, the sovereign in council. Bishop King declined tojigpear in answer to the appeal, openly
5 52 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
disowning the jurisdiction of the Privy Council, re- fusing to admit the supremacy of the sovereign in matters ecclesiastical, and saving himself a great deal of expense. The case for the appellants was fully stated on the five points which Dr. Benson had decided in favour of the ritualists, the hearing occupying nine days, beginning on June lo and ending on July 8, 1 89 1. The first evidence of a change in the senti- ments of the Judicial Committee, and of the tactics about to be adopted by Lord Salisbury and Lord Halsbury on the one hand, representing the Tory ritualists, and by Mr. Gladstone and Lord Herschell on the other, representing the Liberal patrons of Arch- bishop Benson and Bishop King, was the prolonged postponement of judgment. For thirteen months, July I 89 1 to August 1892, the Judicial Committee withheld its decision ; and during that long interval Dr. Benson's judgment was accepted and exceeded by ritualists in all parts of the country. This delay can only be accounted for on one hypothesis, namely, that it was the deliberate act of the Government ; for no court of law would have taken such responsibility on itself except with the con- currence of the Cabinet. It was a silent acquiescence in Dr. Benson's judgment by Lord Salisbury's Govern- ment, and prepared the public mind for the complete official endorsement of the archbishop's views when the suitable moment arrived. It was also a sardonic method of lessening the number of ecclesiastical appeals to the sovereign in council.
Meantime it was fondly imagined that the lord chan- cellor was laboriously mastering all the precedents with a view to delivering an erudite statement of Church law for the enlightenment of the country. Never were vain hopes more rudely shattered. The belated judg- ment, when it came at the end of the parliamentary session on August 8, 1892, was remarkable for its
LORD HALSBURY'S JUDGMENT 553
ignorance, weakness, and evasiveness, no less than for the air of careless flippancy in which it was couched. An hour's consideration of the arguments of counsel would have enabled a man of average intelligence, who had never been engaged in an ecclesiastical lawsuit, to exhibit a fuller knowledge of the law and the facts — not to mention a more serious conception of the gravity of the issues at stake. As Lord Grimthorpe said of Dr. Benson's judgment as well as Lord Halsbury's : " No human being can have read either of these judgments without seeing that the conclusions came first and the arguments for them afterwards." This was simply putting in another form Lord Bacon's words, quoted in our introductory chapter, in reference to the superstitions of Anglican ritualism : " In all super- f ' stition wise men follow fools, and arguments are fitted to practice in reversed order." Dr. Benson's decisions, subversive of previous judgments of the Judicial Committee and other courts, were either endorsed or evaded :
Endorsed Evaded
1. Mixing water with wine i. The use of lighted candles before the service, and adminis- as an essential part of the coui- tering the mixture to communi- munion service, when not required cants. for giving light.
2. Taking the eastward position. 2. Rinsing the chalice ccre-
3. Chanting the Agnus Dei just monially and drinking the ablu- after the consecration. tions.
The permission to mix the water and wine before service suggested to the ritualists the performance of that rite at the " altar," in presence of the congregation, before uttering the first word of the Lord's Prayer with which the communion service begins ; for, as Lord Hatherley had said in Purchas's case, " the private mingling of the wine is not likely to find favour with any." In endorsing Dr. Benson's judg- ment as to the legality of the eastward position, Lord Halsbury covered himself with ridicule, and, so far as
5 54 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
in him lay, lowered the prestige of the Judicial Com- mittee. Twenty-one years before, in Purchas's case, Lord Hathcrley had delivered a masterly statement of the law. The injmictions of Elizabeth ordered " the holy table " to be " set in the place where the altar stood," and that, at the communion, it should be moved down into the chancel or the body of the church, so that the people might freely come round it, " and in more numbers communicate with the minister." Thus the mystery attaching to the altar was completely dis- pelled, the ritual of the mass utterly abolished, and a congregational function substituted for the priestly sacrifice by one man acting as mediator. The fixed altar, as a rule, stood at the east end of the church ; the movable table which took its place could be shifted down into the church, its long side remaining parallel with the east wall. There is a geographical expression at the very beginning of the order for the administration of the communion, in the prayer book, defining the position of the priest or minister while he is at the table : " And the priest standing at the North-side of the Table shall say the Lord's Prayer, and the Collect following." Standing there, at the narrow side of the table, with the south light shining on him, his acts would be in the fullest view of the people, while the long sides of the table would be left free for the communicants. The custom of moving the table down into the church had been discouraged by Laud and the sacerdotalists ; and therefore it became more necessary than before that the minister should stand at the " North-side," if his acts were to be visible to the people. Standing at the north, his right hand would be nearest to the people ; standing at the south, it would be next to the wall. To stand between the table and the wall, looking westward towards the people, was henceforth impossible, for the table was
LORD HALSBURY EAST AND WEST 555
kept close against the wall ; to stand between the table and the people, lookmg eastward, would hide all the manual acts, making it impossible to " break the bread before the people," as ordered, and would be to adopt the position of the Roman priest at the old fixed altar. Lord Hatherley said " they had considered some in- genious arguments intended to prove that ' north side ' meant that part of the west side which is nearest to the north ; " because the old fixed Roman altar was divided into north and south sections by a slab called the sigillum altaris. Lord Hatherley said they in England had nothing to do with the old Roman altar, which had been abolished and a plain movable wooden table substituted in its place : " Their lordships entertained no doubt whatever that, when the table was set at the east end of the church, the direction to stand at the north side was understood to apply to the north end, and that this was the practice of the Church." Lord Halsbury now, in his careless and contradictory judgment, mixed up the east with the west, and the " ends " with the " sides " in unintelli- gible language, and, without adducing any authority to justify his action, reversed the previous well-grounded decision of the Judicial Committee, and held that " it is not an ecclesiastical offence to stand at the northern part of the side which faces eastward." If this judg- ment were construed literally, it merely gave the priest liberty to stand between the table and the wall looking towards the people ; for the side of the table facing eastward is the side close to the wall ! But, though Lord Halsbury did not say what he meant, the ritualists knew what he meant, which was that the priest might thenceforth stand at the north part of the side of the table which faces weskvard, he him- self looking eastward and his back being to the people. All the experts in court heard Lord Halsbury say
5 56 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" eastward " three times, when he should have said " westward ; " his error was corroborated in the official version and in the able reports of the Times and the Guardian ; and was only rectified in a final revision of the judgment published a considerable time afterwards.
With regard to the singing of the Agnus Dei, as an act of adoration, immediately after the consecration, Dr. Benson said its use " could only be condemned on the ground that any and every hymn at this place would be illegal." Now the Agnus Dei differs from other hymns because it is part of the communion service, as ordered in the prayer book, and they are not ; and its allotted place is at the close of the service before the blessing. Dr. Benson, by his judgment on this point, sanctioned the disordering of the service as settled in the prayer book, a proceeding which has opened the gate to many grave evils. Lord Halsbury, re-echoing Dr. Benson's words, said, " if hymns and anthems are lawful at this point in the service, it cannot be said that the Agnus Dei is otherwise than appropriate." The truth is that, of all hymns known to Christians, it is, at that particular point in the service, the most inappropriate, because it is the most reminiscent of transubstantiation and adoration.
On the use of lighted candles, as essential parts of the ritual. Lord Halsbury passed over Archbishop Benson's reversal of the Judicial Committee's decision in Martin v. Mackonochie. As the official organ of the Liberal party ^ put it, he acquitted " a bishop on evidence which had convicted an incumbent," and condoned the bishop's " audacious contempt for her Majesty's courts of justice." Lord Halsbury evaded the issue by holding that it was not Bishop King who had lighted the candles, but the incumbent of the church, and therefore it was against the incum-
^ Daily News.
COLLUSION SUGGESTED 5 57
bent the prosecution lay. " Some persons," said a legal paper, " liad hit upon the schoolboy excuse that the bishop did not light the candles, and hence a decision was avoided."^ "In any other class of cases than an ecclesiastical appeal," said the Times, " the Judicial Committee would put aside such reason- ing as trifling and sophistical." Bishop King had taken all responsibility for the lighted candles on himself, but Lord Halsbury said his doing so " did not add anything to the case made against him " ! Lord Halsbury 's method of evading a judgment on the practice of ceremonial rinsing and drinking the ablutions, approved by Dr. Benson, was that the act was done " after the benediction, when, according to all ordinary understanding, the service is at an end." If some of the mass rites are to be allowed at the close of the service, why not the entire mass ? This legalised ablution-drinking, bowing and praying, on the part of the priest, is all done on the altar now, and the people linger in the church and become parties to it. It is, in fact, an added rite at the close, as the mixing of water and wine is at the beginning. The Roman mass is supposed to be over when the priest says, Ite missa est, and the acolyte says, Deo gratias ; but nobody goes away, for quite a number of cere- monies follow, including the last Gospel and the De Profundis. In the same way, the rinsing before and the act of ablution after are now made part of the English communion service, after the manner of the " Prayer before Mass " and the De Profundis.
The sacerdotal party admitted an understanding up to a certain point between Dr. Benson and the Govern- ment ; but, irrespective of that, all the proceedings, especially the withholding of judgment, bore evidence of Lord Salisbury's Roman and somewhat cynical
^ iSoiicitors^ JvunuU.
5 58 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
hand. Archbishop Benson's judgment, said the most widely-read of the sacerdotal organs/ " was drawn up with a special view to the Judicial Committee. If he had known how pliable the committee would show themselves to be, it is quite possible that the judgment would have been free from those frivol- ous but irritating blots which have been abundantly- exposed." Bishop King also, in his Diocesan Maga- zine, said that the sacerdotal party " evidently felt regret that the Archbishop in his judgment on some points did not go further, seeing that the Judicial Com- mittee had hecn so ready to folloio his lead " ! This Lincoln judgment was the work of the High Church politicians of the Conservative party, lay and clerical, supported by Mr. Gladstone and his legal and epis- copal prot^g^s. It represents the genius of the " high " churchmen of l^oth political parties, who regard the maintenance of highly-paid bishops, capitular bodies, and costly cathedrals, with their soporific ritual, as indispensable to the prosperity of the country; who, in fact, believe in " bread and circuses " in religion — the bread being the millions of money paid to the bishops and priests, and the circuses the ritual prac- tised in the cathedrals and churches for the hypnotism of the people. If those " high " churchmen have any religious convictions, outside a belief in the value of formalism, their main position must be a detestation of Christianity for what Pusey would call its "crudity." Perhaps the pleasantest feature in this brave struggle to maintain the Christian character of the Church of England was the free and independent criticism of Lord Halsbury in the press. The leading legal journal, The Law Times, for instance, after commenting on the astounding ruling that the Judicial Committee " are not bound by what they previously declared to be the
^ Church Times.
WELSH SUSPENSORY BILL 5 59
law," said that " the white-washing of the Bishop of Lincoln must inevitably tend to strengthen ritualism and ritualistic practices." The forecast was accurate, for ritualism has been constantly spreading ever since, until the entire structure of the State Church is worm- eaten by the ravages of this spurious '' Catholicism," which is still being pushed forward on the false pre- tence of combating genuine Romanism ; when its true object is, as Pusey said at the beginning, to "dispose of ultra- Protestantism " — that is, Christianity — " by a side-wind."
In July I 892, the month preceding Lord Halsbary's judgment, a general election had taken place in which the English and Irish Home Rulers obtained a majority of forty ; and it was expected by many that Lord Salisbury would transfer to Mr. Gladstone and Lord Herschell the embarrassing task of " white-washing " Dr. King. Had he done so, the substance of the judgment would probably have been the same ; but, nevertheless, within six months, a startling encounter took place between Mr. Gladstone's Government and the Church, which recalled the bishops and other " high " churchmen to a sense of their true position, and reminded the public that, under sacerdotal man- agement, the State Church was becoming intolerable to the increasing millions of British Christians. On February 23, 1893, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Henry Fowler, and Mr. Thomas Ellis introduced the Welsh Church Suspensory bill, providing that in all appointments in the Established Church in Wales and Monmouthshire after its passage, private patronage alone excepted, " the emoluments shall be held by the new incumbent subject to the pleasure of Parlia- ment ; " and that a person taking office after the pass- ing of the bill should have " no claim to pecuniary compensation " in the event of disestablishment.
56o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Mr. Asquith, on behalf of the Government, restated some constitutional principles as to which " high " churchmen, clerical and lay, are constantly dissemi- nating untruths amongst the people. There is, perhaps, no fallacy more frequently reiterated at the present day than the assertion that the Established Church is supported entirely by the contributions of its own members. I have met more than one Non- conformist who said they believed this to be the case, and who quoted respectable Anglican neighbours of theirs in support of the misstatement. I have met intelligent churchmen who seriously asked me to believe the same falsehood ; and, by way of convincing me, one went so far as to produce his bill for church- rates — seven shillings and sixpence — for the current year! Though, since 1868, church-rates cannot be legally levied, I have discovered in more than one parish, from 1904 to 1906, that the vicar sends out a printed demand note for church-rates, employing the local rate-collector to deliver it with the notice for public rates. I have met Nonconformists who were served with this demand note, and who were not at all certain as to whether they were bound to pay. I asked the Anglican churchman who showed me his receipt for 7s. 6d., and solemnly asseverated, on the strength of it, that the Established Church ex- isted solely on its own property and the subscriptions of its own members, if he had ever heard of commuted tithe, and if he really believed that it was paid by nobody outside the Anglican communion. I men- tioned to him several Nonconformists in the locality who paid from ^i to i^ 10 in tithe for each shilling of church-rates that he had paid— all of which went to support the Anglican vicar and his family. It seemed difficult to accept his assurance that he had not been aware of those facts, and had never con-
WELSH DISESTABLISHMENT BILL 561
sidered the question for himself, but merely repeated what he had always heard from the vicar !
Such being the prevailing ignorance, it was there- fore most useful that the public should now hear it clearly enunciated by Mr. Asquith, speaking for the Government, that " the immemorial and constitutional right of parliament to appropriate, for national pur- poses, national property which has been enjoyed by members of a particular religious community," had been " finally and conclusively settled in the case of the Church in Ireland." ^ " One still hears," said Mr. Asquith sarcastically, " from the lips of belated con- troversialists the words, ' plunder and sacrilege ' ; " but, he declared, using the words of Matthew Arnold, that " to maintain the establishment in Wales for the sole benefit of a small minority is an absurdity," and " its long continuance is an impossibility." Mr. Stuart Rendel denounced the " unbroken manipulation of the Church by the State, not in the interests of religion, but of the earthly policy of the Enghsh Government in Wales," The Suspensory bill, however, was entirely overshadowed by the Home Rule bill of the same year ; and, the last-named measure having been rejected by the house of lords on September 8, the Welsh bill was withdrawn ten days later.
On April 26, 1894, Mr. Asquith introduced a Government bill " to terminate the establishment of the Church of England in Wales and Monmouthshire," and, in doing so, boldly stated a fact with which the reader is well acquainted, namely that, " for genera- tions past, the Church held the control — he might almost say the monopoly — of education and culture " in the principahty. "The Church of England,"^ he said, " as a Church, is not in point of law the owner of property of any sort or kind whatever. . . . The ^ Hansard's Parliamentary Debates.
2 N
562 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
whole ecclesiastical property of this country is property attached to particular benefices, offices, and sees " — which parliament has the power to abolish, or to cease to subsidise. Describing the effects of disestablish- ment, he said that all rights of patronage, public and private, were to be extinguished ; all ecclesiastical corporations, sole or aggregate, to be dissolved. No Welsh bishops were thenceforth to be summoned to the house of lords ; ecclesiastical courts were no longer to have coercive jurisdiction ; there were to be no ecclesiastical appeals from Wales to the Queen in council. Explaining the effects and method of the disendowment which was to accompany disestablish- ment, he estimated the annual revenue of the Church in Wales thus: — Tithe rent-charge, ;^i 79,000; other " ancient," or transferred Roman, endowments, ;6^5 4,000 ; private benefactions since 1 703, ;!^i 3,600, The separate property held by chapters amounted to ^^3360 a year ; and property of the gross value of ;!{^42,300 a year, of which ;^2 7,000 was tithe rent-charge, had been trans- ferred to the Ecclesiastical Commission in return for fixed payments. The Ecclesiastical Commission, on the other hand, subsidised the Welsh dignitaries and incumbents by that amount and ;^40,ooo more. This last-named sum was not to be regarded as property of the Welsh Church ; but all the rest — " everything at present derived from Wales," said Mr. Asquith, " in the shape of either income from land, or tithe rent- charge, however appropriated now," was to be taken from the Church and " secured for the benefit of Wales." The procedure adopted in the case of the Irish Church was to be followed. Three Church Com- missioners were to be appointed to take over the ecclesiastical property, settle the terms of compensa- tion to be given to patrons and incumbents, and hold the property in trust for the benefit of the whole
METHOD OF DISENDOWMENT 563
principality, to bo expended as parliament might determine. The experience of Ireland shows that within a few years after disestablishment the annual charges for compensation begin to decrease, and finally disappear in twenty or thirty years, leaving all the revenue free for national purposes.
The land and tithe being thus secured for the public, the parish churches and parsonages were to be transferred to a Welsh Representative Church Body, analogous to that created in Ireland in 1869, with the obligation of maintenance. Perhaps the most important principle in the bill — one which should bring joy to all true evangelicals — was that the Representative Church Body, or other trustees, were to hold this property " in the same way as though it were held under an express trust," embodying " the present articles, doctrines, discipline, and ordinances of the Church of England ; " and that they could be sued " in the temporal courts," namely, at quarter sessions or assizes, for any breach of that trust. The ritualist who adored the host, wore vestments, used lighted candles, or contravened any ecclesiastical decision of the Privy Council, in his Church service, would render the trustees liable to an action at law, as for breach of any secular trust. The cathedrals were to be vested in the three Church Commissioners, to be maintained by them as national monuments, with liberty "to permit them to be used for divme service." Just as Home Rule had over-shadowed the Suspensory bill in 1 893, so now Mr. Gladstone's resignation and Sir William Harcourt's epoch-making budget, subjecting landed property to the same death-duties as personal property, threw the Dis- establishment bill into the shade ; but even if it had passed through the house of commons, it was sure to be rejected by the bishops' party in the house of lords, and accordingly, on July 18, the measure was withdrawn.
564 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Many evangelical churchmen m Wales opposed the Disestablishment bill because they feared the remnant of Church property would fall into the hands of the ritualist bishops and dignitaries ; forgetting that they would have had the ritualists in their power by the right of action in the ordinary courts of justice for breach of the Articles or the Privy Council judgments. So far the ritualists have been trading on evangelical loyalty to the subsidisation of bishops, dignitaries, and incumbents by the State, and have professed to be un- concerned about, if not anxious for, disestablishment. Let no evangelical be deceived by such a pretence. The high churchmen gain all, and the evangelicals little or nothing, by the State subsidy ; and it is the belief of many that if the evangelicals were to declare openly for disestablishment, ritualism would be checkmated all over the country. The ordinary ritualistic church is not a self-supporting concern, but lives mostly on diocesan funds or ecclesiastical commission money ; and if the evangelicals declared for disestablishment, "high" churchmen would develop an unexpected zeal for that " Protestant cause " which they now profess to despise.
A Protestant church can always support itself in England ; a fact of which we have overwhelming proof in the flourishing Churches of the Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Unitarians, and other denominations, which have all severed their connection at various times from the State Church. The Protestant dissenters in Wales were subscribing ;^400,ooo a year to support their Churches, in 1893, over and above their contribution to the ;6^2 50,000 drawn from Welsh land and tithe by the Anglican Church. But the " high " churchmen, or the Anglo- Catholics, who bluster about becoming " schismatics " if their demands are not complied with, cannot point out a solitary body of men of their views, however small.
SACERDOTALISM IN EXCELSIS 565
who have had the principle or the courage to form themselves into a self - respecting, self - supporting Church. Judged by their past conduct, they like a showy religion at other people's cost ; their boasted belief " in every Roman doctrine except the supremacy of the pope," simply meaning that they want their Romanism at the expense of the British public and object to paying the pope a cash subsidy. Their policy has been to drive all Christians out of the Church and secure a monopoly of the endowments.
At the general election of 1895, Lord Salisbury and the High Church party came into power with an im- mense majority, obtained solely on the Home Rule issue; and during that year and 1896, the sacerdotal managers of the Church, elated by the triumph, were busy with preparations for (i) a Pan- Anglican Synod of archbishops and bishops to be held in 1897 ; (2) a great sacerdotal carnival in the same year in honour of the thirteenth centenary of the founding of the see of Canterbury by Augustine; and (3) the submission of a case to Pope Leo XIII. inviting him to give his infallible opinion on the validity of Anglican orders. Archbishop Benson entered into all these schemes con amorc ; but he died suddenly at Hawarden in October 1896, before any of them were realised. From the beginning of Benson's primacy he had been in continuous communication with the prelates of the Russian State Church and other Eastern bishops, for whom he professed a deep veneration. And, though he was not so " crude," or un-Puseylike, as to appear openly in the appeal to Rome, the Abbe Portal had formally visited him at Lambeth palace and taken his advice before the negotiations with the papacy were actually undertaken. In appointing Dr. Temple as Benson's successor. Lord Salisbury made it sure that the sacer- dotal policy of the Church should undergo no change.
566 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Early in 1897, before the first act of the sacerdotal melodrama, and while the managers of the Church were in the zenith of their political prosperity, they received a warning that, though the governing classes were at one with them, their proceedings had not the approval of Christians. On February 9, Mr. Samuel Smith moved in the house of commons : '' That it is expedient to disestablish the Church of England both in England and in Wales." In a fearless speech, full of knowledge, this most unassuming member of parliament asserted and proved that nothing could be " more opjDosed to those sacred principles laid down by the Head of the Christian religion " than the con- stitution of the Church, whose bishops were appointed by the prime minister of the day, its formularies settled by act of parliament, and its revenues drawn from " endowments granted in Roman Catholic times." He expressed his wonder, " looking to the abuses of every kind which had lasted for hundreds of years," that " the Christian religion had survived at all." ^
Mr. Smith's statement recalls Boccaccio's story of the Parisian Jew who refused to become a Christian until he had studied Christianity at its headquarters in Rome. Having observed with amazement the immor- ality of the pope and cardinals, " given to all sorts of lewdness without the least shame or remorse, so that the only way of obtaining anything considerable was by applying to prostitutes of every description," the Jew came to the conclusion that, since Christianity survived the colossal wickedness of its chief pastors, it " must be upheld by the Spirit of God," and therefore became a Christian."
