BAG v. PLATE.
WE do not know a more puzzling contest, in a small way, than that which rages in half the parishes of England between the Bag and the Plato. It has become customary, for one reason or another, in English parishes, to ask church-goers for a great deal of money, to be used for church repairs, assist- ance to the poor, payment of the expenses of service, and in a few instances, chiefly in towns, for augmentation of the curate's, and even of the incumbent's, stipend. Sometimes the plan adopted is house-to-house collection—at least that is the London way of getting the" Easter offerings "—and sometimes special services are held avowedly for "collections ;" but the most regular and, we believe, effective system is to collect the free- will offeriugs of the people in church every Sunday during service. The house-to-house visitation is inconvenient, and gives too much opportunity to swindlers. The advertisement of a. special collection-service sometimes developes severe colds among the congregation, and always elicits irritable com- ments ; while the regular request for some small gift made by the verger during the reading of the Offertory sentences gradually comes to be regarded as part of the service, and creates neither annoyance nor opposition. The " collection," there- fore, is becoming as usual in this country as in New England, where, they say, a boatman in immediate danger of drowning, finding that his comrade could uot pray and had never learned a hymn, remarked that nevertheless they ought, with their souls in that peril, to do "something religious," and suggested a collection. There is, however, always a minor difficulty to be settled. Ought the benefactions asked for to be given publicly, or privately P That is, in practice, ought the verger to hand the visitors a deep hag, into which anything can be dropped and remain invisible ; or an open plate, on which every coin bestowed always stands out, with a definiteness of self-assertion and a clearness as to its own value which coins in any other situation seem to lack ? A half- crown may look like a, florin on a counter, or be mistaken by a railway clerk, but it never looks anything but half five shillings on a collection-plate, or in a verger's eyes. The clergy, there- fore, if they know human nature, and especially English nature, are always in favour of the plate. They say that if there is a plate, average people give shillings, or, at worst, sixpences; and if there is a bag, the bag is always overflowing with silver three- pennies, which, as one clergyman wrote to the Times, are even specially collected for the services,--a practice we should have thought confined to seine one parish, but that we see a writer in Sheffield mentions a clergyman who used to baffle it by collect- ing the shopkeepers' threepeunies himself. [By the way, what an odd little arree, that is into the English middle-class mind ! The very man who takes trouble and. loses time in order to get the smallest silver coin, and, as it were, do the Church out of threepence, cannot bring himself to give a copper, and have done with it. 'The copper would be beneath him.] And the clergy are, no doubt, in the right. The English are the most generous people in the world, the only people, except the Americans, who subscribe largely, or who will give away money without a return of some sort, and they are shocked if they pass a collection- plate without a contribution ; but they are wanting in simplicity, and cannot forget that neighbours may see what they give, and think they gave too little. They have not the nerve, if rich, to stand on their own judgment as to what they ought to give ; and if poor, they are shamefaced about acknowledging their poverty, as ttey think, before the whole congregation. They, therefore, if the plate is held to them, give sixpences at least, and the clergy, who want the benefactions to be liberal, consequently encourage the plates. The congregation, however, like the bags best, as setting them free from observation ; and a feeling has grown up that it is somehow a little immoral to have a plate, as encouraging ostentation in the House of God. The people, say the objectors to the plate, are taxed, not asked to give, when the benefactions are seen, and all the grace and most of the righteousness is taken away from the gift. Every- body gives, out of the fear of man, as represented by the sharp eyes of the sitters around him. So strong is the feeling, that we know parishes where both bag and plate tire handed round ; and our excellent correspondent, Mr. Harper, who every now and then elects himself to the post of supplementary conscience to the Spectator, is quite vexed with us, on high moral grounds, for defending the plate in a paragraph last week. He says : —" Obvious as it is, still the remark, I think, might to be offered upon your plate instead of the bag' plan for turning offertory threepennies into sixpennies, relying npon the power of the eye of somebody likely to appreciate,' that its omission of the eye and appreciation of Him which seeth in secret,' seems scarcely Spectator-like, especially in such subject-matter." We are not quite sure that be is wrong, though he has not included in his consideration one very important argument. Is it well to encourage the kind of moral weakness which. is revealed by this fancy of congregations for putting their con- tributions in a bag? Should they not rather be taught, in church at all events, to be a little more true to themselves, and a little less afraid of their neighbours, and to do what they think right to do, even if the consequence should be, what we suspect it seldom is,—a half-satirical smile from somebody who has no right to have an opinion about the matter. This root-weakness in the English character is cosseted a great deal too much, and might beneficially be braced a little in church, particularly as the bracing process produces positive good. Christianity was not intended for sensitive respectables only. However, on the whole, we must allow that the balance of right is with Mr. Harper ; that a gift, if it is to be a gift, should be voluntary, in the eye of God, and not of man ; and that as in our rather absurd social system the plate deprives gifts of their voluntary character, the bag is, on moral grounds, more defen- sible than the plate. It tempts ostentatious fools a good deal— at least we have heard of blank cheques being found in church bags—but nothing can care them.
While we are on this subject, in itself almost infinitely small, but interesting to an extraordinary number of parishes, we may fairly add an observation on the inexplicable meanness of English Churchmen about small payments to the church. They are not mean about most things, but they seem to resent very insignificant demands on Church account as they resent no other demand, and as Nonconformists do not. They are right on one or two points. The English habit of levying an offertory before the communion, a gift which is not in social practice voluntary, is utterly bad in principle, and, so, but that it is unavoidable, would be the differ- ence of grade among worshippers established by the charge for sittings. A man ought to be able to attend church without subjecting himself to a humiliation, or an expenditure he cannot afford. But the indisposition to give small gifts, all of which are more or less voluntary, is very singular, unless, indeed, it arises from a feeling that an Established Church ought not to need contributions. A shilling a week is only LI 12s. a year, but no payment of that amount is made with so much bitterness or remark. People who gave double the money to a church-rate, and fought for the rate besides, grow quite angry over the weekly necessity of giving the bit of silver, which they would perhaps next day waste in over-payment for a hardly wanted cab. The stinginess does not quite rise to the Far-West point, where a minister has been known to return thanks that his hat had come back to him safe, if empty ; but it is very acute, too. We have never heard a satis- factory explanation of this reluctance, but of its exist- ence there can be no doubt whatever. It can be brought to a most sharp and decisive test. Let a box for the contributions be placed on every door of exit and entrance iu the church, and the parish will get next to nothing ; and if one were placed inside every pew-door, very little indeed. The boxes are notoriously so useless, that we have seen collection-plates held out under them, and they are seldom put up in new churches. The fact, which materially affects parochial arrangements, is an isolated one, quite curiously out of keeping with English character, and we confess we can offer no suggestion in explanation, except one we once heard from an American, and that explains nothing:—" The English," he said, "ain't mean by nature, but they are by cultivation. They will give freely enough, but they will borrow a shilling magazine, quarrel with cabby for sixpence, swear when their children want postage-stamps, and put bright farthings for sovereigns into a collection-bag." "And," ho said, as the climax of bewilderment, "it is the rich who do it,"—which is true, and the greatest puzzle of it all.
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