The Trials of a Country Parson

In speaking of the trials of the country parson’s life in my last essay, I left much unsaid that needed saying. I rather shrank from dealing with matters which are outside the range of my own experience, and confined myself to such illustrations of the positions maintained as my own personal knowledge could supply. There are, however, some phases of the country parson’s life which I am perhaps less competent to dwell on than others who have been all their lives rustics, and because I would not willingly wound the feelings of those whom I honour and respect, therefore I am inclined to hang back and hold my peace and say nothing.

Why does not somebody else step in and take up the thread where I dropped it, deliver his testimony, and give us the record of his larger experience? Or shall we ask another question? How is it that people who have much to tell, so often have no faculty of setting it down in words and sentences? We boast of our advance in education, and yet what has it done for us—what is it doing for us?

I mean my son to be really educated. I mean him to be able to sit down to an organ and satisfy his soul as he dreams his dreams or sends forth his wail of aspiration, or sobs out his grief and penitence, or laughs forth his ecstasy of rapture, now in a passion of melody, now in subtle tangle of mysterious fugue, now in awful billows of harmony, making full concert to the angelic symphony. I mean him to be able to catch the laugh of the child, or the scowl of the ruffian, or the smirk of the swindler, or the wonder and triumph and joy and pride of the maiden who has just listened to her lover’s tale, or the sombre beauty of the aged when the twilight deepens and they are thinking of the dawn. I mean my son to have the power to catch these things, and to hold them and show them to me, saying, “Look! there they are for you and me to dwell on when we will.” Then, and not till then, will that lad of promise have begun to be educated. But we—or such as I—what upstarts we are! We that talk badly, write worse, and fumble and bungle miserably with that beggarly vehicle of communication between man and man which we call language—that wretched calculus which serves just a very little way towards helping us to hold converse with men as foolish as ourselves, but leaves us helpless to make the throstle feel how much we love him, and which we fling aside as a mere burden when our hearts are dying in us with what we call our loneliness or our despair. Educated! Who is educated? Certainly not the man who, having his memory full of a vast assemblage of odds and ends, can no more bring them out and produce them in an intelligible shape than I can produce on canvas the face of yonder old beldame with the square jaw and the bushy brows and the blazing eyes, and that burlesque of a bonnet, square and round and oval at one and the same moment, and no more capable of being described in words than of being written out in musical notation.

Yet it is undeniable that the knack of Mr. Gigadibs is a convenient knack, and it is a pity that my friend Mr. Cadaverous has not got it; he is “of those who know.” Gigadibs is of those who can juggle with the parts of speech, and very pretty jugglery it is. I envy Gigadibs whenever I am compelled to relate things at second hand; for who can help lying when he tries to bear evidence upon what others have seen and heard and felt—and worst of all—have reasoned about?

It may have been observed that when I began upon the subject of the country parson’s trials, I dwelt first upon those annoyances and positive wrongs which he is compelled to submit to at the hands of the powers that be, and which may be classed under the head of Financial; and, secondly, upon such as are inherent in his position as a personage living a life apart from those among whom he has to discharge his peculiar duties.

As far as regards the mere peasant, this isolation is only what any one must expect who is brought into relations more or less intimate with a class socially and intellectually below or above his own. But there are villages and villages, and the differences between them are as great as between the East End of London and the West, between May Fair and Red Lion Square. The ideal village is a happy valley, where a simple people are living sweetly under the paternal care of a gracious landowner, benevolent, open-handed, large-hearted, devout, a man of wealth and culture, his wife a Lady Bountiful; his daughters the judicious dispensers of liberal charity; his house the home of all that is refining, cheering, elevating. There the happy parson always finds a cordial welcome, and all those social advantages which make life pleasant and serene for himself and his family. Parson and squire work together in perfect harmony, the rectory and the hall are but the greater and the lesser parts of a well-adjusted piece of machinery which moves on with no friction and never comes to a dead stop. This is the ideal village.

