Back Aa

Clergymen Of The Church Of England

<h2>VIII. THE CURATE IN A POPULOUS PARISH.</h2> Would that it were possible to enforce upon the bishops, as a part of their duty, the task of furnishing annually a statistical return which should show what proportion of the clerical duties in their dioceses was done by curates, and what proportion by other clergymen; and also what payment had been made to the curates for the work so done, and what payment to those who were not curates. Such statement might show us for instance, in a tabulated form, how many morning services and how many evening services had been performed by each curate, how many sermons preached by him, how many children baptized, how many dead men buried, how many marriages celebrated, and, above all, how many cottages visited.{93} Then, if we could see, together with all this, what amount of the payment received could be justly appropriated to each task performed, we should have some clear idea of the manner in which the revenues of the Church are divided among those who do the work of the Church. We all know that no such statistical information is within our reach. The bishops are altogether beyond our power, and cannot be ordered by any one to do anything. The idea of comparing the work done with the payment given for the work would be horrible to the imagination of every beneficed clergyman in the Church of England. It would be horrible even to the imagination of the curates themselves, who, like the needy knifegrinder, have no adequate conception of the injustice they are themselves suffering; and who are, as a body, so well inclined towards the rules and traditions of the profession to which they belong, that they have not as yet taught themselves to wish for a change. No clergyman in our Church has, as yet, taken it into his head that there should be any analogy, or any proportion, between work and wages in his profession, as there is such analogy and such{94} proportion in all other professions. There is a something of revolutionary tendency in the suggestion that clergymen should be paid in accordance with their work, which is almost profane to the mind of a clergyman, and which vexes him sorely as being subversive of that grand position which he holds as the owner of a temporal freehold. The very irregularity of the payments still made to parish parsons, and formerly made to bishops, half justifies a latent idea that clergymen, though they work and receive payment, are not labourers working for hire. A second son inherits his living as the elder son inherits his estate;—and the rector who receives his living from his bishop is equally firm in his possession. He may be blessed with 1,000l. a year for doing very little, or have 200l. a year for doing a great deal; but in either case what he receives has no connection with what he does, and therefore no such statistics as those of which we have spoken can be supplied. No revelation will be made to us tending in any degree to give us the information for which we ask. That there will come an adjustment between work and wages in the Church, as in all other professions,{95} is certain. Indeed, much has been done towards this adjustment already, though not after the fashion above proposed. The incomes of all bishops have been arranged on such an idea,—to the great detriment, as has before been explained, of episcopal magnificence. Deans and canons have fallen beneath the levelling hands of ecclesiastico-political economists. And out of the funds which have been acquired by these adjustments and curtailings of ecclesiastical wealth, certain incumbents working in populous parishes have received augmentations of pay, making their incomes up to the very modest stipend of 300l. per annum. But nothing in all this has touched the great body of the clergymen of the Church of England, or has as yet shown any general recognition of the principle that the hire of the labourer should be proportioned to the labour done. In speaking of the work and wages of curates, it must of course be admitted that in all professions and all trades the beginner should be contented to work his way up, taking at first, and being contented to take, a modest remuneration for the very best that{96} he can do. The young barrister does not get fifty-guinea fees at once, nor does the young medical practitioner jump at once into the good graces of the old ladies and gentlemen who make the fortunes of mature doctors; but at the bar, and in the profession of physic, there is at least some proportion kept. The man who gets the most money is generally the hardest-worked man;—or if, in some cases, it be not so, the lower man who works harder than him above him receives something like a fair share of the spoil. If he be successful in work he is successful in pay also. Being successful in work, he will not work without success in pay. But the curate, let his success in work be what it may, does not even think that he has, on that account, a claim to proportionate remuneration. If he can get to the soft side of his bishop, if he have an aunt that knows some friend of the Lord Chancellor, or a father who has means to buy a living for him,—and he be not himself of too tender a conscience in the matter of simony,—then he may hope to rise. But of rising in his profession because he is fit to rise he has no hope. The idea has not, as yet, come home to him that he{97} has a positive claim upon his bishop because he has worked hard and honestly in his profession. It is notorious that a rector in the Church of England, in the possession of a living of, let us say, a thousand a year, shall employ a curate at seventy pounds a year, that the curate shall do three-fourths or more of the work of the parish, that he shall remain in that position for twenty years, taking one-fourteenth of the wages while he does three-fourths of the work, and that nobody shall think that the rector is wrong or the curate ill-used! All the world,—that is to say, the rector’s friends and the curate’s friends also,—have been so long accustomed to this state of things, the bishops have had it so long under their eyes, the idea of a temporal freehold in a living being a good thing for the parson instead of a good thing for the parishioner has got such a hold of us all,—that we none of us see the injustice of the present practice, or stop to inquire how it grew up among us, originating in a practice that was not unjust. When the rectors and vicars were very many among us in comparison to the curates, when a curate was needed in but few parishes,{98}—the ordinary tenure of a curacy was, of course, short. There have been instances, no doubt, since the earliest years in which curates were employed, of curates who have remained curates till they were old men; but the succession from the smaller number of the inferior grade to the much larger number of the superior grade was, of course, rapid, and a clerical babe would be contented to take a curacy