CLERGYMEN IN PARLIAMENT.
MR. GOLDNEY'S very humble little Bill, allowing clergy- men without benefices to take their seats in Parliament if electors choose to send them there, was thrown out in the House of Commons on Wednesday by a majority of 135 tb 66, but the decision thus given is by no means final. The Member for Chippenham, or rather a bolder successor, must succeed in the end. There is absolutely no logical reason for the exclu- sion of clergymen from the House of Commons, while there is a strong reason, which no one has brought forward, but which we will presently give, for their admittance. The old argu- ments for exclusion have lost, in the progress of opinion, almost all their force. No one now-a-days believes that Convoca- tion possesses any taxing-power, or will ever again regain it ; and the clergy, who fulfil all the duties of citizens, who are magistrates and electors, and even play their own definite part in military organisation, are unfairly disabled from a right conceded to every other order of Protestants except—and that exception is a gross injustice—the little group of eminent persons who happen to be Scotch Peers without being Peers of Parliament. Dissenting preachers may sit in the House of Commons in any number—three, we believe, do now sit there—and one within living memory, Mr. Fox, of Oldham, rose to a position of great influence in the House. Nobody, again, will argue that the Clergy are sufficiently repre- sented by the Bishops with seats in the tipper House. They are not represented by them at all, as the Church acknowledges, in England by the organisation of Convocation, and in Ireland in the arrangements for the governing Synod. They do not elect the Bishops, they are frequently at war with them, and they have interests to defend with which those of the Episcopate are often directly at variance. Moreover, as the House of Commons has by degrees absorbed all substantial power,repre. sentation in the Lords no longer suffices for any class of men; and clergymen are no more represented effectively by Bishops, than barristers and solicitors by the Law Lords. The exclu- sion would be as fair in one case as another. And finally, no- body now argues, unless it be Sir W. Edmonstone or some ecclesiastically minded laymen more timid for the clergy than they are for themselves, that the " sanctity" of the Clerical order would be injured by their taking part in Par- liamentary debate. The sanctity of the Bishops is not injured, though by a preposterous custom, which we hope some prelate will soon have the nerve to break through, they usually abstain from debate upon "secular" subjects, so acknowledging, in the teeth of their own convictions, that there can be questions of politics which have no moral side. Out- side Parliament, the Clergy take part in all debates and in all discussions, from meetings on the Afghan war to meet- ings on the shocking price of scrubbing-brushes, without any derogation from their clerical character,—and why not in Par- liament also ? The House of Commons is perhaps the most respectable of our Public Meetings. The Church has no canon- ical objection, which is raised on that side by lay sacerdotalists, not clerical advocates of sacerdotalism. Sir W. Edmonstone is shocked to think of a clergyman administering the Sacra- ments one day, and taking part in a debate the next ; but he is not shocked because a clergyman performs the rites for the dying in the morning, and in the afternoon sees that the muck is properly carted on to the glebe. To us, it seems that the clergy- man who on Sunday distributes the Communion, would be on Monday all the better qualified to raise his voice against unjust wars, unholy jobs, and the dominance of men who think massacres of Christians subjects for a jeer. Rome, which avowedly tries to make of her clergy a separate caste, has never prohibited them from taking part in debate, and in most of the Catholic countries of the Continent, while Cardinals and Bishops sit in the Senates, a priest or two is regularly returned among the Members of the Lower House. That, it is said, is one of the latent objections to the scheme. Catholic priests, now excluded by a law which differentiates them from other Nonconformists, might be re- turned for Irish constituencies. Well, why not ? We had much rather hear Father Daly himself in the House of Commons than Father Daly's nominees, and should distinctly gain if any Catholic prelate were elected dignified enough to tell us authoritatively what his Church, in the matter of educa- tion, really required. Nothing would enlighten Dr. McHale like a Session passed in the atmosphere of the House of 'Commons. Why keep out any force, or any information, or any influence acknowledged by the law and respected by the conscience ? We shall be told that we keep out women ; but the objection is, as regards the Spectator, futile, for we have always contended that while it is essential for Government and physical force to remain in permanent accord, and therefore to refuse the vote to women, with their immense majority in the country, it would be wise to admit into the Rouse any woman whom a male constituency deliberately pre- ferred.
