lay them down again. A Mr. Tiptaft, having resigned his living from conscientious motives, began to preach as a dissenter; but the bishop attempted to stop his mouth with menacing the thunders of the church; and, on his astonished declaration that he was no longer a son of the church, the prelate let him know that he was, and must be,-for clerical orders, like Coleridge's infernal fire, must

Cling to him everlastingly.

To this church, which empties the pockets of the poor, and stops the mouth of the conscientious dissenter, let every Englishman do his duty.

! 1

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHURCH PATRÓNAGE.

Evils of the system of Church_Patronage-Simony-Defence of the Church-Moderate clerical Incomes-Scotch and German Clergy -False notions of Gentility-Christ a true Gentleman-What Clergymen might be-Private Patronage-Surplice Fees.

The Church of England is unpopular. It is connected with the crown and the aristocracy, but is not regarded with affection by the mass of the people; and this circumstance greatly lessens its utility, and has powerfully contributed to multiply the number of dissenters. Edinburgh Review, No. lxxxviii.

We are overdone with standing armies. We have an army of lawyers with tough parchments and interminable words to confound honesty and common sense; an army of paper to fight gold; an army of soldiers to fight the French; an army of doctors to fight death; and an army of parsons to fight the devil-of whom he standeth not in awe!

Fox.

BUT while the nation demands those alterations just enumerated, the internal prosperity, nay the very existence of the episcopal church, as a vital and fruitful Christian community, demands others. First, that it

should be delivered from the curse of patronage,the source of a thousand evils, the cause of lamentable moral lethargy and paralysis. While every Christian society around it enjoys the just privilege of choosing its own ministers, will it be long endured by this church that it should be kept in a condition of everlasting tutelage? that its members, however wise, enlightened, and capable of managing all their affairs for themselves; who would hold it as the highest insult that the state should appoint overseers to choose for their children schoolmasters, and for themselves stewards, attorneys, or physicians-will it be endured long that some state favourite who never saw them, or their place; or some neighbouring fox-hunting squire, whose intellect, if it exhibit itself anywhere, is in his boot-heels; that some horse-jockey, or gambler, some fellow whose life is a continual crime, his conversation a continual pestilence-who, if he were a poor man, would have been long since hanged, but being a rich one, he is at once the choicest son and purveyor of Satan, and the hereditary selector of the minister of God,—will it be endured that such a man shall put in over the heads of a respectable, pious, and wellinformed community a spiritual guide and teacher?put him in, in spite of their abhorrence and remonstrances? and that once in, neither patron or people shall get him out, though he be dull as the clod of his own glebe, and vicious as the veriest scum of his parish, who prefers the pot-house to his polluted house of prayer? From this source has flowed the most fatal results to the church; and nine-tenths of the evils which afflict it. By this means it has been filled with every species of unworthy character: men who look upon it as a prey; who come to it with coldness and contempt; who gather its fruits, while other and better men toil for them; and squander them in modes scandalous, not merely to a church, but to human society. By this means it has been made the heritage of the rich man's children, while the poor and unpatronised man of worth and talent has plodded on in its labours, and

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despaired. By this means so worldly a character has grown upon its ministers, that they have become blind to the vilest enormities of the system, and now look on simony as a matter of course. Whoever doubts this, let him look into the British or Clerical Magazine, and he will find the reverend correspondents asking with the utmost simplicity, How can the bishops help men selling advowsons? It never seems once to occur to them, that if there were no clerical buyers there would be no sellers. In the same journal for June, 1832, is also the following statement ;—" Of the whole number of benefices in England, nearly 8000, more than two-thirds of the whole, are in private patronage. Of the clergy, a very considerable number have purchased the livings which they hold; and of the remainder, most have been brought up to the church, and educated with a view to some particular piece of preferment in the gift of their family and relations. Whether this be right or wrong, it is an effect almost necessarily following from so large a portion of the property of the church being private property; a state of things not to be altered, and which they who wish to abolish pluralities do not talk of altering."

