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A FEW weeks ago the curate of a church not far from where I live got up a theatrical entertainment in the parish schoolroom for the benefit of the church funds. The little comedy which the curate and his friends acted was entitled, “All in a Fog.”[3] Who the dramatis personae were I do not know, but the play would not have been less comic had the rector himself appeared in the character of “the labourer’s friend.” In trying briefly to adduce a few reasons why the labourer fails with his shortsightedness to recognise his best friend[4], I desire at the outset to disclaim any feeling of hostility to the Church of England as a spiritual force doing its best, as I believe it to be in thousands of places, in spite of its iron-bound rules, to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land. Nobody but a purblind partisan will deny that multitudes of the State clergy are fighting to-day nobly against the allied forces of irreligion, luxury, immorality, and drink, and what is not less apparent is that the men who are doing so with the greatest success are those clergy in the crowded cities who depend for their own and their church’s support not upon tithes and endowments, but on the voluntary offerings of men and women ready to pay a fair price for a good article. article. May I go further, and in doing so perhaps run the risk of falling foul of some of my colleagues of the Liberation Society, and say that the Church of England ought to be endowed with full authority to punish ecclesiastically her refractory clergy for offences which do not come within the purview of the ordinary criminal law? But when special legislation is needed to curb the lawlessness of the Anglican clergy, one cannot forget Mr. John Bright’s famous words spoken in 1875: “They tell us that the clergy of the Church of England are set over us by the State as instructors in morals and religion. And yet their own friends — the archbishops and bishops and ministers of State — declare that their conduct is so lawless that it is necessary to have special legislation to keep them in order.” Mr. Bright then referred to the special legislation provided for the punishment of publicans, marine store-dealers, garotters and wife-beaters, and added, “There is something far more dreadful than this, and that is when you find men — thousands of them — upon whose consecrated heads the hands of the bishop have been placed, for whom it is necessary to have special legislation to punish or to curb them.”[5] The cause of
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Nonconformity will not be advanced, and the ultimate liberation of the Church from State bondage will not be hastened, by refusing to give the Anglican Church power to get rid of her unworthy clergy.
One cannot be a very observant student of rural England without quickly finding out that between the country clergy and their parishioners there is a great gulf fixed. The Bishop of Liverpool put the case very neatly and far too forcibly for his hearers at the Church Congress in 1886. Affirming that the Church of England was really weak in rural parishes, and had failed to get hold of the people, he said: “The services of the Church are not valued. The churchgoers are out-numbered by the chapel-goers. The clergyman is not regarded as the best and safest guide to heaven. The fountain of spiritual life is thought to be the teaching of the Nonconformist minister.” This was sufficiently plain speaking, but the bishop hit even harder. “The farmers and labourers as a class may not be highly educated or able to appreciate great intellectual attainments, but they have a very keen sense of reality. They like a man to live consistently with his profession, and they secretly despise the clergyman who does not live up to his ordination vows. Too often the squire’s younger son, who perhaps knows more about horses, dogs and guns than about Jesus Christ and Him crucified; or the Fellow of a college, who knows more of mathematics and Greek plays than his Bible; or the son of some tradesman or land-agent, who has bought the next presentation to a nice quiet country living as a good provision for his son because he is fit for nothing else — too often, I say, men of this kind have been pitchforked into country rectories and vicarages, and have slept there undisturbed for half a century to the immense damage of the Church of England.”[6] I have thought it wiser to borrow the Bishop of Liverpool’s language, and I might have quoted words of almost equal severity from the lips of the late Dr. Fraser, Bishop of Manchester, rather than attempt by any words of my own to explain the root
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and branch abhorrence with which the labourer, possessing, perhaps, little book knowledge, but yet deeply learned in the oracles of God, contrasts the Christianity which the parson teaches and that which he exemplifies in his life.