We see no reason whatever for refusing to electors their choice in this matter. They have no dangerous preference for clergymen. Nine-tenths of them think of the clergy as very good people, quite to be trusted on moral and theologi- cal questions, but entirely incompetent to deal with any matter of human or secular importance. Their ignorance of business and of mankind is a country proverb. The clergyman strong enough to defeat that prejudice, and convince a district or a borough that he would make a good representative, would probably be a distinct addition to the fund of intellectual strength within the House, where there is never too much, and whence some people believe that what with " geronto- cracy and plutocracy," the rule of the senile and the rule of the millionaires, intellect threatens to disappear altogether. The brawling clergyman, the Horne Tooke of our day, has no hold over the people, unless he is a Dissenter, in which case he may sit ; and the popular preacher, though he has a hold, would lose it by entering the political arena. We do not see that any borough, be it never so full of Dissent, invites Mr. Spurgeon to represent it ; and do notice that Wesleyans, with all their instinct for business, confide in Mr. Waddy rather than any member of the "Legal Hundred." Scotland does not, that we know of, return one Free-Church minister, nor Ireland one minister of the Disestablished Church. The clergyman who attracted a district would usually be of the organising type, the man who can make a dozen quarrelsome or susceptible Committees accept his guidance ; and if anybody is wanted in Parliament, he is. What is the sense of a system which says that if Dr. Magee pleases Lord Beaconsfield he shall sit in Parliament, but if not, his oratory shall be lost to debate ; and while qualifying Mr. Gladstone to return Dr. Fraser by giving him a See, disables Manchester from doing so? Which do the Sir W. Edmonstones of the House really wish to see in Parliament, Canon Girdlestone, or Mr. Arch ?—who is a preacher, too—or how is it their interest, of all men, to let in Mr. Mitchell and keep out Dr. Ellicott ? Conservatives never know their busi- ness, or they would long since have enabled Irish Peers to stand for Irish boroughs, as the bitterest of all pills for Irish Radicals ; but the exclusion of the Clergy from Conservative feeling, is a little too ridiculous.
These, however, are not our main motives for advocating the removal of this disability. We maintain, and think we see, that if the Church of England is to stand, some power of internal legislation, some right to bring its creeds and for- mulas and ceremonials up to the level of the modern world, must at last be conceded to it ; and for this purpose, it needs the aid of clerical statesmen, of men who understand thoroughly what both laymen and clergymen think. A Church which can do nothing is a dying Church, and before the Church of England dies, this measure of freedom will be conceded to it. The alternatives are a reformed Convocation, with a powerful lay element, or Disestablishment ; and it is well before either is proposed, that Churchmen should know who are their strong clergymen for active work, who can debate and manage and understand the laity, who, in fact, are fit for ecclesiastical legislation. They could discover this more fully through the presence of a few clergymen in Parliament, than in any other way ; while the clergy returned would undergo the very best training for their future work,— would have their tempers tried by opposition, and their judg- ments cooled by unexpected difficulties, and their arrogance tamed down by the laughter of an unsympathising assembly. There would be no cure like Parliament for the grand defect which clergymen betray in active life, their inability to under- stand the laity, and no contrivance so effectual to lead to the reconciliation which must be effected, if organisation is to be maintained at all, and everybody is not to carry his Church under his own hat. If the electors would not choose any clergymen, which, judging from the experience of the Nonconformist Churches, especially in Scotland, is very probable, no harm would be done ; while if they did send up a few, we should gradually obtain a few men who, while affording to the Commons the immense advantages of direct information as to the feelings, wishes, and interests of a powerful class, would gradually be qualified for work for which at present they have no training, and no rireans of obtaining one. Rome has suffered bitterly from the loss of the old Prince-Bishoprics, in which her great men once learned to govern ; and the Church of England lacks no faculty so com- pletely as that of modern statesmanship, the statesmanship which proposes and carries everything, but decrees nothing, and defends proposals not by an appeal to authority, or even to an inner conviction, but to common-sense and the obvious convenience of the great majority. The men she needs most are best made in Parliamentary strife, and to debar electors from their free choice in fear lest a clerical representative or two should speak too loud or too often, is, for the clergy a blunder, and for the laity an exhibition of rather effeminate fear.
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