Mr. Smith's resolution was seconded by Mr. E. J. C. Morton, who declared that he " had been brought up in the Church of England, and was now a member
1 Times, February lo, 1897. ^ The Decameron, First Day, Novel II.
THE PAN- ANGLICANS 5^7
and communicant of that Cliurch ; " and it was supported by Mr. Carvell Williams, who said that "the Church of England was at that moment the most complaining and the most unhappy religious body in the country." Mr. A. J. Balfour replied to the well-informed speeches of the mover and seconder in a vein of extraordinary insolence, without courtesy, facts, or arguments. A more inauspicious moment could not have been chosen for bringing forward the motion, which was of course lost ; the voting being 204 against 86. But, insignificant as its promoters must have appeared to Mr. A. J. Balfour and the sacerdotal party — an evanescent cloud in the azure sky of sacer- dotahsm— they may be likened to "the fingers of a man's hand," which " wrote over against the candle- stick in the plaster " of the idolatrous edifice of the Anglo-Romans: Gou hath numbered thy kingdom
AND FINISHED IT. ThOU ART WEIGHED IN THE
BALANCE AND ART FOUND WANTING.^
The Pan- Anglican synod of bishops, which met after this spontaneous outburst, was pointed to as a proof that sacerdotalism was acquiring dominion over colonists and foreisfners. But the reader knows that the vast majority of British colonists are non- Anglicans, and that the same number of leading evangelical clergymen would have represented the intellectual and religious power of the empire abroad more truly than the Pan- Anglican bishops, many of whom indulge in a ritual more suitable to the worship of Pan than of Jesus, the Man of Sorrows. But free churchmen abroad are placed at a disadvantage on such occasions of display, inasmuch as they do not confer aristocratic titles on their clergymen, or endoA\ them with imaginary sway over vast regions of the earth's surface. And if a num- ber of evanofelical ministers came home for a conference,
1 Daniel v. 5, 26, 27.
568 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
they would not tind the nation placing a Lambeth palace at their disposal, or expending five or six millions sterling per annum in maintaining a staff of titled dignitaries to welcome them with high sacerdotal festivities. There is no free churchman presumptuous enough to call himself bishop of New York, as if he ruled over the whole population of the Empire State, or bishop of Corea, as if the great peninsular king- dom of the Far East were his personal property ; but there are many evangelical ministers and missionaries in both places who exert far more influence than Bishop Codman Potter or Bishop Charles Corfe, the self-styled lords spiritual of these widespread territories.
Meanwhile, the English Church Union, elated by the alleged success of Bishop King's campaign, was pro- moting, in 1896-7, a direct appeal or petition to Pope Leo XIIL, asking for a papal declaration as to the validity of the "orders" held by the Pan- Anglican bishops and priests.
The movement for a reunion of the sacerdotalists of England with those of Rome and Russia began so far back as 1857, when the so-called Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom was started in London by a number of Anglicans and Roman Catholics, whose policy was thus enunciated in the society's official organ : — " We seek to make no terms ; we come only in the spirit of love and humility ; but at the same time we feel sure that the Chief Shepherd of the Flock of Christ " — the Roman pontiff — " will deal tenderly with us, and place no yoke upon us which we are not able to bear." The association was inspired by Pusey, who wrote the introductory essay in its chief publication, entitled " Essays on the Reunion of Christendom," m which he audaciously put forward the view, for which Ward had been degraded by the university, "that the council of
ANGLICAN APPEAL TO ROME 569
Trent might be legitimately explained, so that it could be received by Anglo-Catholics, and that our Articles contain nothing Avhich is, in its grammatical sense, adverse to the Council of Trent." ^ Stripped of all its euphuistic verbiage, Pusey's proposal was that the Pope should admit that each Anglican and Russian bishop was a Vicar of Christ in the same sense as the successor of Peter. Now, all the power and wealth of the Roman pontiff are dependent on his claim to be the Sole Vicar of Christ on earth. If divested of this sole agency, exclusive custody of the keys of heaven, and autocracy of the " one true Church," the bishop of Rome, for all practical pur- poses, would sink to the level of the bishop of Birmingham. But, so high did Pusey rate his own , powers of deception and cajolery, that he actually hoped to induce the pope and cardinals to surrender their immemorial claims, and with them their in- calculable properties, in return for a barren alliance with Anglican Puseyites. He thought he could dis- : pose of the papacy " by a side-wind," as he was dis- posing of " ultra-Protestantism " ; but he soon found that, in introducing his Machiavellism into Italy, he was like a man taking coals to Newcastle, and that ; Rome was not the market for his peculiar wares. On September 16, 1864, the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office, commonly called the Inquisition, issued an official decree forbidding Roman Catholics to take part in Pusey's scheme ; condemning alike " the Photian schism and the Anglican heresy " as out- side " the Holy Roman Church, out of which there is no salvation ; " and warning Catholics against being " carried away by a delusive yearning for such new- fangled Christian unity into a fall from that perfect unity, which, by a wonderful gift of divme grace,
^ Union Review, vol. iii. pp. 408-9.
570 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
stands on the firm foundation of Peter." ^ The Roman theocracy were willmg to make use of Pusey, but had no intention of allowing Pusey to use them. Com- menting on this decree in 1866, Manning, then recently appointed archbishop of Westminster, and with all his intimate knowledge of Puseyism, said it was a matter for congratulation that by the Anglican reunionists " Protestantism was recognised as a thing intrinsically untenable and irreconcilable with the Catholic faith." It was in that year that Pusey, baffled in his attempts upon Rome, promoted his conference with the Russians for a reunion with them alone, which was also unsuccessful.
The prosecution of the case at Rome was now entrusted to Lord Halifax, ecclesiastical commissioner, and the Abb^ Duchesne, a Vatican official, and, after much delay, resulted in the procurement of a bull — at, perhaps, more cost than a Privy Council judgment — in which the pope solemnly pronounced all Anglican " orders " to be spurious and invalid ! At first sight it seems inexplicable that such unnecessarj'^ humiliation should have been courted by a society of professing Anglican churchmen, including nearly 4000 " priests," whose president holds the important offices of peer of the realm, ecclesiastical commissioner, and governor of Keble College ; and whose most influential member is a highly-endowed bishop of the Established Church with an ex officio seat in the house of lords. But, as the object of the English Church Union has always been to incorporate the Church of England with the Roman Church, its members may have anticipated that a solemn condemnation of Anglican orders would so sting the professional pride of the clerics as to stimu- late their desire for reunion with the papacy, from which alone valid orders might be procured.
1 Letter from Cardinal Patrizi.
THE HALIFAX-DUCHESNE BULL 571
Early in 1898 Cardinal Vaughan and the Roman bishops of England, bent on advertising the genuine- ness of their own orders, issued a pamphlet calling public attention to the spuriousness of the orders held by the bishops and priests of the Established Church — a proceeding characterised by the Times as " flippant smartness,"^ but which was received with such serious- ness by the Church that it elicited an official protest from Archbishops Temple and Maclagan addressed to "my lord cardinal."^ The English Church Union seems to have been in the closest touch with Cardinal Vaughan at this juncture and up to the day of his death ; and he, knowing the desire of Bishop King to convert the communion service into a sacrificial rite, asserted that there could be no valid orders without a belief in, and an ability to perform, transubstantiation, after the manner of the Roman Church. The arch- bishops, in their reply, made no pretence of relying upon the Reformation settlement, or the law of the land, by virtue of which they drew their incomes, but sheltered themselves under the terms of the bull, saying that " had his Holiness followed that line of arsfument " their answer would have taken a different form ; and fortified themselves by an appeal to " the o-reat Churches of the East," of which the Russian is the most important — .the Photian schismatics — whose orders, unlike those of the Anglican heretics, are valid, thousfh their ritual differs from the Roman.
Cardinal Vaughan's hrochurc had been written ad- visedly; and when he died in 1903, Lord Halifax, speaking from personal knowledge, not only described him as " a man whose life was absorbed in his Master's service," but belauded his " generosity " and " self- sacrifice." " On one occasion," said this priest-ridden Ecclesiastical Commissioner who controls the spending
1 February 4, 1898. * Times, March 14, 1898.
572 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of millions of money derived from taxation on English citizens, " he thought he had done me an uninten- tional injustice. He made me such an apology, so generous to me, so humble about himself, that it won him my heart for ever."^ The last act in this drama of Anglo-Romanism, which had its climax in the Halifax-Duchesne bull, took place in June 1906, when Abbe Duchesne received from Oxford the honorary degree of D.C.L., thereby proving the in- fluence of sacerdotalism in the university, and exciting the amazement of all who take an interest in aca- demical matters, but had meantime forgotten the High Church party's appeal to Rome in 1897.
Ritualism continued to increase after the Pan- Anglican conference and the pope's bull ; and was in no way abated by the scandalous disclosures concerning the traffic in advowsons during the passage of the Benefices Act of 1898. The house of commons there- fore passed two resolutions, in 1899, condemning the lawlessness prevalent in the Established Church ; but, as both were based on the absurd assumption that the archbishops and bishops, including Dr. King, were all loyal Protestants, those expressions of opinion only excited the derision of the sacerdotalists. The first, on April 11, declared: "That the house deplores the spirit of lawlessness shown by certain members of the Church of England, and confidently hopes that the ministers of the crown will not recom- mend any clergyman for ecclesiastical preferment unless they are satisfied that he will loyally obey the bishops and the prayer book and the law as declared by the courts which have jurisdiction in matters ecclesiastical." The effect of this resolution upon Lord Salisbury was the appointment, in 1901, of Dr. Chavasse, a pronounced evangelical, to the see of
^ Freeman s Journal, June 27, 1903.
Altar and Rerkdos in Gloucestkr Cathedral
The parochial ritualists find their inspiration in the cathedrals. "Gloucester was one of those stupendous Benedictine churches which were converted into catliedrals by Henry VIII. Its interior is remarkable for its gaunt niassiveness ; and the tonil)S of Robert of Normandy and Edward II. serve to remind one of the character of the famous men who enriched thcae shrines from motives of selfish cowardice." (p. io8.)
To face p. 573
FUTILE PARLIAMENTARY MOTIONS 573
Liverpool; and, in 1 901, of Dr. Moiile to Durham ; but the results for Christianity were more than counter- acted by the promotion of Dr. Ingram to the see of London and Dr. Paget to Oxford in 1901 ; of Dr. Gore to Worcester in 1902 ; and, above all, of Dr. Davidson to Canterbury in 1903. Moreover it is a lamentable fact that, while elevation to a bishopric only intensifies the professional zeal of the sacerdotalist, it invariably dulls the edge of the evangelical's Christianity and predisposes him to ritualism or indifference. The second resolution, passed on May i o, declared : " That this house, while not prepared to accept a measure which creates fresh offences, and ignores the autho- rity of the bishops in maintaining the discipline of the Church, is of opinion that if the efforts now being made by the archbishops and bishops to secure the due obedience of the clergy are not speedily effec- tual, further legislation will be required to maintain the observance of the existing laws of church and realm." Apparently those who voted for this futile resolution did not realise that it would hinder rather than help in maintaining " the observance of the existing laws of church and realm," if " the due obedience of the clergy " were secured to the orders of Archbishops Temple and Maclagan, Bishop King, and nine-tenths of the other bishops ; and therefore the motion, being passed without due consideration, cannot be said to express the real opinion of the house.
In September 1899, four months after the passage of this resolution, a revolting case of ritualism was made public in Archbishop Maclagan's diocese. A large realistic crucifix was erected on glebe land near the parish church of Hensall-cum-Heck, and close to the public road, with prayers for the dead and to the Blessed Virgin engraved on its pedestal, with an in- scription that " this cross is erected in public homage
574 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
to our Divine Redeemer and to mark the opening of the twentieth century." At the dedication of the cross there was a solemn ritual, " the form of service," it was stated,-^ " being similar to that sanctioned by the Arch- bishop of York last year," and " celebrated with the full Catholic ritual in vogue at Hensall church."
The permanent furniture of Hensall church^ in- cluded a high altar furnished with a mass of candles and coloured paper flowers; a tabernacle with white curtains ; a crucifix above the tabernacle ; a figure of the Holy Child surrounded with paper flowers ; seven red lamps hanging, one lighted, denoting that the sacrament was reserved in tabernacle ; a canopy or baldachino ; a " Mary " altar, with " a figure of Mary and Child, with flowers and four candles " ; a third altar, with a " figure of the Virgin and our Lord as a boy, with a golden cross in His hand," surrounded by flowers and candles ; a confessional place, being " a recess at east end of south aisle, chair with surplice and stole, a kneeling stool and chain of beads with silver cross attached, for use of penitents " ! There were images of St. Joseph and the Holy Child, St. Aloysius, Virgin and Child, and other saints ; " a huge crucifix smeared with paint to represent bloodstains " ; a " manger with figures of Joseph, Mary and the Holy Child, with ass and cow " ; a large crucifix with figures on the chancel screen ; a large silver heart, " inside which were the names of children belonging to the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart " ; a medallion of St. Paul, with the inscription, " Holy Apostle Paul, pray for us ; " picture of the fourteen stations of the cross ; of St. Anthony, the Holy Family, the Virgin and Child, a head of our Lord, a head of the Virgin, and a picture of the sacred heart.
^ Parish Mar/azine, October 1899.
2 Sec Church Association Pamplilet, No. 278 : Gross Scandal in the Diocese of York ivith the cognisance of the Archbishop.
RITUALISM UNDER DR. MACLAGAN 575
The parishioners were so repelled by this in sane rituahsm, that a special visitor, in January 1900, only found one adult and two children at morning service, and even at the choral celebration, or mass, there were only twenty adults besides the school children.
The vicar was the manager of the "National" schools, which children of Churchmen and Nonconformists alike were obliged to attend. In the mixed school we are told " there was a mock altar, with candles and a crucifix suspended over it ; " in the infants' school " another mock altar, with two pictures of the Annuncia- tion and the Nativity over it, and a crucifix suspended over the fireplace." The school children were " taught to bow on one knee before the reserved sacrament on the high altar before taking their places in church ; " they were taught the rosary, and taken to hear mass every Thursday at nine o'clock ; were taken to church on Candlemas day ; and had their foreheads smeared with ashes on Ash Wednesday. " The Church catechism was taught as a week-day lesson, but in the Sunday school the Roman Catholic catechism of Christian doctrine was exclusively in use " ! The vicar, Rev. E. H. Bryan, is stated to have been a member of the English Church Union, of the Con- fraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, and also of the Cowley Fathers' community ; and received from Arch- bishop Maclagan, in 1900, a grant from the York diocesan fund. Soon after the public exposure of his ritualism by the Church Association, Mr. Bryan honestly joined the Roman Church ; and Dr. Maclagan, Thereby incriminating himself, gave him a high char- acter, saying that he had " laboured for fourteen years with exceptional devotion and earnestness." ^
Archbishop Maclagan, forced at length to dissociate himself from these scandalous proceedings, which,
1 York Diocesan Magazine, March 1900.
576 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
unhappily, are by no means exceptional in his diocese, wrote to the newspapers to say that, " as soon as he had the power to do so, by the resignation of the vicar of Hensall-cum-Heck, he had paid a personal visit to the parish and ordered the removal of everything in the church which was illegal, and the entire altera- tion of the services to bring them into complete accord with the Book of Common Prayer." ^ But Mr. Henry Miller, secretary of the Church Association, who visited the church after a new vicar had been appointed, found the stations of the cross, crucifixes, and baldachino still there, and witnessed a service in which the vicar " was dressed in mass vestments, his chasuble being embroidered with a large cross on the back." " A server was in attendance on him," he adds, " and not a single parishioner was present, and of course there were no communicants " ! Mr. Miller furthermore said that the Church Association had drawn the archbishop's attention "to the scandal in this parish in 1896 and again in 1897, without any redress;" asserted that " the distinct statements made by the archbishop in the Times were devoid of foundation ; " and added that " when the archbishop had the opportunity to do his duty, he selected as his representative a curate who for some time had assisted the late vicar in his law- lessness, and recommended him to the patron for appointment to the living " ! The facts in this case, representative, as they are, of a condition of things prevailing all over England, amply justify the Church Association in declaring that the " bishops, while posing before the public as endeavouring to put down ritualism, are really fostering it." To obey the archbishops and bishops, then, is to disobey the law of the realm and ignore the Reformation settlement ; for ritualism is the surest road to obtaining preferment from episcopal
^ Times, October 1900.
PROPOSED UNION WITH RUSSIA 577
patrons. In 190 1-2, for instance, the bishops con- ferred benefices or salaried dignities on 380 of the ritualistic clergymen aimed at by the resolution of the house of commons, and of those so promoted 222 were active members of the English Church Union.
During 1901 and 1902 the sacerdotal party were mainly occupied in devising and carrying into law their scheme for relieving themselves of the mainten- ance of their sectarian elementary schools, with which we have dealt fully elsewhere ; but, meantime, the ritualists in the parish churches continued to break the law as flagrantly as ever, relying on episcopal pro- tection. The substitution of Mr. A. J. Balfour for Lord Salisbury as premier, in July 1902, made no change in the Government's sacerdotal policy ; and the appointment of Dr. Davidson to succeed Dr. Temple as archbishop of Canterbury, early in 1903, did not tend to reassure the Christians within the Church.
Temple, too, had been correspondmg with the Muscovites on the subject of union ; and in February 1903, about the time of Dr. Davidson's appointment, the Holy Synod of Russia, under the direction of M. Pobiedonostseff, addressed an official letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople, which is most valuable for its estimate of the position of the Anglican sacerdotal party : " First of all," said this Russian encyclical, " it is indispensable that the desire for union with the Orthodox Eastern Church should become the sincere desire, not only of a fraction of Anglicanism (the High Church), but of the whole Anglican community, and that the other purely Calvinistic current, which in essence rejects the Church, as we understand her, and whose attitude towards Orthodoxy is one of peculiar intolerance, should be absorbed in the above-mentioned pure
2 o
578 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
current." ^ Though the sacerdotal party try to dis- seminate a friendly feeling in England towards the Russian Church and State, they make no converts to Russianism as they do to Romanism ; and hence the cold indifference with which their fawning approaches are received by the Muscovite sacerdotalists.
Dr. Davidson was not long in his new office before he showed how determined he was to pull against the Christian or anti-Russian current in the Church of Eng- land. When bishop of Rochester and of Winchester, he had been "as absolute a failure as Dr. Temple, as regards the duty of preserving discipline." ^ In 1 898, when the Benefices Act was being passed to increase the power of the episcopate, he had given a quaintly-worded official promise on behalf of the bishops that " episcopal authority will now be exercised decisively, and, if need be, sternly, wherever in England any difficulty arises." He made a personal declaration that he had issued a secret admonition to his own clergy. But these pledges, collective and individual, were alike broken, and nowhere more flagrantly than in Dr. Davidson's see of Winchester, where, up to the date of his pro- motion to Canterbury, sacrificial vestments Avere in use, masses were being celebrated for the living and the dead ; crucifixes, candles, and pictures abounded in the parish churches ; and diocesan funds were devoted to the support of ritualists.^ The secretary of the Church Association publicly challenged Dr. Davidson, or any bishop in England, to " specify by name a single case in which illegal mass ritual has been discontinued owing to their intervention ; " but the challenge was not accepted.
Having no confidence, therefore, in Archbishop Davidson, the evangelical party introduced in the
^ Guardian, August 24, 1904. * Church Intelligencer, April 1903.
2 See, inter alia, Record, August 17, and Times, August 21, 1901.
CHURCH DISCIPLINE BILL, 1903 579
house of commons, early in 1903, a moderate Church Discipline bill, proposing (i) to abolish the bishops' power of vetoing proceedings against law-breaking clergymen; (2) making frivolous prosecutions impos- sible by compelling complainants to lodge security for costs; (3) enabling a contumacious incumbent to be deprived of his living after the lapse of three months from the date of the monition, instead of three years as heretofore. The sacerdotalists, realising that public feeling was against them, had recourse to a device worthy of Canon Pusey himself, and quite in keeping with their established policy of indirect resistance to the popular will. They prepared a Church Discipline bill of their own, so plausibly worded that an ordinary member of Parliament might be excused for thinking it aimed at the same objects as the bill of the evan- gelical party ; whereas it really proposed ( i ) to give the bishops, who had been shielding the rituahsts by their veto, more absolute power than they already possessed ; (2) to deprive the laity of the right of appeal to the Privy Council from the bishop's or arch- bishop's ruling, except with the assent of the prose- cuted clergyman; (3) to exempt the bishops expressly from the operation of law ; and (4) to give bishops the power of permitting a clergyman " to officiate as a priest or deacon of the Church of England," even though he was " ordained by a bishop of another Church " — an expression which would cover the case of a Roman or Greek priest ! While pretending to agree with the evangelical desire for reform, they in fact devised a measure which, if adopted, would estab- lish an episcopal autocracy, vastly increase the power of the sacerdotalists, and enable them to Romanise or Russianise the Church with impunity. They posed as advocates of Church discipline while scheming to set themselves free from all discipline.
58o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
The evangelical bill was set down for second reading on March 13, 1903 ; and the saeerdotalists, diagnosing that it was likely to pass, sought for some effective method of obstruction which would present the ap- pearance of sweet reasonableness. Dr. Davidson had a consultation with Mr. A. J. Balfour, the prime minister ; and a meeting of church members of parliament was organised, at which a memorandum to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, appealing to " their graces " after the manner of the resolutions passed at the houses of laymen or diocesan conferences, was agreed to and signed by 1 1 4 members. If this proceeding were spontaneous, and meant nothing more than it professed, we should not dwell on it further than to say that the promoters must have been as ultra-sanguine as the purport of their memorandum was childish or insincere. But it is evident that the true object of the meeting and memorandum was to provide the new archbishop with the occasion for a melodramatic pronouncement calculated to defeat the evangelical party's bill. On i ith March a deputation took this memorandum to Lambeth palace. Sir John Dorington, who was the spokesman, said they repre- sented the moderate party in the Church ; and he mildly criticised " the want of discipline especially noticeable in the younger clergy," which, he thought, " emanated largely from the teaching that prevailed in some of the theological colleges " — a statement which ought to have been embarrassing to Lord Alwyne Compton, bishop of Ely, who was present. Sir John Kennaway, chairman of the Church Missionary Society, spoke as if he held a special brief for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, assuring " their graces " that " the school of Keble and Pusey had its legitimate place in the Church of England," and that the memorialists " would deprecate and
DEPUTATION TO LAMBETH 581
deplore any action which would alienate " the Puseyites from the Church ! ^
Judged from a party point of view, Archbishop Davidson's reply must have seemed superb to the ritualists. He said he had left no stone unturned to abate ritualism — " during the few days he had been in office " ! He " had communicated personally with the bishops ; " but — he did not divulge the nature of the communication. " The cases of flagrant and defiant illegality and disobedience " were, he said, " confined almost wholly " to the dioceses of London, St. Albans, Rochester, Chichester, and Exeter. But, as if afraid of anything like a definite statement, he hastily added : " He was not saying by any means that they were not to be found elsewhere, far from it, but he was speaking in a general way " — in other words, they must not take him as meaning exactly what he said. " There had been in nearly all the advanced churches a marked modification and re- straint as regards usas^es that were habitual some years ago " — a phenomenon which, unfortunately, was invisible to everybody but Dr. Davidson. " There were a few men still defiant of episcopal authority," he said ; and he instanced the cases of the Plymouth and Devonport churches, and of St. Michael's, Shore- ditch, alluded to in our introductory chapter, in which the vicar and congregation had just joined the Church of Rome — as if these alarming defections were mere trifles. But he studiously ignored the fact that the evan- gelical party's grievance Avas, and is, that the priests in these and other cases, so far from being " defiant of episcopal authority," were, and are, acting under epis- copal directions, and receiving subsidies from diocesan funds. Dr. Davidson then professed a virtuous indig- nation at such cases, and assured the deputation that
^ English Churchman, March 12, 1903.
582 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
" tolerance had reached and even passed its limits. The sands had run out, and drastic action was in his judgment quite essential."
This was the discharge of archiepiscopal artillery which, it was hoped, would secure the defeat of the evangelical bill on the next day but one. Following his usual practice, Dr. Davidson characterised the facts and figures published by the evangelical party as to the increase of ritualism, as " literature which struck him as always of an unfair and even inflamma- tory character " — though he was unable to impugn a single allegation contained in that literature. A Liver- pool ritualist, in language analogous to Dr. Davidson's reflections on the Protestants who objected to Bryan King's ritualism in 1859, had described the evan- gelical party's bill as " the product of disreputable fanatics conceived during drunken orgies " ! Archbishop Maclagan joined in depreciating the bill, asking for " more parental authority for the bishops," and declar- ing that the evangelical measure " would not extend that authority," and " would not in the slightest degree hasten the action of the ecclesiastical courts." The archbishops having thus, as they hoped, damned the evangelical party's bill, received the profuse thanks and obeisances of the deputation; and their state- ments were reported everywhere next day, verhatim and in leaded type, as if they constituted a national event of the first importance.