How different are the real villages, and how various! Take the case of my friend Burney’s parish. An oblong surface through which a high road runs straight as a ruler—wide ditches dividing the fields, with never a hedge and never a tree—nine square miles of land with a population of 900 human beings, here and there collected into an ugly hamlet, each with a central alehouse, and a few feeble poplars looking as if they were ashamed of themselves. There is not a farmer in the parish who occupies 300 acres of land. There is not a squire’s house within a radius of eleven miles from the rectory door. The nearest market town is six miles off, the nearest railway station five. Friend Burney has his house and garden and perhaps £350 a year to spend—that is quite the outside. Every morning he goes to his school a long mile off, every afternoon he has some one to “look after,” to visit in sickness or sorrow, to watch or advise or comfort. One year with another he calculates that he has to walk at least 1,500 miles in the way of duty. As to the mere Sunday work, that needs no dwelling on; take it all in all, it is about the least wearing and least troublesome part of the parson’s duties, always provided he puts his heart into it, and has some faculty for it. But in all that tract of country over which he is sometimes cruelly assumed to be no more than a spiritual overseer, among all those 900 people, there is not a single man, woman, or child that cares to talk to him, or ever does talk to him, about anything outside the parish and its concerns. Nay! I forgot the schoolmaster and his wife. They are young, intelligent, hopeful, and they came out of Yorkshire, and have something to say of their experience in the North. But they are just a little—undeniably a little sore, just a little touchy: they have a grievance. When they first came down to X., Mrs. Rector did not leave her card on Mrs. Petticogges. It was a slight. It was hoity-toity, it was airified. That is not all; the farmers are not, as you may say, cordial with the schoolmaster; and Farmer Gay, the big man who holds 700 acres in the next parish and gives lawn-tennis parties, never had the grace to take any notice of the Petticogges, does not in fact know the Petticogges. Meanwhile, friend Burney is manager of the school, and by far the largest contributor to the funds, and day by day he is in and out, he and his daughters. But there is no time to talk or confer. The Petticogges have their hands full; when their day’s work is over they have had enough of it. Round and round and round they go in the dreary mill; every now and then there is a new regulation of My Lords to worry them, a new book to get up, a new code to study. Then there are the pupil teachers to look after, and returns to make up, and all the dull routine which has to be got through.

How can an elementary schoolmaster in a remote country village be a reading-man, or what motive has he to get out of the narrow groove in which he has been brought up? The best teachers, as a rule, are they who know their work best and very little indeed outside it. “How is it that at Dumpfield they don’t get a larger grant?” I asked one day of an inspector noted for his shrewdness and good sense. “Surely Coxe is by far the ablest and most brilliant teacher for miles round; he is almost a man of genius?” “Precisely so,” was the reply, “the man’s out of place. These brilliant men with a touch of genius are a nuisance in an elementary school. My dear fellow, never let a man of views come into your school. Keep him out. Beware of the being who is for revolutionizing spelling and grammar!”

Mr. Petticogge is not a man of genius, only a better sort of elementary schoolmaster, and entirely absorbed in his work. He, too, as all the members of his fraternity do, occupies a position of isolation, and between him and the parson there is just so much in common as to make each hold aloof from the other without making either of them congenial to their other neighbours. As for the rest of friend Burney’s neighbours, take them in the gross, and you may say of them what the ticket-of-leave man said of the Ten Commandments; “They’re rather a poor lot and you can’t make much out of ’em.” I know no class of men who are less sociable than the smaller farmers, as we reckon smallness in the East. I mean the men who hold a couple of hundred acres and under. It has often been laid to the charge of the great occupiers in West Norfolk and elsewhere that in the good times they were lavish beyond all reason in their hospitalities. I believe there never has been anything of the sort among the smaller men; they are not unfriendly, they are not wanting in cordiality, but they are not companionable.

It is my privilege to know some who are notable exceptions to the all but universal rule. I have not far to go from my own door to find one whom I never pay a visit to without pleasure and profit, one who has for many years been a great reader of Lord Tennyson’s poems, has strong opinions on politics and the questions of the day, a thoughtful, resolute, and true-hearted woman, who farms a hundred acres of land without a bailiff, and, among other evidences of her good taste and intelligence, is a diligent reader of the Spectator. But such are few and far between.

It is one of the trials of the country parson that, as soon as he passes out of the stratum to which the labourer belongs, he finds himself in a stratum where there is nothing that has any of the interest of originality, picturesqueness, or even passion. The people who live and move in that stratum are dismally like the ticket-of-leave man’s ten commandments. My neighbours hardly believe me when I tell them I can see, even among the smaller farmers, much to admire, much to respect, and something to love; but I do not wonder that many a country parson “can’t make much out of ’em.” These men are having rather a hard life just now, but they have not to learn the most elementary lessons of thrift and frugality. As a class they have always practised these virtues, and as a class they are far less complaining than those who belong to the higher stratum; they bear their burdens silently, perhaps too silently, and they tell you that it’s no good grumbling—“that,” one of them said to me, “only makes things worse, ’cause it makes you worse!” Take them all in all, they whom I have elsewhere called the little ones are usually those of his parishioners with whom the parson seldom comes into unpleasant relations; they are usually very hard at work, very practical, very straightforward, and very seldom indeed prone to give themselves airs.

