DR. JESSOPP'S ESSAYS.*

'Tins volume consists of six essays reprinted from the Nine- teenth Century, and of one which appeared in the North American Review. Dr. Jessopp is one of those fortunate -writers who has much to say and knows how to say it; and his matter is as suggestive as his style is pleasing. It may be considered needless, therefore, to notice essays with which

most of our readers are already familiar ; but there is so much in this volume worthy of consideration, that we shall snake no apology for so doing.

The best friend of the National Church is the man whose love does not blind him to defects, and who is large-minded enough to appreciate the goodness that lies outside its pale.

It is with the external organisation of the Church that Dr.

Jessopp chiefly deals, and the reforms be suggests are apart from the burning questions of ritual and doctrine. It is -evident, however, that he has no sympathy with the rising generation of clerics that insists upon professional exclusive- ness, and claims for itself the privileges of a caste :—

" It shaves off," he writes, "its nascent whiskers, and glories in a stubby cheek ; it dresses in a hideous garment, half petticoat, half frock, for the most part abominably ill made ; above all, it rumples about its bullet-head a slovenly abomination called a wide- .awake, as if that would preserve it from all suspicion of being sleepy and stupid ; and it adopts a tone and a vocabulary which shall be distinctive and as far as possible from the speech of ordinary • The Trials of a Country Parson. By Augustus Jessopp, D.D. London T. Fisher lJnwin.

Englishmen. 'We must close up our ranks,' said one of them to me, 'close up our ranks and present a united front, and show the world that we are prepared to hang together, act together, march together. We have been atoms too long ; we want coherence, my dear Sir—coherence. We are moving towards the general adoption of the Catholic cassock.'"

Dr. Jessopp, on the contrary, thinks that the parson should be, in the best sense of the term, a man of the world as well as a clergyman, and holds that any clergyman in a country parish who aims exclusively at being a religious teacher, will miss his

aim. "He must be more, or he will fail to be that. He must be a social power in his parish, and he ought to try, at any rate, to be an intellectual force also."

Clergymen like Jane Austen's Mr. Elton and Mr. Collins belong to an extinct type ; but the follies and pretensions of many youthful priests in our day make them as open to the novelist's satire as Mr. Collins himself. Dr. Jessopp seems to have met with some rare specimens of the class :—

" love to see the bell-ropes,' said one of these dear, well- meaning young clergymen to me. 'They are a constant lesson and reminder to us, my friend. Did you ever read Dura,ndus on Symbolism P That is a very precious observation of his that a bell-rope symbolises humility—it always hangs down.' " As this volume is headed The Trials of a Country Parson, it will be well to state upon the writer's authority what these trials are. And the first he mentions concerns the pocket. Touch that, "and a shudder thrills through every fibre." Wide is the difference between the clergyman's accredited income and his actual receipts. Hardly 1 per cent., we are

told, of the country clergy ever touch the full amount which theoretically they are entitled to receive, and "he who gets within 7 per cent. of his clerical income gets more than most of us do." Yet the parson is assessed on the tithe com- mutation table for the parish, and is therefore forced to pay rates on his gross income. Then there is the Land-tax, the mysteries of which surpass Dr. Jessopp's comprehension, and this tax is nearly ninepence in the pound.

The churchyard is technically part of a country parson's freehold ; the surface belongs to him, while the soil belongs to the parishioners; and he is taxed for the assumed value of the herbage growing upon it, which, instead of being a source of income, is in most cases an expense. The parson, too, has to pay the insurance on his church, and in the village he has always to pay a little more than any one else for most things that come to his door.

Another trial to the parson is the isolation of his life, by which Dr. Jessopp takes care to explain that he does not mean loneliness. The country clergyman "must be more than man in that he must be free from human passions and human weaknesses, or the whole neighbourhood is shocked by his frailty; he must be something less than man in his tastes and amusements and way of life, or there will be those who will be sure to denounce him as a worldling who ought never to have taken Orders." Not content with doing what is right, he is sometimes too much concerned to do what is considered proper; and a clergyman fond of vigorous horse exercise once told the present writer that on approaching his village, he always felt it right to make his horse trot at its most sober pace.

Then there is the country parson's trial due to the ex- cessive narrowness of the rustic's mind. It is difficult to say how much he knows, or how little. Of the objects of common life around him, he may know more than the clergyman ; but the knowledge most of us gain from books, conversation, and travel, is to him unknown. Probably, however, the dullest of these village hinds can be reached through the heart, for there is the one touch of nature to appeal to when every other opening to intercourse seems to be closed. The writer observes that he has never seen a map in an agricultural labourer's cottage, and that his ignorance of history amounts to an incapacity of conceiving the reality of anything that may have happened in past time :—" What their grandfathers

have told them, that is to them history—everything before that is not so much as fable ; it is not romance, it is a form- less void, it is chaos." A .parish clerk of our acquaintance,

who had several vocations, said once to his active rector, "I never hear the words, 'the Scripture moveth us in sundry places,' without thinking, Sir, of you and me, for we are always moving about." The stories of the queer mistakes made by our hearers, says Dr. Jessopp are simply endless, and among other illustrations, he gives the following :—