But the house of commons, wisely judging both archbishops by their past unfaithfulness, turned a deaf ear to Dr. Davidson's promises of future amendment. Mr. Austin Taylor, son of the archdeacon of Liverpool, in moving the second reading of the evangelical bill, described a requiem mass at St. John's, Plymouth, " identical with that in the Roman missal," stated that the same practice prevailed in seventeen Keble
STRONG LANGUAGE IN PARLIAMENT 583
College churches, and, using the words of Lord Hugh Cecil, in a recent speech on behalf of the sacerdotal party, characterised the state of affairs in the Church of England as " one of absolute anarchy." Mr. Lawson Walton, now Attorney-General, challenged the ritualists to " point out a single case where for twenty-five years a bishop had put the law in motion to check the prevalence of illegality in doctrine or ritual." Allud- ing to the bishop's veto, he quoted Lord Stowell, Dr. Lushington, and Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, to prove that " the right of the bishops to prevent the laity using the courts had never been asserted in ancient times " — not until 1 879, when Bishop Mackarness had vetoed the prosecution at Clewer — Lord Coleridge, in particular, having declared in the plainest language that " the bishops had abused their trust." He said that the sacerdotal view that " the Church ought to have complete control over its own doctrine and ritual " could never be admitted " until all the Acts of Uniformity had been repealed and they accepted the condition of severance from the State." He urged the house to pass the bill in the interests of " the devoted members of the Church of their fathers, who only want its services conducted with the dignified simplicity in which the Reformation left them." Mr. William Watson Rutherford, lord mayor of Liverpool, said the laity in all Churches, except the Anglican, had the power to get rid of a clergyman who broke the law. " Even the Mohammedans," he said, " are not subject to the same kind of difficulty in this respect as we are in the Church of England." He characterised Arch- bishop Davidson's reply to Sir John Dorington's deputation as " an elaborate attempt to prove that nothing had been done in the past," and " that nothing could be done in the future," to put down Anglo- Romanism. Refuting the abusive statements of certain
584 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
clerical ritualists, who described the bill as " truculent rascality," and the product of a " Tammany ring," he said the bill was brought in by "men with strong religious conyictions, who helped to make this country," and who were determmed to mamtam " those principles of liberty and privileges of the people which they believed to be inseparably con- nected with and dependent upon the Protestant convictions of this country." Sir WilHam Harcourt described the ritualists as a "band of mutinous priests," and said " the episcopacy had not discharged the duty incumbent upon them to enforce the law of the Church in the manner prescribed by the con- stitution." The heat of the debate forced Sir John Dorington to fly his true colours; and, having ad- vocated the claims of the sacerdotal bill, he voted against the evangelical bill, which triumphantly passed its second reading by a majority of 51 — 190 to 139.
Sir William Anson, the brothers Balfour, all the ritualists, including Vicar-General Cripps and Mr. J. G. Talbot, and Sir Samuel Hoare voted against the bill. Their Roman allies assisted the sacerdotal party by sending twelve Irish Nationalists into the division lobby against the measure — Messrs. Carvill, Cullinan, Delaney, Joyce, Law, Lundon, MacVeagh, Murphy, Nanetti, P. J. O'Brien, Reddy, and D. Sullivan. Eight Protestant Irish members voted in favour of the bill — Messrs. Atkinson, Blake, Carson, Corbett, Gordon, Hemphill, Saunderson, and Sloan.
The important lesson to be learned from this debate is that in Ireland, where Romanism is in the ascendant, and in those districts of England, like Liverpool, where Roman Catholics are very numerous, well-informed Christian opinion is against the Romani- sation of the Church of England. But though the house was in favour of the bill, the Government was
CONTINUED EXODUS TO ROME 585
against it ; and, when parliament was prorogued on August 13, the measure had not got through com- mittee, and therefore failed to become law.
The disastrous consequences of ritualism and the prevailing opinion respecting the sacerdotal party were well illustrated, while the Church Discipline bill was under consideration, by a speech of Mr. Edward Aston of Manchester. Presiding at a breakfast given to the evangelical party by Sir Antony Marshall, first lord mayor of that city, on March 2nd, he said " he was born of Church parents, baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, and was only driven from it by the inroads of ritualism. They had a right to look for honesty in religion as in commerce ; and, distressing as it was to say it, he believed that many of the bishops and clergy were acting in a way that would riever be tolerated in any profession or in any secular business."
Many clerical members of the English Church Union were now joining the Church of Rome in their anxiety for valid orders, notably, Revs. J. Golding-Bird, chaplain to Lord Halifax ; W. T. Gorman, St. Clement's, E.C. ; J. H. Filmer, Cardiff; C. R. Chase, Plymouth; E. H. Bryan, Hensall — all in 1 900 ; S. Barrett, Glasgow ; M. Cave and J. M'Kee, Liverpool ; E. N. Parker, S.P.G. — in 1901 ; A. W. Taylor, Lincoln; H. C. Campbell and A. C. Jacobson, Southwark — in 1902; H. M. Evans and W. Hume, Shoreditch ; E. D. Elam, High- gate ; C. F. Norgate, Plymouth — in 1903. Another of Dr. Maclagan's incumbents. Rev. Edgar Lee, vicar of Christ Church, Doncaster, joined the Church of Rome in 1903; and we find the archbishop moving, in the consistory court, for an order compelling the church- wardens " to remove two small altar tables, two statu- ettes with ornaments, and pictures of the stations of the cross, introduced into the church during the
586 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
incumbency of the late vicar witlaout a faculty " ! ^ The patron of this church is a body called the Society for the Maintenance of the Faith, and a carnival of ritual- ism had apparently been going on in the parish for years, without evoking any symptoms of disapproval from Dr. Maclagan or his three suffragan-bishops, who are subsidised to supervise the conduct of public wor- ship in the diocese. Ritualistic churches rarely have a genuine parochial congregation, and their church- wardens are usually the creatures of the incumbents. But even if it were otherwise in this case, and if one of the churchwardens made an official complaint against Mr. Lee, under the Public Worship Regulation Act, there is no reason to believe that the archbishop would not have vetoed the proceedings. It is the archbishops or the bishops who should be prosecuted in such cases, for theirs is the real dereliction of duty ; and it is con- trary to all English ideas of justice that in a public institution the officials who draw the highest salaries should be outside and above the law.
While Dr. Maclagan was thus "posing before the public as endeavouring to put down ritualism " in the diocese of York, the archbishop of Canterbury was joining with the Roman CathoHc party in the house of lords in an attack upon the Act of Settlement by which the present dynasty sits on the throne.^ On June 25, 1903, Earl Grey moved the second reading of a bill for the abolition of the royal declaration against transubstantiation, and Dr. Davidson enunciated what he called " the view taken by the occupants of the episcopal benches with regard to the constitutional change proposed in the bill."^ Stripped of all its casuistry, his position was that the declaration " should avoid giving needless pain to good men who belong to
1 Enqlish. Churchman, June 25, 1903. 2 12 & 13 Will. in. c. 2. ^ Tivies, June 26, 1903.
ROYAL DECLARATION ATTACKED 587
the communion from which the sovereign is debarred." Is the King then only forcibly withheld from becoming a Roman Catholic ? Knowing the subservient rela- tions in which the holders of the see of Canterbury have always stood towards the Crown, we cannot believe that Archbishop Davidson would have spoken so plainly on this occasion without some authority. He boasted that he approached the question " without any Pro- testant bias." He declared " unhesitatingly " that the royal declaration " violated the principle " he had laid down by giving " needless and avoidable pain and offence to religious minds by the epithets which it employed respecting a particular doctrine which those who held it entertained with passionate devo- tion " — a presentation of the case which evidently covered the Anglican, as well as the Roman, Catholics. He denounced the repudiation of transubstantiation as " unsuitable and offensive," and " an anachronism," saying that " there had been a great change in the use of language during the last two centuries." As Pusey would have said, it was entirely too " crude." While thus advocating the emasculation of the oath, he fatuously quoted the modified declaration made by James IL : " I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this government both in Church and State as it is now by law established" — which, as he said, had "given the intensest satisfaction, and the bishops presented an address in which they said that it ought to be written down in letters of gold." While admitting the imbecile conduct of his predecessors in office, he pleaded for a repetition of it, declaring that it was the bounden duty of the Government to alter the constitu- tion. And, " in the name of the bishops," he " believed that the Roman Catholic members of that house would be the most helpful, perhaps amongst the most capable, coadjutors to draw up " — the new declaration ! How
588 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
intensely gratified Canon Pusey would have been to hear Dr. Davidson assert, after all this, that he re- pudiated transubstantiation "with all his might" and intended to vote against the bill !
Transubstantiation is the corner-stone of the Roman position ; and the progress of the Anglo -Romanists must necessarily be barred while the head of the Church of England is bound to swear, as a condition precedent to legal occupancy of the throne, " that in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper there is not any transubstantiation of the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, at or after the con- secration thereof by any person whatsoever ; " and to make this declaration " in the plain and ordinary sense of the words, as understood by English Protestants." That such a declaration conscientiously made by one man should pain, or insult, or offend another man who conscientiously thinks otherwise, only becomes intelli- gible when one remembers that the fight is really for political supremacy. The Duke of Norfolk therefore " heard with gratification the declaration of the arch- bishop of Canterbury." But the Duke of Devonshire refused to support " any weakening of a declaration which is a most valuable security for the maintenance of the Protestant succession to the throne of this country." And Lord Rosebery pertinently asked, " How is the Protestant faith, which is a protest against certain doctrines of the Roman Church, to be satisfactorily defined without some such repudiation " of transubstantiation as the oath contained ? In the result Earl Grey's bill was defeated by 109 votes to 62.
The second reading of the Church Discipline bill forced the hands of Government, and, early in 1904, they appointed a royal commission to investigate the prevailing anarchy in the Established Church, which we shall consider in a new chapter.
CHAPTER XX
Ecclesiastical Discipline Commission, 1904 — The sacerdotal party's first move — Evidence of illee;alities restricted to twelve months — Testimony of medievalists admited without limit — Doings of the sacerdotal party, 1904-6— Father Adderley — Bishop Gore — Bishop Ingram — Clerical criminality — Parish of Wimbledon.
The duty of a Christian bishop, e7r/cr/co7ros, overseer or superintendent, is to oversee the clergy of his district, or diocese, and insure their loyal obedience to the Church law ; and it is for his work as an enforcer of discipline, and for nothing else, that each Anglican bishop receives his excessive salary. We do not pay i^ 1 00,000 a year to the persons who are now bishops because of any pre-existing inherent or divine right in the individuals themselves, not one of whom had any claim to the emoluments of an English see until the moment of his appointment by the Government, when he became responsible to the nation for the good conduct of his diocese. And, as it is not by punishment, but rather by example and personal in- fluence, that a good general or admiral will best promote loyalty and discipline amongst his subordi- nates, so also it is by the virtue of his own life, his loyalty to the law, and his zeal for the promotion of pure Christianity, that a good bishop may best infuse faithfulness and discipline into his clergy. The par- sons and curates will imitate the bishop. As he is, so are they; like master, like man. If we could conceive a British general or admiral at variance with the British Government, and disloyal to British law,
we should expect to find the majority of his subordi-
589
590 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
nates mutinous and evil-disposed, desertions rife, and the work of the army or navy badly done.
Now the bishops, as a body, from the very first, have always been secretly or overtly disloyal to the prayer book, articles, and homilies, and the numerous statutes by which, supplemented by the Civil War and the Great Rebellion, the Reformation settlement was so solemnly enforced. If the bishops had sup- ported and loyally believed in the Christian and congregational forms of public worship which the nation so deliberately substituted for the old Roman sacerdotal system, the pagan impieties of ritualism should now be unknown in the Church of England. But the bishops knew well — and they know it better now than ever — that luxurious episcopal and capitular establishments are not only unnecessary, but posi- tively baneful to a Christian Church ; and that, if they allowed the State Church to become truly Pro- testant in character, those " high " and costly estab- lishments would inevitably have to be discontinued. To paraphrase a saying of Goethe's, " It nettles the bishops to find the truth of Christianity so simple " ; to justify their large endowments, something more than pure Christianity is required ; and that some- thing was most naturally found in the sacerdotal mysteries of the old Roman system, under which bishops, deans, canons, rectors, and vicars acquired all their wealth and power, and religious architecture all its importance. As one studies the actions of the present bishops, or the panegyrical biographies of deceased bishops — let us say Blomfield, Tait, Wilber- force, Benson, and Temple, in recent years — one is forcibly impressed by the solidly successful selfishness, the keenness for personal comfort and advancement of relatives, looming out through the thin veneer of Pharisaical holiness which parasites and biographers
THE RITUAL COMMISSION, 1904 591
polish so brightly that it often dazzles an unthinking public, and hides the true grain of the episcopal timber. Every Anglican bishop, speaking broadly, will be found to be a sacerdotalist or " high " Churchman at heart ; or, to put it otherwise, no genuine Christian, believing in the true and simple creed of Jesus, could conscientiously accept a bishopric in the Established Church. If the bishops were Christians — nay, even if they stood neutral between Christianity and sacer- dotalism— they would, as sensible men, have come to a working arrangement among themselves to put down the un-Christian ritualism prevalent among their clergy. But, being ritualists themselves, they could not take so honest a course ; and, in conse- quence, the Church has had to endure the calamities of revolt, desertion, and internecine warfare amongst its members, and to suffer the ignominy of public condemnation and exposure by parliamentary resolu- tions and commissions of inquiry.
By warrant, dated April 23, 1904, the King, on the advice of Mr. A. J. Balfour, appointed a commission " to inquire into the alleged prevalence of breaches or neglect of the law relating to the conduct of divine service in the Church of England, and to the ornaments and fittings of churches ; and to consider the existing powers and procedure applicable to such irregularities, and to make such recommendations as may be deemed requisite for dealing with the aforesaid matters " ; power being given to summon witnesses, to inspect places, and to call for the production of books and documents.
It is a curious coincidence that, on April 18, that is to say, five days before the signing of the royal war- rant, " Lord and Lady Halifax, with their son, had a private audience with the Pope ; " ^ at which it is not improbable that the ecclesiastical commissioner and
^ Titties,
592 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
chairman of the English Church Union was able to submit the names of the thirteen commissioners to the pontiff, and, at the same time, to assure him that the contemplated inquiry would prove to be a mere friendly proceeding calculated to increase the strength of the Anolo-Romanists.
The large tithe-drawers had no reason to fear that their interests would suffer at the hands of the new tribunal ; and if Lord Halifax submitted the names to the Pope, his running commentary might well have taken the following form : —
" The chairman, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach (since created Lord St. Aldwyn), is a ' sound ' churchman, whose entire career has been identified with Lord Salisbury's party, and who fully appreciates the value of the Roman endowments, Roman system of govern- ment, Roman educational monopolies, and Roman ritual, so tenaciously preserved by the responsible directors of the Church of England ; and our interests are safe in his hands. But an even more important fact for us is that Archbishop Davidson, too, is a member of this commission — the new primate who would hand over the Act of Settlement to a committee of Roman Catholics so as to bring the King's declaration into entire consonance with your Holiness's views; and who, as bishop of Winchester, gave that quaint pro- mise in 1898, to put down Anglo-Romanism ' where- ever in England any difficulty arises' — a piecrust promise made only to be broken. We have also Bishop Paget of Oxford, of whom I need only say that he has filled the ancient Roman deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, and that his ' churchmanship ' is himalayan in its height. We also have Dr. E. C. S. Gibson, vicar of Leeds, once president of Wells theological college, who is stated ^ to adopt the
^ " Eitualistic Clergy List," third edition, 1903.
.5 S '
feo-
THE COMMISSIONERS 593
eastward position in sacrificing, and believes in the objective presence of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine after consecration.^ He also mixes the water and wine ceremonially, and uses lighted candles, like those Roman priests who served under your holiness's predecessor in pre-Christian times, the Pontifex Maximus, by whose title you still so bravely and ingenuously call yourself, as if to show that your dynasty does not permit a mere passing apparition, like Jesus Christ, to break the continuity of your time-honoured and ever-triumphant profession. The Christian clergy of the Ecdesia Anglicana are repre- sented, your holiness, by only one member. Rev. T. W. Drury, of Ridley Hall, Cambridge — a man who does not receive a single penny from the ancient Roman endowments of our State Church.
" But if we are happy in the chairman and the clerical section of the commissioners, we are even more fortunate, if that were possible, in the ' laymen,' or ' lithmen,' the canaille, or common herd, as your holiness considers them. In no Church in the world is the abasement of the laity so ruthlessly carried out as in the State Church of England. I am one of them, yet I exult in their church-outing ; but then, you see, the priests admit me into the sanctuary, and I am, as it were, behind the scenes. There is Sir Francis Jeune, a bishop's son, who has made his career under episcopal patronage as an ecclesiastical lawyer — a profession hitherto one of the most profit- able in England. Sir Lewis Dibdin is himself an ecclesiastical official, judge of the provincial courts of Canterbury and York, and master of the faculties, and is not likely to do anything to interfere with the old-established Romanism of our Church system. Mr. J. G. Talbot is the brother of our devoted leader,
1 Commentary on the XXXIX. Articles, by E. C. S. Gibson ; 1896-7.
2 P
594 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Bishop Talbot ; he is also an ecclesiastical commis- sioner ; and he fittingly represents the university of Oxford in parliament. Those three commissioners belong to the class called ' ecclesiastical laymen ' by the evangelicals, and are altogether with us.
" There are five other laymen who are not committed to our side, but who, nevertheless, are so loyal to the Roman system of their beloved Church, that we do not fear them in the least. The Marquis of North- ampton is a near relative of Lord Alwyne Compton, the ritualistic bishop of Ely ; Sir John Kennaway, though chairman of the Church Missionary Society, was one of the deputation to Archbishop Davidson in March 1903, and refused to vote for the evangelical discipline bill ; Sir Samuel Hoare is one of the most innocuous members of our absurd houses of laymen and diocesan conferences ; Sir Edward Clarke is a busy lawyer, and not likely to attend frequently, and, curious to say, he is patron of a little church near London, in which the ritual practised is so ' high ' as to satisfy us completely.^ The two remaining commissioners are Dr. G. W. Prothero, son of a Church dignitary, son- in-law of a bishop, and brother-in-law of Mr. Butcher, M.P. for Cambridge, whose views on a Catholic univer- sity for Ireland must be well known to your holiness ; and Mr. George Harwood, cotton-spinner, an odd but conscientious student of ecclesiastical theory and practice, who obtained deacon's orders in our Church, when forty-one years old, and worked for some time as a curate in layman's dress, while pursuing his ordinary avocations in Lancashire."
If Lord Halifax had given some such personal de- scription as the foregoing, he would have only presented the pope with an accurate picture of the situation created by the appointment of the commission ; for it
l Church Intelligencer, May 1904; Protestant Chronicle, January 1904.
RESTRICTION OF EVIDENCE 595
seems impossible to get a body of chm-chmen together whose interests are not inextricably bound up with the financial establishment of the sacerdotal jjrofession. One does not impugn their sincerity in saying so much of the majority of the commissioners. They may be as virtuous as Marcus Aurelius, or Julian the Apostate, or many of the Spanish inquisitors ; but it remains the duty of Christians, nevertheless, to oppose them to the uttermost and prevent them from accomplishing their ecclesiastical and political aims.
When the names were announced to the house of commons, three Liverpool members, Messrs, Austin Taylor, Charles Macarthur, and David Maclver, moved the adjournment of the house, complaining that " the ecclesiastical element was too pronounced," and that not even one of the commissioners represented " the strong Protestant feeling of the North." Other mem- bers objected to the presence of bishops on the com- mission, on the grounds that they were not only " interested " financially, but were guilty of condoning, supporting, or committing the breaches of the law which were to' be investigated, but their protests were con- temptuously overborne. Nobody acquainted with the proceedings of previous ritual commissions expected any useful results from this ; but, nevertheless, students of Church politics looked forward with interest to see how Archbishop Davidson would play his cards, and how the sacerdotalists would divert and divide, without seeming to oppose, the forces of Anglican Christianity — for it was not doubted that they would do so successfully.
The sacerdotalists' first move showed that they had lost none of their ancient boldness and cunning ; for, at the initial meeting early in May, they carried a resolution that no evidence of " breaches of the law relating to the conduct of divine service " previous to
596 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
May I, 1903, should be accepted. Thus, at one stroke, the vast accumulation of proofs of gross ritual scandals and disorders prevalent for the thirty-four years which had elapsed since the ritual commission preceding the Public Worship Regulation Act, was imperiously brushed aside as if it were non-existent. The volun- teers of the evangelical party, on whom the entire onus of adducing evidence was thrown, were restricted by this sharp practice to such cases as they could prove to have occurred within a specific twelve months during which the ritualists had been warned to be on good behaviour. Although evidence of those actual breaches of the law — which were the only direct and legitimate topic of investigation — were confined to the brief period of a single year, the commissioners spread out their secret sittings over a period of two years. No inconsiderable portion of this time was con- genially occupied in listening to theological testimony, whose erudition was but a r6chauffd of that nonsensical medievalism which the world has determined to be done with ; but which will apparently flourish in England as long as episcopal and capitular endowments endure. There was no restriction of time put upon this absurd and irrelevant evidence ; the experts being allowed to meander at will over all the well-worn and mystifying paths of the priest's anti-Christian labyrinth. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Cyril of Jeru- salem, the canons of Hippolytus, the decrees of the fourth council of Toledo and the third council of Ravenna, the sacred dicta of Honorius of Autun and Ivo of Chartres, the authority of the Ordo Eomanus, and, last but not least, of the Abb^ Duchesne, D.C.L., were all laboriousl}' listened to by Sir Michael Hicks- Beach, as if each of them embodied some brilliant discovery which should give the commissioners official cosrnisance of those ecclesiastical disorders of which
o
ST. MARK'S DAY SERVICE 597
they refused to accept evidence. Busy with the motes of Roman theology and canon law, they could not see the beam of Anglican disloyalty and lawlessness. While the commission was thus " careful and troubled" about all manner of unnecessary things and evading " the one thing needful," Sir Francis Jeune died, and his place was taken by Lord Alverstone, better known as Sir Richard Webster, a devoted adherent of Lord Salisbury's party. The bishopric of Gloucester, a diocese in which Sir Michael Hicks-Beach is one of the leading churchmen, also fell vacant by the death of Bishop Ellicott, and the lucrative post was given — not to Rev. T. W. Drury, the evangelical — but to Dr. E. C. S. Gibson, the sacerdotalist.
During the two years that the commission was sitting inside closed doors, the clerical leaders of the sacerdotal party outside were in a state of hysterical activity. Bishops Gore, Ingram, and Talbot were con- tinuously figuring in the newspapers, while one clerical " sensation " followed another in rapid succession.
Two days after the appointment of the commission one of the most self-assertive of the London ritualists, Hon. Rev. J. G. Adderley, vicar of St. Mark's, Maryle- bone, held a service in honour of St. Mark, in which — as Daniel O'Connell, the true originator of modern Anglican sacerdotalism, would say — a coach and four was driven through all the fundamental clauses of the Reformation settlement. Though the patron, who presented Mr. Adderley, was Rev. H. Russell Wake- field — the priest-mayor of this decadent London borough, in which none of the Public Libraries Acts, from 1850 to 1892, had yet been adopted at the time of these occurrences — it was understood that he had acted upon Bishop Ingram's suggestion,^ Mr. Adderley having preceded Dr. Ingram as head of
^ English Churchman., June 1 8, 1903.
