MR. BOUVERIE'S " CLERGY RELIEF " BILL.
HOW few statesmen are there who, at the age of five-and. twenty, have settled down into the principles of policy that are to guide them in their maturer years, and through the greater part of life. Without naming the leaders of parties now among us, one has only to reflect on the changes which have taken place in the history of those who carried or who opposed either the Reform Bill or the bill for the aboli- tion of the Corn Laws, in order to be convinced that the political intellect, even in the case of the most gifted and the earliest initiated, is not usually matured and fixed in what are to be its final principles at such an age as that indicated above. If from politics we turn to other professions, who doubts that reading and experience do, by the middle of life, greatly modify and,as it is generally hoped, much improve alike the powers and opinions of the merchant, the physician, or the barrister P How very few men would wish to be bound, at the age of forty, by the judgments they had formed, even on important subjects, when they had nearly a score of years' less acquaintance with the world and its facts!
Such being the course of events in all other walks of life, it would be passing strange if among the men who, at three or four and twenty years of age, honestly and zealously pledge themselves to " assent and consent to all and every- thing contained in the Book of Common Prayer," none were found to alter their opinions to such an extent that they can no longer subscribe, with good faith, to articles and formula- ries for which they once entertained a most undoubting at- tachment.
In no profession, except the clerical, is it thought necessary to forbid such change of principles ; but with the cloth the evi- dent intention of the Church has been, " who enter here leave change behind." We are not about to question the wisdom or necessity of binding the clergy to the Prayer Book ; but we do maintain that, if a minister of the Church finds himself unhappily unable to continue his youthful allegiance to the established creeds and formularies, if he honestly avow this inability, and if he be willing to forego the advantages and emoluments of the position he has attained, it is most unjust and most unwise to say to such a man, You shall not leave the ministry, or, if you do, you shall leave it with a prospect of idleness, dishonour, and starvation before you. This, we say, is most unwise and un- just; yet this is precisely what the Canons of 1603, co- operating with the 53rd Geo. III., c. 127, say to any of our clergy who may have scruples about retaining their office and its sacred functions.
The 76th canon awards "excommunication" to any man who, " being admitted a deacon or minister, shall from thenceforth voluntarily relinquish the same," or "afterward use himself in the course of his life as a layman." The statute of 1813 forbids such excommunication any longer involving a state of outlawry, and restricts its consequences to six months' imprisonment. Recent decisions in the Court of Queen's Bench have ruled that a clergyman must, through all his life, remain bound to yield his bishop canonical obedience, on pain of a similar correction. Several laws and customs preclude the clergy from serving as councillors or aldermen in any municipal corporation, from sitting and voting as members of the House of Commons, or from being called to the bar at any of the Four Inns of Court. If one who, for conscience' sake, has given up his benefice, adopt the vocation of a Nonconformist minister, or a medical man, or a merchant, he may be allowed to do so, unless— like the Rev. James Shore, in 1849—he find himself placed in durance vile for his pains ; but, even if he escape a gaol like that at Exeter, his position is that he labours for an honest livelihood, in spite of the laws of the land, in defiance of their penalties, and as a hanger-on upon the tolerance of the episcopal bench, one of whose now living members has actually imprisoned a nonconforming clergyman. It is thus clear that any deacon or priest, who changes his religious principles after the time of ordination, is reduced to the alternative of choosing between a ministry which has be- come an hypocrisy for him, and quitting the ministry either to starve in idleness, or to gain a livelihood by lawlessness. We say it is high time.that such a condition of the law should be terminated, and we rejoice to see that Mr. Bouverie has resuscitated the " Clergy Relief " bill for this purpose, which he passed through the House of Commons in 1849. At that time there was a clergyman in gaol who needed such relief. Now there are a number of priests and deacons who have quitted the ministry on various scruples, and who feel this grievance so acutely that they petition Parliament for its removal. A more remarkable list of petitioners we have rarely seen. We doubt if the Evan- gelical Alliance itself can boast of having brought together so happy a family. There are Low Church Dissenters, like Baptist Noel; Church Nonconformists, like Messrs. Maskell and Allies, examining chaplains respectively to the Bishop of Exeter and the late Bishop of London ; there is the High Priest (we believe that is his title) of Positivism, an Oxford first-class man, and formerly one of the masters of Rugby ; there is the brother of a living Prelate, and the son of one now deceased ; there is an offshoot of the Broad Church, like Mr. Macnaught ; while some of the petitioners would find it difficult to report themselves, in a religious census, except under some such designation as that of unattached Christians. The petitioners are of most varied creeds and shades of opinion ; but they all seem to have one characteristic in common. They had reached positions in the Church, and had prospects open before them in its ministry which put their resignations very clearly before the world as acts of conscientious self-sacrifice. Yet these are the men whom the existing state of legislation stigmatizes and compels, as they refuse to be hypocrites, to be either idlers or breakers of the law.
