CLERGYMEN PAST WORK.
[To THE EDITOR OP Iii. " SPECTATOR,") Si,—Your suggestion of a clerical pension fund is better, .f.hink, than the charge on resigned benefices provided by the
1), ces Resignation Act, which hardly works well. Only your. lien can safely accept livings subject to a heavy life annuity, and middle-aged men are often obliged to decline offers thus weighted.
But your proposal as to the sources from which such a pen- sion fund might be derived implies either the continuance of the supply—which I believe to be visibly and rapidly failing— of clergymen with private means, in other words, of academical clergy ; or else the recruiting of the ranks of incumbents with celibates, or with (so-called) literates. It may be true that the aggregate income of the English dignities and benefices is greater than in any other existing Church, but not the less is it true that social opinion requires more from their holders than in the case in any other Church, or than has been the case at any former period in our own. The clergyman to whom your article refers—a Demy of Magdalen, who took a second-class in 1816—has held his vicarage (1831) for nearly fifty (not thirty) years. In his earlier life, the pluralists represented to the public mind the well-beneficed parochial clergy. The curates-in- charge, who did the work, were out of sight. The living of Harlow is a true "vicarage," i.e., there are alienated great- tithes, and that to a very large amount. It is not evident by whom they are received.—I am, Sir, &c., A COUNTRY RECTOR.
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