CURATES; THEIR PATRONS, FRIENDS, AND HELPERS.
16th September 1856.
Bra—The observations in your last number as to the payment of curates were very judicious and seasonable. As usual, when the Times gets hold of a grievance, or anything that looks like a grievance, it can- not be content with sober truth, or temperate reasoning, or fair con- clusions; but it straightway begins to smite with its favourite wea- pons of exaggeration and vituperation, and opens its columns to a host of writers whose exceptional cases of hardship and wrong are supposed by a large portion of its hearers to illustrate the general practice. Among ten thousand incumbents, no doubt many are selfish and unreasonable, and dis- posed to make hard bargains with their curates. Among two or three thousand curates, no doubt many worthy men have a pittance which for a man of education who has to keep up appearances is miserably scanty. The real evil, of course, is, that the clerical profession is overstocked like every other. Such as it is, happily, the work, or the pay, or the social position which it confers, are in such repute that our parishes are pro- vided with ministers ; and even the poorest livings find some to take them —often and often men not only worthy of their hire, but worthy of ten times more, if services like theirs could be valued in money. A hundred a year or less is a small income for a family to live upon, we all know ; but the man who has it knew what the Church was when he chose to seek his living in it; he knew, too, what his own chance of preferment was when ho set up house and took to himself a wife ; and, small though his income be—very small for his wants, and small possibly for his deserts—numbers of barristers and surgeons, on whom the world and its great writing organ spend no pity, earn still less in fees, for precisely the same reason—that men will not get ill or go to law often enough to insure a comfortable living to the whole body of practitioners in the healing and pleading arts. Taking high Christian ground, of course every wealthy rector ought to be generous ; a man ought to disrlein to have a helper in the ministry on the cheapest possible terms while his own parsonage is stored with luxuries; they, too, who have their share of the Church's prizes, even if they want no helpers and do their own work, should have a fellow-feeling for men who are their equals in every respect but one, and should be on the look- out for opportunities to reduce the inequalities of fortune by well-timed liberality such as poorer men may accept without loss of self-respect. Taking the same high Christian ground, I wonder what percentage of an income somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand a year should be de- voted to pious and charitable uses by a great trading firm like the Times ; or how much would be a reasonable subscription to associations intended to relieve the poverty of clergymen, or to promote the Church's efficiency?
In matters of this sort, it is quite idle for men to rail at their neighbours for not rising above the average morality of the world we live in, unless we have a special vocation to turn reprovers, and are prepared to illustrate by our own example the higher virtues which we commend. The commercial principle, we all know, infects society too largely : clergymen arc not free from the besetting infirmity ; masters and employers, all alike, with few exceptions, desire the maximum of labour for the minimum of cost : men will be happier all about us when we are a less calculating race, and large- heartedness and openhandedness are found, not in the few, but in the many. But the man is engaged in a hopeless task who shall try to persuade ordinary mortals to refuse the services of men willing to work at a stipula- ted price because the dignity or respectability of the labourers will be com- promised; and something like hypocrisy will be added to the folly, if the censor knows all the while that he never presses on any servant whom he employs higher wages than are asked. I presume that in the concluding observations of your article you refer to the Church Pastoral Aid Society and the Curates' Aid Society. You are under a mistake in supposing that their operations are checked by any undue epis- copal interference, or that lay subscribers have not ample security that their money will be employed strictly according to their wish( s. The two Socie- ties, aiming at the common purpose of supplying curates to poor and popu- lous parishes, have one important difference. The Church Pastoral Aid So- ciety, by its Committee, exercises a veto on the nomination of the incum- bent ; so that every curate whose salary is supplied by them, besides being ordained by the Bishop, and approved by the clergyman under whom he is to labour, is to be a preacher and pastor of the right sort in the judgment of the body which represents the subscribers. As the Committee consists of men whose religious leanings are well known, the subscriber, of course, has faith in their selection ; and the curates paid with his money are all men
belonging to that section of the Church which he prefers. The incumbent nominates to the Bishop a man thus approved, and no other, otherwise he will have to pay the stipend himself; and when nominated by the incum- bent, the curate is accepted and licensed by the Bishop, as in any other case of appointment to a vacant curacy.
To a great many clergymen and Churchmen this interposition of a court of appeal composed of laymen is objectionable. They hold that a man who is episcopally ordained, and selected by an incumbent to be his curate, should not be questioned or challenged as to his fitness for pastoral work. Hence sprang the Curates' Aid Society, the younger of the two, and the least flourishing, but, of course, finding most favour with the High Church party. The subscribers, in this case, give their money on the understand- ing that, when the circumstances of aparish justify the appointment of a curate to be paid out of the Society's funds, the nomination of the incum- bent shall be adopted by the Committee. But both Societies are accepted by the Bishops, as valuable auxiliaries in the useful work of supplying clergy- men in places where the people want more teachers and the income of the living will not supply them. I have some recollection of a correspondence in which one arbitrary and impracticable Bishop made some difficulty for special reasons about a curate to be paid by one of the Societies. It may chance, too, that the Bishop of Exeter will put hard questions about baptismal regeneration, with a view to the rejection of some Pastoral Aid Society's curate, just as he turns back many others nominated by Evangelical incumbents. But, as a rule, I can assure you that the Bishops accept the help of both Societies most thank- fully, and their operations are limited by nothing but want of funds. Most justly and truly do you observe that wealthy laymen will do well to contri- bute largely of their abundance to help on so good a work. Strange to say, an enormously large proportion of the funds comes from clergymen ; of whom many hundreds, out of a scanty income, contrive to spare something yearly
for poor parishes and overtasked clergymen. In the report for 1854 I find eighteen pages filled with the names of clerical subscribers ; and exactly the same number of pages contains the names of the laymen of England who think it worth while thus practically to prove themselves the Church's friends. It is much easier to read a slashing article in the Times, and then to bemoan the hard lot of curates to whom rectors pay too little.
[Our own article on the Maintenance of the Clergy was in print before we received the letter of " 3.11. G." ; and we have no comment to make upon his letter beyond what is contained in that article, except to note that he does not seem very accurately informed as to the constitution of the Pastoral Aid Society. Its Committee is not, as he seems to suppose, a lay Committee, but on the contrary, consists of all clergymen who subscribe to the Society, with twenty-four laymen, as is stated in our paper : and the objection is not to a lay court of appeal, but to a private and irresponsible court of appeal, which places itself between the Bishop and his incumbents, and thus becomes an organ of sectarian proselytism.—ED.]
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