For what purpose, let us ask, is such a condition of the Statute Book continued ? Is the Church better served by constraining unwilling or insincere service ? Does the State profit by having its laws defied by the scrupulous and the respectable ? Or is it benefited by the dissatisfied and compulsory idleness of its subjects ? Are the Bishops any happier for retaining over the conscientious a legal power of imprisonment which public opinion and, let us hope, their own better feelings, would hardly suffer them to exercise ? Shall we be told, that if this barrier be removed inconveni- ently large numbers will quit the ministry for various secular vocations ? We reply, that we are not prepared to believe that such a discreditable state of things exists in the Church ; but, if it be so, so much the greater reason is there for affording legislative relief such as would emancipate all the unwilling, and all who feel themselves unfit, from an occupation, which, perhaps more than any other, requires the sympathy and devotion of the whole man. Mr. Bouverie's bill proposes that, on a clergyman declaring before a magistrate his dissent from one or more points of the Church's doctrine, and on this declaration being regis- tered in his diocesan's court, the ex-clergyman shall forfeit all benefices as if a sentence of deprivation and deposition had been passed upon him by a competent court, shall sur- render his letters of orders, and lose all clerical privileges, exemptions, and capacities, but shall, at the same time, become reinvested in all the rights and abilities and freedom from penalty which would have been his if he had never been admitted into Holy Orders. We have reason to believe that the bill must be carefully drawn, for, apart from other considerations, it was passed through the ordeal of a Select Committee in 1849, on which sat some of the representatives of the Universities ; and at that time Sir George Grey said, with reference to it, " the bill is 'calculated to redress a great practical evil, and he would give it his support ;" while the present Chancellor of the Exchequer declared that " he heartily concurred with his honourable friend (Mr. Bouverie) in the object he had is view ; and, provided there were no difficulties as to details, he should be much surprised, and much grieved, if it did not give general satisfaction." . . . . " He thought it would effect a valuable improvement in the law, besides affording relief to the individuals concerned."
With such prestige, and so much logic and common sense to recommend it, one would believe and hope that this bill must become la* in the course of the present session. In- deed, we have nit yet expressed all the reasonable grounds of that hope, for, in 1849, the bill was read a third time in the Lower House, on the 25th of July, so that, unless the Commons have retrograded in their dislike for persecuting enactments during the last thirteen years, they will at once sanction the bill : and, if it reach the House of Lords, it must assuredly be looked upon with favour there, inasmuch as no less a Churchman than the Bishop of Oxford has spoken (Hansard, for February 10, 1857) in favour of such a measure as " a very proper one," " an act of toleration, protecting those" clergymen "who left the Church, against the infliction of penalties ;" while the present Archbishop of Canterbury thus expressed himself (June 3, 1848), in a semi-official letter, which was published in the (Exeter) Western Luminary of October 3, 1848: "I entirely coincide with your opinion, that there ought to be some method by which a person might disconnect himself from the ministry of our Church without being subject to the penalties of the law." And, perhaps, we should add that, though last not least, his Lordship of Exeter, in a letter published by Murray, and dated March 28, 1849, thus wrote to the Archbishop of Can- terbury : " I rejoice to be able to say that your Grace, as well as myself, is entirely disposed to favour and support any Well-considered measure (as the bill now before the House of Commons must be expected to be) for relieving any clergyman who, after he has been admitted to holy orders in the Church, shall conceive conscientious scruples against a continuance in its communion. So far, indeed, from wishing to chain to the service of the altar any whose conscience bids them renounce that service, the true churchman would urge them, rather, quietly to withdraw, than to persist in the performance of offices which they can no longer perform without peril to their own souls, and a serious offence to the souls of others."
If thus argue the bishops and archbishops, if the House of Commons is pledged by its consistency, if the measure be good, and if no valid objection can be urged against it, we do hope and trust that this, which is one of the few good laws proposed in the present inactive session, will not be lost either by the carelessness of those who love toleration and justice indifferently well, or by delay in carrying it through the various stages necessary to its enactment. The bill can have few if any avowed opponents ; but let not its friends forget that delay and over-confidence have slain more " inno- cents" in Parliament than, perhaps, any other cause.
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