SHALL POOR BENEFICES OR POOR CLERGY BE FIRST HELPED?
WHEN to put up with a second best is one of the most troublesome of practical problems. The case on each side is often so unanswerable. Why should we content ourselves with a plan which is obviously and hopelessly inadequate to the work it has to do, besides possibly leading to a variety of mischievous consequences at present unsuspected? Is it not wiser to let foolish people follow their own foolish lines, while we set them an example of which they will by and by see the wisdom ? On the other hand, how can any good work get done if every one engaged in it insists on having his own way ? The business of every committee, from the Concert of the Powers down to the humblest club that meets in the local public-house parlour, is largely concerned with arranging compromises. The people who in the long run get most of what they want are the people who best know the value of half-loaves and of cherries taken at more than one bite. Impracticable sticklers for every item in their demand commonly end by getting nothing.
The Oxford Diocesan Conference has raised an issue of this kind with regard to the Queen Victoria Clergy Sustentation Fund. That Fund, as many of our readers know, has been set on foot—rather late in the day—to meet the crying poverty of the Anglican clergy. It is ten years since public attention was first drawn to this question, but the formation of a Central Fund has only now been seriously taken in hand. The scheme associated with Lord Egerton of Tat ton is a combination of central and local effort. It is hoped that there will be an Association in every diocese paying one-fifth of its income over to the Central Association, and receiving in return a proportion of the money which the Central Association has at its disposal. This seems to us a very practical and reasonable scheme. It forms no check on diocesan liberality, because four-fifths of the money raised in the diocese will be devoted to local needs. At the same time it does something to equalise the financial conditions of rich and poor dioceses, by pro- viding a Central Fund out of which money may find its way to the places where it is wanted in some rough pro- portion to the urgency of the demand. A large number of the English dioceses have already accepted this scheme. In two or three cases doubts whether they will get a sufficient return for their contribution, or satisfaction with the result already obtained by local effort, have delayed or prevented affiliation, but in these cases no issue of prin- ciple has been raised. The Oxford objection, which has been successfully urged at the Diocesan Conference, takes higher ground. It is founded on a reasoned disapproval of the method which the managers of the Sustentation Fund have determined to follow in the distribution of the money raised. The Diocesan Committee to which the subject was referred was a strong one. It comprised the Bishop of Reading, Lords Addington, Cottesloe, and Stanmore, the Warden of All Souls, and Sir Charles Ryan. They have thoroughly gone into the working of the Sustentation Fund, and they report—as indeed they had no choice but to do— that it is in the main a system of annual doles. So long as this is the case they cannot recommend the affiliation of the diocese to the Fund. A resolution to this effect was moved by Sir Charles Ryan, seconded by the Chancellor of the diocese, and in the end carried over the head of an amendment, the supporters of which did not attempt to defend the principle adopted by the managers of the Central Fund, but were only anxious not to give them "a direct slap in the face." Has the Conference done well or ill ? Are the criticisms passed by the Committee on the method of the Central Fund just, and if so, do they sustain the con- clusion founded on them ? As regards the first of these inquiries, we are altogether with the Committee. We think that the decision arrived at by the authorities of the General Fund is open to all the objections urged against it. The cause of the poverty of the clergy is the insufficiency, whether original or recent, of the endow- ments set apart for their benefit. The labourer is worthy of his hire, but the hire is no longer worthy of the labourer. The incomes of many benefices are less than a man with a wife and family can decently live on unless he has some private means. There can be no need to insist on the impropriety of giving any weight to such a consideration as this last. A patron who, before presenting a man to a living, has to inquire what income he has of his own is greatly handicapped in the discharge of his duty to the parish. He may have no doubt who the best man for the post is, but it is poor comfort to be clear on this point if he is equally clear that the man in question cannot live on the income of the benefice and has no other source from which to supplement it. Apart from con- siderations of this kind, why should the clergy be expected to pay themselves instead of being paid ? We do not ask the question of people who think religion a mistake and the ministers of religion a nuisance. They cannot be expected to contribute to the support of an order of men which they would prefer to see abolished. But the average Englishman, who wishes to have an Established Church, and an endowed clergy, and a married clergy, cannot with any consistency approve of a system in which a consider- able number of benefices do not afford a bare living to the holders of them, or care to see them offered to and accepted by men whose sole qualification possibly is that they can afford to take them. This, however, is the system which actually prevails in England to-day, and which the Clergy Sustentation Fund does not aim at altering. On the contrary, the managers propose to devote the larger part of the money entrusted to them to making grants, not to the poorest livings, but to the poorest incumbents, —the income taken into account being not the income of the benefice, but the income from all sources of the holder of the benefice. A scheme of this kind is rightly described by the Oxford Conference Committee as "moat invidious and inquisitorial in its operation, full of uncertainty and anxiety to its recipients, and not free even from a sense of humiliation on their part." But when we come to the question, Is a scheme which can be thus described, and. truly described, one from which a Diocesan Society may rightly hold aloof? the answer, to our mind will be different. We shall remember the difficulties and delays which have attended the launching of any scheme at all ; we shall remember that every one of these objections must have been considered by Lord Egerton's Committee, and have been passed over for what seemed to them good reasons. We shall remember that the managers of the Central Fund can have had no wish save to devise the plan which should conciliate the largest number of supporters, and extract from them the largest subscriptions. In all probability, therefore, the ultimate decision was based on an extensive knowledge of what the subscribers to the Fund wish. The managers may think—we should be dis- posed to say they do think—that the majority of the subscribers are mistaken, and that the wiser course would have been to spend the money raised in increasing the endowments of all the benefices below a certain value without reference to the accidental circumstance that the incumbent has a private fortune. But it may be better to relieve the poverty of the clergy in a wrong way than to let it go altogether unrelieved, and we may take the action of the Central Fund as an indication that a con- trary decision would have greatly lessened even the very modest amount which is all that has yet been contributed. If so there is some reason, or at all events some excuse, for the choice that has been made. Still, if the Central Fund required that the whole income of the local Society be made over to it, we could not blame the action of the Oxford Diocesan Conference. It might be too much to ask men to collect money every penny of which is to be spent in a way of which they disapprove. But this is not the case. Of the total sum collected by the Diocesan Society four-fifths—£80 in every .2100—would remain under its own control and be spent in the way it thought best. It is only as to one fifth part—X20 in each £100 —that this opinion would be overruled. Is it impossible, after all, that this percentage of the total sum raised in the diocese may fairly and usefully be laid out in the relief of cases of exceptional and immediate distress ? There would still be a much larger percentage left to go to the better endowment of poor livings.
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