The Press. — London, England, 1858-10-30 00:00:00

1048 least of the evils resulting from our existing ecclesiastical arrangements. The fact that clergy men in that position are reduced, to a greater or lesser extent, to a state of enforced inefficiency, reacts upon society at large with retributive justice and with most pernicious effect. The " salt " of society being made savourless, it is not surprising that society itself should sink down to an unsavoury condition. When, as occasionally will happen, this retri butive effect of the social injustice committed wholesale towards the ill-paid clergy manifests itself in a peculiarly offensive and inconvenient form, a great outcry is raised,—not, however, against the act of injustice, or its perpetrators, but—in aggravation of the original injury— against its unhappy victim. A case of recent occurrence in one of the western dioceses aptly illustrates this sort of thing. The Vicar of a borough containing some 3,000 inhabitants has, it appears, become an inmate of the debtors' prison. For some time the Churchwardens managed to find substitutes for the performance of his Sunday duties ; but at last, one fine Sunday morning, they were unable to do so, and Divine Service had to be intermitted. Forthwith there appears in the local press an indignant para graph about "the position of a flock that has no shepherd," and " the immediate attention of the Bishop" is demanded to the question "how far " the imprisonment of a minister may affect his " having the spiritual charge of some 3,000 or " 4,000 people from whom he is separated." Who that reads this paragraph is not ready to cry "shame" upon the clergyman who has brought his profession into discredit, and whose unfor tunate flock is by his misconduct reduced to a state of "spiritual destitution " ? But what, on consulting the statistics of the parish, turns out to be the state of the case ? The vicarage has annexed to it the curacy of a hamlet, for the spiritual wants of which the Vicar is responsible; the assessment to the poor-rate of the real property in the borough with its hamlet is neat upon 15,000/. ; the great tithes are divided between several impropriators; and the income of the Vicar, out of which he has to keep the vicarage-house in repair, to pay rates and taxes, and to meet every other claim upon him as " the spiritual head of the parish," is-1341. per annum ! We know nothing of the Reverend Gentleman, of his character or ante cedents, and we are unable to tell, therefore, whether or not there may be in the circumstances which have led to his imprisonment—beyond his inability to meet the claims upon him—any thing censurable ; though from the absence in the indignation paragraph of even an insinuation to that effect, it is, perhaps, fair to infer that he is not chargeable with any delinquency beyond poverty. Assuming this to be the case, it can scarcely be denied that the " some 3,000 or 4,000 people " thus left spiritually destitute, and among them especially the owners of property, and the impropriators who levy the great tithes, arc far more to blame than the clergyman brought to ruin by the utter inadequacy of the provision made for his support ; and that the Bishop's attention is required, first and foremost, to the neglect by the parishioners, by the patron of the living, and by other impropriators, of the duty of making for the parochial minister a pro vision sufficient to enable him to support himself in comfort and respectability—a duty which, we venture to think, is quite as incumbent on them as is on the parochial minister the duty of per forming the functions of his sacred office. We are not arguing in favour of rich endow ments for the clergy. " Give me neither poverty, " nor riches ; feed me with the food convenient for me," is the standard of provision which we should like to see applied to them. Less than this is unjust to them,—for " the labourer is " worthy of his hire,"—and it is hurtful to society at large. The parochial system of the Church of England is, when carried out according to its theory, the most efficient machinery that has ever been devised for maintaining the people in a morally healthy and civilly well-ordered condition. The reason why such large masses of the population have fallen into a state of moral degradation, which makes them the easy victims of vice and crime, is, that we have not allowed our parochial system to develop itself pan/ passu with the increase of the population. We have left that beautiful engine to become powerless through want of fuel, to grow rusty, or wear itself out by hard friction, through want of oil ; THE PRESS, OCTOBER 30, 1858. and we wonder, forsooth, that it does not work as it should do! According to the theory of our Church, the parochial minister is to be the mainspring of moral health and intellectual light to the great body of the people among whom he is placed. Individuals may have opportunities of mental cultivation, sources of religious light, indepen dently of him; they may, through the power of social influences at work in the upper strata of society, be restrained front evil, and induced to the practice of virtue, or, at least, of its semblance. But to the general mass, to the uneducated and unlearned, whose social position is low and obscure, surrounded with manifold temptations, religious truth is the only really enlightening influence, and religious feeling the only thoroughly efficient safeguard against evil, and inducement to follow after good. And for that truth and that feeling they are, if not entirely, at least largely, dependent on the degree of efficiency with which the clergyman pursues the avocations of his sacred calling. Now, there is no profession which, when dili gently followed, makes greater demands upon the mind and heart of a man than that of the paro chial clergyman. his bead ought to be at all times clear, his mental vision unclouded; his heart, though made heavy at times, should never lose its vigour and freshness for the work that is before him. The duties publicly performed by him within the walls of his church are the least part of that work. It is under his superinten dence that the little ones of the flock are to be trained in the way they should go ; by his gui dance and counsel that the young are to be kept in that way on their entrance upon life and its temptations; to his advice, and often to his bene volent aid, that any who are in trouble or diffi culty are to have recourse; from his consolations that the sick and afflicted are to derive the com fort they need; by his admonition and reproof that the evil-disposed are to be kept back from the indulgence of vicious habits and criminal courses, and those who have fallen from virtue and honour brought to repentance, reformed and restored to respectability and self-respect. No man can do all or any of these things so well as the parochial minister. But, in order that he may be all this to his flock, and to every member of it, at all times and on all emergencies, he must not be a man weighed down and dispirited by gnawing care and grinding poverty; who finds it a hard matter to keep his own head above water; who