598 CHUKCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Oxford House, Bethnul Green, and having been after- wards head of Christ Church Oxford Mission in the East End for six years. We are informed by an eye- witness ^ that there were lighted candles on the com- munion table, and others on the top of the reredos which were lighted during the service. There was a crucifix on the rood-beam and another high up on the chancel arch, and " holy " pictures on the walls. There was a procession in which one of the cross- bearers wore " a splendid garment of silver cloth with gold ornamentation and gold tassels," while " four little boys were dressed in copes, exact miniatures of the copes worn by Father Adderley, the deacon, and sub-deacon." One of the hymns was " Our Lady sings Magnificat!' A book was carried from which sentences were solemnly recited at intervals when the procession halted. The leading actors " vested themselves for mass " after the manner shown in our illustrations ; and, we are told, " incense was blessed, the holy table was censed, the celebrant of the mass was censed, and the deacon went round the chancel censing it in all parts while the choir was singing the Kyrie. The chalice was brought in under a veil ; a wafer and the chalice were elevated, and there were numerous acts of adoration directed to the consecrated elements." Writing some months later, " on behalf of the hitherto insulted and ignored Protestant parishioners of St. Mark's," a local newspaper ^ " solemnly appealed " to " the male Protestant parishioners " of Mr. Wake- field's parish, " the real patrons of St. Mark's," to rescue " this Protestant parish, mainly peopled by the very very poor," from " the tender mercies " of the ritualists.
" Father " Adderley seems to have been almost as much out of touch with his parishioners as Mr. Bryan
1 English Churchman, April 28, 1904. - Marylebone Star, Sept. 1904.
PUBLIC DISTASTE FOR RITUALISM 599
King was in 1859. But the energy whicli produced the " riots " at St. George's-in-the-East has transferred itself respectably to the ranks of Nonconformity, and modern ritualists are left to perform their sacrifices in a solitude which they mistake for peace. Dr. Rox- burgh, the people's churchwarden, writing to the evangelical newspaper, said : " During my term of oflS.ce I could not count ten men who were parish- ioners who attended the church 10.30 a.m. service" — presumably the choral celebration or mass — " it is ex- tremely improbable that there were half that number who were communicants." Dr. Roxburgh had " strongly urged Mr. Adderley to give up his ritualistic practices, because he knew they prevented men attending the church ; " and he went on to say : " There are about five hundred male parishioners in St. Mark's parish. At the vicar's request I have examined the communicant's roll. I find thirty-four names of males on it who reside in the parish ; of these four are parishioners," the rest being " lads and small boys." ..." Four men out of five hundred is all that Mr. Adderley can show after three years of hard work. Matters are worse than I ever thought they were. Will Mr. Adderley be convinced now that his ritualism is keeping men away from his church ? " ^
Shortly after this Mr. Adderley left Marylebone, being appointed by his father. Lord Norton, to the benefice of Saltley, near Birmingham, where his brother is chaplain to the Sisters of the Society of the Incar- nation, under the generalship of Bishop Gore. One of Father Adderley 's first acts was to stop the evangelical practice of evening communion which had hitherto prevailed in the parish ; and when the parishioners appealed to Bishop Gore, stating that " many of the communicants were working men and their wives
1 English Churchman, October 6, 1904.
6oo CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
who were precluded from coming to the Lord's table earlier in the day," the Resurrectionist's reply was : " I am not able to urge any incumbent to celebrate the holy communion in the evening. There is no class of the community, especially in towns, which cannot come to communion in the morning."^
Bishop Gore, besides being the founder of the Order of the Resurrection, is a patron of the Society of the Sacred Mission, which teaches children the Roman doctrines of " the real presence," purgatory, extreme unction, auricular confession, and prayers for the dead; and he is a member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament.^ In his oAvn words, he advocates " all the ancient ritual exposition " of pre-Reformation times ; and in 1898, only three years before he became a bishop and when he belonged to the English Church Union, he exhorted the sacerdotal party " to use such liberty as they could gain or squeeze from any particular bishop, over and above that for additional services." He practises " the adoration of Christ in the Sacrament ; " ^ prefers the Sarum missal to the prayer book ; and holds that sacramental grace is given " irrespective of the state of mind or condition of faith of the receiver." A drunken man or a swindler actively at work may be regenerated by baptismal water and secure the kingdom of heaven ; or, as Bishop Gore puts it, " a bad man really receives the spiritual endowment of his nature." Bishop Gore is the sole patentee of, perhaps, the wildest and most audacious doctrine of what may truly be called mad Anglo-Romanism. He believes in the offering of Christ's body as a eucharistic sacrifice, alleging that
^ Guardian, December 2, 1904.
* See " Lord Salisbury's Nomination to the Bishopric of Worcester ; " Church Association, Nov. 27, 1901.
3 "The Body of Christ," by C. Gore, D.D., of the Community of the Resurrection.
BISHOP GORE, RESURRECTIONIST 60 1
the Epistle to the Hebrews forced the Fathers of the Church " to view the eucharistic worship and sacrifice upon the background of Christ's continual intercession and presentation of Himself in Heaven, and not upon that of the cross." He holds that it was not by His death on the cross that Christ redeemed the world, but by His presentation of Himself, in His capacity as supreme priest, to God the Father in Heaven after the resurrection ! " It is at His entrance to heaven, and not upon the cross, that He accomplished His atonement for us. His propitiation and His intercession are identical; and both consist in His ' appearing ' and ' presenting ' Himself for us." But almost in the same breath in which he preaches the doctrine of perpetual propitiation, this Puseyite of Puseyites says that " when the Jewish passed into the Christian Church, it became a first principle that there was no more need for propitiating God " !
The alliance between agnosticism and endowed sacer- dotalism is instructively exemplified in the person of Bishop Gore. In Lux Mundi he questions not only the inspiration, but even the accuracy, of the most important books of the Old Testament, and con- descendingly admits of the Pentateuch that it may not have been concocted with " any intention to deceive." The creation and fall of man, and all that went before the call of Abraham — that is to say, before the earliest establishment of tithes — are myths, ac- cording to him ; but, he adds, " the inspiration of their narratives is as conspicuous as that of any other part of Scripture."
We can imagine, therefore, how the clerical sacer- dotalists of Worcester welcomed the advent of Dr. Gore, and how the agnostics rejoiced in so friendly a lord spiritual. When he came to Birmingham he probably found the agnostics more influential than
6o2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tlie sacerdotalists ; and, at his first diocesan con- ference/ he had a word to say on both schools of thought. He had a sjambok for the starved intellects of the too-outspoken Anglo-Roman priest — that con- temptible type of man which the Resurrectionist has done so much to create and multiply. It appears that he had recently heard one of those clerical anti- scientists, who refuse to know Christ, propound this question in public : " What is the exact effect upon flowers when placed upon an altar — are they con- secrated or not ? " Bishop Gore did not indignantly declare that the placing of flowers on an altar pro- duced no spiritual effect whatever upon them ; nor did he denounce the belief implied in the question as rank superstition. His bishop's conscience only spurred him far enough to condemn " ecclesiastical shop " when " talked in public places ; " because " the outsider was enormously alienated by it" — in Birmingham — the inference for misguided priests and students being that, wherever outsiders were not likely to be alienated, such superstitions might be freely proclaimed and discussed. For cultured agnosticism he had a word of damning flattery, saying that " the body of declared agnostics " were not a " serious element " of danger to the High Church party. Sir Oliver Lodge, for instance, " excellently illustrated the changed attitude of science towards religion." He might also have quoted Sir Leslie Stephen's pleasant dictum that " a State Church may be regarded as an anomaly ; but we take anomalies easily, and the hostile sentiment corresponds rather to a pious aspiration for theoretical symmetry than to a deep sense of pressing injustice."^ Even an atheist of Mr. John Morley's ability has no terrors for bishops, deans, and chapters. A man may denounce Jehovah, the God of the Jews, with a
^ Daily Express, Nov. 9, 1905. '^ Introd. Encyc. Brit., loth ed. , 1902.
CULTURED AGNOSTICISM 603
bravery qualitied only by the fact that he regards Jehovah as an imagmary being who cannot strike back. But the same man well knows that, however visionary certain personal deities may have been, the bishops and priests of those deities always were, and still are, a living fact — a body of men always capable of striking back and frequently of annihilating an opponent. Therefore, cultured agnosticism's plan of campaign is to ridicule the sacerdotal conception of a god and venerate the endowed priests of the despised deity. This is not so with the undeclared agnostics, Avhom Dr. Gore describes as " the vast majority of literary, scientific, and those we call highly-educated or reading men, and those who have taken first classes at the universities " — a class which must chiefly consist of nominal members of the Church of England, inasmuch as the Church has enjoyed an immemorial monopoly in breeding them in the public schools and universities. They are the sort of men whom Bishop Gore's writings and speeches must have especially reached ; and, while such litera- ture has been making young Anglican priests and theological students as superstitious as Neapolitans or Muscovites, it has been driving well-educated lay- men into infidelity.
Dr. Ingram's mode of operation differs from Bishop Gore's, but it is no less dangerous to Christianity. Havinsr flourished in the thick of East End ritualism, first under Bishop Temple, as rector of Bethnal Green, and then under Bishop Creighton, as canon of St. Paul's and bishop of Stepney, he was promoted to the bishopric of London by Lord Salisbury. A constantly- shifting population, an excessive devotion to pleasure and self-indulgence, numerous degraded areas, absence of that local pride and independence with w^hich the inhabitants of provincial cities and towns are so deeply
6o4 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
imbued, the consequent lack of local leaders of public opinion, all tend to make London an admirable covert for ritualism. Dr. Tait considered the diocese to be " the key of the Church of England ; " and the fact that it has been the chief centre of ritualism for over seventy years now, since Bishop Blorafield urged his incumbents to " put fresh incense into their censers," supplies a convincing proof that Anglo-Romanism is the official policy of the Church. Dr. Ingram was educated at Keble College, and it must have given great joy to the directors of that institution to be- hold him invested with " the key of the Church of England." Dr. Creighton died in January 1901, and the see had remained vacant for four months, during which Lord Salisbury seems to have been undecided as to whether he should appoint a bishop who should strive to win the heavy-laden Anglicans of London over to the rest and refreshment of Christian virtue, or one who should follow the broad and downward road which the State Church in London has been travelling since Blomfield's time. The appointment was much resented by the Christians within the Church, and indeed was only intelligible when viewed as one of Lord Salisbury's many acts of friendship to the sacerdotalists. When Mr. Evans and the congregation of St. Michael's, Shoreditch, openly joined the Church of Rome in 1903, public attention was concentrated upon Bishop Ingram, and keen interest was taken in his history, For fourteen years before that date, as head of Oxford House, rector, canon, suffragan, and bishop, he had been a leader of the London sacer- dotalists. It need not surprise us, therefore, to find him galvanised into an almost frantic activity by the appointment of the Ecclesiastical Discipline Commis- sion. During 1904 and 1905 his name was never out of the newspaper headings, his unnecessary and
DR. INGRAM'S BALANCE-SHEET 605
sensational sayings and doings being always calculated to " sta^eer " women and children, to use President Kruger's verb, and to irritate or amuse every thinking man. To enumerate in detail even a part of his perform- ances would take up more space than the structure of this book would admit of; and we shall therefore confine ourselves to a few examples of his method of imitating the great apostle of the Gentiles, whose name is so intimately associated with London. Of all the bishops there is, perhaps, none more true to the Puseyite type. His first great act of self-advertise- ment, after the appointment of the commission, was to publish a balance-sheet in 1904, showing his receipts and expenses from May i, 1903, to May i, IQ04 — precisely the period during which the com- mission had decided to accept proofs of ritualism — alleging that his objects in so doing were (i) "to keep faith" with his "friends amongst the working classes"; (2) to prove that he, as a bishop, " came to them straight from Jesus Christ and not from a palace " ; and (3) to prove "that the chief followers of Jesus of Nazareth " are not " making large sums of money by their ministry in His cause." Those unacquainted with Puseyite methods might be led to infer from this boastful proclamation that Bishop Ingram had obeyed the command of Jesus and sold all he had and given it to the poor, or that he had followed the example of Barnabas, with whom he is so fond of compar- insr himself, and had handed nine-tenths of his net profits over to the apostolic governors of Queen Anne s Bounty for the relief of such poor London incumbents as the Kentish Town vicar who was committed to Wormwood Scrubbs prison in November 1903, the very year covered by his balance-sheet. The poor Anglican priest had failed to keep an undertaking to pay ^5 a month to a creditor, and he pleaded that he
6o6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
had a wife and six children, of whom only the eldest boy, a clerk, was able to support himself. " It would take ^looo a year to keep the vicarage up adequately," he said, " so we lived in a corner of it, and during the last three months my wife and children have been nearly starving. My net income is £\7.i. I pay £dfi a year in rates and taxes." ^ Barnabas would hardly have been content to draw a salary of £2^, I OS. per day to maintain himself in celibate gran- deur, while poor presbyters and their families were thus hungry within earshot. But if any one expected, for the honour of Christianity, to find a modern Barnabas in Bishop Ingram, he must have been not only dis- appointed, but astounded — nay, must have had his breath literally taken away — when he studied the bachelor bishop's accounts. As vicar of Bethnal Green, Dr. Ingram may have had ;^5oo a year, as canon and suffragan- bishop he had assuredly ;ifiooo a year — an ample salary on which a single man, especially a minister of the gospel, might well consider himself rich " beyond the dreams of avarice." As Bishop of London he leaped into a fortune of ;^ 10,000 a year, with, perhaps, the most valuable patronage rights in England, and control of two diocesan funds now amounting to i^ 5 0,000 a year. His first act on promotion shows how little value need be attached to the official description of the Keble students as " per- sons desirous of academical education and willing to live economically." ^ He immediately borrowed the enormous sum of ^5000 to buy new furniture for Fulham Palace, insuring his life, as he says, " to cover loan," and he sets down the annual premium, £172, 1 6s. 2d., and interest, ;^i3 5, as permanent diminutions of income ! It may be imagined that this ;^5ooo included structural repairs, but it did
1 British Weekly, November 12, 1903. ^ Oxford Calendar.
SERVANTS, GARDENS, AND STABLES 607
not; for he spent an additional £iigo, 7s. 3d. in improving and decorating the residence. Having thus furnished and beautified his rent-free pahxce, he set up an establishment of four male and seven female indoor servants, and his domestic expenditure for the year came to ;i^i 78 i, lis. 4d. Besides this, he keeps three coachmen and ten gardeners ; his outlay on stables and gardens being i^i6i8, 9s. lod. ! That was how this self-styled " chief follower of Jesus of Nazareth " showed his appreciation of that Saviour who said : " The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." And it is because he adopts this method of proving that he comes " straight from Jesus Christ and not from a palace " that I deem Bishop Ingram more true to type than any of the episcopal Puseyites. All this was admitted unblushingly in the balance- sheet, yet he complained of the calls made upon him for charity and hospitality in such a way, that many people who cursorily read the document were left under the impression that the princely income, on which so many married bishops with large families lived in affluence, was altogether inadequate for a bachelor. That some of the disbursements should have been published by a dignitary of the State Church would almost seem incredible if we had not the actual figures before us.^ Such items are two days' hospitality to the young candidates for ordination, a few inexpensive garden parties to the wives, and a little Christmas treat to the children, of the clergy, ^^342 spent on the "education of nephews," £12$ "help to individual cases," £53, 7s. 2d. (one and ninepence a day) on " books and newspapers." Outlay on printing and post- age, on coal, gas, and taxes, and ;!6^50o to Queen Anne's bounty, are all paraded ; and, instead of being grateful ^ The Guardian, December 28, 1904.
6o8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
to the nation for the magnificent and undeserved generosity with which it treated him, his object seems to have been to show that he had not received enough, and that, like R. W. Church, he had sacrificed himself en pure perte. If he frankly acknowledged that he had expected to be able to save up his entire salary, his position would be intelligible, viewed solely from a worldly point of view ; but the expenses of which he makes a grievance are those which all generous men regard as the very highest privileges of wealth. The professional or business man, or civil ser- vant, does not set off against income his payments for coal, gas, taxes, cab fare, furniture, life insurance, educa- tion of children, charity and hospitality, to prove that his money has been of no use to him ; for he thinks it only natural that it should be so spent. But Bishop Ingram, whose expenditure differs in no respect from that of a luxurious man of the world in his position, apparently thinks himself victimised, and thereby shows his ignorance of the troubles of the average man with a wife and family. How he could have hoped to benefit " the working classes " by thus showing that a single man may find i^ 10,000 a year insufficient for his wants must ever remain a mystery ; for if his balance- sheet serves any useful purpose beyond its illumination of the sacerdotal character, it is that it professes to be a " Key to Heaven " for the rich and luxurious, edited by the holder of the " key of the Church of England."
The balance-sheet was published at Christmastide, and that festival was kept at St. Paul's by celebrations of holy communion in the side-chapels at 8 and 8.30 A.M. " Then came matins," which, says the Guardian, " were fully choral as usual, followed by the high celebration," or, in plain words, high mass. " The choir moved in solemn procession. All the cathedral
BISHOP INGRAM'S EVIDENCE 609
clergy were there, and were vested in their copes. The sub-dean was the celebrant, and wore the new minor canons' cope of white and gold damask, which has just been substituted for the less suitable one worn hitherto. A beautiful worked chalice veil and stole, recently presented to the cathedral, were also used for the first time."
In May 1905, Bishop Ingram gave his evidence before the royal commission,^ its sum and substance being (i) that he is a "high" churchman on the friendliest terms with all the ritualists in his diocese, whom he never mentions except to belaud them as models of piety and virtue, and (2) that, as a natural corollary, he had done nothing to check the Romani- sation of the State Church in London. He has a particular veneration for Canon Newbolt, whose chartreuse address to the unemployed has been re- ferred to, describing him as " one of our leading high churchmen" (question 20,786); and he quoted approvingly a long letter from that dignitary to Bishop Creighton, in which Newbolt threatened a " rupture " if the practice of reserving the sacrament, after the Roman fashion, were prohibited (question 20,728). Newbolt's letter was dated April 23, 1900, and it is not improbable that Creighton used it and similar letters for the purpose of influencing an im- pending judgment which Archbishops Temple and Maclagan were to deliver on May i, following, on the legality of the use of incense and the reserved sacra- ment in the Church of England. Bishop Creighton, who was Dr. Ingram's chief patron, had set a bad example to his successor. Article XXIII. says that the sacrament " was not by Christ's ordinance re- served, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped." But to Creighton's mind, who considered himself bound
1 "Minutes of Evidence," vol. ill., pp. 256-85 ; July, 1906.
2 Q
6 10 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
rather by the ordinances of the Roman papacy and the Muscovite Holy Synod than by the simple teach- ing of Jesus, this language was unintelligible. And in 1900, when the scandals of London ritualism were fast becoming intolerable, he had, in the most ostentatious way, submitted a case to the archbishops ; and they, disregarding Newbolt's pro- phecy, decided that both practices were illegal. Dr. Ingram read another letter addressed to Creighton by " a very leading churchman," dated May 4, urging him not to turn the archbishops' judgment into "an order of the diocesan," as he felt convinced that " it would not be obeyed " ! Bishop Ingram now told the commission that the archbishops' ruling had never been obeyed by the London ritualists. Shortly after his appointment, he had interrogated 43 out of the 607 churches in the diocese, and found that 42 of them were still using incense (20,688), and 34 were reserving the sacrament (20,723). These mutineers represented the large class of Anglo-Romans who had been palliating their disobedience to the monitions of the sovereign in council by saying that their con- sciences would only allow them to render obedience to the decrees of their professional or sacerdotal superiors. These men and a large number of other priests also " deliberately " disobeyed Dr. Benson's judgment in the Lincoln case (20,960) , and Bishop Ingram now supported them, and became their champion in resist- ance to the ecclesiastical law of the realm (20,988), saying defiantly, " that any attempt to enforce the old decisions of the Privy Council upon the consciences of the clergy now would be fraught with disaster " !
The information gleaned from his meagre inquiries must have been already known to Dr. Ingram, in his capacity as chief assistant to Bishop Creighton for four years, He now took a step further Romeward than
SACRAMENT IN LOCK-UP 6ii
any of his predecessors by specially allowing reservation of tlie sacrament (20,739) ^^^ incense (20,772), ac- companying the official permission with an injunction ( I ) that the reserved sacrament was to be " kept in a locked chapel into Avhich no one at all might enter except the priest who took the sacrament to the sick person," and (2) that incense was to be confined to " a swinging use before service" (20,766) and "vague swinging during service " (20,767). How vividly this idea of a consecrated host, " locked up " in awful soli- tude, must appeal to the imaginations of the super- stitious incense-swingers! As for the lay commissioners, they listened to it apparently in a state of reverent stupefaction, which would have been better suited to a commission of Irish Nationalists listening to a similar statement from Cardinal Logue than to a body of educated English Protestants in every way superior to Bishop Ingram, A few daring ritualists refused to ac- cept even Dr. Ingram's conditions. They were, of course, the most exalted of men, but he gravely said he had " disciplined " them by refusing, or saying he would refuse, to visit their churches once in three years for confirmation, thereby leaving them free to pursue their own " primrose paths," In the case of St, Michael's, Shoreditch, where Romanism had been officially sanc- tioned under Mr, Evans since 1 891, he had served the vicar with notice, just at the last moment, in 1903, when the evangelical party was introducing its Church Discipline bill, that he meant to appoint a commission (20,786) consisting of five clerical London ritualists,^ under the Church Discipline Act of 1840, to inquire whether Evans had been publicly saying the Rosary and Hail Mary and prayers to the Saints, and celebrating benediction of the sacrament after the Roman fashion! Mr. Evans's reply was to take himself and the bulk of
1 " Ritualistic Clergy List," 1903,
6i2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
his congregation to the Roman church close at hand, as mentioned in our introductory chapter ; but, had he chosen to face the investigation, there was nothing to alarm him in the antecedents of his intended judges.
The practice of locking-up the sacrament, coupled as it always is, to Bishop Ingram's knowledge, with a belief in the real presence (20,789), has led to superstitions in the State Church of England, which, all things considered, were hardly surpassed by those barbarous nations immortalised by Herodotus. In some London churches, the alleged deity, created and fashioned by the incumbent, is locked up in a compartment within the church, the gates being " constructed of open ironwork, so that the reservation is visible " to the congregation outside. In a Kensington church the god is thus housed in a loft over an idolatrous rood- screen (115), or, to quote the report, "on an altar in the rood-loft, with a lamp burning before it visible to persons in the church " ! In another London church the deity was, and is, thus reserved, " in a hanging pyx over the altar of a chapel in a crypt " (12,212-8). The church is in a degraded neigh- bourhood, and the wretched denizens go down into this vault, like so many Chinamen into a joss-house, to prostrate themselves before the god ; and the com- missioners, to their eternal discredit, say approvingly in their report that " a great many poor people make use of the opportunity thus offered and value it very much " ! The non-clerical commissioners should have condemned such practices, and suggested some means, by education or compulsion, of raising poor Anglicans above these gross superstitions, and giving them the benefit of the Reformation.