" • As yow was a saying in your garment, 'tarns' mowing won't du vrirout 'tarnal making—yow mind that ! yer ses, an' I did mind it tu, an' we got up that hay surprising !' Mr. Perry had just a little misconceived my words. I had quoted from Philip van Arteveldt, He that lacks time to mourn, licks time to mend. Eternity mourns that.'" Here is another anecdote by the country parson :— "Not many months ago I was visiting a good simple old man who was death-stricken, and had been long lingering on the verge of the dark river. I've been a-thinking, Sir, of that little hymn as you said about the old devil when he was took bad. I should like to hear that again.' I was equal to the occasion The devil was sick—the devil a saint would be; The devil got well—not a bit of a saint was he 1'

[It was necessary to soften down the language of the original.] Is that what you mean ? ' Yes ! it was that. Well, I've been a-thinking, if the old devil had laid a bit longer and been afflicted same as some on 'em, as he'd a been the better for it. Ain't there no more o' that there little hymn, Sir ? ' "

Dr. Jessopp, by-the-way, observes that Norfolk people are singularly prosaic, and that the county has never produced a single poet or romancer, and he adds, "I do not forget

Crabbe—that sweet and gentle versifier. But the romantic element is wholly wanting in him." "Sweet and gentle" are singularly inappropriate terms to apply to Crabbe's poetry ; but the author might have spared his remark, for Crabbe was born in Suffolk. One peculiarity which he notes of the smaller West Norfolk farmers is in accordance with the characteristic just mentioned. They are not wanting, he says, in cordiality, but they are not companionable. Yet Dr. Jessopp knows some exceptions to the all but universal rule, and has not to go far from his own door to find one whom he never visits without pleasure and profit,—" one who has for many years been a great reader of Lord Tennyson's poems, has strong opinions on politics and questions of the day, a thoughtful, resolute, true-hearted woman, who farms a

hundred acres of land without a bailiff, and among other evidences of her good taste and intelligence, is a diligent reader of the Spectator."

Dr. Jessopp's book is desultory in character. He flits from his trials as a country parson (one of which, treated very pleasantly, is the inability to visit America) to the perilous risk our churches run from the zeal of ignorant restorers. On

this subject, which is a trial to him as a man, if not as a parson, he writes with a point and force that should command attention. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has had no warmer advocate. Our old churches are growths which bear the mark of different ages and different styles ; and which of these, the author asks, will the restorer choose,—the Norman, the Early English, the Deco- rated, or the Perpendicular church ? There are several thousand churches in England that stand upon the same foundations that they stood upon five hundred years ago, and some standing as they were left eight hundred years ago.

Dr. Jessopp confesses that he really does not know to whom these invaluable old buildings belong. "By the abolition of church-rates," he says," the church practically ceased to belong to any one." This matter of ownership is of little conse- quence until the question of restoration arises, and then "practically the ownership is surrendered to the parson in the frankest and the freest and the most generous way by the whole body of the parishioners." But the clergy as a body know as little about the history of Church architecture as lawyers know about theology ; and Dr. Jessopp observes that he could not put the case more strongly than that. The peril arising from such ignorance is obvious. An incompetent architect, or a still more incompetent builder, may be selected for the task of restoration ; and when his work is done, a great national monument has been deformed for ever. The writer argues that "the public at large have a claim to be heard" before these venerable buildings are dealt with as if they were the private property of individuals or a handful of worthy persons inhabiting a minute geographical area ; and he suggests—what, indeed, seems the obvious and only practical course—that they should be vested in a body of trustees responsible for them to the nation. Any altera- tion made without authority would' then be a penal offence.

The public attention, after long years of apathy, is now aroused to this subject, and one may hope that ere long the reckless restorer of our churches will be as extinct an animal as the megatherium.

Dr. Jessopp's chapter on "The Church and the Villages" will well repay perusal. He sees very strongly the necessity of reform in Church organisation, and writes with a force and

clearness worthy of Sidney Smith on the confiscation schemes of men whose aim is not to reform but to destroy. His own views of Church reform are sufficiently broad. He would open the House of Commons to the clergy, and remove Bishops from the House of Lords, for he "cannot see how any director or overseer of any corporation, or indeed of any department of the State, should be made a Peer of the realm by virtue of his holding office." He would abolish "that. preposterous antiquarian curiosity, the Parson's Freehold," which makes a beneficed clergyman tenant for life of a real estate, from which only by an act of his own can he be re- moved. "I am myself," he writes, "the patron of a benefice from which the late rector was non-resident for fifty-three years. Is it at all conceivable that we should continue to keep up this condition of affairs under which we have been living so long?" And he adds :—" I know no more splendid testi- mony to the high and honourable character of the English clergy than that which would be wrung from their worst enemies, who should fairly consider what the law of the land would allow of their being, if they were so disposed—and what in fact they are."

Dr. Jessopp's many suggestions for effective Church reform have that measure of vitality in them which invites discus- sion, and the time is ripe for it. The book should be welcome to a large class of readers.