Here in one sentence, written by a clergyman, and published in a clerical magazine, we have the root and ground of three-fourths of the evils and enormities of the establishment. We have a statement, that out of 10,000 livings in England, nearly 8,000 are in the hands of private people; that is, each in the hands of a man who, whatever be his life or his qualifications for judging, can and does put in a clergyman over the heads of his neighbours, to serve his own views, which are commonly to establish some rake or blockhead of a son or nephew, or to make what money he can out of a stranger, if he has no children; not to seek the most pious man, but the highest bidder: and, consequently, that a very considerable number have purchased these livings. Thus, not the pious man, but the

* Appendix VI.

highest bidder, the boldest dealer in simony, has had the livings. Oh! poor people, who are doomed to sit under such pastors, and vainly hope to grow in heavenly knowledge! The remainder, says this most logical writer, have been brought up with a view to some particular piece of preferment from their friends and relations. Yes, younger sons-no matter what their heads or their hearts are made of-doomed to deal out God's threats and promises to the people. Desperate handlers of God's sacred things-who rush fearlessly into his temple, not because he has called them, but because their relations have the key of the doors. And this clerical writer puts forth all this with the most innocent face imaginable. While he enume

rates causes enough to have made St. Paul's hair stand on end; when he tells us that simony is common as daylight; that the bulk of the livings in England are not open to the pious and the worthy, but are the heritage of certain men who may be neither-he is so far from seeing any thing amiss, that he goes on to point out the advantage of such a state of things. Hé declares it cannot be altered; and this is one of his reasons why the church should not be reformed. He does not at all perceive that no church with so scandalous and preposterous a foundation can possibly stand many years in the midst of a country where the spirit of man is busily at work to pry into the nature of all things, and where any monopoly, but especially of religious patronage, must assuredly arouse an indignation that will overturn it. Miserably dark must be the moral atmosphere of a church where its members come forward with a mental obtuseness like this, to advocate its abominations as if they were virtues, while the people gape round them with astonishment, and they perceive it not. But there are no labourers in the demolition of a bad institution like its own friends. They are like insects in a rotten tree; roused by external alarm to activity, they bustle about and scatter the trunk, which holds them, into dust. Such men

put a patch of new arguments into the old garment of corruption, and the rent is made worse.

By these means the church has been filled with pride and apathy; and it is notorious, that of all Christian ministers, the ministers of the establishment are the least interested in their flocks,-cultivate and enjoy the least sympathy with them. I accidentally, the other day, took up Faulkner's Tour in Germany, and immediately fell on this passage, which, coming from a man fresh from the observation of the Continental churches, is worthy of attention. "Nowhere else in Europe are clergymen less respected among the multitude than in the British dominions." He proceeds to account for this by their apathy, their pluralities, their exorbitant revenues, maintenance by tithes, and acting as legislators. He adds, "The clergy of the United Kingdoms are paid more than the clergy of all the rest of Christendom besides by a million sterling and upwards, the full amount of their annual revenue being 8,852,000l. In primitive times, and in the different countries at the present time which I have visited, the remuneration of their labour is chiefly voluntary. In these countries it needs no prelacy strutting in lawn sleeves, and 'raising their mitred fronts in courts and parliaments,' to clothe it with respect.”

This, in contradiction of the many assertions of the advocates of our English establishment, who contend that without dignities and large revenues the clergy would sink into contempt, is borne out by the experience of all the world. The dignities and large revenues of the papal church did not embalm its clergy in public estimation; and to whatever country we turn, we find that wherever the clergy are but moderately endowed, there they are diligent, and there they are esteemed. What is the opinion of Milton, of the preferments which have been so much vaunted as stimulants to activity and talent in the church? That they are but "lures or loubells, by which the worldly-minded priest may be tolled, from parish to parish, all the