THE POVERTY OF THE AMERICAN CLERGY.
THE bitter cry of an underpaid priesthood does not seem to be confined to England or to the clergy of the Established Church. American ministers, who are paid for the most part upon the system described here as that of Non- conformists, are beginning to complain that they find their position a hard one to endure. The clergy of the rural dis- tricts, who form, of course, the immense majority in America, have always been poor, singularly poor considering the reverence of Puritans for the profession, and they are now either worse paid than of old, or they have become more conscious of their insufficient payment. They begin to murmur audibly, they dissuade candidates from seeking to enter the profession, and they discuss radical remedies, with as little result as any curates in the Anglican com- munion. They have, we fear, too much reason. Whether, as is often alleged, there is any decline of desire for their ministrations we are unable to decide, though observers draw sad sketches of districts, both East and West, in which the very attempt to maintain churches would seem to have been abandoned; but the freehold farmers, pressed by falling prices, are more and more reluctant to subscribe with anything like adequate liberality. They economise in every direction, and one of their first economies is in their ministers' stipends. They have always, as we understand the accounts we read, been exceedingly jealous of raising the pastors to a position above their own, fearing, they say in excuse, lest difference in worldly circumstances should involve a diminution of sym- pathy, and they are just now reluctant to pay even the few dollars which they agree are essential to decent maintenance. They try, too, many. of them, to pay by con- tributiona in kind, the collection of cash becomes almost unbearably difficult, and the unlucky rural ministers, who want a little more than food for their families, are re- duced to humiliating straits. They find it nearly impossible to exchange their livings, they complain and complain without redress, and if they threaten to resign, they see very young men elected who are content to serve practically for any little they can pick up, or in some instances for nothing. Hampered with wives and children, unable or unwilling to abandon their profession, and in many cases full of a spirit of self- sacrifice, they struggle on, providing for their houses like labourers in Europe, and fretting first of all over their difficulty in procuring professional education for their children, or any kind of liberty or comfort. The result is a tone of angry resignation which impairs their useful- ness, a cleavage between pastors and flocks which renders cordiality impossible, and in too many instances a sub- missiveness towards the few who are well off which threatens grievously their ministerial independence. There are, of course, hundreds, possibly thousands, of exceptions, but out- side the cities we are assured this description is too generally correct, with the result that the clerical office is every year more avoided by those who feel in themselves any promptings of ambition, or any overplus of energy, and the work falls more and more into the hands either of those who are con- tent with a narrow and laborious but quiet life, or of men who, with much zeal and little culture, would in Europe be described as a peasant clergy, with all the defects and some of the merits of that very separate and peculiar class. The literature which they themselves produce is full of their repininge, and, if we may say so, of their inner rage, and unless we are deceived by some descriptions we have recently read, they are beginning to feel an almost savage dislike for the system under which they are chosen, and maintained, and in too many instances
oppressed, more especially by that spirit of minute espionage and criticism which seems to be the curse of American villages, wherein a sort of education is universal, but broad or general interests are extremely few, so that all
eyes fix unceasingly upon the drama of the life around them. This spirit is bad enough in Scotland, as it would be in England but that the Established clergy are irremovable ; but in the United States, owing to their vast area, and the
consequent seclusion of multitudes of small communities, it rises to a height which many ministers, and especially ministers raised by a little cultivation or thought above the average of their fellows, find to be positively intolerable. The narrative in a book like " Illumination " is, of course, fictitious, but seems to the sympathetic reader as if it were written with drops of blood. We dare say many of the Non- conformist clergy in the poorer rural districts of England have as much to suffer, but somehow one expects in the United States more of external happiness.
There is plenty of discussion, of course, as to the remedy ; out as yet no proposal seems to have taken any general hold. The clergy want advocates who dare preach as one of the first of truths that the teacher, to be of the highest utility. must not be wholly subservient to the taught, or compelled to waste energy and courage in the effort to preserve an independence which ought never to be threatened ; and the laity are perhaps a little bewildered by the fact that the desire to preach still affects so many young men that a pulpit, however unfairly emptied by the congregation, is sure to be almost instantly filled again by candidates who, in their inexperience, think that they personally will soon overcome all that is disagreeable. There are four methods in which, as experience shows, when poverty impairs the usefulness of a ministry, a remedy, partial or complete. can always be found. One, the steady resolve of the congregations in prosperous years to endow their pulpits, would probably be unacceptable in America, where the majority of churchgoers are penetrated from tradition with the belief that an endowed ministry is sure to be a " dead " ministry, an idea which may have some a priori foundation, but which is contradicted by the whole modern record of the Anglican Establishment, and, we may add, by that of some Roman Catholic provinces on the Continent, where a little more " deadness," or absence of zeal, in the beneficed priesthood would be accepted as an improvement. The second plan, that of the Sustentation Fund, has succeeded in Scotland, but is, we suspect, opposed to the root ideas of those churches in America which cannot endure that a congregation and its pastor should be even partially independent of each other. From good motives and from bad they wish the minister always to feel that his worldly position depends exclusively upon his influence with those whom he is set to teach, an idea
which would only be sound if the search for a stipend did not always tend to lower the character of that influence. The third plan is what may be described as the ladder plan now pursued in an unscientific and rather stupid way by all Episcopal churches. Poverty in the manse or parsonage does
not signify nearly so much if there is hope of promotion ; and even in America, where care is universal, there would be cheerfulness in ministers' houses if there were hope or certainty
that in mature years the village pastor would be always called to enjoy the easier circumstances of the city pulpits. Unhappily the gulf between town and country is nowhere deeper than in America, while the wealthier churches would fiercely resent any such limitation upon the perfect freedom of their choice. They would think themselves oppressed on a vital point for the benefit of their inferiors. The fourth plan,
which the Daily Chronicle of Tuesday declares upon local evidence is now finding much favour, is to make of celibacy
in the clergy, not indeed an obligation, but a usual, and in most circumstances a binding, custom. A celibate clergy can live on little, and retains, as far as worldly circumstances go, a large measure of independence. It is very difficult to bully a Thoreau in the pulpit, and exceedingly easy to maintain him. There is no doubt that this system, if accepted, would solve the difficulty; but then it will not be accepted. Protestant com- munities never like a celibate clergy, not, we think, because they have any doubt of their personal purity, but because they dislike castes which stand apart from the rest of man- kind; and the candidates, feeling no moral, or, so to speak, canon law, obligation to celibacy, would regard it as an addi- tional and heavy burden upon the profession. There is, in fact, no remedy visible except a greater desire in the churches to relieve the pastors of cares which interfere with their spiritual life; and in the existing materialisation of ordinary life in America, that improvement must await some great and real " revival " such as occurred in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. Of the kind of strike among can-
didates which we see a correspondent of the New York Post recommends we believe there is no chance whatever. The
desire to preach, to make people better by one's spoken word.
or by persistent counsel, is too widely spread ; and each good lad who feels it thinks at heart that he will be too little like the rest of his profession to fall under the common doom.
There will always be a crowd of candidates for the ministry in America, as there will always be a crowd of curates in England, the real danger being not that the caste of ordained men will grow insufficient in numbers, but that it will be constantly recruited by men of inferior intelligence or inadequate power of impressing divine truths. We know little of most of the Apostles, but the Jew of Tarsus who moulded Christianity was not only a gentleman, but a man of lofty intellectual power and broad attainments. A peasant clergy may be very useful, but it will hardly possess the power of resisting the tendency to secularism which marks American society to-day as it marks German society, and more than a century ago marked our own.
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