It is often very different with the large occupiers. In the good times the large farmers must have made very large profits, the percentage upon the actual capital embarked (unless my information has been strangely untrue, and the calculations that have been laid before me strangely inaccurate) being in many cases larger even than that which the shipowners earned in their good times. Is it to be wondered at that they became frequently intoxicated by their success, and got to believe that they were a superior order on whom the welfare of the nation depended? Or, again, can we be surprised that their awakening from their dream has not been pleasurable, and has somewhat soured them? Ten years ago a gentleman farmer—and every man who farmed 500 acres was a gentleman farmer—looked down upon the retail tradesman as quite beneath him in station, and regarded the parson as a respectable official whom it was the right thing to support, though he might care very little for him and his ways. In those days the farmer’s sons and the parson’s were frequently schoolfellows; the young people drew together, and the farmer’s pupils too were another link between the farmhouse and the rectory. The bad seasons and the fall in prices came together, and the collapse was very rapid. But in nine cases out of ten, whereas the farmer’s losses meant a disastrous abatement which extended over his whole income, the parson felt the pinch only in the fall of the tithe or in the rent of his glebe. His private fortune, being for the most part settled, remained as it was before. In East Anglia not 5 per cent. of the clergy are living upon the income of their benefices; but I should be very much surprised to find that 5 per cent. of the tenant-farmers have any considerable investments outside their working capital. The result is, that though the clergy have suffered quite severely enough, they have not suffered nearly so much as the farmers. The one has had to submit to a painful loss of professional income, and has had to fall back upon his private resources; the other has too often found himself with his credit balance approaching the vanishing point, the trade profit has been nil, and there have been no dividends from investments outside the going concern to keep up the old style or meet the old expenditure. When neighbours have been in the habit of meeting on equal terms, and one goes on pretty much as before, while the other has become a trifle shabby, and has to consider every shilling that he spends, it is almost inevitable that the poorer of the two should feel less cordial than before. He revenges himself upon the laws of the universe by proclaiming that there is wrong and injustice somewhere. Why is he on the brink of ruin while the parson has only knocked off his riding horse, or ceased to take his annual trip to the Continent, or lessened his establishment by a servant, or it may be two? He forgets that his neighbour is living upon the interest of realized property, and that he himself has to live upon what he can make, and upon that alone.

But what irritates the farmer most is that, at the worst, the parson is getting something out of the land while he is getting little or nothing; and though he knows as well as any one else that the tithe stands for a first mortgage upon the land, or for an annuity charged upon the land, which takes precedence of every other payment; and though he knows also that, in too many instances, he has himself to pay interest on the capital with which he has been pursuing his business, and that this interest has to be provided for whether that business is carried on at a profit or a loss, yet he persists in trying to convince himself that he was “let in” when he made himself liable for the tithes; he tells you he has “to pay the parson,” and he does not like it. The parson is always en évidence, the landlord is out of the way—almost an abstraction, as the Government is; the agent must be submitted to, so must the tax gatherer. But the parson, could he not be got rid of? Granted that it would all come to the same in the end, and that if you could eliminate the parson the tithe would be laid on to the rent sooner or later, yet it might be very much later, and the end might be a long way off, and in the meantime he, the farmer, would put the tithe into his own pocket and into that of no one else. Hence there smoulder in the minds of many the smoky embers of discontent, and there is a coldness between the former friends. We are conscious of it, but we see no cure at present. When the tithe comes to be paid by the landlord, there may be a return to the old friendliness; but the gratia male sarta always leaves traces of the rift. I forbear from dwelling any longer upon this branch of the subject. When men are sore and in danger of becoming soured, then is the time for exercising a wise and tender reserve.

So far I have dealt with those trials which the country parson is exposed to from without; that is, such as arise from his intercourse with the wicked world—the wicked world that puts its cruel claw into his pocket, or growls at him, or glares at him, or frightens him, or laughs at him, or tries to gobble him up. But his trials do not end there. He has relations with another world—that professional world to which he belongs in another sense than that by which he is regarded as a citizen. As a clergyman he is a member of a class, a profession, a clique if you will, which has a coherence and a homogeneity such as no other profession can lay claim to, not even the profession of the law. The lawyer may be half a dozen things at the same time—a trader, a politician, a practical agriculturist, a land agent, a coroner, a steeple-chase rider, a general Jack-pudding. Everything brings grist to his mill, and the more irons he has in the fire the larger will be the number and the more varied the character of his clients. But the parson must be a clergyman, and a clergyman only; he is, so to speak, confined within the four walls of his clerical associations, and if he steps beyond them he is always regarded with a certain measure of suspicion. Even literature, unless there be a distinctly theological flavour about it, he embarks in at his peril; a clergyman who writes books is looked askance at, as a person whose “heart isn’t in his work.” Of course we get “narrow-minded.” We all go about with an iron mask weighing upon us—hiding our handsome features, interfering with our respiration, stunting our growth.