Dr. Ingram's ignorance of his own diocese seems almost incredible. He did not even know the number of churches in it : "I have always called it 640," he
ANGLICAN ANARCHY 613
said (20,715); "I am told by the commission that it is 607. It is either 640 or 607 " ! He " had no idea " that a Poplar incumbent " was in the habit of taking the reserved sacrament to the sick," through the streets, " with a verger carrying a lighted candle before him " — as the Roman priests do abroad ; and, as usual, he went out of his way to eulogise the ritualist as " a perfectly loyal man," saying : " Directly I tell him not to do it, he will not do it " ! Bishop Ingram admitted that he had done nothing to stop the Roman practice of eucharistic celebra- tions, or masses, for non-communicating school children (20,952-4), some of which have been already described (pp. 364—6) ; nor the ceremonial mixing of the chalice which Dr. Benson held to be illegal (20,881) — he thought the mixing in the vestry before service intro- duced needless complications ! The chairman almost grew indignant at Bishop Ingram's contempt for the Lincoln judgment, saying, " Here is a decision of what may be called essentially a church court, which no bishop of London has attempted to enforce or called the attention of his clergy to " (20,885). Neither does Dr. Ingram discourage auricular confession (21,139), but rather encourages it ; nor altar lights (21,123-5); nor processional lights (20,759); ^^r Roman vest- ments (21,008-11). He said (21,012) that if the Privy Council judgment against vestments in Clifton V. Ridsdale were enforced it would lead to schism. The public are not likely to witness an Ingramite schism, but, should it arise after disestablishment, it is likely to get short shrift from the public. He wears a cope and mitre himself, he said, because he approves of ceremonial ; and many clergymen (who, perhaps, found religious theatricals good for the collection) asked him to wear his paraphernalia when he visited their churches (20,892). Nothing was said about the
6 14 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
gigantic crosier, though that, 'of course, constitutes a special feature in those exhibitions. Dr. Davidson (20,957), coming to his friend's relief, suggested that Bishop Ingram "justified" the cope and mitre "on general rather than on technical grounds." Dr. Ingram accepted the suggestion, and the Pickwickian explana- tion apparently gave complete satisfaction.
Sir Edward Clarke so far forgot himself (21,121) as to ask, with a humility of expression foreign to him in another sphere : " Has your lordship tried the plan of forbidding vestments by your authority as bishop ? " The answer being a direct negative, the eminent lawyer said : " But why not try it ? " Whereupon Bishop Ingram said arrogantly : " Well, that is my own busi- ness, if I may say so." The amount of episcopal encouragement given to Roman vestments and ritualism of all sorts may be gathered from the fact (21,134), that at the institution of an incumbent in one of the poor London ritualistic churches, on June ii, 1904, while the commission was actually sitting, Bishop Lang — an able Scotch Presbyterian minister's son and Dr. Ingram's alter ego — was arrayed in " a dark blue cassock, a rochet, cream - coloured stole, jewelled pectoral cross, yellow brocade cope, with peacock blue fringe and gold orphreys, and a mitre embroidered with gold," while in the church " there were the stations of the cross, two pictures of the Madonna and Child, three altars, four crucifixes, and two confessional places " ! The meanness displayed by the Anglican sacerdotalists in thus selecting the poorest districts for these exhibitions of priestcraft is only equalled by their misanthropy, and shows them to be several degrees beneath the genuine Romans, who, whatever else may be laid to their charge, have never stooped to such duplicity.
Bishop Ingram had sanctioned the Roman service
BISHOP INGRAM ON TRIAL 615
known as " going the rounds of the Stations of the Cross" (21,085); and imbkishingly stated that he did not know that the Privy Council and the Arches Court had both decided that Stations of the Cross were illegal ornaments ! He said boldly that he had a higher respect for the Court of Arches as a "spiritual" court, than for the sovereign in council. If he had known (21,089) that the question had been decided by a " spiritual " court, he might have reconsidered his decision !
Lord Alverstone asked (20,755): " Do you take any steps with regard to a new church which is being built to prevent these practices being started ? " The answer was " No " ; but he presently said (20,798) " he looked to new appointments as one of the most hopeful ways of getting matters into order." It soon became evident, however, that what he called " order " was what law- abiding churchmen and all other Christians would call "disorder." He was asked (20,795) if, when the benefice of St. Augustine, Stepney — one of the six ritualistic churches which refused to accept even Dr. Ingram's limitations on the use of incense and reserva- tion of the sacrament — had fallen vacant in 1902, he as patron had appointed a priest who had been assist- ing for eighteen years as curate in the illegal rites practised in the church. He admitted that he had done so, and added mysteriously (20,798): "The reasons for which I made that appointment are reasons which I cannot reveal to the commission." The chair- man pointed out that the new incumbent was just as "recalcitrant" as the old one. Bishop Ingram admitted that he was, saying (20,797) in terms of great familiarity: "With regard to the Rev. Harry Wilson, the difhculty of explaining it is that I should reveal something about the man that I do not feel justified in revealing." This is so reminiscent of
6i6 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Ireland and " the seal of the confessional," that one finds it hard to realise that the witness is a bishop of the Church of England, and that nine of the commis- sioners, thus trifled with, are representative English citizens of high standing. He was next asked if, when the benefice of the Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, fell vacant in 1904, and the patrons presented a man who had been practising as curate in the still more ritualistic church of St. Mary Magdalene, Munster Square, he had instituted their nominee. His answer was : " That is quite right. I did not institute him myself, but the Bishop of Stepney, representing me, did " ! We have already described the sartorial splendour in which Dr. Lang performed the institu- tion. Having thus been caught red-handed, as it were, appointing ritualists to benefices in his own gift, and of instituting them to benefices in the gift of others, he excused himself by mentioning his recent appointment of a Mr. Buck to St. Faith's, Stoke New- ington (20,798), a tremendously ritualistic church. If the commissioners hoped to hear that the incum- bent was an evangelical, they were destined to dis- appointment, for Bishop Ingram described him as a " loyal high " churchman. Having in his subsequent evidence described some of the very worst Anglo- Roman temples as " loyal high churches," he was asked (21,148-151) by Mr. Prothero to say what he meant by " loyal " ; and his answer was that a " loyal " clergy- man was " not one who obeys the law as laid down in the courts," but one who " keeps his engagements " to Bishop Ingram " personally " ! Never, perhaps, did a body of sober, law-respecting Englishmen listen to such a gospel of anarchy.
Amongst other " extra " services approved by him, were distribution of palms (20,709); special services for St. George's and St. Cyprian's days (20,925); ser-
MASSES FOR THE DEAD 617
vices " in commemoration of tlie faithful departed " (20,817); and a "celebration once a week" in tlie locked-up chapel " when the sacred elements are changed" (20,817). He said that all " extra" services had to be submitted to him before, being used, and he praised the " loyalty " of the ritualists to that rule. Thereupon his attention was called to some gross and glaring Roman services in St. Stephen's, Gloucester Road (20,825), St. Alban's, Holborn (20,826), and St. John's, Holland Road (20,855), and asked if he had approved of them. His reply was that they had not taken place with his sanction. " Or with your know- ledge ? " said Lord Alverstone, pressing him. And he said he did not know they had taken place. When it was pointed out to him that " at St. Cuthbert's, Ken- sington, the Holy Eucharist was celebrated for the faithful departed in seventeen days in one month ; at St. Mary Magdalene's, Munster Square, on the same seventeen days ; and at St. Mary Magdalene's, Pad- dington, on sixteen • days," he replied : " That, of course, is new to me." The commissioners omitted to inquire whether these services were specially paid for. Sir Edward Clarke pointed out how a number of incumbents — including those of St. Clement's, City Road, and St. Columba's, Haggerston — had broken their written pledge, given to Bishop Creighton in 1898, to perform the communion service "as it is appointed in the prayer book ; " and asked him " if he had ever raised with these clergy the question of their faithfulness ? " His answer was that " he was not sure that he had " ! His friendship and familiarity with the ritualists are manifest all through, When Mr. Long- ridge, vicar of St. Clement's, City Road, refused to lock up the reserved sacrament on the grounds that " the privilege of visiting the Blessed Sacrament is the natural and legitimate consequence of belief in the
6i8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
real presence," Bishop Ingrain, instead of rebuking him, wrote two familiar letters (20,789) to "Dear Longridge," in which he " entirely denied that the doctrine of the real presence was bound up with " the practice of visiting the sacrament — in other words, was not impugned by the lock-up system — and signed himself " one who wishes to be your sincere friend and bishop " ! " Mr. Percy Dearmer," of St. Mary's, Primrose Hill, he said, fumigated his church with incense before the service, which was the only increase of incense he was aware of (20,713). Again, he always addressed the incumbent of St. Columba's, Haggerston — who insisted on such " extras " as incense on fifteen great festivals, services or masses for the dead, and celebrations in the lock-up — as " Dear Le Couteur" (20,817), thanking and blessing him thus : " Let me thank you heartily for the spirit you showed the other day. May the New Year be happier than the past ! " Though All Souls' day was, as he admitted, " erased from the English Kalendar " at the Reformation, he allowed " Dear Suckling " — Mac- konochie's successor at St. Alban's, Holborn — to " create his own festivals," as Lord Alverstone put it (20,819), and approved of a eucharistic celebration, or mass, for the dead, on All Souls' day in that church, while the commission was sitting (20,821), wishing Father Suckling, Father Stanton, and " their colleagues God's blessing upon their work " ! Dr. Ingram's posi- tion is that " if he cannot get a church in on one compromise, he tries it on another" (20,820), his compromises being always in the direction of Rome and Moscow ; and he modestly describes this as " a statesman-like policy" (21,122). What effort, may we ask, has this self-styled statesman ever made to " get in " the Christians who now stand at least twelve millions strong outside the gates of the State
INSULT TO CALVINISM 619
Church, or to " keep in " those uncounted millions who have not yet left the Church, but who are leaving it, distracted between the opposing claims of attach- ment to the religion of their fathers and loyalty to the precepts of Christ ?
Within two months of the delivery of his evi- dence, Dr. Ingram " dedicated " at Westminster a new monastery for the celibate priests of Cowley, who, it appears, had already eleven settlements in his diocese, and predicted " an enormous field of labour " for them in the West End.^ Returning from his holiday in October, he gave London an appalling character for vice of every description in his " annual charge " to his priests at St. Paul's, without seeming to perceive that the responsibility rested largely on himself and his predecessors. Apathy, drink, gam- bling, doubts, indifference, Sunday bands, luxury, bookmakers, drunkenness of women, dishonesty in trade, were some of the milder headings in his category of sin ; but these were followed by more repulsive details, including " number of prostitutes," " indecent instruments exposed in shop windows," " immoral houses," and, as a climax to the loathsome structure of words, " a hundred years of Calvinistic teaching " ! " It would have been fortunate for the Anglo-Roman paupers and criminals of East London, if their bishops had looked to Geneva rather than to Rome and Moscow. Had they done so, we might now behold a British Government in which Cockneys should be as numerous as Scotsmen are in the present Cabinet, and the Church might be able to find her archbishops in the East End. With an unmarried man's audacity, he blundered into the delicate topic of procreation, and, citing Rome as his authority, denounced what he called " the limitation
1 Standard, July 21, 1905. * Guardian, October 25, 1905.
620 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of the birthrate by artificial means," pointing to Russia as the high exemplar to be followed. " The Roman Church, all honour to it," he exclaimed, " has never wavered in condemning such prevention of conception as a sin ; " but he forgot to proclaim the well-known truth that Roman priests themselves in every land indulged in that prevention of concep- tion which he praised them for officially condemning. Utterly forgetful of the empty salons and corridors of Fulham Palace and London House, he boasted that in Russia the birthrate is 49.5 per 1000, whereas in England it is only 28 ! On October 29, he preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, and said it was " a common sight" to see drunken men coming from college wine-parties which " he could not help thinking they had misguidedly called ' drunks.' " ^ He then pro- ceeded to show how appropriate the name was by saying that " he had at that moment in London at least twenty university men hopeless drunkards on his hands, and one of the worst was a university cox " ! This being the state of affairs, he declared passionately that " it was the Oxford men that they looked to, to come down and reform East London " ! On November 11, he addressed a Women's Diocesan Association at Westminster, and solemnly announced himself to be a miracle-worker. " Here is a true incident," he exclaimed, " which will illustrate my meaning. The wife of one of my clergymen was recently forced to undergo an operation which might cost her her life. When I called upon her, I found her in a state of moral collapse. Partly owing to fear and partly owing to other causes, her faith and her hope were entirely gone, and the physicians and surgeons recognised that it would be impossible for the operation to be performed while she was in that
1 Times.
SACERDOTAL MIRACLES 621
state. I vnll pass over the sacred half-hour that I spent with her, but it is a fact that two days later she walked from her room to the operating-table without a quiver. The surgeons exclaimed : ' What has the Bishop of London done to you ? ' She replied in simple words, ' Something which none of you could have done.' ... To her inmost being, where the faith and the hope and the courage had died down and crumbled, with God's help alone, I had brought that reinvigoration of her central being which she needed, and the effect of bringing the power of God to her central being brought back again her faith, her hope, and her courage." Then, identifying himself with our Saviour, he said : " She did directly owe her cure to the power of Jesus Christ Himself " ! ^ It was only in the preceding year, 1904, that an Anglican priest named Pigott, of ample means and good family, residing in the diocese of Southwark, claimed to be the reincarnate Jesus, and found numbers of credu- lous women to believe him; and, in 1905, the same priest, though already married, became the father of a male child by a handsome young woman, one of his dupes, and claimed that the child was Jesus Christ, and again found numbers of women to believe him. Bishop Ingram now, speaking "as their bishop," said that " priests ought to lay hands " upon the sick, and " to maintain the equal rights of the Christian minister and the doctor in the sick room." ^ A fortnight afterwards he spoke after luncheon at a Ladies' Club in Piccadilly,^ and narrated how he was watching with interest " two girl friends," one of whom had taken " a first in theology," and the other " a first in history " ; yet, mirdbile dictu, they remained " true girls and women " ! And, forgetful
1 Daily Express, Nov. 13, 1905. ^ Guardian, Nov. 15, 1905. 3 Daily Express, Nov. 28, 1905.
62 2 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of his recent advocacy of unlimited procreation, lie belauded the work of unmarried women, " lonely work, perhaps, but splendid work," saying that " the un- married often gathered larger families than the wives and mothers through their work " ! " With all my heart," he said, " I come to give the sanction of the Church to the Lyceum Club " !
While the key-holder of the Church of England was thus filling so huge a space in the eye of newspaper- readers, some of the rank and file of the clergy were bringing everlasting discredit on the Church. At the Church congress at Weymouth, a dignitary delivered an address urging " all clergymen to take up spiritualism as part of their theological studies." He spoke to " a crowded audience which included two bishops and at least fifteen clergymen, and in certain passages he absolutely drove ladies from the room in dismay." ^ Early in November, an Essex rector was sentenced at Chelmsford to six months' hard labour for unnatural crimes committed with boys in London.^ His wife, a young woman of twenty-five, had died a short time previously, her death being followed within a few days by that of her intimate friend, a young woman aged twenty-two. At the same time an Anglican priest in the diocese of Oxford was sentenced to four years' penal servitude for unnatural offences of a more serious nature, Mr. Justice Kennedy remarking that " he had used his sacred calling to lead lads of inferior education astray." ^ A few days afterwards the King's proctor applied for the annulment of a decree of divorce obtained by an Anglican priest against his wife. In her evidence the wife, who was of humble origin but exceedingly pretty, said that " after marriage her
^ Daily Mail, Oct. 7, 1905. ^ Essex Assizes, Nov. 11, 1905. 3 Berkshire Assizes, Nov. 8, 1905.
PRIESTS IN COURT 623
husband did no work except for five weeks ; " she had prolonged relations with another man, " from whom ;^40o or ;^ 5 00 was got;" her husband "forced her to get money from this man," and " knew of her relations with him." ^ He had married her under a false name, and without informing her that he was in holy orders. At the same time a vicar in the diocese of Oxford was arrested and returned for trial for " conspiring to cheat and defraud people of money ; " ^ for Avhich he was afterwards sentenced to hard labour for eighteen months. He had been sent to penal servitude many years before, and the recorder in passing judgment said " it filled him with horror that a man who had actually been convicted and sentenced to penal servitude for seven years should first be appointed to a curacy and then to a vicarage." At the same time, a benefice-holder, residing at a fashionable watering-place, away from his parish, with his wife and family, was summoned along with his wife for assaulting their maid-of-all-work with a toasting-fork, a saucepan, a hair-brush, a poker, a carpet-beater, and a stick. The girl escaped at night and went to the poorhouse, whence she was advised to go to the police station and show her injuries to a doctor. The priest and his wife were sentenced to a month's imprisonment,^ the sentence being subsequently mitigated to fines of 50s. each, and ;^ioo compensation to the girl. At the same time a Somersetshire rector was fined ten shillings for using bad language and striking a blacksmith in the face while at work in his forge ! We have made no effort to collect these scandalous cases ; they are only a few out of many which forced themselves on our attention while following Bishop Ingram's " statesman-
^ Divorce Courts, Nov. 27, 1905. ^ London Police Courts, Nov, i, 1905. ^ Daily Express, Times, &c., Dec. 2 and 3, 1905.
624 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
like policy." Such cases are occurring all the year round, as well as others, such as grave-side scenes caused by refusal to perform the burial service ; sale of grave sites to non-parishioners at high prices without the concurrence of churchwardens — in one case it was alleged that the vicar had made thousands of pounds by this practice ; indignation meetings of vestries at which the vicar is hissed and reviled for his misconduct ; libel actions by incum- bents against their parishioners, in which the most sordid details are revealed ; all make up such a picture of our times, as will undoubtedly astonish posterity.
One result of the " statesman-like policy " pursued in London appears to be that St. Paul's cathedral requires police protection on special occasions. This was so on January 25, 1906, at a theatrical celebration of the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, which I witnessed. All the doors, even those leading to the crypts, were guarded by police, and cordons of constables were stationed inside between the pillars on both sides of the nave. The altar and reredos, with their crucifix, lighted candles, and statues seemed to rivet the atten- tion of a nondescript audience of about 600 people, who had come rather to enjoy a free musical enter- tainment than to refresh their energy by commemorat- ing one of the great incidents of Christianity. An immense surpliced band, numbering apparently over a hundred, with violins, 'cellos, cornets, drums, &c., occupied chairs or stood before music-stands in the body of the church, and extended far out in the space under the dome, a platform for the conductor being placed near the lectern. The psalms were chanted to the accompaniment of tattoos of drums and blasts of cornets; and at each solo, the singer mounted into the choir stalls, facing the audience and holding a piece of music open in his hands. It seemed a
THE PARISH OF WIMBLEDON 625
desecration, in the worst style of op6ra houffe, to hear them trilling forth, with aria, chorus, and the full band, such passages as " Hear thou, Saul ! The Lord hath sent me hither, even Jesus, that appeared to thee as thou camest, that thou mightest receive thy sight and be filled with the Holy Ghost."
During the two years the Church Discipline com- mission was sitting, I was living in the parish of Wimbledon, Surrey, which may be said to represent, as in a microcosm, the present position of the Church of England as a whole. According to the parlia- mentary return of 1887, the tithes of Wimbledon, valued at £6Sg, 2s., belong to the dean and chapter of Worcester, who are also the patrons ; the tithes and patronage of the adjacent parishes of Mortlake, ^460, and Putney, £620, belonging to the same body. Be- fore commutation, and after it, when the price of corn was highest, the tithes of Wimbledon must have been worth nearly £ 1 000 a year ; yet there was no parsonage provided and the stipend paid to the vicar by the clerical appropriators was so low, sinking at one time to about £s^> that, at the last vacancy but one, in 1859, ^-he living remained vacant until a man of private means, Mr. Haygarth, consented to accept it. At that time Wimbledon was a quiet rural district, with a small village on the top of the hill near the famous common, and the parish church was the only place of worship. The encounters between Church and State during Mr. Haygarth's incumbency (1859- 1903) have resulted in several revolutionary changes: I. The evangelical churchmen, having dissociated themselves from the vicar's establishment, have built and endowed a church for their own use, which has a larger attendance than the parish church, and in which pure Christian doctrine is preached, and the liturgy of the Reformation settlement strictly adhered to. 2.
2 R
626 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
The Christians who have left, and are still leaving, the Church have built large and well-attended churches for themselves, served by Free Church ministers. Of these the most important are two Congregationalist, three Methodist, one Presbyterian, and two Baptist, besides several smaller places of worship, including the Brethren, Strict Baptists, and Primitive Methodists. 3. The Jesuits have built the finest of all the local churches in a splendid position on the hill, with a large college attached for the education of officers for the British army ; and an important convent of Ursuline nuns is close at hand. Meantime the ancient parish — of which the population has grown from about 5000 in 1859 to close on 50,000 in 1906 — had been divided by the Ecclesiastical Commission into three ecclesias- tical districts with as many vicars, the patronage of one of the new districts being vested in the vicar of the remnant of the old parish, that of the other in the bishop of diocese, who is Dr. Talbot. Following the usual rule, the new churches built and the parsons endowed with Ecclesiastical Commission money are ritualistic in the highest degree. The remnant of the ancient parish retained by the vicar, following the estab- lished custom, is that containing the wealthiest in- habitants, and comprises the hill district and common. It now contains three solidly-built chapels-of-ease, of which one is extremely ritualistic, the two others and the parish church being what is called High Church. There is a fourth temporary chapel in a poor neigh- bourhood, in which extreme Puseyite practices are carried on, thereby giving rise to much local indigna- tion. Ritualism has increased even since Mr. Haygarth's death in 1903, the new senior vicar having secured a visit from Bishop Gore in 1904, and his curates now residing in community in a clergy-house or monastery, and being all unmarried. In a new church built with
DECLINE OF THE STATE CHURCH 627
the help of the Ecclesiastical Commission, on the con- fines of the parish at Raynes Park, and dedicated by Bishop Talbot in July 1 906, 1 saw an idolatrous rood- screen surmounted by a realistic crucifix, and an altar with candlesticks and crucifix set up, before the floor, roof, or seats were finished ! The numbers of Roman Catholics, on the one hand, and of Free Churchmen, on the other, are constantly increasing, so that the State Church here has no longer any title to be called the national Church, but rather a richly-endowed sect levying contributions on the other denomi- nations whose adherents exceed the professing church- men. The attendance at the free churches on an ordinary Sunday in 1904 (including the evan- gelical Anglican church, which receives nothing from tithe or Ecclesiastical Commission) was 7050; at the Roman Catholic churches, 1675 ; and miscellaneous places, 286 — total, 901 1 ; as against 4879 attending the nine endowed State churches.^ While none of the ritualists can live without subventions from the national endowment, the evangelical Anglican church, which gets nothing from outside sources, supports its two clergymen respectably, its congregation subscribing, in 1904, £70 per week, or ^^^3664, i is. 6d., of which ;^2 5oo was generously given to various charities.^ The total offerings of the five churches in the remnant of the ancient parish, in the year October 1904-5, were ;^3 363, 4s. 3d.; but this was supplemented by special subscriptions, raised by extraordinary devices, amounting to ;!^2 8 90, of which ;^ 1 06 1 went to the South- wark bishopric fund for the endowment of Bishop Talbot. I calculate that altogether, inclusive of pew-rents, a minimum of £'j 1 64 passed through the senior vicar's hands during the year,^ exclusive of his endowment
1 Daily Neics census. ^ Emmanuel Church Accounts; June 1905. ^ Wimbledon Parish Magazine.
62 8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and fees ; but it is notable that his five congregations subscribed less than twice the amount cheerfully given by the one evangelical church. The fall of the Church from its national position was well illustrated, in 1905, when Wimbledon received a municipal charter. A committee being formed to direct the celebration, it was proposed that " the charter day programme should include a service in the parish church ; " but the sugges- tion was not supported, the charter mayor significantly saying that "they had to consider everybody's feelings." ^ The truth is, it would have been regarded as an affront to the public to give the State Church in Wimbledon any such recognition.
