THE WORLD ON THE CHURCH.
IT is curious and instructive to compare Lord Houghton's remarks on the Bishop of Peterborough's Patronage Bill with the modest object of those who support the Bill. Lord Houghton's notion is plainly this :—You may have a worldly Church or a Churchy Church, which you please, but on the whole, there is not much spiritually, though there is a good deal politically, to choose between the one and the other. Churchiness is a sort of worldliness, after all, and not altogether the best sort. If you leave the patronage of the Church to the operation of the ordinary motives which influence the world,—i.e., the laity,— you will have a mixed sort of result,—.-a good bit of selfishness, a decent respect for common opinion, a fair element of disin- terested desire for the elevation of the people, all mixed up together to determine the average character of the appoint- ments made. On the other hand, if you devise any plan for defeating the ordinary operation of these mixed lay motives in the matter, and give Churchmen as such the command of the threads of that plan, you will soon find a different class of motives at work, more plausible perhaps, more capable of being moulded into a shape that will bear a superficial criticism by the careless world, but not really better, after all,—motives of eEclesiastical ambition and ecclesiastical conventionality of all kinds, but motives quite as likely to be devoid of earnest simplicity, purity, and elevation as if there had been no attempt at all to exclude the operation of worldly influences. If you shut out external carelessness and indifference by your safeguards, you will let in pride and all the varieties of imitative holiness in their place. If you shut out open free-thinking, you may let in manifold subtle modifications of self-deception. If you shut out mere self-regarding desire for a career without any reference to the duties of this particular career, you may let in in its place that special craving for sacerdotal dominion which is both more dangerous and more full of embarrassments for the State. Hence, hints Lord Houghton, it is a great mistake in dealing with a State Church to try and provide too carefully against the deficiencies to which that sort of Church is specially liable. It is the special function of a State Church to aim at a moderate and sober, but still attain- able type of excellence which exactly suits the objects of the State. If you try too carefully to mend this, you may succeed in spoiling what you have, but fail in getting what you aim at. You may weed out the ordinary worldliness of the laity from the Church, without supplying its place by anything better. You may make it subserve less adequately the ordinary civilian's notion of duty, without making it approach a bit the nearer to the true spiritual type of excel- lence. You may spoil its adaptation to the society which it leavens, without giving it a single new breath of that divine life and impulse which would alone suffice to give new guidance to that society.
Such was Lord Houghton's view, as developed in his speech against going into Committee on the Bishop of Peterborough's Bill,—though it was really a speech against the Bill itself, not against any of its provisions. He wanted to see not only advowsons bought and sold as they now are,—the Bill did not propose to interfere with that,—but the right of presentation left as unlimited as ever, and the power of buying ex- changes and donatives even increased. He wanted to see no restrictions put on the acceptance of incumbents after they had once been ordained. Once ordained, Lord Houghton seemed to regard them as the fixed elements with which the Church was to be constructed, and none the worse elements for a good dash of the world's bias in them. Nay, he even laid himself open to the Bishop of Peterborough's sar- casm that he evidently thought that clergymen, like wine, improved by keeping, and that because a clergyman is all you could wish for a living at thirty-five, he will be quite as much 130 at ninety-five. Yet the Bishop of Peter- borough's very able reply was pitched in the same key as the attack. Speaking to an assembly of large proprietors of ecclesiastical property, who had no desire either to see their own rights taken from them, or to have clergymen of any type different from the present—namely, dignified squires of a compassionate turn of mind,—Dr. Magee took immense pains Lo show that he clearly understood the present position of the Church, and that his Bill was not intended fundament- ally to alter it. The changes he proposed could be defended, nay, he defended them, from the same plane of thought as Lord Houghton's. He did not want to lose for our clergy the natural gifts of sensible men Of the world, through aiming at what no mere system could give, supernatural gifts which raise men above the world. What he aimed at was just what in every profession that is organised as an institution at all, the superiors would naturally aim at,—to have checks on obvious incapacity or bad character ; to prevent the selling of appoint- ments the proper filling of which demanded the exercise of a responsible and conscientious discretion ; to guard against the presentation of superannuated old gentlemen to posts requiring the activity and energy of youth ; to make the supervising and controlling power of the heads of the profession a reality instead di a sham ; and above all, to avoid the scandals which the venality of patrons and the unscrupulousness of clerical am- bition not unfrequently bring upon the Church. All these are objects entirely consistent in their scope with Lord Hough- ton's general view of the State Church. They are objects which the reformers of the Army and the