CLERICS AND LAYMEN IN CONVOCATION. T HE proceedings of the Canterbury
House of Laymen on Tuesday, and those of the Lower House of Con- vocation on Wednesday, offer an accidental contrast of some interest We are not of those who wish to decry the business ability of the clergy. On the contrary, it is often quite equal, and sometimes decidedly superior, to that of a lay assembly. But in this case, it is impossible to give it this praise. It is true the House of Laymen had the advantage of being engaged on a work which eminently belongs to them. If the poverty which has overtaken so many of the clergy is to be satisfactorily relieved, it is the laity that must put their hands in their pockets. It is a very proper thing for those of the clergy who happen to be well off, to contribute as largely as they can to the relief of their brethren ; but their numbers are too few to make their gifts more than so many drops in a vast ocean of distress. It is not to the clergy in their thousands, but to the laity in their millions, that we must look for a solution of the problem. What we do not quite understand, is why the House of Laymen should have waited till now to pass their resolutions. The poverty of the clergy is no new thing, and the scheme by which the House of Laymen propose to deal with it need not have taken long to devise. The mischief of the delay is that the public imagination has had time to grow weary of the subject. Two years ago, the discovery that many of the beneficed clergymen were poorer than a well-to-do artisan, had something startling about it. People were not accustomed to think of the clergy in that light ; and if a strong appeal had then been put forth by the authorities of the Church, it might have met with an unexpectedly hearty response. As it is, we fear that it may be treated as a familiar story, and so be confounded with the multitude of more or less deserving objects for which money is constantly being asked. The first resolution of the House of Laymen declares that the permanent augmentation of poor benefices is the best remedy for the impoverishment of the clergy. Mr. Heygate, who moved it, rested his case mainly on the permanent character of the distress. In the country— and it is in the country that clerical incomes have so markedly declined—the income of incumbents is mainly derived from agriculture. Tithe depends upon agricul- tural prices, the letting of the glebe or the successful cultivation of the glebe depends in the last resort upon agricultural prices. When these are depressed, the in- comes of the clergy are depressed in proportion. There is no prospect, therefore, of any speedy recovery in clerical incomes. There may be a future in store for farming, but it is still an extremely remote one. Consequently, a system of annual grants does not really touch the evil unless there is some security that they will be continued for a long time. It would be a cruel kindness to give a man whose income has been permanently reduced an an- nual grant of £100 for three or five years. It would prevent him from adapting his mode of living to his means, and encourage him to regard the evil day as averted, when it was only postponed. Few things, how- ever, can be more certain than the temporary nature of any relief that depends upon annual subscriptions. An impoverished clergy is not an object of perpetual and visible attraction like missions or hospitals. It is an object in which people may be greatly interested, but with an interest which is pretty sure to die out as the facts on which the appeal is kunded are forgotten. Nor, indeed, could we -wish it otherwise. What could be more de- grading to the clergy than to live under a constant neces- sity of having their destitution paraded before the public as the only means of getting it relieved ? But if annual grants can only be relied on for a time, except at a sacri- fice of dignity and independence, which would be most injurious to those for whose benefit they were intended, nothing remains but a permanent augmentation of poor benefices without reference to the means of the particular incumbent. There is no reason, however, why subscriptions expressly devoted to the maintenance of annual grants should be refused, and the House of Laymen did well to include, among the objects aimed at by their resolution, the provision of a sustentation fund to assist impoverished benefices in this way. Althoug% the grt at mass of clerical poverty may come from causes mhich are likely to be permanent, there will always be a minority of cases in which the need is only temporary. Dilapidations, for example, may take the whole of a year's income; or an unusually bad harvest may necessitate corresponding reductions in the rent of the glebe; or a fire may compel the rebuilding of the house, and the sum for which it is insured prove in- adequate; or the buildings on the glebe may have been allowed to fall out of repair and an intending tenant insist on having them put in order. In these instances and in many similar ones a grant for one or more years would be the proper and natural way of giving assistance. When we pass to the proceedings of the Lower House of Convocation on the following day, we are at once struck with their unreality. The question before the House was the promotion of temperance, and without one dissentient voice they expressed their hope that some legislative mea- sure may speedily be passed "which shall largely diminish the number of places in which intoxicating liquors are sold." This is a wish often expressed by well-intentioned people, but when formal expression is given to it on behalf of the Lower House of Convocation, we might at least have expected that one or two obvious objections to it would have been referred to in the debate. It is certainly incumbent on any one who votes for such a resolu- tion as this to explain why in the statistics of the question the cases of drunkenness bear no ascertainable relation to the number of public-houses. If we take a list of towns, the chances are about equal that we shall find most drunkenness where there are most public-houses, or most drunkenness where there are fewest public-houses. If there were a natural connection between the two, the ordinary rule would be that pre-eminence in the number of public-houses involved a similar pre-eminence in the amount of drunkenness. As a matter of fact, nothing of the kind is forthcoming. The figures supply no reason to suppose that there are more drunkards where there are many public-houses than where there are few. Again, we should have looked for some reference to the very decided opinion expressed by Mr. Charles Booth on this point. He is as fully alive to the evils of drinking as Archdeacon Farrar himself, while he has a far wider knowledge of the circumstances of the London poor. But his judgment is given in the most positive way against any legislative diminution of the number of public-houses. The direction in which he looks for any beneficial change is the improvement of public-houses. He already sees many signs of this in the increased provision of appetising food and of non-alcoholic drinks. It is no longer enough for a public-house which wishes to hold its own against its rivals to provide its customers with beer and spirits. The wise publican seeks to tempt customers away from older and less enterprising houses, by catering for a larger variety of wants. It stands to reason that, in proportion as public-houses become used for other pur- poses than the drinking of a dram or a pint, they will be less used for these last two purposes exclusively. If tea, coffee, or lemonade are placarded outside, it must be because the landlord finds that the announcements serve to tempt people inside, and so by degrees the idea of going to the public-house becomes dissociated from the idea of getting drunk there. But the root of this improvement is competition. If public-houses were so few that there could be no rivalry between them, publicans would have no inducement to make their bars more attractive, or less entirely alcoholic. We do not say that Mr. Booth's argu- ment is conclusive, but we do think it deserves the careful consideration of any body of men which professes to approach the question with a sincere desire to arrive at the truth. In the Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury, it did not serve to elicit a single speech.
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