That is not all, though that is bad enough; we are all ticketed and labelled in a way that no other class is. Of late years it appears that the rising generation of clerics has begun to insist more and more upon the necessity of this professional exclusiveness, and desires to claim for itself the privileges of a caste. It shaves off its nascent whiskers and glories in a stubby cheek; it dresses in a hideous garment, half petticoat, half frock, for the most part abominably ill made; above all, it rumples about its bullet head a slovenly abomination called a wide-awake, as if that would preserve it from all suspicion of being sleepy and stupid, and it adopts a tone and a vocabulary which shall be distinctive and as far as possible from the speech of ordinary Englishmen. “We must close up our ranks,” said one of them to me, “close up our ranks and present a united front, and show the world that we are prepared to hang together, act together, march together. We have been atoms too long; we want coherence, my dear sir—coherence. We are moving towards the general adoption of the Catholic cassock!” “Do you mean to say,” I answered, “that you will persist in sporting that emasculated felt turbanette till you arrive at the general adoption of the cassock? Then, in the name of all the lines of beauty, on with the cassock, but away with the wide-awake!” I’m afraid my young friend was hurt; suspected me of some covert profanity, and deplored my flagrant want of esprit de corps.

And yet I have been almost a worshipper of Burke from my boyhood, and was early so impregnated with the fundamental positions of the Thoughts on the Causes of our present Discontents that, if I only could choose my party, I should follow my leader to prison or to death, and do his bidding, ἀνδρείως καὶ μύσαντα, never looking behind me. Unhappily in matters political the curse of a flabby amorphous eclecticism is upon too many of us; watching the conflict of principles or policies in a dazed and bewildered frame of mind, we persuade ourselves that we are philosophically impartial when we are only indolently indifferent. “Which train are you going by, sir—up or down?” “I’ll wait and see!” And both engines rush out and leave the unhappy vacillator to his reveries, till by-and-by the platform is cleared and the station is shut up for the night, and the gas lamps are turned down; and there is no moon and no stars and no shelter, and the wind is rising.

But ever since I have, so to speak, taken the shilling and entered the Church’s service and put myself under orders, I have loyally stood up for my cloth, and I am quite willing to bear the reproaches of that service where there are any to bear. We clergy get a good deal of stupid and very vulgar ridicule hurled at us, and we cannot very well retaliate. It is a case of Athanasius contra mundum. The “world” is very big and rather unassailable, and we of the minority are apt to assume that we can afford to hold our peace, that we gain by turning the right cheek to him who smites us on the left, and that we should lose by giving a foul-mouthed liar and coward a drubbing and tossing him into the horse-pond. We stand upon the defensive. We have hardly any other choice. But it is rather trying to have to answer for all the sins, negligences, and ignorances, the follies and the bad taste of all who wear the wide-awake.

As far as the instances of downright wickedness and immorality go, I think nobody will pretend that any class in the community can show such a clean bill of health as the clergy. As I look round me upon my clerical brethren of all ages and all opinions, I can honestly say I do not know one of them whose daily life is not free from reproach or suspicion. During all my life I have never myself known more than one beneficed clergyman who was a real black sheep. That there are such men of course I cannot doubt, but their aggregate number constitutes, I am sure, a very small percentage of the class which they disgrace by being included in it. Surely it is very trying and very irritating to have such instances brought up against you, not as rare exceptions, but as examples of the general rule.

Our Nonconformist neighbours know all about such cases, and cannot understand why they should exist. They know that a Wesleyan or a Congregational minister who should underlie any grave suspicion would infallibly disappear from the neighbourhood in a week. Why should the rector of Z——, whose intemperance has been clearly proved, be allowed to return to his parish after his term of suspension, and begin again to minister among the same people whose sense of decency he has outraged till it was past all bearing? You tell your Nonconformist friend that it cannot be helped because the reverend sot has got a freehold in his benefice. “Oh, it can’t be helped, can’t it?” he answers; “that’s it, is it? The law ain’t to blame, and the bishop ain’t to blame, and the churchwardens ain’t to blame, and, according to that, the parson ain’t to blame neither, except that the old fool’s been and got found out.” These people know that such scandals are impossible at the chapels; they are not impossible at the churches; they know that the deacons, and the elders, and the conference, or whatever the power may be that keeps up the discipline, comes down with swift severity in the one case, and the rural dean and archdeacons and the bishops are all but powerless in the other. In many cases the influence of a bad example, or the memory of a shameful reputation, is avoided by giving an incumbent indefinite leave of absence; but this is, after all, only a confession of weakness, and the fact that the parson still takes the income of the benefice, though his work is done by another, that itself is a scandal. Ecclesiastical reformers, lay or clerical, who stop short of dealing with the subject of the parson’s freehold, are merely hacking and lopping the branches in the vain hope of saving the tree. If the thing is rotten, let it die placidly, or let it be cut down bravely. Where you have not the pluck to do the one thing, why fidget about the other?