reformers of the Civil Service have carried out with far greater thoroughness than the Bishop of Peterborough proposes at present to use in his reform of the Church. The true answer to Lord Houghton is that Dr. Magee is not proposing to alienate the Church from the World, but only to recognise in the administration of the Church the higher of those moral standards which have at last got themselves acknowledged in the administration of the better organised parts of the world. Dr. Magee in his Patronage Bill aims only at sweeping away a few abuses which have been long regarded as abuses in regions by no means purely spiritual. And he cannot even accomplish as much as he aims at. The Lords are so enamoured of the influence of property in the Church, that they will not even permit the prohibition of the sale of next presentations. What has been done in the Army and the Civil Service, it is held to be revolutionary to do in the Church. Englishmen are to retain the right not only of buying and selling the advowson,—that is, the trust itself,—but even of buying and selling the right to determine the next exercise of that trust. The difference is considerable, because the motives which make a man wish to gain and to use a permanent influence over any English institution, are usually much wider and more elevated than those which make a man wish to gain and to exercise a particular and transient influence over it. In the former case, he probably thinks not a little of the institution itself and of its welfare ; in the latter he probably thinks chiefly, if not solely, of the individual purpose he wishes to gain through it. Of course it is quite possible that a rich man may buy a next presentation, as he may buy the advowson itself, for the sake cf conferring what he regards as a great boon on the Church, by finding a sphere in it for some particular kind of moral genius. But if that be his object, he is much more likely to buy the advowson itself, and not solely the next presentation. In nine cases out of ten, the man who buys only the next presentation will be found to be thinking much more of securing a career for a relative or friend, than of securing a general influence over the course of ecclesiastical affairs. When the Government and the House of Lords, with Lord Salisbury speaking for both, refused to accede to the Archbishop of Canterbury's provision,—supported by the Bishop of Peter- borough,—forbidding the sale of next presentations, they were 'really assuming that the National Church needs more infusion df worldliness into its management than other State institu- tions. If wealth had the power of buying the next appoint- ment to a clerkship in the Treasury or the command of a ship, we should never hear the end of the abuse. But the great and pious Peers of the House of Lords appear to agree almost as one man—at least, Lord Blatchford was the only Peer who ex- pressed his disagreement—that it is a very salutary thing indeed for wealth to be able to buy the next appointment to a cure of souls. We should have said, on the contrary, that a man who, having the right to make the next presentation, sells it, had better, in nine cases out of ten, part with the advowson altogether, since it is clear that he is not in a position to use the trust which his inheritance or his wealth has brought to him for the benefit of the public, but is turning into a mere bargain what should be the responsible exercise of a trust. Lord
Salisbury certainly did not at all make out, as he wished to make out, that the arguments against the sale of such presentations are equally good as arguments against the sale of advowsons. A great proprietor is apt to be the most independent, and therefore, as human affairs go, not unfrequently the best judge you could find, as Lord Houghton said, of the sort of in- cumbent who is needed for a parish; but the buyer of a "next presentation" is not very likely to be, in relation to that living at least, a great resident proprietor. It is ten to one that a man who buys a "next presentation" only, buys for a p3rsonal reason, and would not buy for any other.
We think, then, that the real case for the Bishop of Peter- borough is, that though it is undesirable in a State Church, where Bishops are appointed by statesmen, and not without reference to considerations which are considerations of general policy, as well as considerations relating to the spiritual results of the appointment, to substitute purely ecclesiastical for secular influences even in the appointment of the lower clergy, it would not be in the least dangerous to demand that mere pecuniary motives should be as much as possible ex- cluded,—that the patronage of the laity should be exercised with the same kind of conscientious liberality of view with which the patronage of the Crown is exercised in the ap- pointment of the Bishops,—that is, that the appointments should be made mainly for public reasons, and without re- gard to minutely selfish considerations. And for this reason we were at first disposed to regret that the declaration of the clergyman and the patron that they have not been actuated by any simoniacal motive is not to be required. It may be, of course, that the declaration would have been a pure failure,— and failures in these cases are worse than failures, they add to the hypocrisies of life. But it also sometimes happens that honour binds men much more than law, and that men who would not scruple to violate a law against the purchase or sale of an appointment would decline altogether to make a false declaration. However, there may be wisdom in minimising the number of moral traps for men's consciences, be they clergymen or be they laymen.
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