I found the Anglican and Roman Catholics in alli- ance in Wimbledon, as elsewhere, in resistance to public control over elementary education. The secondary education for boys is practically monopolised by the clerics of the State Church — King's College school, with about 300 pupils, being the largest estab- lishment ; and, as the reader knows, Wimbledon is typical of the whole country in this as in all the other respects mentioned. Of the nine public ele- mentary schools, six are under sectarian boards of managers, five being under the three Anglican vicars, and one under the Jesuits. The senior vicar inter- feres in municipal elections, and he and his friends sent me circulars canvassing for a Roman Catholic candidate, while his daughter made a house-to-house canvass for a special Anglican candidate. At the poor law elections, Roman Catholic candidates showed me the vicar's name in print heading the list of their supporters, to induce me to vote for them. And at all elections the two " Catholic " sects fought openly and bitterly against the Nonconformists, who really represented the general public of all creeds.
1 Wimhledon District Gazette, June 24, 1905.
A BROKEN-DOWN EPISCOPATE 629
In 1904 Bishop Talbot, in spite of the opposition of the Anglican Christians, divided the diocese of Rochester into two parts, the western section, in which Wimbledon is, being now known as the diocese of Southwark. Although before the division he had only one suffragan, when he became bishop of the reduced see of Southwark, and without consulting the laity, he appointed two suffragans, as he said, " to pull the labouring oar " for him. He imperiously fixed their salaries at ^^500 each, and, after their consecration in October 1905, he sent out a whip to the churchmen of the diocese to raise a capital fund of ;!C2 5,000 for their permanent endowment, inde- pendent of the laity.^ Lord Hugh Cecil, speaking at a meagrely-attended meeting called for this purpose at Kingston, said, " they did not want to pass the hat round every year," and he upbraided Englishmen for thinking that a bishop " should be as far worked as he could be until he positively fell ill." He drew a picture of the bishops " so overworked that from sheer fatigue they were unable to do anything whatsoever " — but imitate the lazy formalism of the Romans. He described the present state of the episcopal bench in terms which would be harrowing, if they were not so untrue and so comically overdrawn, and which showed his utter disrespect for the intelligence of his hearers.
"To have the bishop of the diocese," he exclaimed, "only limited in his eflforts by an absolute collapse of physical strength, which would send him to bed and keep him from deciding matters of the utmost importance, and from initiating movements which might have a far-reaching effect, and from controlling persons whose assiduity and energy, though admirable in itself, might make them most difficult to lead — doing all those difficult matters with strength at the point of collapse, with one foot not in the grave, but in bed, waiting for the doctor to forbid him any more work — that was not an exaggerated picture of what they regarded as quite a possible and admirable system of Church organisation " !
^ Surrey Comet, Nov. i8, 1905.
6 so CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
This egregious Anglo-Roman, son of the late Lord Salisbury, seems to be a member of that perennial brigade of priest-ridden laymen to whom the bishops owe their baneful dictatorship in the Church of England; and if the episcopate be as prostrate as he describes them, it is only natural that the State Church should be in a condition of anarchy. He went on to say :
" I ask myself the question, What is it that a layman ought to say to his hishop tvhen he meets him ? I think the salutation should be, When is your lordship going for your holiday ? — / hope it will be soon. We should look out for it and congratulate ourselves upon it, be- cause, unless he has frequent, sufficient, and lengthy holidays, we may be sure, however careful we may be to have an able and godly clergyman, we shall have but the refuse of his intellect and of his spirit and power of leadership, because he will be too tired to have anything else to give us " !
Immediately after this ludicrous speech, in November 1905, the senior vicar of Wimbledon gave the teachers in the only considerable Church Sunday school in the ancient parish, a " National " Society's book, with orders to instruct the children in its contents. This text-book (i) inculcated unconditional regeneration by baptism ; (2) recommended auricular confession to the young, saying " it will make you more ashamed, making your repentance real, and so secure forgiveness"; (3) defined "all the means of grace " given by God as " baptism, confirmation, holy communion, and absolution," describing them as " the mysteries of which His ministers are the stewards, they are to be administered by them in His name " ; (4) enforced the doctrine of passive obedience in these words, " We have no right to choose for ourselves what we shall believe and what we shall not believe."
At the very moment that this book was introduced into Wimbledon, one of the Anglican priests of South- wark was committed to Brixton gaol by the Greenwich police magistrate for refusing to divulge what he had heard from a poor Irishwoman as to certain stolen
ANGLICAN CHRISTIANS REVOLT 631
goods found in her possession ; and one of the ecclesi- astics attached to St. Saviour's cathedral, Southwark, declared publicly, over his own name, that the priest was right in " declining to divulge whatever was said to him in confidence and as a priest." And it was only after two days in gaol that the confessor re- vealed what he knew, and his penitent being convicted of theft, was sentenced to two months' imprisonment.^ The majority of the Wimbledon teachers, being evangelicals, asked the new vicar not to force them to use the "National" Society's book. But he was obdurate; and the result was that the superintendent and his wife, the secretary and eleven assistants, some of whom had been thirteen years connected with the school and had built it up by their exertions, resigned their positions. They issued a circular to the parents announcing their intention to start a children's Sunday mission, independent of the vicar, in which pure Christian doctrine would be taught. The parents supported them, and, on the first Sunday, the attend- ance at the free school, held in one of the public halls, was 130 in the morning and 120 in the afternoon. Since then the numbers have been increasing, and, on visiting the school last month, I found 300 children present. This case, so typical of what is going on over all England, shows how Anglo- Romanism is the ofiicial policy of the Church, and how it is driving numbers of Christians into Non- conformity. The founders of the evangelical church in Wimbledon wisely provided for any exhibition of Sacerdotal tyranny by empowering the trustees by deed to join the " Free " Church of England, if a ritualistic bishop should refuse to institute, or a ritualistic vicar should veto the appointment of, evangelical clergymen for their service.
1 Daily Express, Dec. 2 and 4, 1905.
CHAPTER XXI
Report of Ecclesiastical Discipline Commission, 1906 — Evidence of Rev. W. E. Bowen, Sir J. Lawson Walton, Mr. J. Athelstan Riley, Rev. W. H. Frere, Lady Wimborne, Mr. Henry Miller, and others — Episcopal Church of America — Refusal of evangelical evidence — Unjustifiable recommendations — Sacerdotalist claims more audacious than ever — The nation's duty — Conclusion.
The report of the Ecclesiastical Discipline Commission, appointed in April 1 904, was not published until July 1906; and the minutes of evidence, 15 12 double- column pages of small type, did not appear for many weeks afterwards. This ponderous mass of print, cal- culated to mystify the small section of the public who will attempt to read it, might have been reduced by nearly a hundred pages, if the words " my lord," "your lordship," and " your grace " were omitted from the questions to the episcopal witnesses and from the replies to the episcopal commissioners. If the genuine object of this royal commission were to bring the Church into accordance with the Reformation settlement, the natural course of procedure would have been to summon all the bishops consecutively in the first instance, and insist upon obtaining from them classified particulars as to the nature of the services held in every State church for the preceding twelve months, with an ana- lysis of the legality or illegality of such services. The bishops are the stewards of the nation for the main- tenance of discipline ; and it is because the onus of proof and explanation rests officially upon them, that it was impolitic to appoint any of them to the commission,
thereby making them judges, as it were, in their own
632
MR. BOWEN'S EVIDENCE 633
cause. This commission, however, acted on an entirely different plan. Though it was not appointed at the sug- gestion of the evangelicals, but was rather the device of a Government friendly to the sacerdotalists ; though it was dominated by the High Church party ; and though it threw difficulties in the way of proving eccle- siastical disorders by unduly restricting the period for which such proof would be accepted ; it, nevertheless, cast upon the Christian volunteers the entire burden of technically proving the existence of those breaches of discipline which it was appointed to investigate.
The first witness called was the Hon. and Rev. W. E. Bowen, an unbeneficed clergyman and son of the late Lord Justice Bowen, who gave laboriously- collected and unimpeachable evidence of illegal Roman practices in 126 State churches within the prescribed period.^ Even if his evidence stood alone, it was enough to prove the existence of a mutinous conspiracy amongst the State clergy, so serious as to justify some special legislation for the enforcement of discipline, and to excite the in- dignation, not only of every ordained minister eager for the salvation of souls, but of every true Christian and loyal citizen. He was followed by four volunteers, who worked in conjunction with him, Messrs. H. C. and H. T. Hogan, W. G. Johnson, and Sir Robert Lighten, who gave evidence of gross illegalities in the following churches, distributed over a wide area of the country: —
St. Matthew's, Sheffield ; St. Cuthbert's, Kensington ; St. Columba's, N.E. ; St. Augustine, Stepney ; St. Clement's, City Road ; St. Peter's, Ryde ; St. John Baptist's, Bath ; All Saints', Clifton ; St. Bartholo- mew's, Brighton ; St. Andrew's, Worthing ; St. James, Plymouth ; All Saints', Plymouth ; St. Stephen's, Devonport ; St. Peter, Ply- mouth ; H oar Cross, Worcester ; St. John's, Norwich ; St. Barnabas, Oxford ; Clewer St. Stephen, Windsor ; St. Saviour's, Leeds ; St. Ansel m's, Streatham ; St. Saviour's, Folkestone ; St. Mary Magda- lene's, N.W. ; St. Alban's, Holborn ; St. Mary Magdalene, Paddington; St. Agatha, Portsmouth ; St. Saviour's, Luton ; St. Agnes, Cardiff ;
^ "Minutes of Evidence," vol. i. pp. 1-58.
634 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
St. Lawrence, Northampton ; All Hallows, South wark ; St. Andrew's, Plaistow ; St. Alban's, and St. Jude's, Biriumgham ; St. Agnes, Kenniiigton Park ; St. Anne's, Derby ; St. Peter's, Barnsley ; St- Tliomas's, Liverpool; All Saints', and St.Columba's,MiddlesLorough; St. John's, Kensington ; St. Barnabas, Pimlico ; St. Michael and All Angels, Bussage, Glos. ; St. Michael's, Verwood, Dorset ; &c.
In addition, the same witnesses handed in evidence of illegalities, en hloc, in a number of other churches in Bournemouth, Bristol, Croydon, Horsleydown, Land- port, Richmond, Sneinton, York, and Sunbury, besides several in all parts of Greater London, which the com- missioners seemed too impatient to listen to (question 424). The secretary to the commission wrote officially to the incriminated incumbents, asking them if they desired to give rebutting evidence in explanation of what had been proved. Some of them declined to answer the letter ; and practically all the others refused the oppor- tunity of giving evidence, admitting the correctness of the descriptions which the Christian witnesses gave of the illegal services. The ritualists manifestly took con- certed action, for the terms of their replies almost inva- riably took this stereotyped form : " The statement is in the main correct, but I entirely repudiate the colour attempted to be given to the facts." Some of them openly discarded the authority of the sovereign in council, and, like Rev. R. Wilson of Stepney, protested that the commission had no right to inquire into questions of doctrine or theology ; or like the incum- bent of St. Anne's, Derby, who said: "I may be acting contrary to certain decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, but I deny the competence of that tribunal." Others grew abusive, like the incumbent of All Saints', Middlesborough, who described the Christian witness as " a Protestant or Roman Catholic paid spy or informer, whose business it is to traduce the Church of England's established doctrines or laudable practices " ; or, like the incumbent of St. Stephen's, Devonport, who
THE CROWN REPUDIATED 635
said: "I am very surprised that a body of English gentlemen who comprise the royal commission should consent to receive evidence of a paid informer, who has no interest in or connection with the parish." Mr. Han- bury-Tracy of St, Barnabas', Pimlico, said Mr. Bowen was " an unbeneficed clergyman who considers it consistent with his duty, without authority, to act as the spy upon his brethren." Canon Knox Little, writing from 3 5 Park Lane, W., admitted the accuracy of the description of ritualistic practices in his church at Hoar Cross, Worcester, and added : " I need not trouble the com- missioners to arrange to receive any remarks of mine orally, as I should not be able conveniently to call upon them, as I am much engaged." Rev. J. Wylde of St. Saviour's, Leeds, said he " was appointed by Dr. Pusey and others," and that his benefice " was transferred to Keble College some years after." " The informer," he added, " has given a fairly accurate account of our service." The incumbent of St. Agatha's, Portsmouth, wrote : " For my actions as a priest of the Church, I am responsible to the bishop alone, to whom I am ready at all times to give an account, not to the Crown." This clergyman must have felt himself on particularly safe ground, as he had held his vicarage all through Dr. Davidson's tenure of the see of Winchester, and then carried on the very practices which had now been proved against him, and as to which he contemptuously said he had " no observations " to make.
The charge of spying brought against the Christian witnesses by the ritualists, and reiterated by Bishop Talbot in his evidence at a later stage (18,736), when he described it as '' mali exemjjli," "not very English," and " not very creditable," is not only absurd and un- founded, but recoils upon the ritualists themselves. A man is not a spy who walks into a public church, sub- sidised by the State and open to all, for the purpose of
636 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
attending a public service. If the celebrant at such a service be afraid or ashamed to have his acts witnessed and noted by all comers, then he must be conscious of doing something the morality of which is at least ques- tionable, if it be not wholly wrong. Spies have no terrors — nay, they do not exist — for the man who does only what his own conscience proclaims to be right. But it is quite in keeping with all Puseyite precedents to find the ultramontane, anti-English ritualists, who would Romanise the State Church, denouncing as " un- English " those Englishmen who would preserve to the Church of England its native independence.
Mr. Lawson Walton, who is now attorney-general, next came forward, and made some rational suggestions for ensuring obedience to the law, such as that a public prosecutor should be appointed for breaches of ecclesiastical discipline, and that the judges, both in the archbishops' and the diocesan courts, should be ap- pointed by the Crown, instead of, as hitherto, by the archbishops and bishops. At present it often happens that, if a man is a favourite, he holds office as chancellor in several dioceses. Bishop Talbot's nephew, for in- stance, Mr. G. J. Talbot, fills that post not only in his uncle's see of Rochester, but in Lincoln, Ely, and Lich- field. As almost all the bishops are ritualists, a chan- cellor who dares to interpret the law in accordance with the decisions of the sovereign in council, is effectually debarred from further preferment. In one case, it was shown (1247) that a bishop "had sought to impose a condition upon his chancellor that he should take a particular view in regard to a particular branch of church law " ; and Mr. Walton, to quote the words of Sir Francis Jeune (1253), "did not think it right for anybody who appoints a judge to tell him in what way he shall decide a case before he has heard it."
RILEY'S "GUIDE TO HIGH MASS" 637
While the commission was sitting, Dr. Tristram — chancellor of the dioceses of London, Hereford, Ripon, Wakefield, and Chichester — granted a faculty to a London vicar " to fit up the south transept of his church as a side chapel, to place two candlesticks on the altar in the sanctuary, two candlesticks on the altar in the side chapel, a cross on a ledge behind the altar, and two standard lights in the sanctuary." He said "he founded his permission for the candlesticks on Archbishop Benson's judgment in the Lincoln case, in which it was held that the presence of two lighted candles on the holy table was permissible during service." ^ Now Dr. Benson's decision in favour of lighted candles was ultra vires, inasmuch as there was a pre-existing decision against them by the supreme court, namely, the sove- reign in council. And as Lord Halsbury's judgment evaded the question, merely holding that Bishop King was not the party responsible for the lighted candles ; the chancellor was therefore still bound by the Privy Council decision. Yet he disregarded the highest autho- rity and followed a decision by a lower court, and in doing so, he only went with the stream of episcopal tendency towards ritualism.
Mr. Athelstan Riley, who was next called, is perhaps as fanatical a ritualist as Lord Halifax and Lord Hugh Cecil, and, when he gave evidence, was actually pre- paring a brochure called " A Guide to High Mass Abroad " ; which was published while the commission was sitting, and was described as " a manual for English churchmen attending the celebration of the eucharist in Roman Catholic countries " ^ — thereby identifying the Roman mass, at which the taking of the sacrament by the priest is made a spectacular show, with the English communion service from which gazers are ex- cluded by the terms of the Reformation settlement.
^ Guardian, Nov. I, 1905. ^ Ibid., Oct. 25, 1905.
638 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
He is vice-chairman of the English Church Union and chairman of the Alcuin Chib, to which Archbishop Davidson used to belong; and, being a layman, was put forward, after the Puseyite fashion, to fight for the clerical ritualists who mainly constitute both societies. He was naturally full of the old Roman usages, and the priest-made canons of 1603 ; and the role assigned to him was meant to be so amazingly cunning as to be almost unintelligible, like most priestly mysteries. One of the present objects of the ritualists, especially of Bishop Jayne, is to procure the general adoption of a special vestment at the administration of the sacrament, so as to increase the ritual importance of the communion service, and apparently to oust morning prayer from its position as the principal act of public worship in the Church. Mr. Riley advocates the use of full Roman vestments at the communion service, which he regards as synonymous with the Roman and Russian mass. Imagine, then, the astonishment of those commissioners who were not in the confidence of the sacerdotal party, when the Alcuinist became an informer against his own parish priest, Rev. S. E. Pennefather, vicar of Kensington, and Rev. A. G. Tomlin, a Somerset- shire vicar, both being " high " churchmen, and gravely charged them with wearing over the surplice — one at communion, the other at morning prayer — a stole, the least obtrusive of all the Roman vestments ! Mr. Riley, who repudiates the supremacy of the sovereign and the law, now appealed, by a master-stroke in the fine art of Puseyism, to the decision in Purchas's case, in which, as the reader knows (p. 527), "stoles of any kind" were declared illegal ; and he formally reported the two incumbents, as law-breakers, to the commission. It was as if a band of confederates, on being charged with having stolen enormous sums of money, made no de- fence, but simply put forward one of their number to
MR. RILEY AND REV. W. PEPLOE 639
lay an information against a friend, who happened not to be prosecuted, charging him with having embezzled half-a-crown ; in the hope that, if he were acquitted, their own crimes might escape punishment. Mr. Penne- father was also accused of not wearing his Master of Arts hood at the communion, in contravention of canon 58 of 1603; and Mr. Riley read an extract from a book, giving the commissioners to understand that the judgment in Clifton v. Ridsdale, with which the reader is already acquainted (p. 533), declared the canons of 1603 to be "solemnly binding" (866). He was asked to quote his authority (870); but, after some hesitation, he said : " I have got it in a book you probably would not know." And he retreated from his position, saying he " did not want to press the point." Both parish priests took the accusation in the spirit in which it was intended, and wrote to say they would desist from wearing stoles, " if asked to do so by their bisJiops," which was tantamount to transferring to their bishops the responsibility for the offences laid to their charge by this pious believer in the divine right of bishops !
Mr. Riley's next strategic move was to lodge a complaint against an evangelical clergyman, Mr. Webb Peploe, vicar of St. Paul's, Kensington. " I was asked to give evidence," he said (883), "with regard to breaches of the law on the part of low churchmen " — thereby admitting that he was pushed forward by others whose names did not appear. " I am not in the habit of going to what are called low churches," he added superciliously ; " I thought I would go to that church, having to select one." Now, Mr. Peploe is, in some respects, a figurehead of Anglican evangeli- calism, being, as Mr. Riley stated, chairman of the National Protestant Union, and therefore the selection of his church was not by any means made at hap-
640 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
hazard. If the illegalities of which the " high " churchmen were accused were comparatively insignifi- cant, it may be readily imagined that those which were laid to Mr. Peploe's charge were infinitesimal or utterly fictitious ; inasmuch as he ministers to a large congregation who scrupulously adhere to the Reforma- tion settlement. Mr. Peploe was charged with wearing " a stole," but it was proved not to be a coloured Roman stole like that worn by Messrs. Pennefather and Tomlin, but a black scarf ; of saying a prayer at the close of his sermon ; of celebrating evening communion " contrary to the practice of the universal Church " ; and of a number of other alleged offences which, if brought forward by any less favoured witness, or by any wit- ness before a royal commission not entangled in the web of sacerdotal mysteries, would be considered as trifling with the dignity of the court. One does not seek to justify even Mr. Peploe's scarf; but he wrote a long, candid, and respectful letter of explanation, in which, however, one regrets to find him citing Bishop Cosin's authority for wearing it, setting ritualist against ritualist, a practice of which one cannot approve, in- asmuch as Christians do not admit the authority of men like Cosin. He denied stoutly that the cele- bration of evening communion was " contrary to the practice of the universal Church " ; and all the other imaginary illegalities laid to his charge he explained, or proved to be inaccurate. An anonymous " friend " of Mr. Riley made six further charges against Mr. Peploe, and the commission actually received this hear- say evidence from Mr. Riley (983), all of which the evangelical incumbent proved to be either untrue or impertinent.^ The conduct of the sacerdotal party in adopting such a policy laid them open to compari- son with the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees against
^ " Minutes of Evidence," vol. i. p. 73.
RESURRECTIONIST AND CHRISTIAN 641
whoin Jesus denounced woe, callino- them " blind guides which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel."
Rev. Walter Howard Frere, posing as merely "a priest in holy orders of the Church of England," without " any cure of souls," but deeply read in " the historical ques- tions connected with rites and ceremonies" (1840—2), engaged the attention of the coriiniission for five days, in attempting to prove, in effect, that, as Bishop Stubbs put it, the Reformation was not " in any sense a refor- mation of religion." Mr. Frere seems to be a monastic priest, who, in. 1 904, was the superior of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, and he cited (2072) a dirge for Henry II. of France, which was sung early in Elizabeth's reign in St. Paul's cathedral — before the nation had recovered from the Marian reaction — as a valid precedent for memorial services for the dead.
Concrete evidence of ritualism in a number of churches in Dr. Davidson's diocese was given by Colonel Porcelli, R.E. ; and the rector of Broadstairs, when asked for an explanation, " protested against evidence of a man {sic) of his [Porcelli's] views in the matter of ecclesiastical discipline," on the grounds that Colonel Porcelli had " refused to pay the education rate," and had written to the press complaining that the children in the " National " Society's Kentish schools " learn that a baby is born again eight days after first birth by the magical application of drops of water by a priest, and that a child of sixteen is filled with the Holy Ghost by the imposition of prelatic hands ! " Baron Porcelli is within his rights, as a loyal member of the Church of England, in disbelieving in baptismal regeneration, apostolic succession, and the efficacy of confirmation, which Article XXV. declares to be " not a sacrament of the Gospel " ; and also in objecting to such doctrines being taught in the State schools at public expense. And to accuse him of being a " passive resister " was
2 s
642 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
not an answer to his specific proofs of illegalities in the churches of Canterbury.
Hundreds of grossly pagan rites in State churches were proved by the witnesses co-operating with the Church Association, forty-five in number, and by twenty- eight witnesses put forward by the Ladies' League and National Protestant Union ; as well as by several inde- pendent witnesses. Mr. W. W. Scott testified to the grossness of ritualism in Doncaster. Mr. P. F. Bellew de- scribed its excesses in Exeter, saying (3 1 2 1 ) " the Church of England service has been practically displaced in our parish for twenty years, and the people have complained over and over again to the bishop about it. The whole of the services, doctrines, and ceremonies of the Church of Rome were performed in our church, and we could get no redress. I myself desired to prosecute the rector under the Act of 1874, but it was vetoed . . . and now (3170) the church is utterly deserted." Mrs. Emily Bruce proved casesof Anglo-Romanism in London, especi- ally in the East End. Mr. Samuel Arnold, the able repre- sentative of the English Churchman, Messrs. C. B. Banks, W. T. Hambly, C. Callaway, and W. Dixon gave further details of the enormities of ritualism in other London districts within the prescribed period. Mr. L. Heitland (4082) proved the grossest Romanism on the part of the vicar whose committal to Wormwood Scrubs in 1903 we recorded sympathetically elsewhere (p. 605): "The prayer of consecration was hardly audible and, at the actual words, died away in a mumble, while the cele- brant elevated the paten and chalice to the level of his forehead, the acolytes raising their candles, sacring bells were rung, and both thurifers poured volumes of incense smoke towards the elements " ! One of the notices in his church w\as: "Confessions — Friday, 11 a.m. ; Saturdays, 7-8. Before great festivals (Saturdays), 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., or at other times by appointment,"
LADY WIMBORNE'S EVIDENCE 643
Extraordinary cases of ritualism were proved in the Fiilham district around Dr. Ingram's palace, and in benefices of which he is the patron, one incumbent admitting (6282) that he had celebrated the com- munion service in mass vestments for the benefit of one lady, besides whom, as the aggrieved ritualist said, there was nobody present but " the man who attended the service, apparently as a worshipper, but actually as a spy and the accuser of his brother." Specific evi- dence of ritualism was given in widely-divergent dis- tricts like Chester, Taunton, Frome, Leicester, Dover, Tunbridge Wells, Burton-on-Trent, Stockport, Torquay and many parts of Devonshire, Penzance, Burnley, several places in South Wales, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Derby, Bradford, Cambridge, Hastings, Brighton, Nor- wich, Oxford, Liverpool, York, Nottingham, Scarborough, Gloucester, Wolverhampton, Reading, Southampton, Cheltenham, Stafford, Lowestoft, several parts of Dorset, and in other places too numerous to mention.
