LORD HARTINGTON ON CHURCH EXTENSION. A MONG the adversities with which
good men have to struggle, one of the chief is unfamiliar labour. Probably Lord Hartington would rather have made twenty long speeches about Home-rule than the one short speech. on Church extension which he made at Derby this day week. But in Derbyshire Lord Hartington is more than a statesman, or a Member of Parliament, or a Prime Minister presumptive. He is an integral part of a great county institution,—an institution so great, that we ought perhaps to have written it with a big " I." He is the eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire, the future head of the house- of Cavendish. To every man in such a position as his, Church, extension is like death. It cometh soon or late. And so Lord Hartington braced himself to the inevitable, and took the chair as his father's representative at the meeting of the Derbyshire Church Extension Society. It is not easy at once to feel interested in such an object. For the benefits of Church extension are more real than obvious. In each, given case where a new church is built, the immediate good is a little problematical. It is so because the chief value of an additional church is that it secures and necessitates the supply of additional clergy. Consequently, its usefulness mainly depends on the character of these addi- tional clergy. If a new church falls into bad hands, if the incumbent is indolent or careless, or only interested in secular things, the benefit is a deferred benefit. The oppor- tunity for good has been created, but it will remain un- fruitful until he makes way for a successor, or takes a new view of his duty. And even where the clergy are all that one would have them, the good they do may not be visible to a superficial observer. Such an observer will be disposed to think that their principal function is to maintain services on Sunday for a certain number of people who, if the church had not been there, would either have gone to one further off, or not have been greatly the worse for staying at home. The real influences at work escape his notice. He does not remember the steady, if slow, improvement that is wrought by the presence of at least one man in a parish whose single object is the good, in the largest and most comprehensive sense, of the people among whom he lives. Really this influence is beneficial beyond calculation ; but to bring its effects vividly before the mind, the dry bones of church-building statistics must be made to live by imagination and enthusiasm. Those who best understand what may be done by single-eyed, eager, and resolute clergymen, will be most anxious to see the supply of them increased. New churches are then sure to be so many new centres of excellent work. It is well to build them, because they are like nests to which the birds are sure to come.
These reflections a little resemble Disraeli's enumeration of the reasons which were not those that led. Lord George Bentinck to vote for the Jewish Emancipation Bill, for Lord Harlington wisely confined himself to the secular side of his subject. Indeed, a large part of his Speech was directed to making this limitation plain. First he put aside the Church as a society appealing to men of deep religious convictions. Then he put aside the Church as charged with the spiritual interests of its members. Finally, he addressed himself exclusively to the Church as a great educational and civilising agency. He took the lowest view of it, but he was able to show that even in this respect the peculiar position of the Church of England makes it the duty of its members to interest themselves in Church extension. That peculiar position is this. The Church of England has accepted and still retains State endowments, and this acceptance and retention throws upon her a responsibility over and above the responsibility of making a good use of them. She is bound to provide moral and religious instruction for the whole population, so far as it is not provided from other sources. The ministrations of the Dissenting Churches are, in the first instance, addressed to people who are able to pay for them or willing to pay for them. The religious bodies in question may, and often do, go beyond this limit. Their work is not exclusively confined to their own members. As Lord Harlington pointed out, it is to a great extent of a thoroughly. missionary and catholic character. But, at the same• time, it . does not cease to be voluntary work. It is work which the State has no right to ask of them. With the Church of. England it is different. She holds her endowments on the under- standing that she shall minister, not merely to that portion of the population which can afford to pay, or is willing to pay, for the services she renders, but to that portion of the population which is too poor or too indifferent to pay for those services. From Lord Hartington's point of view, it would be no answer to a charge of neglect to render these services, that the endowments of which the Church has the usufruct are exhausted. The Church must not say : I have so much money allotted to me, and this will go so far, but no further.' She holds her endow- ments on a different tenure from this,—on the tenure of supplementing them wherever and whenever they need to be supplemented. She has undertaken the care of the whole people of England, so far as they have not volun- tarily placed themselves under the care of other religious communities. Consequently, when new needs arise which the endowments are not adequate to meet, it becomes the duty of her members to meet those needs. That is the implied condition on which the endowments are held. I have given you '—so the State may be supposed to say- ' the means of meeting the religious wants of the community as those wants were, say, fifty years ago. You in return Must be responsible for meeting the new wants that have arisen since that time.'
There is a school of Churchmen who will be disposed to challenge this account of the facts. They will deny the implied condition ; they will ask for some proof that . it was ever accepted by the Church ; they will main- tain that if the State wants more from the Church than her endowments enable her to give, it is for the State to make those endowments larger. Our reply to these objections is simply this. The account we have given may not be capable of historical proof. Nothing. indeed, may have really happened that at all . corresponds to it. But it expresses with sufficient accuracy the principle that now underlies any establishment and endowment of religion. The reason why the Church of England is maintained in her present wealth and dignity, is because the majority of Englishmen believe that she is a great educational and civilising agency, an agency coex- tensive with the population, an agency pledged to minister to that population, no matter what may be its numerical or territorial extent. It may be possible, for anything we know to the contrary, to disabuse Englishmen of this idea ; to teach them to regard the Church as responsible for the proper use of her endowments, and for nothing more ; to convince them that if the population grows beyond the present ability of the Church to cope with, it is the State that must provide the additional educational and civilising agencies required. But of one thing we are quite sure. If Englishmen are brought to look at the Established Church in this light, it will not long remain established. It will have ceased to play the part the majority of Englishmen are accustomed to assign to it, and they will speedily ask themselves whether it is worth while to let it retain the smaller and less important part it has chosen to take to itself, whether, in fact, the State would not do better to resume ecclesiastical endowments and provide educational and civilising agencies of another kind. As we look at the matter, therefore, Lord Harlington is quite right in regarding Church extension less as a voluntary offering on the part of Churchmen, than as a price paid for the reten- tion of great means and great opportunities of doing her proper work. No doubt it is a less agreeable way of stating the case. Nobody likes to have benevolence made a matter of obligation, to find that, in the matter of endowments, the State is acting on Prince Bismarck's principle, Do ut des. But if that is the principle on which the State acts, it is well that Churchmen should know it. If they were to remain in ignorance of it, the end might be that they would find themselves reduced to making their voluntary offerings take the place of endowments, instead of merely supplementing them.
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