THE SALE OF ADVOWSONS.
WILL Dr. Fraser just tell us where the patronage of the Church of England ought to be lodged ? It is very easy and very pleasant for a Bishop to reprehend the present arrangement, and say that the sale of livings deters Noncon- formists from entering the fold, and hint at the sin of simony, and hope for a more Christian scheme of selecting pastors ; but if he had to draw the necessary Act of Parliament, and provide the necessary means without which no change is possible, he would very soon discover apologies for the eccle- siastical auction-room. We doubt if there is a layman sincerely attached to the Church of England who has not tried to de- vise some remedy for this grievance, the sale of livings, and we know there is as yet no one of any mark who after careful study has not given up the attempt. The Bishop of Manchester says the sale of advowsons and presentations as ordinary property, if not evil, is inexpedient, shocks the Nonconformists, and lowers the national ideal of the sacerdotal character,—that is, the national aspiration
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towards a ministry worthy of Him who founded it. We do• not entirely agree in that condemnation, deeming the standard set up in the Establishment to be at least as high as the- standard maintained in the Nonconforming Churches ; but we.
do not know that we are greatly concerned to answer it. The notion of merchandise in "livings " is to our minds as repul- sive as it is to that of the Bishop of Manchester, and if he will suggest a working alternative, we shall certainly consider it with a strong bias in favour of acceptance. But we must honestly say, that after the most careful and favourable con sideration, we are wholly unable to discovei a plan which, would supply, as the present system supplies, the link between the clerical order and the laity. We say nothing of the concrete difficulties in the way, of the sum—exceed- ing thirty millions—which would have to be provided in com- pensation for a property guaranteed by law, a property which could not be taken away on religious principles any more than
any other property legally acquired, for we believe the English people under certain excitement might be capable of that great effort, and we confine ourselves to the single question, where is the patronage to go ? Of course, if the Establishment is to be abolished, the answer is easy ; but if it is to be retained, as Dr. Fraser doubtless wishes it should be retained, where, under his ideal system, is patronage to be lodged ? Let us suppose the nation, after enormous sacrifices which will certainly not• be made, to have repossessed itself of an authority it ought never to have surrendered, and to be as free to select its own system of filling cures as it now is to select its own system of filling bishoprics, and what is it to do ?
Clearly it cannot, except upon one condition, which would, make most clergymen sick with annoyance and distrust, entrust the whole patronage of the Church to the Episcopal order. If it did, there would, within a generation, be twenty—
four Churches preaching and teaching within the pale of the Establishment. Every Bishop would select throughout his
reign men who agreed with him, and leave it to other Bishops to select those who disagreed with him, and would thus become, from the necessity of his situation, a kind of Pope. He could not, if an honest man, act• otherwise, for supposing any Bishop even to hold that his first duty was impartiality among the parties within the Church, then his diocese would be the impartial one, that is
to say in no long time distinctively the Erastian one. As a rule, however, the Bishop, if a sincere man, would consciously
or unconsciously favour men of his own opinions, and we should have an Evangelical Church say in Winchester, and a high-and-dry Church say in St. David's, and an ultra-Ritualist
Church say in Durham, and a verbal-inspiration Church in London, and a semi-Romanist Church in Canterbury, and so on, each diocese living to itself and exaggerating the tenden- cies of its possible head. We say nothing of the absolute impossibility of inducing Parliament to consent to any such scheme, to assign a penny of the income-tax in perpetuity to the work of creating diocesan ecclesiastical systems, and con- fine ourselves to the argument that any such scheme would in no long period be fatal to the Church of England, which must either exist as a national, that is as a comprehensive Church, allowing wide divergencies within its bosom, or cease- to exist at all. It is true that if our excepted condition could be granted, and the Bishops were treated as civil officers merely, and appointed for five years—an experiment which Americans say they will yet try—such a bestowal of patronage might be- endurable ; but English Churchmen would probably resist that change more vigorously than any merely political innovation. There is no reason that we can think of, either in morals or theology, why a special grace should not be given for a limited term, as well as for the whole term of life, and indeed our Colonial Bishops evidently think the term limited by their own convenience, and accept livings at home every day as if they were simple pastors ; but that is not the view of the Church, and some day their practice of refusing to die in their sees will produce most dangerous schisms, with undoubted though unbenoficed Bishops at their head. A five-years' Bishop who misused his patronage could be superseded, but there is much less chance of five-year Bishops than of any other arrangement, much less, for example, than of the existing system of patronage going on. The Bishops are out of the question, and so, we believe, are popular elections. The politicians who would vote the com- pensation would wish probably for them, would, to speak
