CLERICAL DELINQUENCIES.
Ir the members of the educated professions are not more virtuous now-a-days than they used to be, they are at least more decorous. The raffish Templar, Life-Guardsman, and medical practitioner, the wits of Queen Anne's or King Charles's time, have either disap- peared, or are rarely met with, and thought bad ton. One class of educated professionals alone does not appear to have advanced with the age. To judge by the records of criminal and civil courts and police-offices, the moral tone of the clergy as a body has not improved since Swift and Fielding painted the chaplains and rural churchmen of their age for the edification of posterity. Cases of flagrant depravity—crim. con., gross assaults, and the like—are exceptional, and attract more attention because the guilty parties are clergymen ; but it is the lamentable frequency of those minor offences, verging upon swindling, of which the po- lice takes cognizance—cases like that of the Reverend James West, charged this week at Lambeth with illegally pawning goods from a furnished lodging—that renders the clergy suspected of a lower moral tone than the .members of any other gentle- manly profession. This remark applies to the clergy of the Establishment, not to the Dissenters, among whom, from the liberality with which the public accords the ministerial character to any one who chooses to take it up at his own hand, the excess would have been less surprising. Real friends of the Church might find the reform of this gross scandal a matter more worthy of their attention than the resusci- tation of the Offertory, or the canonical strictness in the wearing of black and white gowns. A church may survive though slight irregularities in the ritual service or negligence in apparel may have been allowed to creep in : but no church ever tolerated in its clergy a conventional tone of morality, lower than that which prevailed among other educated classes, without endanger- ing its stability. Yet the clerical is of all the learned professions that which is most liable to lag in the rear of the age's morality. The clergy are in a greater degree than any of the other profes- sions mere literary men ; their character is less formed and braced by action ; they are, under all circumstances of society, apt to contract indolent passive habits—to acquire a will which is guided by impressions from without, by events and associates. The peculiar character of the English Universities increases the risk for the Anglican clergy. The only preferment open to an University-man is in the Church : all the more robust and stirring spirits leave college as soon as possible, and repair to more stirring scenes ; and inferior minds take orders less from a love of the profession than because it is the only means open to them to earn a livelihood. The staple material of University dons is decorous mediocrity. The young clergyman has no opportunity of imbibing the contagious spirit of activity from the companionship of contemporaries looking forward to a civil career. Intellectual mediocrity is coupled with literary indolence. Self- indulgent, and a bad manager, he passes from college to a parish, where he is thrown upon his own resources. His heart is not in his business ; and, from sheer want of occupation, he is apt, if of a timid character, to sink into secret sensuality—if of a more reckless disposition, to run riot in dissipation ; which conducts to debt, and debt to dishonesty. The esprit de corps leads even the better class of minds to palliate the vices of their brethren, which they seek to conceal, and to adopt a low estimate of human capa- city for virtue. It will not be easy to check an evil which has its principal source as it were in the very nature of the profes- sion. Men set apart for contemplation and the guidance of others are destined to a task almost above human powers. .Action, which leaves no time for reflection, banishes thoughts which con- templative men can scarcely banish, but which it allowed to re- main in the mind are almost certain to corrupt it. In a secluded life, men indulge in habits of which they would be ashamed in society. These considerations would seem to suggest, that the claieal
character might be elevated if clergymen were obliged to mingle more freely with secular men, especially during; that most trying period when "men are growing out of boys," devoted to strictly professional studies. In other words, by remodelling our Univer- sities, so that the future clergyman should be forced into intimate contact with the future lawyer, physician, diplomatist, engineer, or soldier, the churchman's code of conventional morality might be raised to the same level as that of other educated professions.
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