cannot stir hand or foot for the good of his parish without anxiously calculating whether it may not involve him in expense which he is unable to meet; who has to look sharp after the perquisites of his office, and has little or nothing to spare for active benevo lence ; who, supposing him to be fortunate enough to hit upon some mode of earning money, apart from the duties of his calling, in order to eke out a bare subsistence, is compelled to devote to other occupations the time and attention which ought properly to be given to his clerical functions. How, we ask, is it possible that a man so situated, with a mind and heart permanently depressed by the circumstances in which he is placed, can efficiently fill the position and perform the duties of a parish priest ? Tliat the majority, an immense majority, of our working clergy—unless they be men of property, or have succeeded in the speculation, not unusual, nor very creditable, of marrying for money—are in this depressing situation, is a great reproach as well as an incalculable injury to our whole social system. Had there been proper care taken to avoid this reproach, had the increase of our population, its congregation into dense masses, been followed up by a sufficient—we do not say an ample, but a sufficient—provision for an adequate staff of parochial clergy well trained for their work, —a provision which our national wealth would easily have enabled us to make,—we should have been at less expense for police and for prisons, for convict establishments, penitentiaries, and re formatories; there would be less poverty, less misery, less vice, and less crime, all over the land. The truth of all this, we imagine, no thinking person will deny. But, we shall be told, the mischief is done ; to attempt to recover the lost ground would be a hopeless task. To this we answer that it is far from being as hopeless as many think, and as, at first sight, it may appear. In what way we must set about it, if we would retrieve the past, is a question on which some other time we may have a word to say. J IRISH ENCUMBERED ESTATES COURT. TO THE EDITOR OF THE PRESS." Sir,—l must ask your leave to protest against t he accuracy of one portion of your remarks with reference to the Encumbered Estates Act, in which a meaning is given to tho words of Lord Chancellor Napier which, to my mind, they do not convey, and which, if I am not mistaken, he would be the first to repudiate. In speaking of the enormous " change " (revolution is a more correct word) brought about by the operation of that Act in Irish landed pro perty, you say that "it was brought about neither in pursuance of abstract theories, nor as the result of a forcible subversion of the established order of things, but was called for by an imperative necessity as a remedy for acknowledged evils of the most serious character, and carried into effect with a due regard for existing rights." It is against this last assertion that I cannot resist from emphatically protesting. The Encumbered Estates . Act, which had the Reformed Parliament passed it some ten or twelve years before the time e w pabb xteee h t; e 3rtno n tahio. t ene,d,gidtapr carriedeiud w groni a ho dud e b s,r t , often its a na r b s d a b y pe f i ee o n rn r g . anith t tht o u esven a e l sgr l ey y arifftnog i rst n etai o a asi n c ,tow t jh e isttio d ohsho , ta stiocaa w ert o ondw u f ouar l htol d eli me; have tu b e passedn, h confiscation surpassed boy whichthe outrageous acts hee of l of a u undiscriminating ati despot ng ever inflicted on a conquered people. No doubt the estates of the Irish landlords were, generally speaking, deeply mortgaged. No doubt that that state of things was the result of inexcusable extravagance on the part of their former possessors, and in some instances of the then existing pro prietors ; but, taking them as a body, the then land lords were tar more sinned against than sinning; and one of the greatest obstacles to prosperity with which they had to contend was the defective state of the law, rendering it difficult for them to make a good title to their land, so that they could not sell a part to flee the remainder. The Legislature allowed this grievance to continue unredressed for years, during which a measure, such as the Encumbered Estates Act, giving a varliamentary title, would have relieved the worst part of their difficulties. Thus, at a moment when the whole land was stricken down with as severe a famine as any with which it ever phased the Almighty to visit a sinful people, and when all its awful consequences were in active operation, the Imperial Parliament avenged their own delinquencies on the Irish landlords and mortgagees, and passed a series of measures which consigned to undeserved penury and ruin a host of innocent individuals. First was removed the grievance as to the difficulty of procuring a title—an excellent measure, but one which might easily have been passed ten years before"; but this was accompanied by an Act enabling ally one having a small mortgage on the property to force its sale. To this was added a poor-law, the amount of which was in some districts nominally forty shillings in the pound, bie, in a vast number of cases it absorbed the whole annual value of tne land. 'rhe machinery of confiscation was thus complete. The laud in some districts was rendered worse than valueless ; in others it was made of no value; in all its value was materially diminished. Under such cir cumstances forced sales were ruinous to the owners; but the power given to small debtors to sell, of which they took a most extensive advantage, had this lumber effect in diminishing the market price of land—viz., that the market was glutted, and, as always follows in such cases, the property to be sold . was immeasurably depreciated. What fo llows" Estates which four or five years before were of sufficient value, and have now again become of sufficient value, to pay off all the incumbrances upon them, and to leave a handsome surplus tor their proprietors, were sold at prices which were . only sufficient to pay off the first mortgagee, and left the other mortgagees and the owners in a state of abject poverty and destitution. I am not now going to enter into a detail of the unnumbered instances of undeserved ruin thus brought down upon some of the most respectable gentry of Ireland by this rough and heartless legis lation ; neither do I wish to deny that the fearful ordeal through which Ireland passed in those days of death and confiscation has not resulted in a inure prosperous and healthful condition of the who, e island than any previously known in her long sod dreary annals of turbulence and misery. But let us not with insufferable self-complacency attr . these beneficial results to the foresight , the w . tsdolut or the justice of British statesmen and legalators; t They hod neither sufficient foresight n or wisdom keep millions of our fellow. countrymen o ut of a state of chronic starvation, nor had they sufficient skill to prevent, ill the end, hundreds of thousands o f them. 'butt perishing by famine and pestilence. And w . als regent to that other unfortunate portion of our Irish ii