Happily, however, we are not much troubled with “criminous clerks,” we country parsons. The regular out-and-out bad ones usually retire into holes and corners, and they are but few and far between. We hear of them much more from our Meetingers than from any one else. The Meetinger keeps himself posted up with the last clerical escapade, and fires it off at us when he gets a chance, and the old argument has to be gone over again, and the parson goes home feeling that he was born to be badgered, and that he must expect it even to the end of the world.

It may seem strange to the inexperienced, but it is none the less true, that we suffer a great deal more from the best of our brethren than we do from the worst. They are the over-zealous, who are determined to change the face of the world and revolutionize society and reform everything, and improve everybody, and who cannot leave things alone to develop and grow, who make their fellow-creatures’ lives a burden to them. When we are young we have such unbounded faith in ourselves, and such unbounded ignorance and inexperience. The world is all before us, and all to conquer and remodel; our seniors are sad fogeys, so slow, so stiff, so cautious. There is so much dust everywhere and upon everything. Our brooms are so new, so swishy, and our arms so strong. We have our wits about us, and our senses all keen and sharp. We find it hard to believe that we have not been called into being to do a great deal of sweeping and getting rid of cobwebs. I love to see the young fellows all bubbling over with energy, and all aflame with fiery zeal; I would not have it otherwise. God bless them! say I, but they do rout us about very uncomfortably, and they are very foolish.

It was only the other day that I was asked to go and visit a church to which a very hurricane of a man had been recently appointed, and which he had already set himself to restore. He knew no more about church architecture than I do about Sanskrit, and less about history than I do about chemistry. He had a small army of bricklayers picking and slopping about the sacred edifice, tearing down this and digging up that and smalming over the other. And this reverend worthy had not even consulted the parish clerk! “Of course you have had a faculty for all this?” I suggested.

“Not I! Faculty indeed! I have to save all the expense I can. I have made up my mind to have nothing whatever to do with any officials or professionals of any sort or kind; I’m my own architect!”

Now, if a man chooses to be his own tailor, nobody will be much the worse and nobody will much care; but when a man sets himself to “restore” a church by the light of nature, it is a much more serious matter, and it is almost beyond belief what a brisk and bouncing young fellow, with the best intentions, and an immeasurable fund of ignorance to fall back upon, can do without any one interfering with him. You tell him he’ll get into a scrape—that the bishop will be down upon him—that there are such things as law courts. He smiles the benevolent smile of superior wisdom, and dashes on with heroic valour. If he calls himself a Ritualist, he gets rid of the Jacobean pulpit, or the royal arms, or the ten commandments, and sets up a construction which he calls a reredos, all tinsel and putty and papier mâché; hurls away the old pews before you know where you are, nails the brasses to the walls, sets up a lectern, and intones the service, keeping well within the chancel, from which he firmly banishes all worshippers who are not males. As for that gallery at the west end where the singers used to sit for a couple of centuries, and never failed to take their part with conscious pride in their own performances, that is abomination in his eyes—that must go of course, “to throw out the belfry arch, you see, and to bring the ringers into closer connection with the worship of the sanctuary.” “I love to see the bell ropes,” said one of these dear well-meaning young clergymen to me. “They are a constant lesson and reminder to us, my friend. Did you ever read Durandus on Symbolism? That is a very precious observation of his, that a bell rope symbolises humility—it always hangs down.”

But if an energetic young reformer calls himself an Evangelical, he is, if possible, a more dangerous innovator than the other. Then the axes and hammers come in with a vengeance. None of your pagan inscriptions for him, teaching false doctrine and popery. None of your Orate pro anima, none of your crosses and remains of frescoes on his walls; St. Christopher with the Child upon his shoulder wading through the stream, St. Sebastian stuck all over with arrows, or St. Peter with those very objectionable keys. As for the rood screen, away with it! Are we not all kings and priests? If you must have a division between the chancel and the nave, set up the pulpit there, tall, prominent, significant; and if the preacher can’t be heard, then learn the lesson which our grandfathers taught us, and let there be a sounding-board.

