THE REFORM OF CONVOCATION.
IT is a curious characteristic of the present time, that the more irresponsible the utterances of public men are—we use the term public men in its widest sense—the more interest they seem to excite. A Member of Parlia- ment rises in his place, representing presumably the opinion of the constituency which has sent him to Westminster, and his speech will often be cut down to a few lines by the reporters ; while no one will be found to complain of the freedom with which the pruning-knife has been used. If he goes down to a constituency which is not his, to speak on behalf of a candidate with whom he has no connection whatever, save that they belong to the same party, he may find his modest reproductions of his leaders' arguments treated as an important indications of the drift of public opinion. On all but the very greatest occasions Parliament is now the poorest stage on which a man can present himself. There is the same inconsistency in matters ecclesiastical. When the Church Congress meets in October, the daily newspapers are filled for a week with reports of papers read and speeches delivered. Every year the space allotted to the proceedings becomes larger, and—since editors have to be diligent observers of the tastes of their readers—the interest taken in them must be held to increase in propor- tion. On the other hand, the meetings of the Convocation of Canterbury—an assembly of great dignity, having its recognised place in the ecclesiastical machinery of the country, and containing, as a matter of fact, a large pro- portion of the more eminent clergy—commonly attract scarcely any notice beyond an occasional jest at an antiquity which is assumed to deprive the proceedings of all claim to attention. Out of Convocation, a Bishop has now a fair chance of being listened to by the general public. In Convocation, so far as the general public are concerned, he might as well remain silent. The exercise of a defined and recognised function seems to excite no interest.
An uneasy sense of this was visible in the Lower House of Convocation on Tuesday. The members are anxious to see a reform in the system under which they are elected ; and one of the reasons assigned is the need of making Convocation more interesting to the outside world. Whether the change would have this effect we will not ven- ture to say ; but there can be no doubt that, in view of the ends for which the Lower House of Convocation is supposed to exist, it is very much needed. Possibly, indeed, the defects of the Lower House, as a representative body, are more apparent than real. A considerable proportion of the official members would probably be elected by the parochial clergy, if they were not there already ; and as the Dean of St. Paul's pointed out, many of the members who now sit in virtue of their office, sat as elected members before they were in office. But the appearance of representation has to be considered as well as the reality ; and so long as the present method of election remains unchanged, it will be open to any one who dislikes a conclusion at which the Lower House of Convocation has arrived, to say that it is the utterance of a body in which the official element greatly predominates over the representative. After deans and archdeacons have been deducted, the array of elected members looks rather attenuated, and a considerable num- ber even of these represent only the Cathedral Chapters, leaving to the parochial clergy no more than forty-eight members. It is not to be expected that the resolutions of a body constituted in this way will command the assent of the parochial clergy to the same extent as th ose of an assembly in which they were not liable to be outvoted in every division. No amount of confidence that an official member expresses your opinion, as well as his own, will quite take the place of the knowledge that you yourself have sent your representative to Convocation, and will by-and-by have the opportunity of determining whether to send him there again. The general principles of a. Reform Bill for Convocation are simple enough. The proportion of representative mem- bers needs to be increased, the proportion of official mem- bers needs to be diminished. The official element should by no means be Lcluded, as this would deprive the Lower House of Convocation of some of its best and most experi- enced members ; and in ecclesiastical assemblies, at all events, one may be permitted to remember that efficiency is one mark of a good electoral system. But it should be the smaller, instead of the larger, element. The other direc- tion in which reform is needed is the composition of the electorate. It now consists of the beneficed clergy ; it ought to consist of a portion at least of the curates, on whom devolves so largo a part of clerical work. It is not, however, the provisions of a scheme of reform that present the difficulty, since upon these there is a remarkable unanimity. Why is it, then, that in the course of the forty years that have passed since the revival of Con- vocation, the question has been under discussion twenty-five times without anything coming of it P The answer is that a successful measure of reform requires agreement, not merely as to what should be done, but also as to who shall do it. It is upon this point that every proposal has gone to pieces. In the opinion of some of the clergy, the proper course is to apply to the Crown for leave to make a canon regulating the composition and, distribution of the con- stituencies and the method of election. In the opinion of others, the Archbishop has the power to act in the matter proprio milt. Judging from the debate of Tuesday, the former opinion is the more generally held, as it is thought that even if the Archbishop has the power which some attribute to him, the safe course is not to use it, Of course, all action is attended by some risk; the mistake so often made is to forget that inaction has its risks also. In the present case, it seems to us that it is the hesitation of those con- cerned with the reform of Convocation that has given these risks such importance as they possess. Our own impression is that if, when the need of a reform of Con- vocation was first seriously felt, the Archbishop had applied a moderate and careful remedy to the defects which do most to lessen the representative value of the Lower House, his action would have been welcomed by all parties in the Church, and have excited very little comment out- side. Indeed, to the consistent Radical, action taken by the Archbishop alone ought to be less objectionable than action taken by statute or by canon. What he dislikes is any recognition or gift by the State of any greater freedom than the Church already enjoys. Such freedom as she can take for herself without the intervention of the State would naturally seem to him a matter of comparative unimport- ance. He objects to the fetters being knocked off, but not necessarily to that movement of the limbs which is consis- tent with the fetters remaining on. Ask him for an Act of Parliament, and he will refuse it. Ask the Crown for have to pass a canon, and he will censure the Ministry which advised that the permission should be given. But let the Church make full use of such powers as she believes herself to possess, and our Radical friend will probably never notice the circumstance, or, if he does, will be so ill-informed on the law of the case that his criticisms will have no point. The Church, we feel sure, might have got much that she has been content with wishing for, if she had taken it instead of talking about it. It is fair to say that, in the diocese of Canterbury, the Vicar-General was asked to say what the Archbishop might do of his authority, and he replied— in substance—very little. But this does not in the least affect our position.' We claim no knowledge of one of the obscurest regions of ecclesiastical law. We only say that if the Archbishop had taken his powers for granted, and had introduced a reasonable minimum of im- provement into the constitution of the Lower House of Convocation, it is a hundred chances to one that he would not have been interfered with. Nor, if he had been inter- fered with, do we see that the Church would have been any the worse. If the Crown had thought fit to move in the matter, and if its action had been sustained by the Law Courts, the constitution of the Lower House of Con- vocation would have reverted to the old pattern. As it is, the old pattern has never been departed from, and between the two conditions, we cannot see any appreciable distinc- tion. The Church would at least have had the credit of knowing what she wanted and of going the straightest way to get it. Whether, after so long a delay, it would be competent for the Archbishop to act on these lines, is a. question on which we shall not pretend to have an opinion. But where . the need for reform is great, and the advantage of effecting
it soon rather than late is greater still, we may fairly regret that bolder counsels did not prevail when they might, as we believe, have been listened to without danger.
Previous page
