THE CHURCH AND THE PARISH COUNCILS BILL, In regard to
parish schools and parish rooms there can, we think, be no doubt whatever as to the intention of the Government. They have invariably treated the Parish Councils Bill as in principle a non-contentious measure. Like all Bills of the kind, it may be found to need consider- able amendment in detail ; but Ministers have all along assumed, and assumed with the general consent of the Conservative Party, that it gives no occasion for a second- reading opposition. It is inconceivable that they should have taken this line if they had meant the Bill to mask a destructive assault upon denominational schools. They must have known perfectly well that even the fringe of this question cannot be touched, without letting loose an amount of theological passion which makes the notion of the measure which has this effect being non-contentious a patent absurdity. They must have known, further, that to subject Church schools to the control of the ratepayers, without compensation and without conditions, would be an act of high-handed confiscation. These schools are, to all intents and purposes, private property. They have, for the most part, been built by Churchmen ; they have received nothing from the State except in return for ample value given. One Liberal Minister after another has recognised this fact,—sometimes perhaps grudgingly, but more often frankly, and even generously. Even that section of Liberals which is opposed to Denominational Education has never proposed anything more stringent than the withdrawal of Government grants from voluntary schools. Yet now, without warning, and under cover of a Bill directed to quite different objects, a large number of Church schools are, on this interpretation of the Bill, to be practically made over to the ratepayers. We say " a large number of Church schools " because this confiscation would not be even consistent and uniform. The Bill, if this were its meaning, would not affect all Church schools. It would only touch those in which, by the trust-deed, the Churchwardens of the parish were as officio members of the Board of Management. The con- fiscation of Church schools would be brought about, not by a general scheme with a defined object, but by the accident that their founders had included particular officials among the managers. Is it, we ask, to be sup- posed for a moment that a Cabinet of which Mr. Gladstone is the chief ; which has on hand quite as much contentious legislation as it can reasonably desire ; which has declared by the mouth of the Lord President of the Council that it wishes well to voluntary schools, and is anxious to deal fairly by them,--is it to be supposed that such a Cabinet would, in the case of a Bill which it is very much to their interest to pass, deliberately provoke a bitter and most obstinate resistance, in which regard for the simplest rights of property would be fortified by the addition of religious feeling ? The case of parish rooms is in some respects even stronger. Their confiscation, indeed, would do less harm to the Church, and so far excite less opposition ; but, on the charity to Churchmen. As he did not do this, it is , the other hand, it would lack even those feeble excuses not unreasonable to assume that had he been living now which would be set up in behalf of a similar treatment of he would himself transfer his bounty into the hands of parish schools. Parish rooms have had no help from the persons who will in future represent the parish. We building grants ; they have had no association of any do not wonder at the irritation which this and some other kind with Parliament or with a Government Department ; provisions have caused to some of the clergy ; but we can ■ they are as absolutely private property as a theatre. not share it. Still less can we sympathise with them in One or more benevolent persons . have thought that reference to the lesser wrongs of which they complain. the Church in a particular parish would be the Parochial disestablishment does not seem to us a news- better for having a room in which meetings for religious sarily mischievous process. On the contrary, it may be or social purposes could be held, and have found the simply the retirement from an outwork which is fast money for building it. We do not ourselves believe that becoming untenable, and so be done in obedience to those such rooms so built can come under the description of " a strategical rules which govern ecclesiastical in commot parochial charity not being an Ecclesiastical charity." with all other warfare. But still less do we believe that the Government intended them to come under this description. We do not mean, however, to imply that Churchmen ought not to be active THE VALUE OF OBSERVANCES. in insisting that the meaning of the clauses in questionWE are by no means surprised that the Jews are dispose& should be cleared up beyond the possibility of mistake. to treat the accusation of cruelty in their way of It is not always easy to get an amending Bill passed, and killing animals for food as a new mode of persecution. It is in the absence of such a Bill it is quite possible that the extremely improbable