Country Clergy The Church is often accused of taking little
more than a abstract interest in the education and general affairs of the country side; but does the countryside take any more interest in the affairs the Church? The more I live in the country the more I feel so for country clergymen. They have often been painted viciously it is often said that there are too many of them. (There are at 1 35o of them in the Diocese of Canterbury alone, accounting for onl half of Kent.) But the apathy, vindictiveness, bickering and bigo that most of them face reaches, I imagine, a fairly high general lee A canon in a neighbouring village preaches to a congregation that often not more than five; another parson, at harvest festival, 1 round in vain for a single member of the four farming househol in his parish; another endures life in the ugliest of rectories, wh the enormous cavernous rooms never get warm and where you co put a bus in the entrance hall and where four servants would j ensure moderate comfort—small wonder he longs for a cosy semi detached in a town. But there is something more heart-bre than damp rooms in cavernous, ugly rectories; and when I hear say "Ironical, isn't it, that my only friends in the village are am the unbelievers? " I can guess what it is.
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