well-understood language, desire to vest the advowsons in the body of ratepayers, but they will scarcely succeed in that attempt. The chasms within the English social system are too deep. The scheme has been fairly tried in many parishes, and by the consent of all good men it fails. The bulk of the ratepayers, not being " Church members " in their own eyes, vote without responsibility, on grounds which have little relation to the true ideal of the pastorate, and under in- fluences which are not those to which any living Church, and above all any State Church, can safely submit. One- half of them are not Churchmen at all, and of the remain- ing half large sections never enter a church except to be married or to attend a funeral. Besides, to speak frankly, there are limits to human endurance of the principle of election, and unless we mistake its whole tone, the educated of this country will absolutely refuse to have their spiritual teachers set over them by the ignorant, will vote the Church away sooner than its ministers shall universally be selected by the people who happen to pay rates. A system of popular election is, no doubt, found endurable in Scotland ; but Englishmen have neither the Scotch traditions nor the Scotch canniness, and would infallibly break down the grand Scotch safeguard. With that wonderful contempt for logic which in all spiritual matters distinguishes that nation of logicians, the Scotch have decided that the grace of God essential to the minister is never given to any one who has not passed through a long university course, and so have secured to a poverty-stricken and Calvinistic Church an edu- cated ministry. If there were the faintest chance of English ratepayers being as wise, we might be content to trust them ; but as it is, any patron sooner than the British ratepayer. We, who are Radicals, say that plainly, believing, as we do, that there are at least two oMoes in the world, that of the judge and that of the minister of Christ, to which the prin- ciple of popular election is not applicable, to which it is, ex necessitate rei, more or less injurious, if not fatal. A Parish Council might choose well, but it would be very apt to be selected in order to choose, and of a Council of communicants there is, of course, no possibility at all. An idea of that kind always hovers before episcopal minds, but practical poli- ticians have long since recognized that it is as hopeless as, in our judgment, it would be unfair. The revenues of the English Church belong to the nation, to be held, if you will, in trust for that Church, and any attempt to devote them to the uses of a sect would be followed by their appropriation to other purposes, say national education.
The populace are as much out of the question as the Bishops, and there remains only the Cromwellian scheme. In theory, it is incomparably the best ever invented to meet the difficulties incidental to the relation between the Church and the State. It is conceivable that a committee of " Triers," appointed by Parliament, and invested with all the advowsons of the kingdom not attached to episcopal sees, might under existing guarantees make better selections than the country gentlemen do, might be exceedingly conscientious, and might enforce excessively strict rules of qualification. That is, we believe, the wisest device that could be tried, and if the Committee were carefully selected, it might, for a time at all events, give satisfaction. Bat State Churches are intended to last, and if ours lasted, the old and, as we fear, the insuperable difficulty would still recur. Is the Committee of Triers to be removable or not ? If it is removable, then we have election, by the majority over again, and the whole Church will be of one type, that is, will be abolished to a certainty within a genera- tion, as being the Church of a sect, and not of the whole nation. If, on the other hand, the Committee is not removable, then the Triers will gradually impress a uniform tone upon the Church equally fatal to its chances of continued existence. Take even an ideal Committee, composed of Archbishop Tait, Mr. Wal- pole, Dean Hook, Lord Shaftesbury, and Dean Stanley, and we all know without argument that whole sections of the Church would be left out, and in twenty years variety of thought and action would be so difficult within the Establish- ment that all men save those attached to a single lino of spiri- tual thought would be clamouring for its abolition. The majority could not be trusted not to regard five-sixths of the Broad Church as heretical. Private patronage is in theory absurd, but it does preserve us from uniformity ; it does keep up the connection between laity and clergy ; it does emancipate the teachers from the control of the pupils ; and it does secure us a race of clergymen who, with enormous drawbacks of another kind, are, as a body, better than the community which they undertake to instruct, And if we have private
patronage, why should one mode of transfer be holier than another V There is, we perceive as we read this article, one omitted suggestion. A lay Council of the Diocese, a Presbytery, in fact, with a Bishop for its chairman, might be entrusted with the patronage, and might, it is conceivable, exercise it with some deference to the opinion of the Churchmen within the parish to be supplied. A Council of that kind might un- doubtedly be an excellent selecting body, but it would, as we apprehend, become in a very short time a mere Council of delegates, would be specially charged to appoint no one dis- approved by the majority, and would within a generation be a mere instrument to conceal election by the ratepayers, whose first demand would be that their candidate should pledge himself to give " its just weight to the local feeling of the parishioners," that is, to accept their nomination as a matter of course, as the Bishop now accepts that of the lay patron. That would be the present system over again, with this enormous aggravation, that while the squire is under a strict and well-understood responsibility to the Church, to his order, and to the cultivated opinion of the country, the rate- payer would be under no control save that of a conscience thirsting usually for Calvinism rather than Christianity. We doubt, to put the matter plainly, whether a Diocesan Lay Council would dare to offer livings to Mr. Maurice, Canon Liddon, or Dr. Thirlwall, that is, to any one not a Calvinist who stood markedly and boldly out from the crowd.
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