even at seventy pounds a year, who might reasonably expect to be raised from that humble position after a service of two or three years. But now-a-days, since the immense increase of population has forced upon us an increase of curates,—any increase in the number of endowed rectors and vicars being out of our reach,—the clerical babe must become a clerical old man on the same pittance, and it is coming to pass that young men whose friends have been at the trouble of giving them a good education, do not like the prospect of becoming curates, without any prospect of rising from their curacies to the glories and comforts of full-blown parsondom. And in considering this matter we must remember that the curate of to-day is deprived of a great advantage{99} which belonged as a matter of course to the curate of yesterday. The latter was presumed to be, by virtue of his calling, a gentleman, and as such possessed almost a right to be admitted into society which neither his fortune nor his own abilities would have opened to him. He was a gentleman as it were by Act of Parliament, and it was understood that he might receive where he could not give, and so enjoy many of those good things which a liberal income produces, though such things were beyond the reach of his own purse. Thus the pains of his position were mitigated. And in this way the poor clergyman mixed with men who were not poor, and received a something from his status in the world, to which no disgrace was attached, though it was something which he could not return. But we may say that all this is now altered. A clergyman is no longer a gentleman by Act of Parliament. Till the other day he was admitted into all families simply because he had a place in the reading-desk of the parish church;—but he is no longer so admitted. Things have become changed within a few years, and mothers are becoming as chary of admitting the curate among their{100} flocks—till they know exactly what are the curate’s bearings—as they have ever been in regard to the new young doctor till they have known his bearings. Under these circumstances, all men who care for the Church of England are beginning to ask themselves how the race of curates is to be continued. Let us for a moment look at the life of a curate of the present day. We will suppose that he comes from some college at Cambridge or Oxford. We will so suppose because Cambridge and Oxford still give us the majority of our clergymen, though we can hardly hope that they will long continue to be so bountiful. He enters the Church, moved to do so by what we all call a special vocation. During the period of his education he feels himself to be warmed towards the teaching of the English Protestant Church, and as he finds the ministry easily in his way he enters it—and at about the age of twenty-four he becomes a curate. He is at first gratified at the ease with which are confided to him the duties of an assistant in the cure of souls, and does not think much of the stipend which is allotted to him. He has lived as a boy at the university upon two hundred{101} a year without falling much into debt, and thinks that as a man he can live easily upon seventy pounds. Hitherto he has indulged himself with many things. He has smoked cigars, and had his wine parties, and been luxurious; but as a curate he will be delighted to deny himself all luxuries. His heart will be in the service of his God, and his appetites shall be to him as thorns which he will make to crackle in the fire. To eat bread without butter and to drink tea without milk is a glory to him,—and so he begins the world. And for a year or two, if he be not weak-minded, things do not go badly with him. The parson’s wife sees far into his character, and is kind to him, stirred thereto by a conviction of which she is herself unconscious, that the money payment made by her husband is insufficient. The dry bread and the brown tea are still sweetened by reminiscences of St. Paul’s sufferings, and the young man consoles himself by inward whisperings of forty stripes save one five times repeated. To be persecuted is as yet sweet to him, and he knows that in doing all the rector’s work for seventy pounds a year he is being persecuted.{102} But anon there grows up within his breast a feeling in which the grievance as regards this world is brought into unpleasant contact with the persecution in which he has a pietistic delight. He still rejoices in the reflection that he cannot possibly buy for himself a much-needed half-dozen of new shirts, but is uncomfortably angry because the rector himself is not only idle, but has bought a new carriage. And then he gives way a little—the least in the world—and at the end of the year owes the butcher a small bill which he cannot settle. From that day the vision of St. Paul melts before his eyes, and he sighs for replenished fleshpots. But he still works hard in his curacy,—perhaps harder than ever, driven thereto by certain inward furies. What will become of him,—of him, with his seventy pounds a year, and nothing further to expect as professional result, if he be deserted by his religious ecstasy? But religious ecstasy will not permit itself to be maintained on such terms, and gradually there creeps upon him the heart-breaking disappointment of a soured and an injured man. In the midst of this he takes to himself a wife. It is always so.{103} The man who is most in the dark will be the best inclined to take a leap in the dark. In the lowest period of his despondency he becomes a married man—enjoying at the moment a little fitful gleam of shortlived worldly pleasure. Then, again, he is a male saint for a few months, with a female saint beside him; and after that all collapses, and he goes down into irrevocable misery and distress. In a few years we know of him as a beggar of old clothes, as a man whom from time to time his friends are asked to lift from unutterable depths of distress by donations which no gentleman can take without a crushed spirit—as a pauper whom the poor around him know to be a pauper, and will not, therefore, respect as a minister of their religion. In all this there has been very little, we may say nothing, of fault in the curate himself. As a young man, almost as a boy, he placed himself in a position of which he knew the old conditions rather than those then existing around him—and through that mistake he fell. But young men are now beginning to know, and the fathers of young men also, what are at present the true conditions of the Church of England as a{104} profession, and they who have been nurtured softly, and who have any choice, will not undergo its trials—and its injustice! For men of a lower class in life, who have come from harder antecedents, the normal seventy pounds per annum may suffice; but all modern Churchmen will understand what must be the effect on the Church if such be the recruits to which the Church must trust.{105} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.