Lady Wimborne, who is not alone a lady of excep- tional ability and the highest rank, but an example of all that is best in an English wife and mother, and to whom the country will yet perceive that it is lastingly indebted for her efforts to preserve the Christian char- acter of the Church, told the commission how, in 1 898, her attention had been accidentally directed to the widespread evils of ritualism : —
"I had been asked by certain friends to join a committee of a Rescue Home," she said (3846), " and I threw myself with great energy and zeal into it, collecting money by means of a concert, when incidentally a friend said to me, Did I know that the home was under very ritualistic management ? I had not suspected anything of the kind, because my friends, Lady Arran, Lady Cran- borne, and Lady Edward Cavendish, were quite as much opposed to anything of the kind as I was. 1 went to the secretary, Miss Dun- combe, but she seemed to show such a very hostile spirit to the sort of Protestant feeling which I had been brought up in, that I deter- mined to see for myself the character of the church which the girls from the home were in the habit of attending. I went to the church with my son-in-law, Mr. Villiers, on the loth of July 1898,
644 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
and I there saw a service which I never could have imagined would have been performed in a Church of England church. It was nothing more or less than the Mass, which is now so sadly familiar to those of us who have been engaged in this present controversy."
The Anglo-Roman bishops and priests, besides prac- tising their ritualism in the poorest parishes, make their experiments also upon weak and fallen women, and they see " a spy and an informer " in every indepen- dent citizen who witnesses, without being deceived by, their occult mysteries. The priestcraft thus discovered so " horrified" Lady Wimborne that she became, thence- forth, a leader in the movement for the defence of Christianity within the Established Church. She "con- ceived the idea of forming a league," amongst her friends, " to induce them to use their influence in various ways to resist ritualism." One sympathiser subscribed ^5000, and the work, thus started, had expanded in five years to a flourishing organisation with 14,000 members, of whom 200 are clergymen and 2000 laymen, the rest being churchwomen. Bishop Knox's sister asked Lady Wimborne to " take up work among schools, saying that the influence of the Woodward and Con- vent schools" — with which readers are already ac- quainted (pp. 520-2) — "was such that the young women of the day were being more and more pre-dis- posed to this ritualistic movement." Lady Wimborne's league not only started several excellent schools, but also a training college at Oxford ; and had spent ;£^40,ooo " in five years upon establishing these institu- tions." Lectures were given and literature circulated, Lady Wimborne herself having spoken " in no less than eighty-seven diff'erent towns in England ; " and her large experience has led her to the following conclusion (3848) with regard to the ritualistic movement: —
" It is not the work of individual men scattered about the country, but the outcome of a highly-organised movement only to be termed a conspiracy, to get behind the Reformation, to efface
A "SILENT REVOLUTION" 645
that movement, and so to leaven religious thought in our Church as to make re-union with Rome an accomplished fact. A graduated line of advance is being carried on by a very large body of men, one taking up the position where his predecessor leaves it, and carrying it a step further, not only in churches but in schools, religious and philanthropic organisations, hospitals, convalescent homes, and sisterhoods all over the country."
Her account of ritualism was, indeed, a startling one, beginning with Rev. Spencer Jones, rector of Batsford in the diocese of Gloucester, already mentioned at p. 353, and well furnished with proofs of many ritualistic services of which she was an eye-witness. " The old Sunday school, with teachers drawn from the place, is disappear- ing," she said (3851), "and the children are taken at 10 o'clock, or 10.30, to the choral eucharist, after which they are dismissed to their homes ; and in the afternoon they have " — Bishop Dupanloup's catechism, known as the " Method of St. Sulpice," which has been translated into English and widely circulated amongst the Anglican priests, and " contains the most elaborate system for enforcing the confessional that it is possible to conceive"! The revolt of the Sunday school teachers in Wimbledon proves that many Christian Anglicans are prepared to defend their children against the corruption of sacerdotal doctrine ; but, as long as over i^2,ooo,ooo a year in rent and tithe rent-charge is levied and distributed by the ritualists who control the Ecclesiastical Commission, the bishop and priest will find their quarry amongst the spiritless poor and the indifferent. Morning prayer on Sundays is being gradually supplanted by the choral eucharist; and, says Lady Wimborne (3852), " nothing less than a silent revolution is being accomplished by this means." Let us hope that the statutory revolu- tion, which will end the nation's responsibility for the ritualists, may be with us speedily. All the signs of the times show that it will be as bloodless and as popular as the extirpation of the monks 350 years ago; and,
646 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
unlike that great coup-d'etat, it will not be for the enrichment of a small coterie of court favourites, but will serve to ease the pressure of taxation on all the people of every class and creed.
The Countess of Lindsey (3999-4062), proved a number of ritualistic services in the counties of Devon, Notts, Cambridge, and Lincoln within the specified period. Mr. Henry Miller and Mr. J. T. Tomlinson, the oflficial witnesses of the Church Association, explained the evangelical position with that clearness and simplicity which are always characteristic of truth. That most industrious lay theologian, Mr. Tomlinson, proved the fallacy of the quibbling interpretations which the sacer- dotalists and their ecclesiastical lawyers, losing sight of Christ and the Bible, put upon the statutes and liturgy of the Reformed Church, and Avhich are so many re- iterations in different words of Newman's audacious contention that the Articles were meant to condemn, not Romanism itself, but only " popular errors " with regard to Romanism. Mr. Miller stated (4509) that "in speaking of breaches of the law, the Church Association always means the law as defined by the King's courts having jurisdiction in matters ecclesiastical." And he truly added : " What is the standard set up by those who deny our figures it is impossible to surmise." The ritualists seem to acknowledge no obvious standard of authority except the Pope and the laws made by him Avhen he ruled England before the Reformation, and when the English clergy were, perhaps, more subservient to the papacy than any clergy in Europe. The same mauvais siijeis who disobey the decisions of the sovereign in council also treat with contempt the formal ex cathedra pronouncements of the archbishops ; nor can they be blamed for disrespecting the decisions of prelates who condemn in public ritualistic practices which they en- courage in private. Mr. Miller enumerated the leading
ARCHBISHOPS AND CHRISTIANS 647
practices of tlie ritualists, and proved their illegality. He said (4579) there were 5779 churches in England and Wales in which Roman ritualism was known to be practised. Deducting 1074 churches, "where the only change is that of the eastward position," he said, " we still have the very large number of 4702, being about one in three of the benefices of the Church of England." The following figures illustrate the growth of ritualism during the twenty-five years 18 76-1 901: — In 1876, when the Oxford sacerdotalists had been thirty years at work, Roman vestments were in use in 182 churches, lighted candles in 314, the eastward position in 673, while incense and the ceremonial mixing of the chalice were practically unknown ; but in 1 90 1 , vestments were in use in 1504 churches, lighted candles in 3913, the eastward position in 5731, incense in 256, and the mixed chalice in 3667.
From its first foundation in 1865 the procedure of the Church Association had been perfectly straight- forward. It sent a deputation to Archbishop Longley in 1866 to state the objects of the Anghcan Christians, and Dr. Longley, in his reply ,^ said : " I believe the first step to be taken would be to ascertain distinctly what the law allows and what it does not allow. We to whom the government of the Church is entrusted shall then know what is the real position of the Church in this respect, and shall be able to regulate our action accordingly." Acting upon this incentive, the Associa- tion instituted its first legal proceedings in 1867 "for the purpose of ascertaining the law " ; and it was soon afterwards further encouraged by the unanimous re- commendation of the Ritual Commission of that year : " That it is expedient to restrain in the public services all variations in respect of vesture from that which has long been the established usage." Immediately after Dr. Tait's appointment in 1869, the Association waited
648 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
on him, and he spoke even more explicitly than his predecessor : —
"At considerable cost and difficulty," he said, "you have ascer- tained the law of the Church and of the land, and you come here to-day to ask a very simple question, which seems to me to call for a very simple answer, namely : The law being ascertained, is it to be maintained ? There is no doubt at all about it. / do not under- stand hoxv, when ive know what the law is, there can he any hesitation in saying it must he oheyed. Great difficulties have existed in past times as to what was or is the law ; but when we know, as we now do distinctly, what the law is, I cannot conceive of any person in a responsible position saying otherwise than that, so far as his influence and power go, he is bound to see that the law is obeyed. As long as the law is doubtful, those who are called upon to ad- minister it are in a very difficult position. But when the law is made plain, of course the bishop, whatever else he is, is a minister of the law, and his bounden duty is to see it obeyed."
Mr. Miller then related how, as readers are aware, those promises were broken ; and he proved what he called " the uselessness of appealing to the bishops," by- giving specific recent cases in which Archbishops Temple and Maclagan, Bishops Creighton of London, Davidson of Winchester, Wilberforce of Chichester, Ellicott of Gloucester, Moorhouse of Manchester, Stubbs of Oxford, Talbot of Rochester, and Ridding of Southwell, had refused to take any action agamst ritualists in their dioceses, when petitioned to do so. He also showed how the bishops had so far fallen away from Dr. Tait's standard, that they had become the leaders of the law- breakers, giving dates and places in which the following had taken part in the worst type of Anglo-Roman rites : Archbishop Maclagan, Bishops Lloyd of Newcastle, Robertson of Exeter, Ingram of London, Compton of Ely, Richardson of Brechin, Lang of Stepney, Jayne of Chester, Browne of Bristol, Kennion of Bath and Wells, King of Lincoln, Wilberforce of Chichester, Talbot of Rochester, Jacob of St. Albans, and Ridding of South- well. He also showed how, in a single year, ^12,445 had been granted from the bishop of St. Albans' fund
DR. DAVIDSON'S SYMPATHIES 649
to assist grossly ritualistic churclies in the East End, and ;^ 1 1,939 had been given from the bishop of London's fund for the same purpose ; while seven ritualistic churches in Brighton had received ;^2 830 in a year from the bishop of Chichester's fund. There was, in fact, only one bishop in the country who could be held absolutely guiltless of ritualism, and that was the bishop of Sodor and Man, whose cathedral is in ruins ! Mr. Miller, like all the Christians, was cross-examined as a hostile witness by Dr. Davidson, Dr. Gibson, and the other sacerdotahsts. When he had modestly stated his case, as we have summarised it, Dr. Davidson, aspersing his bond fides, instantly asked : " Will you tell us shortly, in your own words, what is the object of the collection of those statistics ; because in your own statement they are spokenof more than once as being in order.to show where there are illegahties ? " If a man's "own statement" be not believed, how can his " own words " be credible ? But, as if to make his offensive insinuation more clear, Dr. Davidson propounded, without waiting for an answer, a second question, more absurd and disrespectful than the first : " Is that really it, or is it in order to show where there is a breach of what you regard as Protestantism ? " How different it was when Mr. Frere, the Resurrectionist, was under examination ! Dr. Davidson had then assisted the witness by reading aloud, with every mani- festation of approval (3025), and getting Mr. Frere's assent to, a declaration of the ritualists, made in 1898, in which they proclaimed their object to be " to secure those Catholic privileges which, while they obviously and certainly belonged to us, have been overlaid and forgotten in past years of apathy and neglect " — that is to say, from the Reformation until the time of Keble, Newman, and Pusey. The Puseyites spoke truly for once in calling Puseyism a " revival of religion " ; for it was not a revival of Christianity, or of virtue, but of priest-
650 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
craft ; and they openly said " the Church of England is bound in respect of doctrine by continuous Catholic consent and (Ecumenic decrees." No sacerdotalist wit- ness had to endure such a heckling as Sir Edward Clarke administered to Mrs. Bruce, when that lady proved wdth great clearness the " high " services in a church of which the famous lawyer is the patron, and in reference to which he needlessly and pompously announced : " I built the church and am churchwarden of the church " — seeming to think that its ritualism was thereby justi- fied, and that the witness's ignorance of these particulars detracted from her credibility. Mrs. Bruce came through the ordeal unscathed ; and, though the incumbent, in his reply, called her " a spy and informer," her accuracy remains as unimpeachable as her good faith.
It was not until September 30, 1904, when the seriousness of the evangelical indictment had been realised, that the commission wrote officially to the bishops, informing them that " the question of publish- ing the first volume of evidence by the beginning of 1905 " was being considered ; and asking those bishops, in whose dioceses illegalities had been proved, to state whether such breaches of the law had taken place with episcopal sanction, and, in any case, why they had been permitted. The evangelical evidence, without which the commission would have had nothing to work upon, still flowed in with increasing force, so that when the first volume closed on October 28th, 1904, out of forty-five witnesses examined, thirty-eight were Christian volunteers and only two were clerical ritualists — the others being Mr. Riley and his friend ; Sir L. T. Dibdin, an ecclesiastical judge appointed by the archbishops ; Sir Walter Phillimore, an ex-ecclesi- astical lawyer and son of an ecclesiastical judge ; and Mr. James Campbell, attorney-general for Ireland, whose evidence Avent to show that disendowment and
THE WOES OF BISHOP BROWNE 651
a system of representative government had strengthened and purified the Christianity of the Irish Church. The replies of the ritualist incumbents to the com- missioners were, if possible, more incriminating than the evidence given against them. Nor did the letter to the bishops evoke any intelligible response. Of the early replies to it, Bishop Talbot's, dated November 10, 1904 (vol. iv. p. 43), culminated in an offer to lend the commissioners " his own copy " of the " Church Year Book " — which may be bought for a few shillings ! Bishop Browne complained that his small income was almost absorbed " in payment of insurance premiums ; " and that, after deducting mortgage charges, his epis- copal income was only " about ^^^2400 ; " and therefore, he wrote, " it is too much to ask me to be to the clergy, chief pastor, father in God, spy, informer, prosecutor, judge, and executioner, and to pay the whole money cost of these seven phases of character ! " Up to the end of 1904, no answer whatever had been received from the bulk of the bishops ; and it was under cir- cumstances so disastrous to the sacerdotal party, that the commissioners decided to withhold the publica- tion of the first volume of evidence, Avhich could and should have been issued in January or February 1 90 5 — an injustice not merely to the evangelicals but to the British public. The two archbishops, as usual, were the worst defaulters in replying to the letter of September 30, 1904. Dr. Davidson did not answer it until May 15, 1905. It is true that he gave evidence in February and May 1905, but his testimony was of no practical value, opening with a series of quotations from Dr. Johnson's and other dictionaries (12,850) as to the meaning of the word " ritualist," and being merely a reiteration of the hollow verbiage with which readers are familiar ! In his letter he admitted he had done nothing to check ritualism in Canterbury, not
652 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
even to enforce the Lincoln judgment, and his easy- going conception of his duties may be gathered from the disclosure that, though he was over two years in his archdiocese, he had not as yet made a single personal visitation ! Dr. Maclagan, who did not give evidence, only replied on August 14, 1905, and then it was to tell the commission what it already knew, namely, that he was " very familiar with all those cases [in York] about which information had been given." The answers of the bishops, which came in tardily through- out 1905, proved them collectively to be as guilty as the ritualist incumbents.
It was now becoming clear that the ritualists had no case; and, at the end of 1904, after the adjournment for Christmas, 2519 priest-members of the English Church Union, whose names have been withheld, ad- dressed a memorial, not to the commission to which other memorialists directly appealed, but to Dr. David- son (vol. iv. p. 47), asking him as their special repre- sentative to transmit their views to the commission. In this document, which the archbishop presented, they took the desperate step of repudiating the authority of the sovereign in council, and asserting that it was those priests who did not wear Roman vestments who broke the law ; thereby contending that the continuous prac- tice of the Church had been wrong from the Reforma- tion down to 1 840, when Newman cried out : " Give us more services, more vestments and decorations in worship, give us monasteries " ! Proofs of illegalities continued to flow in from the Church Association, Lady Wimborne's League, and the National Protestant Union ; and, when the second volume of evidence closed on March 10, 1905, out of ninety-five witnesses in the volume sixty-three were evangelicals — the rest con- sisting of six bishops, eleven clerical ritualists, seven churchwardens or sidesmen of ritualistic London
PROOFS OF RITUALISM STOPPED 653
churclies, our old acquaintance Canon MacColl, Bishop Talbot's nephew, an Oxford priest-fellow, the secretary of the Guild of All Souls, Lord Hugh Cecil, Vicar- General C. A. Cripps, Dean Fremantle, and Sir L. T. Dibdin for the second time. Under these circumstances the second volume of evidence, which could have been issued at Easter 1905, was also withheld from the public. But a more unjustifiable proceeding remains to be recorded. Illegalities had now been indisputably proved in 5 5 9 specific churches, and similar proofs for as many more were ready and awaited hearing, when the commission suddenly, and without reason assigned then or since, decided to refuse all further testimony of " breaches of the law relating to divine service " — the true object of the inquiry. By one post they returned 392 additional cases sent in by the Church Association, and, we are told, " other societies had similar experi- ence " ! We are assured that " illegal practices might have been proved in nearly 5000 churches instead of 559 about which the commissioners chose to listen;" nor can we doubt that the rejected evidence was as irrefutable as that which was accepted. When the Christians had been closured, the main body of the bishops began to come into the witness chair ; the third and final volume containing the evidence of an Ameri- can, a Scotch, and fourteen English bishops. The reader may judge of the episcopal evidence from the samples given of Bishop Ingram's. But an exception must be made in favour of Bishop Perceval, who solemnly declared (21,274) that, if even what is called " moderate " ritualism be persisted in, " the great part of the nation will go off to what are called the free churches." The presence of the Scotch bishop must have recalled the fact that the shrewdest, most suc- cessful, and bible-loving race in the United Kingdom has abjured the Laudites and Puseyites with all their
654 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
equivocations and superstitions. The presence of the American clergyman, calling himself the bishop of Albany, must have reminded those who value histori- cal truth that the great republic, in which Anglicanism is comparatively an insignificant sect, was primarily an English colony, built up by conscientious Britishers who were driven into exile by malpractices like those which the commission was appointed to investigate.
The " Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America," to give it its legal title, has little in common with the Established Church of England, which now so loudly proclaims its anti-Protestantism through the mouths of Dr. Davidson and other ritualistic bishops. Its fundamental declaration — " This Church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship, or further than local circumstances require " — illustrates the negative allegiance it owns to Anglicanism. It owes its separate existence to the Episcopal Church of Scotland, which consecrated its first bishop. Dr. Seabury of Connecticut, at Aberdeen in 1784 ; and it was only three years after that event that the archbishop of Canterbury consecrated two other bishops. Dr. Provoost of New York and Dr. Whyte of Pennsylvania. Being thus provided with three bishops, the minimum neces- sary for a consecration rite according to Anglo-Rornan usage, the Americans were enabled to confer " apostolic succession " upon any required number of clergymen in their own country. But the privilege was very little esteemed or believed in, and Episcopalianism languished; while the evangelical forms of Christianity dominated the national life and moulded the national character. Of recent years the sacerdotal element in the Episcopal Church of America, blinded by the showy achievements of the Irish-Romans, has evinced a tendency to approxi- mate to Anglo -Romanism in proportion as the State
I
EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF AMERICA 655
priests of England have drawn closer to Rome. But the outcome of such a scheme does not concern the public in the United States, and is regarded with complete in- difference. Not only are there no State endowments, but there are not even voluntary endowments for bishops, capitular bodies, and incumbents. The bishops depend on parish assessments, the incumbents on pew-rents and offertories ; and it is by no means uncommon to find a church made absolutely bankrupt by the withdrawal of one or several generous contributors owing to their dis- pleasure with the incumbent's method of discharging his duties. Incumbents change from one district to another as frequently as Methodist ministers in England ; and, in cities with over 300,000 in population, there are often not a score of Episcopalian priests. There are no cathedrals to serve as rallying centres for ritualists, except th')se at Albany and Garden City, in the State of New York — and it was probably owing to his cathedral that the bishop of the first-named place was summoned by Dr. Davidson. There is no patronage system, with its inducements to corruption, and no absurd theory of " parson's freehold." In every parish the ownership of the church, the management of the finances, the ap- pointment of the incumbent, and the fixing of his stipend, rest absolutely with the vestrymen, who, when a vacancy arises, " call " the clergyman of their choice, just as do the Presbyterians or Congregationalists.
Each diocese is governed by a convention composed of all the incumbents and four lay delegates from each parish, thus giving the clerics only one-fifth of the membership ; and, when a vacancy arises in the bishopric, the new bishop is appointed by this body. There is a standing diocesan committee, consisting of four clerics and four laymen, whose duty it is to con- sider the applications of all candidates for holy orders ; and these committees, acting collectively, can veto the
656 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
consecration of any man to the episcopate. The General Convention, the supreme legislative body, meets tri- ennially, the weakest point of its constitution, as com- pared with a Presbyterian Assembly, being that the bishops are allowed to constitute a separate house. But, while the meetings of the " House of Clerical and Lay Deputies " are held in public, the bishops are compelled to sit in private, and are really nothing more than a consultative body !
• The last volume of evidence, in which Lord Halifax appears for the first time, was closed (23,525), and the ofiicial shorthand writer formally withdrew on July 20, 1905. Yet, will it be credited, not a line of the evidence given before the commission was published for over a year afterwards ? And, even then, the evidence did not appear until the mis- leading report of the commissioners had been more than a fortnight before the country prejudicing the public mind. The first part of the report appears to have been written in the autumn of 1905, before Mr. Chamberlain, as champion of the Church, forced Mr, Balfour to resign amidst the discreditable scenes of turmoil already described. At the outset (p. 2) we find the abusive language of the ritualists towards the evangelical witnesses deprecated ; the Christian testi- mony, with some negligible exceptions, described as "admitted or unchallenged"; and (pp. 17-19) the Privy Council decision in Sheppard v. Bennett, as to the true nature of the English communion service, with which the reader is acquainted, quoted respectfully and at length. But even here, there is much that is indefensible, as, for instance, the assertion that " the making of a collection during morning or evening prayer, there being no permission for this in the rubrics" (p. 13), is a "non-significant" breach of the law for the conduct of divine service. An illegality
THE GENERAL ELECTION, 1906 657
which produces a revenue of several millions sterling is no trifle. A sense of the unreality of the proceedings of this commission of inquiry is also forced on us by the quantity of ritual technicalities quoted from Abbe Duchesne, Amalarius, Micrologus, Isidore of Seville, and other sacerdotal sophists whom this progressive nation, happily for itself, no longer reverences. Some of the more odious Anglo-Roman practices, however, are condemned. The following criticism on services for the dead, for instance (p. 48), evasive though it be, penetrates to the very core of Puseyism : " It is not our duty to attempt to reconcile disavowals of Roman doctrine with the use of services and prayers which state that doctrine in the very terms which the Roman Church itself employs for the purpose of setting it forth " !