that the people of Switzerland cared Act might prove to have a meaning which its authors two straws how the Jews prepared calves for eating, or never intended it to bear. Highly competent lawyers believed that pole-axing was so much more merciful a way of are of opinion that the Bill, as it stands, does touch both parish schools (where the churchwardens are ex officio managers) and parish rooms ; and though equally competent lawyers may doubtless be quoted in support of the contrary view, no one can say with which of the two conflicting interpretations the Judges would eventually agree. They might be of opinion that the slaying animals to a Referendum, and carried it, too, by words of the Act were too clear to give any room for a heavy popular vote. The obvious inference is the Jewish ' consideration of the intention of its authors, and the one,—that the Swiss people desired to expel the Jews, and Church might find herself poorer by her schools and her took this method of intimating that their presence in Swiss parish rooms, and with no prospect of recovering them, cities had become disagreeable. Nor are we quite sure except by the slow and doubtful expedient of subsequent that the recent prosecutions in Aberdeen were entirely die- legislation. At the Church Congress it was suggested that tated by motives of humanity. The Scotch do not love the a deputation should wait upon Mr. Fowler, and obtain from Jews, being much too like them, and can hardly have con- him an authoritative declaration of what he means the sidered them inhuman when they themselves kill pigs is Bill to do, and a promise to insert whatever explanatory almost exactly the same way, and fowls, unless they have words may be found necessary to place that meaning some practice different from the English, in a way far more beyond the reach of doubt. That is a very good way of cruel. It is quite true that we are none of us, Jews or Chris- meeting the difficulty, and we hope that it will be shortly tians, half solicitous enough to avoid needless suffering to the adopted. animals we must put to death ; but it is a little invidious to There remains that more vague dislike of the Bill, fix upon the Jews as the first objects of what ought to be the which finds expression in such phrases as " parochial subject of a general law. It is extremely doubtful if their disestablishment." There are some incumbents who do system is the most cruel. Professor Virchow, who is the first not like the supersession of the Vestry by the Parish of living physiologists, says it is not; while it is not doubtful Council, or their own deprivation of all purely civil that the motive for their practice is entirely untainted functions in the parish, except so far as they can win the with cruelty or even recklessness about animal suffering. confidence of their parishioners, and induce them to elect They believe they are obeying a direct divine command, in them as one of their representatives. They feel that they have not deserved to be ousted from the chairmanship at presence of which, if it could be proved, the accusation of parish meetings, and from the official honours they have cruelty would be futile ; while they are undoubtedly follow- hitherto enjoyed. They have, on the whole, done their ing a tradition of three thousand years, which makes them work well, and they have done it when there was really no think that method of inflicting death not only reasonable one else to do it, and when, but for them, it would have and right, but the only right and reasonable method to pur- gone undone. Of these official honours there is one to sue. As a people, the Jews are far from inhuman, either to" which some of them cling with special tenacity. There are beasts or to each other, though they share, naturally enough, a, number of charities of which the incumbent and church- the feelings of each land in which they dwell, and are not wardens are charged with the distribution. These charities, in Italy or Spain, or perhaps Switzerland, so kindly as the they contend, ought to be treated as ecclesiastical charities, ecclesiastical charity is to our thinking a charity de- since the third Temple was destroyed, with the abolition of the daily sacrifice. They could wait for the restoration of the voted to ecclesiastical objects, not a charity administered by ecclesiastical persons. The incumbent and church- one custom, as they wait for the other; and the habit of so wardens of a parish have no natural right to superb- waiting and eating " Kosher" meat, for example, on one day increase the convenience and freedom of their lives. The persons to undertake it,—they may also be the worst ; but in either case they will be so in right of their personal, observance must to a majority of them be a horrid nuisance. not of their official qualifications. The contention that It binds those whom they themselves call " the observant," to When a man in the last century made the incumbent andthey diminish the churchwardens the trustees of a charity, he took the people must considerably increase the costliness or otherwise, he would. naturally have limited the benefit of
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