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IX

MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS

THE REV. MR. BARNETT AND DISESTABLISHMENT

The Rev. Samuel Augustus Barnett was born in 1844. He was Vicar of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, from 1872 to 1894, and Canon of Bristol from 1893 to 1906. From this time to his death in 1913 he was a Canon of Westminster.

FROM The Times, OCTOBER 15, 1886.

The Rev. Mr. Barnett, of St. Jude's Vicarage, Whitechapel, finds fault with his brethren in the Church. It is, he says, 'an organization under the control of men who are not responsible to the nation, in which payment has no relation to work, in which place depends on patronage, and in which age is no disqualification for duty'. The first charge is not true. The clergy are responsible to the laws of the land relating to the Church of England as by law established, and they are the only religious body who are so responsible. The second is only partially true; for a curate may rise by work to a vicar, a vicar to a bishop, a bishop to an archbishop, the hardest worked as well as the best paid. There is plenty of inducement to work in the Church. The fourth charge is true, but might be easily corrected by retiring pensions, which are also necessary in any elective church.

The third charge remains, Place depends on patronage'. The evil attributed to this mode of choice is that it does not produce the best religious teachers of the people. The obvious remedy, therefore,' says Mr. Barnett, ' is to disestablish this class, to substitute for the clergy the people, and to give them or their representatives control over the

churches and over the appointment of their incumbents.' At the same time he would not disestablish the Church. This is the panacea of the Rev. Mr. Barnett, to disestablish the clergy without disestablishing the Church.

The practicability of the proposal finds no place in his letter to you. When he says that the people are to be the electors, who are the people? It must be remembered that the persons to be elected are not members of a clerical Parliament, but clergymen each of a little parish. If the electors are the people of England, their representatives would frequently be quite out of accord with the people of the parish; they might elect a Congregationalist for a parish mainly of Anglican Catholics. If the electors are all Church of England people, they are not the people, but a class; and their representative might yet be out of accord even with the Church people of the parish; they might elect an Anglican Catholic for an Evangelical parish. If the electors are the people of the parish, they are not the people; and they would, especially in poor town parishes, often elect a Dissenter, and then the Church would be disestablished in that parish until the next election. If the electors are the Church people of the parish, they are still further from being the people; but they might indeed then elect a clergyman of the Church whom the majority might like after election. It is obvious, then, that there is only one way of representing the people in a parish without disestablishing the Church-namely, by making the Church people of the parish the electors. But they are not the people, not the Church people, not the people of the parish, but the Church people of the parish, and the majority only of them. The grand word, the people, is an illusion.

Is the proposal in any form a better mode of choice than that which exists? Two maxims are

certain: the first, that all men have their faults, and the clergy, however chosen, will be no exceptions; the second, that all modes of choice have their faults, and time alone proves real merit. However obvious these truths they are constantly neglected. On the one hand, that the clergy have faults is imputed not at all to human nature, but altogether to patronage. On the other hand, because patronage is not always successful, popular election is to be an infallible panacea for getting the man of merit.

Are there, then, no defects in popular election? This is the question which Mr. Gladstone ignores when, in his manifesto, to hereditary Lords he opposes elective men of knowledge and virtue; as if the members of the House of Commons were, or were going to be, all men of knowledge and virtue because they are chosen by the people. It is also the question which the Rev. Mr. Barnett ignores when for patrons he would substitute the people; as if the Dissenters, who choose their own ministers, elected better men than the present clergy of the Established Church. This confusion of election and merit is the fallacy of the present age.

Popular election in any form whatever is the best mode of electing the person whom the majority thinks it is going to like at the moment. But the person most liked is not the person best for them; he is usually nothing but an orator, who is capable of coming down to them and saying what they please and proposing what they please, in order to keep his place. Men's likes and dislikes are not their good and evil; and public opinion, about which one hears so much, is a test of the former, but not of the latter opposites. In short, there is no evidence, from the present English House of Commons or any other popular body, that popular election chooses men who know and wish to attain the

public good and avoid the public evil; it mainly chooses waiters on public opinion. It gives the majority what they want at the moment, like a spoilt child, but it does not give them what is good for them even at the moment, still less in the distant future. The consequence is that it sacrifices the permanent good of a nation to the chance opinion, fancy, whim, demand, cry, of the moment.

Patronage, on the other hand, has been proved by time. Are the clergy of England really faulty as a class? He is an ingrate who says so; the Church and its history in every parish of England gives him the lie; the English clergyman is the friend without being the flatterer of the people. The patrons, therefore, cannot be bad electors. The truth is that when they are individuals they are always men of position, members of the Church, and nearly always responsible, both from intention and because an individual is always more responsible than an elective body. Secondly, the patrons are in a great measure the Universities and the Colleges in the Universities, often the Chapters and the Bishops, frequently the Crown. Thirdly, patronage is not their patronage, but patronage of an educated class. The patron cannot take anybody; he is limited to those who have been made clergymen by the Universities and Colleges. How long would this remain in popular elections? If the election was really popular, the Thirty-nine Articles and the orthodox education would soon disappear. The people would elect the clergy, like the School Board, from any denomination or undenomination. The same parish church would be tenanted by everybody in turn, from a Roman Catholic to a Salvationist. Even if it were kept, by the election not being really popular, to the Church of England, the pulpit, Sir, would always be occupied by a flatterer.

272

A REMINISCENCE OF BOWEN AT OXFORD

Baron Bowen was born in 1835, and was educated at Rugby and Balliol. He had a brilliant career as an undergraduate, carrying off the chief prizes and other honours in Classics. In 1858 be gained a Fellowship at Balliol. He was called to the Bar in 1861. In 1879 be became a judge of the Queen's Bench, and in 1893 a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. He died in 1894.

FROM The Times, APRIL 12, 1894.

When I came up from Rugby to Balliol in 1863, Bowen (Bonv ȧyalós), as he was wittily called by another old Rugbeian (Mr. Arthur Sidgwick, I think), was still a great name at Balliol. The old porter told me that in the morning after lecture Bowen would often come into the lodge; there and then would first carefully read over his lecture notes, and finally would make the sheets on which they were written into a large spill to light his pipe. This is a striking contrast to the practice of the modern undergraduate, who accumulates vast note-books, copied down at many lectures, but seldom looks at them again until he is too far from the lectures and too near the schools to digest them properly. Oxford, April 10, 1894.

THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH

Discussions on the relation between science and religion were much engaged in during the last forty years of Queen Victoria's reign. Mary Augusta Ward (1851-1920) was a granddaughter of Dr. Arnold of Rugby and was the wife of Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow of Brasenose College. She was prominent in the social life of the University until 1880, when her husband moved the household to London. In 1888 Mrs. Ward created a great sensation in literary and religious circles by the publication of Robert Elsmere', a novel. Mrs. Ward owed much to the teaching of Thomas Hill Green (1836– 82), Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford, and to Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), Master of Balliol College. Edward Caird (1835-1908) was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow from 1866 to 1893, when he succeeded to

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