Poverty in the Church
There will be universal sympathy with the efforts the Church of England is making to secure minimum stipends and minimum pen- sions for her clergy. What is aimed at is modest enough—stipends of L500 and pensions of £200 at the age of seventy, with correspond- ing allowances for the widows and orphans of deceased clergy. This is less, so far as stipends are concerned, than is earned by many manual workers who have nothing like the same calls on their income and on whose training nothing like the same sums have been expended. None the less, the gap between the suggested figure and what many clergy are receiving now is sufficient to make the raising of the necessary funds a serious matter, particularly since the income of various Church endowments will fall heavily as a result of the compensation provisions in the Transport Bill. But nothing is pro- posed that ought not to be well within the compass of the lay members of the Church of England. The Free Churches support their ministers with practically no help from endowments. The spirit in which the proposals outlined by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Church Assembly on Tuesday were received suggests that a measure not- of charity but of the barest justice will be carried through with resolution, good will and ultimate success.
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