The serious part of all this passionate meddling with the status quo ante is that any young incumbent can come in and play the wildest havoc with our old churches without any one interfering with him. The beneficed cleric is master of the situation, and is frightfully more so now that Church rates have been abolished than he was before. It is no one’s interest to open his mouth; is he not inducted into possession of the sacred building, and is he not therefore tenant for life of the freehold? As long as he makes himself liable for all the expense, it is surely better to let him have his way. “I ain’t a going to interfere,” says one after another; and in six weeks a church which had upon its walls and floors, upon its tower and its roof, upon its windows and its doors, upon its every stone and timber, the marks and evidences which constituted a continuous chronicle, picturing—not telling—a tale of the faith and hope, and folly and errors, and devotion and sorrow, and striving after a higher ideal and painful groping for more light in the gloom—a tale that goes back a thousand years, a tale of the rude forefathers of the village world which still regards the house of God as somehow its own—in six weeks, I say, all this is as effectually obliterated as if a ton of dynamite had been exploded in one of the vaults, and the genius of smugness had claimed the comminuted fragments as her own.

Then there is the mania for decorations too. I like to see them; I am sure the new fashion has been the occasion for awakening a great deal of interest in, and something approaching proud affection for, our old churches; but here again people, with every desire to be reverential and to do the right thing, succeed amazingly in doing just the wrong one. Have I not seen a most beautiful fourteenth-century rood screen literally riddled with tin tacks and covered with various coloured paper roses, festooned in fluffy frills of some cheap material on which languid dandelions and succulent bluebells lolled damply at the Eastertide? Next time I saw that exquisite work of art, lo! there was a St. Lawrence with his eye put out and two holes in his forehead, and between the lips of a St. Barbara, who for her loveliness might have been painted by Carlo Crivelli, there protruded a bent nail which looked for all the world like an old tobacco pipe. Who can “restore” that precious rood screen or repair the damage wrought in an hour by the decorators turned loose into that meek little church a year ago?

I think the average laymen who live in the towns can have very little notion of what the parson suffers when he finds himself turned into a church in which he has to officiate for the rest of his life, and which his predecessor has mauled and mangled and murdered, leaving no more life in it than there is among the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s.

“But do not these rash and furious young zealots of whom you have spoken burn their fingers sometimes, and does not the bishop sometimes come down upon them?” Yes! very often, after the mischief has been done. I knew one monster who upon his glebe had some seven of the noblest oak trees in the county of Norfolk. Lucus ligna was his view of the case, and he sold them all. Down they came every tree of them. Some said he wanted to see how the landscape would look without them, some that he wanted to go to Norway, and there are plenty of trees there. The patron of the living called that man to account, and I am told made him disgorge the proceeds of his ill-gotten gains; and the bishop is generally believed to have sent him a mandate to put back those trees in their former position. But that clerical monster, though he plays the fiddle to put Amphion to shame, has never learnt Amphion’s tune or cared to charm back the giant vegetables that were once the pride and glory of the countryside. In the days when the wicked received their reward in this world a thousand evil-doers have been hanged for crimes incomparably less injurious to the community at large than that which lies to the charge of this reverend sinner; but he enjoys the income of his benefice to this day, and grows willows instead of oaks, not to turn to the use which Timon recommended to one of his visitors, but to turn into cash; for they grow fast, and the manufacturers of cricket bats are hard put to it to supply the demand for their wares.

What we want is to make it at least a misdemeanour punishable by imprisonment for the parson to touch the fabric of the church under any circumstances whatever, except with the consent and under the license of some external authority. But that implies that the ownership of the church should no longer be vested in a corporation sole. It brings us again face to face with the whole question of the parson’s freehold, and how long is that mischievous legal fiction—which is, however, a very stubborn legal fact—to be endured?

If I were to go on in this vein, and dwell upon all the parson has to suffer from his predecessors—the man who built the house two miles from the parish church; the man who added to it to find room for a score of pupils; the man who loved air, or the man who loved water, or the man who loved society, or the man who bred horses, or the man who turned the rectory into a very lucrative lunatic asylum—I should tire out my reader’s patience, and the more so that there are other trials about which it is advisable that I should utter my querulous wail.