After the close of the evidence, the report was held back for six months, pending the result of the general election of January 1906. After that event, the com- missioners found their friends hurled from power, almost all the ritualists expelled from parliament, and a Free Church Government in office, supported by the largest ma,jority known since the first Reform Act. It was possible that the Church might now be on the eve of disendowment ; and the commissioners, as loyal sons of the establishment, naturally recoiled from inflicting another blow upon the tithe-drawers at such a crisis. They continued to withhold their report as Avell as the evidence, and spent a second period of six months, January to July 1906, in puzzled cogitation, during which they seem to have com- posed the conclusion of the report, which runs en- tirely counter, not only to the evidence, but to its own exordium. Frightened by the political revolution, the commissioners threw themselves, as it were, into the arms of Bishop King in their eagerness to save the Church. " The law of public worship in the Church
2 T
65 8 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
of England," they declared (p. 75), "is too narrow for the religious life of the present generation," which is virtually a palliation and a defence by the com- mission of the ritualism previously condemned. The Bishop of Lincoln, in his letter (vol. iv. p. 24), had asked for " elasticity " and " adaptation " in the conduct of divine service ; and, to prove his case, quoted from the Anglican bishop of Madras, who, in effect, demanded liberty to infuse something resembling " the formal ritual of Hinduism " into the ritual of " the Indian Church," inasmuch as " it is not likely that the rather cold and intellectual form of worship congenial to English people will ultimately commend itself to the more emotional people of India " ! Under happier circumstances this dreadful letter of Bishop King's, despite its gloss of Puseyite plausibility, should have convinced the commissioners of the essentially savage character of Anglican ritualism, which, so far from being congenial, as they allege, to modern thought and feeling, is absolutely repugnant to all that is earnest, refined, and progressive in the present generation — a truth which is amply exemplified by the enormous de- sertions from the State Church to Nonconformity, on the one hand, and to Agnosticism, on the other, since the beginning of Pusey's movement, and especially since the spread of education amongst the people. The Nonconformists were a negligible political quan- tity when Keble preached his sermon in 1833; to-day they dominate the United Kingdom and the Empire, though as yet they do not seem to have realised their own strength.
But even more unjustified, if that were possible, and assuredly more misleading, is the final paragraph of the report, in which it is stated (p. yO) : " The com- plaints made to us rdate to a small proportion of the 14,242 churches in England and Wales, and vary greatly
HIGH CHURCHMEN'S NEW SCHEME 659
in their character and gravity " ! No mention is made of the refusal to accept further evidence of breaches of the law, or of the rejection of hundreds of carefully- proved cases of ritualism, without any reason assigned ; The report is thus calculated to deceive millions of people who will not read the evidence, by giving them to under- stand that the whole forces of evangelicalism could only discover 559 churches in which all grades of ritualism were practised. Such conduct on the part of the lay commissioners, as unparalleled as it is inexcusable, can only be explained as one of the fatal consequences of con- doning superstition by " favouring too much " the " good intentions " of the ritualists — a policy which forces wise men to follow fools to-day, as it did in Bacon's time.
Under such circumstances the ten recommendations at the end of the report are not likely to carry much weight with the Government or the pubhc. They con- stitute, perhaps, as typical a sample of Puseyism as any adduced in these pages, beginning plausibly with a condemnation of specific ritualistic practices — which, it is urged, " should be promptly made to cease by the exercise of the authority belonging to the bishops and, if necessary, by proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts " — and winding up with an elaborate scheme for the vindication, establishment, and legalisation of ritualism in all its worst phases. Even the alleged condemna- tion of ritualism, embodied in the first recommendation, is a spurious one ; for it expressly omits the following flagrant practices from its scope — (a) services for the dead as commonly practised, {h) auricular confession as a preliminary to receiving communion, (c) incense, {d) reservation of the sacrament in public lock-ups, (e) ceremonial mixing of the chahce and the taking of ablutions, (/) lighted candles, {g) eastward position, {h) Roman vestments ; and others, of which some were adversely criticised in the earlier stages of the report !
66o CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
Building upon tlie public confidence secured, as they thought, by this deceptive condemnation, the sacer- dotalists, in the second recommendation, raised the demands of the priests to a pitch which, if conceded, would carry us back not only to the days of Laud, but to those of Wolsey ; would degrade the State religion of England to the level of Muscovite and Neapolitan priestcraft ; and would assuredly end in scenes of vio- lence, or even revolution, amidst which the endowments of the State Church might not prove the only old- established institution to be demolished. Their boldness recalls, in a small way, the audacious policy of Pius IX. in promulgating the dogma of his own infallibility at the very moment when his administration had been disgraced and he had been forcibly deprived of tem- poral power. One can understand how it was only a strained conception of their loyalty to the Church and the stress of a great political defeat which induced the lay commissioners to acquiesce in such a proceed- ing— especially as one is led to believe, from several sceptical questions put by them to the episcopal witnesses, that a strong minority, including Lord Alverstone, Sir E. Clarke, Mr. Drury, and the chair- man, might never have signed the report, as finally published, if Mr. Balfour and the Church party had remained in office. The laymen's difficulty undoubtedly proved to be the bishops' opportunity, and they used it so unscrupulously that, if Bishop King alone had drafted the report, he could not have devised a more pre- sumptuous and insupportable scheme of sacerdotal aggrandisement.
Exposed and discredited though they were by all the facts, by their own subterfuges and broken pledges, by their open law-breaking and confessed incompe- tence, the bishops actually succeeded in getting the commission to rehabilitate them by what is virtually a
NEW DECREE OF INFALLIBILITY 66 1
declaration of episcopal infallibility. " Letters of busi- ness," they say, " should be issued to the convocations, (a) to consider the preparation of a new rubric regu- latmg the ornaments (that is to say, the vesture) of the ministers of the Church," and (h) " to frame such modifications in the existing law relating to the conduct of divine service and to the ornaments and fittings of churches as may tend to secure the greater elasticity which a reasonable recognition of the comprehensive- ness of the Church of England seems to demand." " Elasticity," it will be remembered, was Bishop King's word, and "comprehensiveness" is one of Bishop Talbot's favourite expressions ; but it is an elasticity of com- pression that the sacerdotalists aim at, so far as Chris- tians are concerned ; and " comprehensiveness " is but the Puseyite name for the policy which, while con- ciliatinor the Roman, the Russian, and the Hindu, has driven nearly two-thirds of the English people outside the sectarian barriers of the State Church. The con- vocations, as readers know, are only another title for the thirty-seven overpaid, philo-Russian, philo-Roman bishops, those ringleaders and champions of ritualism, who, to borrow the phraseology of Lord Hugh Cecil, are always prostrate, whenever any Christian service is re- quired of them, " with one foot not in the grave, but in bed waiting for the doctor to forbid them any more work." They are the Ecclesiastical Commission; they are the "National" Society; they are Queen Anne's Bounty; they are the convocations ; they are, in fine, what the same class of men are in Catholic Ireland, Catholic Spain, or Catholic Russia, and they are what men mean when they speak of "the Church" as a national incubus. Their con- vocations had to be suppressed at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in order that Christianity and good citizenship might not be made impossible for English churchmen ; and the present sham convocations, resusci-
662 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
tated not by the desire of the citizens, but by the intrigues of the sacerdotaHsts headed by Bishops Phillpotts and Samuel Wilberforce, have been advisedly ignored by the country. The episcopal managers of those convocations are as disloyal to the ecclesiastical laws and settled con- stitution of the United Kingdom as were their prede- cessors in the reign of George I. Indeed their utter faithlessness is acknowledged in a previous paragraph of the very report which seeks to re-endow them with the powers they wielded before the Civil War. " The deli- berate persistence " in Roman ritualism, says the report (p. 75), " ought to be met hy an attempt at least to assert in a constitutional way the Church's claim to obedience. If such attempts failed, the case for reorganisation of the ecclesiastical courts would he strengthened." Like Rev. Bryan King, the bishops, or convocations, never " made even an attempt " to maintain the Christian and con- gregational character of the Church services as settled in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth. Such acts as the appointment of a commission of ritualists by Bishop Ingram to try the late incumbent of St. Michael's, Shore- ditch, cannot be regarded in a serious light, seeing that it was indisputably proved by Mr. Joynson Hicks, the legal adviser to the Church of England League and National Protestant Union, that the ritual practised in that church at present is as Roman as it ever was under Mr. Evans ! The bishops not only never attempted to suppress ritual- ism, but, on the contrary, revived it, and are fostering it by their patronage and grants from their special funds. No rational man, therefore, can interpret this second recommendation otherwise than as a proposal to legalise Roman " vesture " for the State priests, and Roman " ornaments and fittings," such as idolatrous pictures, statues, confessionals, and crucifixes, for the State churches ; so that men like the bishops of Lincoln and Madras may practise Anglo-Romanism or Anglo-
AN ANGLICAN "CURIA" 663
Hinduism, while drawing stipends as the Christian overseers of a reformed anti-Eoman Church. The men who make this proposal may loudly proclaim they are not Roman, but their protestations are like those of a lunatic who declares he is not mad, or an in- ebriate who insists that he is not drunk ; and their conduct, as a whole, is only worthy of the pupils of Pusey, the students of Duchesne and Micrologus, the feeble imitators of Pius IX. and Leo XIII. If this recommendation were adopted, the thirty-seven bishops would be elevated to the rank of an Anglo-Roman Curia, with power to legalise the Anglo-Romanism which has hitherto been only indulged in, like any other form of criminality, at the risk of prosecution ; the " silent revolution," spoken of by Lady Wimborne, would be consummated and the work of the Refor- mation undone for those who remained in the Church. Even Mr. Gladstone did violence to his predilections by always shrinking from such a step as this recom- mendation suggests. And, if the sinister project were to be entertained now, openly or secretly — an impossible supposition, let us hope — by a British Government in- cluding such men as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. John Morley, Sir Henry Fowler, Mr. James Bryce, Mr. Lloyd George, Sir J. Lawson Walton, Mr. John Burns, Mr. Haldane, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Birrell, and Lord Loreburn, it is not too much to predict that the name of British Liberalism would be covered with eternal infamy. It is to be hoped that no existing pohtical party in this country will ever attempt to pass a religious statute to legalise the priestcraft of Amalarius, Micrologus, the Abbe Duchesne, and the Anghcan Resurrectionists. May the credit, public spirit, and morality of England never again sink to the low level at which they stood in the reign of Charles II., those halcyon days of priests and prostitutes, when theo-
664 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
logical legislation last engrossed the energies of Parliament.
The remaining seven recommendations of the com- mission are all carefully -planned items in the scheme for creating an infallible Anglican Curia. The third says, " the law should be so amended as to give wider scope for the use of additional and special services," and urges that " the archbishops and bishops of both provinces acting together " should be constituted into a statutory tribunal " for the sanction and regulation " of such services ! This would be the realisation of the aim we ascribed to the Tractarians (p. 179), namely, " to set up within the Church of England a supreme clerical tribunal to settle questions of faith and morals on the model of the Roman papacy." What a continuous carni- val of Romanism we should have in the State churches, if parliament sanctioned such a scheme ! What a trade we should have in vestments, monstrances, mitres, crosiers, censers, statuary, and confessionals !
The fourth recommendation proposes to give each bishop power " to refuse the institution of a presentee into a benefice " without an undertaking " to submit to the directions given by the bishop as to the conduct of divine service and as to the ornaments and fittings of churches." This would enable the ritualist bishops to refuse institution to every evangelical and Christian presentee ; for what Christian minister of the Word could possibly subscribe to the episcopal directions for the conduct of service and the furnishing of churches under such a menage ? If the lay com- missioners had done their duty on the evidence before them, they should have recommended the Government to insist upon a written undertaking from each clergy- man nominated to a bishopric to retire from his see if he should disobey, or permit any disobedience to, the ecclesiastical law of the realm in his diocese.
PUSEYITE SNARES 665
The fifth recommendation demands the abolition of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the final court of appeal for ecclesiastical cases, and revives all the sacerdotalist proposals of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission of 1883, advocating the formation of a new court whose members should not be eminent judges, but men of an inferior class selected by a religious test, who should be obliged to refer every question of ritual and doctrine to the thirty-seven bishops, and give judgment in accordance with their directions ! The sixth and seventh recommendations aim at enhancing the importance of the Church Dis- cipline Act of 1840, under which the bishop has the power of appointing a special commission to try an offending incumbent. They make a great parade of surrendering the bishop's power of vetoing a trial under this Act ; but inasmuch as a bishop may, as Dr. Ingram did in Evans's case, appoint a commission of clerical ritualists to sit in judgment on a brother ritualist, the value of this concession would be entirely imaginary. It was merely a sprat thrown out to catch a mackerel. And the sacerdotalists, advancing under cover of this supposed reform, straightway demand, by way of com- pensation, the repeal of the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1 874, under which the judge must be a layman and a lawyer — a statute which, if given a fair trial by the bishops, might have proved a bulwark of Christianity.
The eighth recommendation, with a view to de- priving the lay chancellors of the small remnant of independence left to them, suggests that the bishop should be authorised to sit instead of the chancellor in the consistory court, whenever he so desires, and " should have a locus standi in all faculty cases affect- ing the ornaments, objects of decoration, or fittings of churches." If this suggestion were adopted, we should never see another clearance of idols from a State
666 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
church, such as those removed from the Church of the Annunciation at Brighton in September 1903, and of which we give an iUustration elsewhere.
The ninth recommendation suggests that arch- deacons and rural deans should keep the bishop better informed as to what is going on in the churches of the diocese, thereby inferentially throwing upon these men — who are, as a rule, ordinary incumbents on moderate stipends — the responsibility for the faith- lessness of the bishops who, in their capacity as overseers, receive i^ 100,000 a year in salaries and get the disposal of patronage worth over i^ 1,000, 000 a year.
The tenth recommendation is a proposal to permit the creation of new dioceses — presumably by the bishops themselves, acting as the Ecclesiastical Com- mission— by orders in council, as new parishes are now created, without special acts of parliament.
Never in the history of England, perhaps, did the sacerdotal class propound a more complete scheme of self- aggrandisement, based on an assumption, amply justified by past experience, that they can successfully mystify and deceive the public of this realm for all time. The project, if adopted, would more than realise the most ambitious dreams of Pusey, Newman, Ward, and Faber. And it is characteristic of the profession that it should have been broached, like Pius IX.'s decree of infallibility, at a moment when their policy had been discredited, when they had suffered a severe political reverse, and when the recruits for the ministry are decreasing constantly, despite our growing popula- tion. The average number of candidates for ordi- nation in the decade 1891-1901, was 67 per annum below the number for 1 8 8 1 -9 1 ; and the "Official Year Book" for 1905 laments that "the average per annum for the next decade threatens to
RESULTS OF RITUALISM 667
be 100 below that for 1891-1901." Oxford and Cambridge are still the chief sources of supply, it being a noteworthy fact that all the unhappy clergy- men, whose arraignment in the courts of law we reluctantly chronicled elsewhere, were full graduates of one or other university. During the generation 1 872-1904, out of 22,705 priests ordained, 13,524 came from the two ancient universities, 5851 from the theological colleges, and 1543 from the priestly university at Durham. Knowing what we do of the training for the ministry given in these institutions, we cannot reasonably anticipate from these figures that the number of AngKcan ritualists is at all likely to decrease, or even to remain stationary, in the im- mediate future. It would be in vain to point out to men educated as the ritualists are that their re- actionary campaign, besides being anti-Christian and unpatriotic, stands condemned by its results. Do they pretend that they are anti-papal? Then the all-sufficient answer is that, loari 'passu with the growth of ritualism, Roman Cathohcs have been increasing in numbers and influence in England, and mainly by deser- tions from the High Church party in the Established Church. Do they assert that they are reverting to the primitive Catholic usages of Christianity ? Then we tell them that either they themselves are deceived, or they seek to deceive the nation by disseminating a colossal falsehood. Christ was crucified by the priests of His day for protesting against the very practices which the Anglican sacerdotal party seek to revive in His name in this realm ; and the millions of Nonconformists who have left the Church have done so because they believe those practices of its bishops and priests to be the antithesis of primitive Christianity. Do they allege that, in sapping the foundations of the Refor- mation, they are endeavouring to compromise with
668 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
science and agnosticism ? Then the milHons of agnos- tics, to be met with now in every walk of Hfe, rise up in judgment against them, and declare that, but for the medievalism of the Anglican bishops and priests, they might never have ceased to be believers in Christianity and doers of the Word,
One of the favourite assertions of the ritualists, reiterated by Bishop Compton and others before this commission, is that the Roman vestures, church- fittings, and religious services, which they seek to reintroduce, are mere superficial trifles, the import- ance of which is altogether exaggerated by Christians. Few thinking men or women are likely to be deceived by this spe^^ious plea. Are sane men, as the clerical ritualists deem themselves, prepared to rebel against the supremacy of the sovereign and undermine the constitution of the realm for what they consider a mere trifle ? Can that be a mere trifle which has forced more than half the religious population of England and Wales to leave a State Church, which they are bound to support, and burden themselves with the upkeep of a second Church ? Was it not by these Roman vestures, church-fittings, and religious services that all mental progress was arrested and Europe kept in universal turmoil, misery, and supersti- tion for over a thousand years before the Reformation ? And if the United Kingdom and other countries have progressed during the nineteenth century, has it not been in direct proportion to their renunciation of priestcraft and their loss of reverence for its professors? Nay, of the countless improvements in the position of British citizens at home and abroad, accomplished during the last century, there is not one due to the highly-endowed theologians, while almost all the more important were only achieved in face of the organised opposition of the sacerdotal caste.
CHRIST OR THE PRIESTS? 669
This is the stage, then, which England has now reached in the struggle waged for centuries between the Church and the State, between the priests and the people, between religion and Christianity, between formalism and morality, between theology and truth. The priests have issued a declaration of war ; and it is the nation's duty to grapple fearlessly with the great question thus forced upon its attention. There is no room any longer to doubt that the State is subsidising the ritualists, for the ritualists control the Church which receives so many millions yearly from the public purse ; and England, so law-abiding, is scandalised by their lawlessness. Pending the inevitable recasting of the financial relations between Church and State, on the lines of the precedents worked out in Ireland, about to be accomplished in Wales, and adopted voluntarily in the self-governing colonies and the United States, it is to be hoped that the Government and lay patrons may combine to transfer the controlling power in the management of the Church, so long abused by the sacerdotalists, to the thousands of Anglican clergymen who are faithful to Christ and the English ecclesiastical laws based on His teaching. Three bills for restor- ing order in the Church have been introduced in parliament since the appearance of the report of the Ecclesiastical Discipline Commission. Sir George Kekewich's bill, which has the support of the most active leaders of the evangelical party, proposes that paid commissioners should be appointed by the Government, with power to visit all State churches, to investigate illegalities on the spot, and to dismiss the ritualists from the benefices ; the expenses being paid out of the funds now managed by the Ecclesiastical Commission. As it is not right, or conducive to order, to have one law for the rich and another for the poor, it would be advisable, if this bill were likely to be
670 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND
enacted, to authorise the new commissioners to try and dismiss bishops as well as parochial incumbents.
Besides controlling the finances of the Church, it is equally clear that the ritualists are moulding the characters of the youth by their supremacy over all grades of secular education, and are luring the people away, as they have ever done, from all true know- ledge, including that of the living Christ. All the symptoms, so well known in Ireland and other Roman Catholic countries, are now to be found in England wherever ritualism prevails — superstition amongst the women, agnosticism amongst the men, mental distraction amongst the children. Will the people turn from Him whose divine teaching they have found so pre-eminently suited to a progressive democracy, and by Whom they have been guided to so high a level of national happi- ness? It is no exaggeration to say that the destinies of the English race must depend largely on the answer to this question. We are near the parting of the ways ; and two voices are heard in the land. The bishops and priests are calling on Englishmen to take the broad road by which so many empires andicivilisa- tions have travelled to perdition ; but experience and duty, speaking as if with the voice of Omniscience, also seem to invoke them, saying : " If ye will walk before me, as your fathers walked, in integrity of heart, and in uprightness, and will keep ray statutes and my judgments : then will I establish the throne of your kingdom for ever, as I promised your fathers, saying, There shall not fail you a man upon the throne of Britain. But if ye turn away, and forsake my statutes and my commandments, which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other gods and worship them ; then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given you ; and England shall be a proverb and a byword among all people,"
NOTES
Page 226: "A commission was appointed in 1850," &c. The Government found it very diflficult to get men to act, and the commission was ultimately made vip of five clerics and two laymen. It was presided over by the then bishop of Norwich ; and, of the other four clergymen. Dr. Tait became archbishop, Mr. Jeune, Sir F. Jeune's father, became bishop of Peterborough, Mr. Stanley became dean of West- minster, and Mr. Johnson became dean of Wells. Knowing its composition, we may feel satisfied that the strictures passed on the university by this commission erred on the side of lenity rather than severity.
Page 234 : " Wilberforce was revelling in sophistical de- liverances," &c. A recent writer of undoubted knowledge says : — " The unerring pei'ception of the Prince Consort rated Wilberforce at his proper level, and it was the prejudice against him which the Prince created in the mind of Queen Victoria that saved England the indignity, if not the scandal, of having this supple and self-seeking ecclesiastic at the head of the Church." — Personalia, by "Sigma," 1904.
Page 651 : " The replies of the ritualist incumbents to the commissioners were, if possible, more incriminating than the evidence given against them." I have not quoted in the text from the most objectionable expressions of opinion received from the High Churchmen. But the following extract from the letter of Rev. C. L. Marson, Hambridge, will be sufiicient to exemplify the character of the ritualists : — " I beg to acknow- ledge your letter, with the report of a spy, concerning the High Mass at Hambridge Church on the Sunday within the octave of Hallowmass, MCMIV. I gathered from the copious con- versation bestowed upon me by your agent (while I took a much-needed breakfast after my third Mass), that he was a Donatist heretic. May I protest against your employment of an agent of this sort. It was a gi-eat indecency. . . . The particular service mentioned was the High Mass for All Saints. . . . The ministers were two acolytes, a thurifer, and a boat-bearer. Before I began the Mass I confessed my
671
672 NOTES
sins to the acolytes and obtained their forgiveness, else I should have been the only unforgiven person in the church. Incense was used ceremonially, as it is in heaven. Also we used unleavened bread and wine mixed with water (publicly mixed, of course), according to Christ's own custom. We rang a bell at the Sanctus and at the Sacring. I was clothed in a vestment, and washed my hands after the Oblations. At the Consecration I elevated each species of the Blessed Sacrament for worship of Christ. I hope I put in the right number of manual and general acts, and also signed the people with the Holy Sign when I forgave and when I blessed them. The kiss of peace was passed round to all the ministers before I communicated. There was oidy one other communicant, If the commissioners wish for any further information as to our clothes, chandlery, or as to which of our joints we crook in worship, I shall be delighted to give them every information," &c.
Page 663 : " The men who make this proposal may loudly proclaim they are not Roman," &c. The keenest detectives at Scotland Yard cannot distinguish the Anglo-Roman from the real Roman priests. The able ex-Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, presiding at a lecture given by the author at Loughton in Essex, in November 1904, gave the following interesting experience of ritualism in the East End, where Oxford " missionaries " are so numerous. Being officially informed by his men that a gang of disreputable knaves used to visit a Catholic priest's house nightly, and his advice being asked on the subject. Sir Roberb Anderson interviewed Cardinal Vaughan, to whom he gave the priest's name and address, with an account of the evil company fre- quenting his house. The cardinal made inquiries, and satis- fied Scotland Yard that the ecclesiastic complained of was an Anglican, and not a Roman, Catholic !
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