The agricultural labourer is a keen observer. He communes with nature in her loveliest moods. His brain is not addled like the town worker’s by the conflicting ideas of half-a-dozen halfpenny dailies. He knows that a Church which attaches little importance to the personal piety of her clergy cannot help him very far along the road to the celestial city. To him it is a curious anomaly that his Nonconformist companion should have a voice in the selection and retention of his pastor; but that the cure of his soul should be knocked down to the best bidder, or secretly bartered, and the “living” change hands much in the same way as the village public house[7]. No one could doubt the hostility of the labourers to the clergy who was present at the recent Liberal Congress of agricultural labourers in London. One man rose after another and described in burning words the petty tyranny of the village parson[8]. Nor can any Churchman forget the vehement cheers which greeted Mr. Ball, an agricultural labourer who is the candidate for Rye division of Sussex, as he quoted at the Town Hall, Newcastle, at the last Federation meetings, the well known and bitter lines—
“They preached to us contentment when we have wanted bread;
They told us Jesus Christ was poor, but parsons are well fed;
They told us that’s the way to heaven — to pray and fast, you know;
But if it is, there’s one thing sure, not many parsons go.”[9]
Next to the absence of personal piety I should be disposed to attribute the unpopularity of the country clergy to their foolish antipathy to Dissenters. Surely there are enough men and women and lads and lasses in most parishes thronging the public-houses, loafing at the street-corners, belong to no Church and making no religious profession, to tax the energy of
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the clergy without rendering it necessary for them to expend their restless zeal upon the village Nonconformist. I remember some years ago spending the Sunday with some friends who lived in the manor house of a picturesque little town on the South Coast. My friends were Methodists, and on friendly terms with the rector. On the Saturday afternoon the rector called and invited us all to come to church the next morning; as he intended, he said, to preach a special sermon to Methodists, we all went. The church was nearly empty, or, at all events, what was left of it, for the transepts and the chancel were all that remained, the nave having been burnt down ages ago by the French. The Crusaders, with their crossed legs, were quietly resting under their sculptured canopies; and we Methodists formed a very comfortable family party in the big square manor house pew. The rector began his discourse with a declaration that if he were to see the devil running across his churchyard with a Methodist on his back he would not feel it to be his duty to shout out “Stop thief!” because, said this eccentric genius, “I should consider he had got his own property.” [10] That sort of conduct, some one will say, is a thing of the past. Is it? It is only a few weeks since the President of the Wesleyan Conference was compelled, in dignified but most severe language, to publicly censure the Bishop of Truro for his impertinent conduct towards the Methodists in Cornwall[11]. I have before me at this moment the letter of a Methodist farmer, who tells me that there was recently a revival of religion in his village, and night after night the little chapel was crowded with persons seeking salvation. One evening the vicar of the parish came into the farmer’s kitchen. “Mr. A.,” he said, “I cannot understand how you, an intelligent man, can be so taken in. These sensations, which you imagine to arise from a conviction of sin and a desire to obtain salvation, are nothing more than a form of St. Vitus’s or St. Anthony’s dance. Now,” he added, “I will just show you how some of these people act.” And thereupon the vicar danced round the room, putting his body into all sorts of contortions, and uttering such cries as he considered penitents “convinced of sin” would utter. How is it possible for such a man to gain the respect of his parishioners? In another village, or rather a group of villages with which I am very familiar, the Methodist children who were willing to go and be confirmed by the bishop at a recent confirmation were paid fourpence each. It would take up far more space than there is at my command to refer to the cases of intolerance of the rural clergy towards Nonconformists which have come to my personal knowledge in connection with the burial laws. Sometimes the front gates of the parish church-yard have been closed and Dissenters ordered to enter by a back gate; often the church bell has not been permitted to be tolled; the utmost harshness has been practised as to the strict form of notice; on other occasions graves have been selected for Nonconformist burials among the pauper graves, and on one occasion within my knowledge under a refuse heap[12].