I know one clergyman who, though ordained some forty years ago, has never written or preached a sermon in his life; but I only know one. His is perhaps a unique case. As a rule, we all begin by being curates—that is, we begin by learning our business as subordinates. It would be truer to say we used to begin that way; but subordination is dying out all over the world, and in the ministry of the Church of England subordination is a virtue which is in articulo mortis. Nowadays a young fellow at twenty-three, who has become a reverend gentleman for just a week, poses at once as the guide, philosopher, and friend of the whole human race. He poses as a great teacher. It is not only that he delivers the oracles with authoritative sententiousness from the tripod, but he has no doubts and no hesitation about anything in earth or heaven. He fortifies himself with a small collection of brand-new words which you, poor ignorant creature, don’t know the meaning of. You feel rather “out of it” when he gravely calls your gloves Mannaries (he does not wear them), and your dressing-gown a Poderis; expresses his mournful regret that there is no Scuophylacium in the Presbytery, nor any Bankers on the walls; gently admonishes you for standing bareheaded by the grave at your time of life, when prudence would suggest, and ecclesiastical precedent would recommend, the use of the Anabata; tells you he always goes about with a Totum under his arm, and a Virge in his right hand. When he vanishes you slyly peep into your Du Cange, but the Bankers are quite too much for you.

I am not much more ignorant than other men of my age, but I never did pretend to omniscience, and when I don’t know a thing I am not ashamed of asking questions. But our modern curates never ask questions. “Inquire within upon everything,” seems to be stamped upon every line of their placid faces. When I was a young curate I was very shy and timid, and held my dear rector in some awe. It might have been hoped that as the years went by I should have grown out of this weakness—but no! I am horribly afraid of the curates now. I dare hardly open my mouth before my superiors, and that they are my superiors I should not for a moment presume to question. I know my place, and I tremble lest I should betray my silliness by speaking unadvisedly with my lips. All this is very trying to a man who will never see sixty again. The hoary head is no crown at all to the eyes of the young and learned. They don’t yet cry out at me, “Go up, thou baldhead,” but I can’t help suspecting that they’re only waiting to do it sooner or later. For myself I have, unfortunately, never been able to afford to engage the services of a clergyman who should assist me in my ministrations. So much the worse for me, and so much the worse for my parish. When I am no longer able to do my own pastoral work, I shall feel the pinch of poverty; but I am resolved to be very meek to my curate when he shall vouchsafe to take me under his protection. I will do as I am told.

It is a very serious fact, however, which we cannot but think of with anxiety, that since the Curate Market rose, as it did some fifteen or twenty years ago, there has been a large incursion of young men into the ministry of the Church of England who are not gentlemen by birth, education, sentiment, or manners, and who bring into the profession (regarded as a mere profession) no capital of any sort—no capital I mean of money, brains, culture, enthusiasm, or force of character. This is bad enough, but there is a worse behind it. These young curates almost invariably marry, and the last state of that man is worse than the first. My friends assure me, and my observation confirms it, that the domestic career of these young people is sometimes very pathetic. Sanguine, affectionate, simple-minded and childlike, they learn the hard lessons of life all too late, and their experience comes to them, as Coleridge said, “like the stern lights of a ship, throwing a glare only upon the path behind.” When their children come upon them with the usual rapidity, it is but rarely that we country parsons keep these married curates among us. They emigrate into the towns for the sake of educating their progeny, or because they soon find out that there is no hope of preferment for them among the villages. When there is no family, or when the bride has brought her spouse some small accession of income, the couple stay where they are for years till somebody gives them a small living, and there they do as others do. But in the first exuberance of youth, and when the youthful pair are highly delighted with the position that has been acquired, he is profoundly impressed with the sense of his importance, and she exalted at the notion of having married a “clergyman and a gentleman;” he is apt to be stuck up, and she is very apt to be huffy. It’s bad enough to be associated officially with an underbred man, but it’s a great deal worse to find yourself brought into social relations, which cannot be avoided, with an underbred woman. The curate’s wife is sometimes a very dreadful personage, but then most dreadful when she is a “young person” of your own parish who has angled for the clerical stickleback and landed him.

The Rev. Percy De la Pole was a courtly gentleman, sensitive, fastidious, and just a trifle, a little trifle, distant in his demeanour. His curate, the Rev. Giles Goggs, was a worthy young fellow enough, painstaking and assiduous, anxious to do his duty, and not at all airified. We all liked him till Rebecca Busk overcame him. Mr. De la Pole was cautious and reserved by temperament; but who has never committed a mistake? In an evil hour—how could he have been so imprudent?—he gently warned the curate against the wiles of Miss Busk and her family, telling him that she was far from being a desirable match, and going to the length of saying plainly that she was making very indelicate advances. “All that may be quite true,” replied Mr. Goggs, “but I am sure you will soon change your opinion. I come in now to let you know that I am engaged to be married to Miss Busk.” From that day our reverend neighbour had so bad a time of it that it is commonly believed his valuable life was shortened by his sufferings. I am afraid some people behaved very cruelly, for they could not help laughing. Mrs. Goggs took her revenge in the most vicious way. On all public occasions she clasped the rector’s arm and looked up in his face with the tenderest interest. She tripped across lawns at garden parties to pluck him by the sleeve, screamed out with shrill delight when he appeared, called him her dear old father confessor, giggled and smirked and patted him, and fairly drove him out of the place at last by finding that he had twice preached borrowed sermons, and keeping the discovery back till the opportune moment arrived, when, at a large wedding party, she shook her greasy little ringlets at him with a wicked laugh, exclaiming, “Ah! you dear old sly-boots, when you can speak like that why do you preach the Penny Pulpit to us?” The wretched victim could not hold up his head after that, and when a kind neighbour strongly advised him to dismiss the curate whose wife was unbearable, the broken-down old gentleman feebly objected. “My dear friend, I may have an opportunity of getting preferment for Mr. Goggs some day, but in the meantime I have no power to send away my curate because his wife—well, because his wife is not nice.”

