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

1047

POOR INCUMBENTS.
THERE is a wail of pity raised, every now and
then, about the " poor Curates." We do not say
that there is no cause for it. Their lot, it is.
true, is not an enviable one. They are, as a rule,
and with rare exceptions, ill paid and hard
worked. Too often their position is no better
than a kind of gentlemanly servitude. Their
duties are frequently of a nature which requires
the cheering consciousness of a willing self-
sacrifice, to make their performance endurable.
On nice points, involving personal responsibility
of the highest order, they are not unfrequently
expected to put their conscience into their pockets,
and to act—at variance, it may be, with their own
convictions—at the bidding and discretion of
another. Thus socially and ecclesiastically
lowered, they are, moreover, deprived of that
protection which, in a free country like ours, the
law secures to the meanest of subjects, to the
lowest of criminals. They are at the mercy of a
judge armed with arbitrary powers, who may
receive charges against them without requiring
their accusers to meet them face to face, condemn
them without a hearing, sentence them without
trial, and ruin them without appeal. Whoever,
therefore, may at any time invoke the com-
miseration, or the sense of justice, of the public,
on behalf of the " poor Curates," we shall not.
gainsay him.
But there is a large class of Ecclesiastics whose
condition, though in some respects less hard than
that of the "poor Curates," is on other accounts
not less pitiable or unjust, and, what is more, in
its effects infinitely more detrimental to society at
large. We allude to that numerous body of
labourers in the field of pastoral superintendence,
reckoned, with painful irony, among the " bene-
ficed " clergy, and, with a bitter sarcasm upon
the hopelessness of their position, called "Perpetual
Curates." They are the men who mount the
breach as the Church's forlorn hope—the men
sent on her desperate service. In newly-formed
districts, where a church has with difficulty been
built, where the religious feelings of the popula-
tion are at the lowest ebb, where no provision,
except of the most scanty and precarious cha-
racter, is made for the support of the minister,
they are set to fight the battles of religion and
morality, and to encounter a weight of responsi-
bility and an amount of labour altogether dispro-
portioned to their strength and to the resources
at their disposal.
In the same category with them we must, in
common justice and fairness, place many others of
the " beneficed" clergy, distinguished from them
by the more ambitious titles of " Vicar " and
" Rector," but little better off than the " Per-
petual Curates"—the Incumbents of countless
poor vicarages and rectories. Their ecclesiastical
position, it is true, carries with it somewhat more-
of the sound, at least, of dignity; their official
position is not of recent creation ; it rests upon
an historical foundation, and is supported by tra-
ditional feelings among their flocks, which, for
the most part, preserve some attachment towards
the National Establishment. But against these
advantages they have, in many instances, to set
the disadvantages arising from a dilapidated
church, ill calculated to support the decencies of
religious worship, and wholly unfit to awaken its
more reverential associations; as well as from the
coldness of merely formal attendance through
hereditary habit, more hopeless, almost, than
total neglect ; and from a variety of local abuses
of immemorial standing, which no effort of theirs
can eradicate. Their battle, too, though in a
different way, is a hard one ; and they are left to
fight it while labouring, personally, under all the
difficulties and discouragements entailed by
straitened means, if not by absolute poverty and.
want.

Such as we have described it, is the position of
a large body of men,—comprehended under the
generic term "poor Incumbents,"—men educated
for the profession in which they labour, at an
expense out of all proportion to the remuneration
they receive—who, from the office they fill, are
called upon to exercise a most powerful and
telling influence, to prove themselves, in fact, the
very " salt " of society. That such a position
involves an act of gross injustice towards the
individuals condemned to wear out in it a mono-
tonous and cheerless existence, is, though a most
serious consideration, yet, after all, perhaps the