THE REVOLT OF THE CURATES. T HE C7turch, Beformer, which, as
might be expected in the organ of Mr. Stewart Headlam, is an ecclesiasti- cal Cave of Adullam, has opened its columns to a certain Dr. Thackeray, who is making ample use of them as a vehicle of his special grievance. By " special " we do not mean personal. Dr. Thackeray, indeed, has this also ; but he is so-anxious to make himself the mouthpiece of a class that he almost loses sight of his own wrongs. He has quarrelled with his rector,—this fact is clear enough from the letters printed in the Church Reformer. But, unlike most people in similar positions, he does not seek to make out the exceptional hardness of his own case. On the contrary, he heads the second instalment of the correspon- dence,—" The Revolt of the Curates : a Call to Arms ! " He wars not merely or chiefly against his own former in- cumbent, but against incumbents generally. That there may be exceptions among them he thinks possible ; but "in the loomp " they are bad. Dr. Thackeray is the most outspoken of the revolting curates, but he is far from being alone in his protest. The columns of the Guardian, have borne frequent testimony to the prevalence of similar views among men not gifted with Dr. Thackeray's fluent indignation. They complain that they do not get on well with their incumbents, that they do not get promotion early enough or surely enough, that the possession of a wife and children acts injuriously on their chances of em- ployment, that they are practically superannuated at an age when in any profession they would still be in the prime of life ; and finally, though by the side of the greater grievances this is rather a small detail, that they have no means of learning the characters of their rectors before engaging themselves to work under them.
Of the reality of some of these grievances there can un- fortunately be no doubt. Nobody can deny that the life of a curate has many discomforts, however convinced he may be that these discomforts are inseparable from the position. We should all like to be our own masters and our own commanding officers, though whether the work of the world would be any better done in consequence is another question and far less easy to determine. Taking the first and last of the complaints we have enumerated, we are inclined to think that it would be well if some means could be devised whereby a curate might ascertain rather more easily than he always can now, whether a curacy is likely to suit him. At the same time, we suspect that more information is gained by curates upon this point than is generally known. A young man seldom takes a curacy with no acquain tance with any of the facts beyond that there is a curacy to be had. But if we may venture upon a sug- gestion, it might be well if archdeacons or rural deans were willing to become the advisers of young men seeking curacies, and to give them the benefit of such information as they have at their command, in order to indicate whether the intending curate and the intending rector are types that are likely to work together without undue friction. Where we differ from Dr. Thackeray, and differ most completely, is in regard to the relative numbers of contented and discontented curates. We believe that, on the whole, the relation works fairly well, and that nothing would less tend to making it work better than the intro- duction of the machinery of a Trade-Union.
One of the points that Dr. Thackeray is most proud of seems to make rather against him. He says that the Prayer-book only speaks of two ranks among the clergy, —Bishops and curates. Undoubtedly this is so ; and the moral we draw is that the Prayer-book knows nothing of such divided responsibility as Dr. Thackeray has in his mind when he speaks of an incumbent as being of right only prinins inter pares. The curate, in the view of the Prayer-book, is the person in charge of the spiritual wel- fare of a parish, who has the care of the souls contained in it. For these souls he is responsible to God and man, and of this responsibility we do not see how he can use- fully divest himself or be divested. When a parish is, or becomes, too large for one man to work, this responsibility does not divide itself ipso facto ; it remains on the same shoulders on which it originally rested. The incumbent is still in law the curate of the parish ; the only difference is that he has to devolve on others a part, not of the responsibility, but of the work which has to be done in discharge of the responsibility. Dr. Thackeray would hardly hold his solicitor or his stockbroker free of blame if, in answer to his complaints that they had given him bad advice, they pleaded that they were only primus inter pares among their clerks. He would be tempted to remind them that he employed them, and not their subordinates. Whether it would have been better if all large parishes had been divided into separate cures as soon as they became unmanageable by one man, is another question. There is much at all events to be said for the system of working them by many clergy under a common head, and as long as this system lasts it will be impossible to accord to curates—in the modern sense of the term—the rights with which Dr. Thackeray would invest them. They and their incumbents are riding on one horse, and they cannot hope to escape the general law, that one of them must ride behind.
It is a more real and serious hardship that the chances of a curate grow less with every year he lives after forty, and that at any age the fact that he is married, and still more the fact that he has children, will militate against his finding employment. On the other hand it is unfortunately plain that in the majority of cases the incumbent who regards these things as a disqualification is quite justified in taking this view. The position of a curate is, as we have seen, essentially a position of subordination, and age and matrimony certainly do not help a man to fill this position to advantage. An in- cumbent naturally wishes for a curate whom he can mould in some degree to his mind,—a curate who will work on his lines rather than on the curate's own, and will take to some extent the impression of his rector. These are essentially the virtues of youth. As a man gets on in life, he grows less malleable. His character becomes formed, and though his theory of work may have grown and widened as years have gone by, this very circumstance, though it may make him better fitted to be himself an incumbent, probably makes him less fit to be a good curate ; and after all, it is a good curate that an incumbent, even the best incumbent, really wants. So, again, with marriage and children. Whether an incumbent does, or does not, think in his own case that marriage creates a conflict of interests, and that an unmarried man is more likely to devote himself to his work than a man who has a wife and a family to care for, we may be quite sure that he thinks this about his curate. His object in choosing him is to get the best helper he can ; and the common-sense view of the process certainly is that the best helper—the helper that will suit the parish best, and give it the best work—will be found among unmarried men rather than among married, and still more among men without, rather than among men with, children. It is a common notion among commanding officers that married subalterns do no good to a regiment ; it is an equally common notion in Oxford and Cambridge that the marriage of tutors does no good to a college. We fear that the incumbents of parishes are not less in the right when they take the same view about married curates.
We do not think, therefore, that Dr. Thackeray's "Call to Arms" will have any considerable or lasting effect upon the status of those he is anxious to benefit. If he would make curates what he wishes them to be, he must also compel incumbents to employ them in some fixed rotation, and to ask no questions about age or circumstances. But from this it would follow almost as a corollary that incum- bents should no longer have to pay them out of their own pockets, and when all these reforms had been effected, it would be found that curates had disappeared. A man appointed automatically, without reference to more than a very limited list of qualifications, and paid from some general fund, might be a co-rector, but he would certainly not be a curate. There is no radical cure, we fear, for the evils of which Dr. Thackeray complains, except the aboli- tion of curates, and when that had been accomplished, curates would have, we suspect, to be created anew for their own and their rectors' convenience.
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