It often happens that the parson has to go away from his parish for some months, and he finds considerable difficulty in getting any one to take charge of it during his absence. At the eleventh hour he is compelled to take the last chance applicant. And behold, he and his parishioners are given over to a locum tenens. This is nothing more than saying that he has put himself into the power of a man with a loose end.

When the worthy rector of Corton-in-the-Brake had reached his fiftieth year, he obtained an accession of fortune and gave out that he intended to marry. He furnished his house anew at a great expense, and found no difficulty in getting a wife. Then he vowed that he would go to the south of France for the winter, and get a curate. He was a prim and punctilious personage, and he did not mean to deal shabbily with his substitute. But two things he insisted on: first, that this locum tenens should be married, and secondly that he should be childless. He got exactly the right man at last, a scholarly, well-dressed, and evidently accomplished gentleman, who spoke of Mrs. Connor with respectful confidence and affection, who had been married ten years, and had no family, who made no difficulties except that the stables were, he feared, inconveniently too small, but he would make shift. With a mind relieved and a blissful honeymoon before him, the Rev. John Morris set out for Nice—in the days when the railway system was not as complete as now—and the Rev. Mr. Connor arrived at the rectory the next Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Connor came too, with fourteen brindled bulldogs—young and old. That was her speciality, and she gave her whole mind to keeping the breed pure and making large sums by every litter. During the following week appeared seven pupils, the rejected of several public schools, who were committed to the care of Mr. Connor to be kept out of their parents’ sight and to “prepare for the University.” Mrs. Connor kept no female servants. Not a woman or a girl dared pass the rectory gate. The Connors had a man cook and men housemaids. The bulldogs would prowl about the neighbourhood in threes and fours with a slow shuffling trot, sniffing, growling, turning their hideous blood-shot eyes at you, undecided whether or not to tear you limb from limb; and then passing on with menacing contempt. Sometimes there were rumours of horrible fights; no one dared to separate the brutes except Mrs. Connor. Once the two mightiest of the bulldogs got “locked,” as the head man expressed it. “What did you do?” “Do? Why I shrook out to Billy to hang on, and I called the Missus, and she gave ’em the hot un, and they give in!” The hot un turned out to be a thin bar of steel with a wooden handle which was always kept ready for use in the kitchen fire, and which Mrs. Connor had her own method of applying red hot so as to paralyze the canine culprit without blemishing him. But imagine the condition of that newly furnished parsonage when the poor rector came back to his home.

It is easy for everybody else to look only at the ludicrous side, but the clerical sufferer has to bear the real bitterness of such an experience, and to him the mere damage to his property is the least part of the business. Everybody says sulkily, “Why were we left to such a man as that?” For the country parson has to answer for all the sins and short-comings of those whom he leaves to represent himself; all their indiscretions, their untidiness, their careless reading, their bad preaching, their irreverence or their foolery, their timidity or their violence, their ignorance or their escapades. One man is horribly afraid of catching the measles; another “has never been accustomed to cows” and will not go where they are; a third is a woman-hater, and week by week bawls out strong language against the other sex, beginning with Eden and ending with Babylon. The absentee returns to find everything has been turned topsy-turvy. The locum tenens has set every one by the ears, altered the times of service, broken your pony’s knees, had your dog poisoned for howling at the moon, or kept a monkey in your drawing-room. People outside laugh, but when you are the sufferer, and the conviction is forced upon you that harm has been done which you cannot hope to see repaired, you are not so likely to laugh as to do the other thing.

Shall I go on to dwell upon the aggrieved parishioner, the amenities of the School Board, the anxieties of the school treat, the scenes at the meetings of the Poor-law guardians, the faithful laity who come to expostulate, to ask your views and to set you right? Shall I? Shall I dwell upon the occasional sermons which some delegate from some society comes and fulminates against you and your people? Nay! Silence on some parts of our experience is golden.