THE NATIONAL CLERGY AND THEIR CLAIMS.
IT is clear that some of the Clergy think we have dealt hardly with them in relation to their attitude on the Burials Bill. But it will appear also, we think, from the remarkable letter of a correspondent,—the Rev. F. W. Harper,—who has always the merit of saying boldly and even crisply what many of his brethren only dare to think,—that we have not at least under- rated the claim to special privilege on which the clerical feel- ing in that matter is based. And if we wanted confirmation of this feeling, where could we find confirmation so striking as the Guardian of Wednesday affords us in the following very significant little bit of "ecclesiastical intelligence,"—in refer- ence to the recent decision of the Judicial Committee that Mr. Keel, a Wesleyan Minister, is entitled to be described as the 'Reverend Mr. Keet ' on a tombstone in Owston Ferry Church- yard?—"Mr. Manning, the Rector of St. Petroc Minor, Corn- wall, has advertised that he will receive no letters addressed to him with the prefix 'Rev.' Our publisher has received com- munications from clergymen desiring that the term may no longer be applied to them, but instead, they may be addressed as rectors or vicars." If this does not really mean, at least every Dissenting minister in the kingdom will at once take it to mean, that a title which is not exclusively applicable to the national Clergy is altogether unwelcome to those of the national Clergy who have made this protest,—that rather than bear a title which is technically and legally no more their's than a Dissenting minister's,—which is, indeed, a mere honorific title describing them in relation to the nature of their occupation, and without relation to the specific act of ordination by which alone, according to their views, they were rendered com- petent for that occupation,—they would prefer to be addressed, we suppose, simply as "Mr.," where the circumstances of the ease will not admit of the official title of Vicar or Rector. Indeed Curates in Charge would hardly wish to be addressed as' Curate in Charge '—life is not long enough for such circumlocu- tion—and then what is an ordinary curate to do who has no official title to fall back upon except priest or deacon? Will the publisher of the Guardian be instructed to address that journal to "Priest Smith" or "Deacon Brown" at the parsonage-house, rather than to describe them by a title of respect to which the neighbouring Wesleyan minister is now declared to have an equal right? Let us trust, not,—that this little display of exclu- siveness and peevishness may be repented of almost as soon as it has been made, and that we may not have a general out- break of feeling from the national Clergy which will render it more and more difficult for us who sincerely desire to uphold the Church, to find any reply to those of its assailants who declare that the spirit of privilege and caste is fostered by the very existence of the Establishment.
Assuredly the Clergy ought not to let the Lord Chan- cellor's judgment on the Owston-Ferry case pass without carefully noting the difference between the tone taken by a Bishop, and that of even a Conservative Lord Chancellor, in relation to such matters of privilege. Listen, first, to Bishop Wordsworth, and note carefully his attitude of mind :—" Divested of all its technicalities this is the real point raised by the question, 'Whether a Wesleyan preacher is to be designated by the title of "reverend" in a churchyard of the Church of England ?' and this is ,a point of great importance, especially in times like the present, when our people are distracted by religious divi- sions, which are injurious to the cause of Christianity, and are affording a triumph to Rornanism and infidelity.
Holy Scripture speaks strongly against the sin and danger of schism. The Church of England prays God in her Litany to deliver her from it. Can any faithful minister of the Church do otherwise than protest against the admission of an inscription into his churchyard, by which the Church her- self would be made, in the eyes of the people, to seem to connive at schism, if not to encourage it ?" Now it evidently never occurred to Dr. Wordsworth to ask him- self seriously whether any man in his senses, seeing the in- scription of a name on a tombstone as that of the "youngest daughter of Rev. H. Keel, Wesleyan minister," would be put in danger thereby of drawing the inference that the Church of England shrinks from denying the validity of the. Wesleyan minister's claim to administer the sacraments, and so counten- ances the sin of schism. The Bishop was obviously so possessed with the exclusive right of the Clergy to be recognised officially as belonging to a distinct caste, that he assumed at once that any wavering as to the proper meaning of the title 'Reverend' must be assumed to endanger the position of the caste itself, else he would certainly have been struck by the humour of the hypothesis that any man, woman, or child could possibly be shaken in faith or confirmed in schism by observing that the Church did not hesitate to allow Mr. Keet to describe himself as "the Rev. H. Keel, Wesleyan minister." Apparently it never entered Dr. Wordsworth's head to ask himself the preliminitry question whether or not the use of this title had any doctrinal signification at all. His only idea was to protest against any confusion of Dissenting ministers with clergymen of the Church. His obvious feeling was probably adequately represented by the view, 'Resist the first demands of opponents, whatever they be ; concede nothing to competing sects ; deny that anybody is to be revered in respect of his office except a clergyman ; if you don't, you will let the Dis- senters get in the thin edge of the wedge.' But now turn to Lord Cairns's calm judgment :—" In the opinion of their Lordships, the word 'reverend' is not a title of honour or of courtesy. It is an epithet, an adjective used as a laudatory epithet, a mark of respect and of reverence, but nothing more. It has been used for a length of time, yet by no means for a great length of time, by the Clergy of the Church of England. But the time has been when that title did not belong to them. It has been used in ancient times by persons who were not clergy at all. It has been used for a considerable time, and it is used at the present day, in common parlance and in social in- tercourse, by ministers of denominations separated from the Church of England,—by ministers of the Wesleyans, by ministers of bodies holding a congregational form of govern- ment, and by Presbyterian ministers. Under these circum- stances, it appears to their Lordships impossible to treat this word as a title of honour exclusively possessed by the Clergy of the Church of England, or that ministers of other denomi- nations should be refused their claim to be permitted