MR. BALFOUR'S BENEFICES BILL.
T"position of the Benefices Bill is a striking illustration of the relative value of Ministerial and private Members' advocacy. For we do not know how many Sessions measures similar to this in general scope and outline have been waiting the pleasure of the House of Commons. That House has not usually been hostile to them. On the contrary, it has read them a second time and referred them to the Standing Committee on Law. In fact, it has done exactly what it did on Monday with Mr. Balfour's all, and, a few days earlier, with Mr. Lyttelton's. It is in their several prospects that the difference lies. So long as a Benefices Bill was in the hands of a private Member everybody knew that it would be withdrawn at the end of the Session. Now and again its authors might get a chance of going on with it, but the only result of their success would be to defer thc ultimate disappointment to a later date. It came all to the same in the end. Now the Bill belongs to the Govern- ment, and is certain to have days found for it and to be forwarded a stage whenever an opportunity occurs. The change is enough to make private Members protest that never again will they bring in a Bill or take the duties of the Government upon themselves. And yet they would be quite wrong if they did protest this. Their un- noticed or forgotten labours have not been really wasted. But for them it is most unlikely that Mr. Balfour's Bill would have been introduced. The function of a private Member is not the same as it once was, but it is not for that reason unimportant. It is seldom that his efforts at legislation make much impression upon Parliament, but they may still make an impression on the Government. Year after year a measure is brought forward, and by and by the Leader of the House begins to see that there is some merit in it. The first indication of this is a civil word dropped in debate, followed perhaps by a promise to see if he can find a day for it. As by the time this is said every day is pretty well filled up, the value of the promise lies in the good- will to which it testifies, and the final and conclusive evidence of this goodwill is the announcement that the subject is to be mentioned in the Queen's Speech. If there had been no private Members to prepare the way in this fashion, there would have been no Ministerial Benefices Bill. It is as truly the work of the men who have spent their time and strength over the failures of previous Sessions as though their names were at the back of it to-day.
Mr. Balfour's Bill has the merits of being short and of avoiding issues which are either purely speculative or hopelessly unpractical. To the former kind belong the whole question of private patronage. It is one of those arrangements which, though it is not at all easy to defend in theory, has many advantages in practice. Its operation doubtless is reducible to no known law, but on the average of appointments it is found to insure the presence among the clergy of men who would have small chance of promotion at the hands of any public patron, while at the same time the Church would be the poorer by their remaining laymen. We may argue for ever about the improbability that a chance Peer or squire should be as good a dispenser of Ecclesiastical patronage as a Bishop, but when all is said the fact remains that we can point to men who are making proof of excellent qualities which but for the intervention of some private patron might have remained unknown. Among unpractical questions which find no place in the Bill we may mention the superannuation of incumbents who are past their work. It may be very desirable that they should make way for younger and more vigorous successors, but they cannot fairly be asked to do this at their own costs and charges. As the clergy have been constantly reminded of late, their incomes are derived from endowments, and as these endowments bear all, and more than all, the burdens that attach to other forms of property in land, it is only reason- able that they should share its solitary advantage,— permanence of enjoyment. The retirement of in- cumbents through no fault of their own can never be arranged except in connection with a pension scheme. When we are able to offer to an old man who has worked well for something like half a century an adequate pension, we may consider how to enforce com- pulsory retirement upon aged incumbents. Till we have the money wanted for that purpose in hand it will be very much wiser to limit our efforts, as Mr. Balfour does in the present Bill, to getting rid of men whose short- comings have a graver origin than old age or infirmity.
The debate on the second reading disclosed no serious opposition to the measure. Its rejection, indeed, was moved and seconded, but the only reason by which Mr. Brynmor Jones sought to justify his Motion was that so long as the Church declines the boon of freedom offered her by the Liberationists, she ought to be pinned down to the posi- tion, or rather to the worst incidents of the position, she has chosen for herself. Mr. H. S. Foster, who seconded the Motion, did so on quite different grounds. His objection to fhe Bill is that it does not go far enough in the direction of reform. The powers of refusing institu- tion given to the Bishop are in his opinion too vague to make it at all likely that they will be exercised with the necessary uniformity. rhat one Bishop may think a reason for rejecting a presentee may to another Bishop seem to be no reason. Mr. Foster might as well object to giving the Judges any discretion in the matter of sentences. It is a choice between two kinds of inequality,—the in- equality which comes from the rigid application of rules, and the inequality which comes from the elastic applica- tion of rules. Examples of both are to be found, but, on the whole, the chances that something like justice will be done are greater in the latter system than in the former. In other words, there must be a large amount of dis- cretion somewhere, and in an Episcopal Church the natural thing is to vest it in the Bishop. Still, there is more reason in the theory that the Bishops will be overlax in the exercise of their new powers than in the theory that they will be too severe. "I am firmly convinced," said Mr. Balfour, "that those who are afraid that the Bishops will exercise their powers harshly, and that in a doubtful case they will give a hostile rather than a favourable judgment, entirely mistake the conduct which usually commends itself to Bishops." As a rule, we should say they will be more likely to err in the opposite direction,—to seek to escape the annoyance of an appeal to the Archbishop, of a quarrel with the patron, and of having after all to institute the man who has been objected to. The weakest of the arguments urged against this and similar Bills is the plea that they prohibit the sale of next presentations without forbidding the sale of advowsons. That the Bill would be improved by some limitation of the right of purchase, some indication as to classes of purchasers to whom some preference might be given or some objection raised, is quite possible. But the need of such provisions has been greatly lessened by the fall in the value of livings. Except for possession, the right of presentation to a benefice is not, we suspect, greatly sought after ; and for possession, what is bought, as the law stands, is usually the right to present at the next vacancy. One main object of this and every other Benefices Bill is to forbid the sale of next presentations, and this most neces- sary reform will, we hope, deprive the sale of advowsons of their one thoroughly mischievous feature. To go further would be impossible, unless Parliament were pre- pared, as it certainly is not, to abolish private patronage. Without this the prohibition of sale would be in effect a law to keep the right of presentation to a benefice in the hands least likely to exercise it wisely. Where would be the advantage, for example, of leaving the advowson in the hands of a man who has been obliged to sell the estate with which it was formerly associated ? When the patron of a living is also a land- owner in the parish, he has obvious inducements to make a decent appointment. The opinion of his neighbours and his tenants may not matter very much to him, but it will usually matter something ; and whatever force there is in this consideration will not be operative on bankrupt patrons living abroad. Yet it is in the hands of this latter class of men that a simple prohibition of sale would tend to keep advowsons. No matter how fit a would-be purchaser might be to have the right of pre- sentation, no matter how excellent his motives for desiring to possess the right, the law would insist on its being retained by a man whose one wish was to get rid of it. Certainly the notions of some Church reformers are not of a kind to be easily " understanded of the people."
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