to place it on a public monument. To that I may add, that if ever there was a case in which no possible misapprehension could arise with regard to the title—even in the minds of those, if those there be, who think that the Church of England should ex- clusively possess the title—it is this case, because on the face of the inscription there is not merely the use of the word 'reverend,' but there is appended to the name, 'the Rev. H. Keel,' these words, 'Wesleyan minister.' Therefore, this in- scription in substance states that although the person placing it there thinks right to prefix the term 'reverend,' he does not claim to be a person in holy orders." In other words, the radical assumption on which the Bishop's advice turned, was, according to the view of a Conservative lawyer of orthodox views, so utterly irrelevant to the whole question, that it could not have arisen in any-man's mind who looked simply at the point submitted to him for decision. It was a violent pre- judice or prepossession which alone raised all these scruples in Bishop Wordsworth's mind. He was rendered incapable of look- ing calmly at the facts of the case by the activity of his fears and of his ecclesiastical anxieties. He was asked to decide one thing, and he decided it on the strength of his conviction about something else which was Tilt° irrelevant to it. The pathos of the situation lies in his having been able to think that the considerations which he advanced were relevant. That really learned and thoughtful and pious men should have been capable of believing that by describing a man on a tombstone as "Rev. H. Keet, Wesleyan minister," the Church was countenancing false doctrine and the sin of schism, and should have been able to pass over without even a reference, the preliminary and only relevant inquiry, as to the proper meaning of "Rev. H. Keet, Wesleyan minister," is a lesson on the disturbing power of prejudice such as, we venture to say, no man ought to ignore, and the national Clergy ought very carefully to lay to heart.
And we say this the more emphatically because, as we have already hinted, the letter of our able correspondent, the Vicar of Selby, whom we have no reason to class amongst those who will wish to cast off the title of Reverend the moment it is decided that a Wesleyan may lawfully assume it, seems to us to place the position ef the national Clergy expressly and most emphatically on the ground of privilege. It is our in- terest, he says—and we quite admit it—to get the very ablest men we can to rank themselves in the national service, and most of all, in the national service of religion. You cannot, he argues, get the ablest men, without giving them a position in proportion to their ability,—a position of which they need not feel ashamed. Farther, he argues, the national Church- yard, whatever its legal purposes, is, in the national feeling, an appurtenance of the Church, and you cannot put the Dissent- ing minister or the layman on an equal footing with the national clergyman in any place which the popular feeling regards as belonging to the Church, without derogating from that clergyman's dignity and rank, and making it less likely than before that wealthy and careful parents will bring up their sons with all the pains to qualify them in ability and in learning for their post which they now take, if that post is to be one involving the humiliation of equality with Dissenting Minis- ters in any part of the Church precincts. That is really Mr. Harper's argument, stripped of its non-essentials, and we can imagine none which it is more painful for the Liberal friends of an Established Church to hear. Why should the argument be limited to humiliations affecting only the Church precincts? Was it not to some extent a derogation from the exclusive privileges of the Clergy, when marriages were first permitted in other places than the Established Church at all? Nay, was it not a dero- gation from the position of the Clergy when Dissent was legalised in any form, and a man could for the first time honestly say that he had attended to his religious duties as sanctioned by law without going to church? Probably every exclusive privilege which the Clergy have had has been apologised for on the ground that, if you abolished it, the Church would be manned by less able and less carefully educated men in future ; but the obvious reply is, and must always have been,—if you can get the ablest men only on condition of permitting them to keep unjust and mischievous caste distinctions, you had much better have less able men than more able men at such a price. Christianity was not preached in the first instance by twelve particularly able men. Indeed, till the conversion of St. Paul, there was remarkably little ability in this sense among the Apostles. It was the charity "that vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own," that spreadoChristianity far and wide, and it would be by the agency of men even inferior in ability, if that were needful, to our Clergy, but with a higher spirit of self-denial, that the national Church would really be best recommended. We confess it dis- heartens us to hear these arguments for privilege from the mouths of our national Clergy. Not that we wish to see the Clergy humiliated in the churchyards of their own churches. As they are prohibited from using at the burial of the dead any service of a controversial nature, by all means let the Dissen- ters, who are to have the right of burying their dead there in their own fashion, be put under some equivalent restriction, so tiat it may be impossible for any sect or party to use the common ground for offensive purposes. But let us hear no more of these suicidal pleas for privilege ; let us hear no more that
Christian ministers of the State must not be asked to stand on the same ground with heretics and schismatics, "people who know not the law" and are "cursed." We are surprised that the Clergy of the Church of England do not eagerly welcome every advance, so far as it involves no concession of truth on their part, to that complete social equality, that absolute obliteration of all grounds for social soreness, which is the first condition of a true moral interchange of thought. How are you to get at the true- mind of a man whose whole moral nature is fortified by the un- conscious bitterness of an inherited sense of social inferiority, against the very name of Churchman ? If you want to overcome' Dissent, it must not be by exalting the horn of the Church in relation to her social dignity, but by her becoming the servant of all. Can anything be more disheartening than to see that every opportunity which we hold out to the Church of playing this part with simplicity and earnestness, is indignantly re- jected, as an unworthy humiliation which it would be wanting in a proper pride to accept ?
Previous page