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Nonconformists cannot be expected to forget that the clergy of the National Church have been their steady opponents in Parliament. The bishops were the most formidable opponents of the admission both of Roman Catholics and Jews to Parliament and Dissenters to the Universities; and they fought like Trojans for church rates. Who does not remember with what tenacity Churchmen have, in both Houses of Parliament, clung to the national schools, until those seminaries have in the rural districts become sectarian schools, managed in the interest of the Anglican Church? I could enumerate village after village in Lincolnshire where the children of Nonconformists number 60 to 80 per cent. of the whole school; and yet the parents have no voice in the management, and the children are sedulously instructed in the doctrines and tenets of the Anglican Church[13]. If, then, the rural clergy desire to win the confidence and gain the respect of the agricultural labourer, they must stop their insane hostility to the village chapel, and cultivate in the pulpit, on the platform, in social life, and in Parliament a spirit of Christian toleration.
The labourer has sense enough to know that the country parson draws his salary from the soil. He knows that with the landowner, the farmer, and the labourer the parson shares the profits of the farm; or, to put the case more accurately, the clergyman takes his pay before either the landlord or the farmer are allowed to take theirs. This is not the place to argue the Small Holdings Bill, but there is little doubt that the multiplication of the small freeholder will, in years to come, cause the parson many a sleepless night in parishes where the tithe comes to ten or twelve shillings an acre. This difficulty has not troubled the labourer so far. What, however, has and does most seriously displease him is to find that the parson almost invariably hates his politics. In the Louth division of Lincolnshire there are seventy-four clergymen of the Established Church. I believe I am right in saying that only five are Liberals. In the adjoining great agricultural divisions-Brigg, Gainsborough, and Horncastle the proportion of Liberal clergy is even less; and yet the overwhelming mass of labourers are distinctly Liberal. How can a labourer who sees his vicar at the Primrose League demonstration on the Saturday afternoon in the squire’s park, and hears him advocate Protection or some allied form of Reciprocity, listen with ordinary patience on Sunday to a man who believes in the dear loaf, expensive clothing, and the low wages which Hodge knows perfectly well would follow any tampering with Free Trade?
Have the country clergy sitting as magistrates on the bench, acting as guardians of the poor, serving as members of the sanitary boards used their position and power to protect the poor against the oppression of the rich, to deal out even-handed justice, to improve the houses of the people, to distribute public funds with delicacy and Christian sympathy among the deserving poor, to render the workhouses less repulsive? As a class, they have not.[14] There was a day in English history when the clergy sprang from the
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people and sympathised with them; but that day is over. Poor men in tattered coats do not go to church. The Church of England is the Church of the squire, the big farmer, the country lawyer, the producer of fine ales. It is no longer the refuge, the shield, the deliverer, as in ages gone by, of the needy and poor. Nonconformity is now the mediator between the classes and the modern mouthpiece of democracy in the churches.
We are told that it is the duty of the National Church to infuse the religious spirit into the social problems of to-day. Granted; but is this being done? Certainly not in rural districts. Let me quote a few sentences from a letter only a few days old, written to a mutual friend by an observant and industrious country rector living in one of the most beautiful counties of England-a letter, by the way, not written for publication.
“Few of the landowners and the rich recognise their moral obligations; many are non-resident. Their personal influence is lost on the people for good. The farmers as a class are niggardly and sordid, and the poor are oppressed, and generally there is no one but the often-maligned poor country parson who always resides amongst the people and attends to them.
. . . There is evidently a falling away of religious influences all the country over and among all classes, and perhaps more than all among ‘the upper classes.’ And we see the results in rudeness, impatience of law, profanity, vice, envies, and strife and crime. When the masses feel their power and rouse themselves to resist oppression and wrong, what will the end be?”
The picture is too terribly true; but the labourer has taken his place on the electoral roll. He is stolidly fighting his way home to his village and back to the land — going for guidance in his temporal and spiritual concerns to the itinerant preachers of the Nonconformist churches, and not to his “best friend” across the rectory lawn.
Endnotes
[1] The Review of the Churches was first published in October 1891. Its founder and “general editor” was Henry Simpson Lunn (1859-1939). It was “the first British periodical devoted to Christian Union” (Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “The Forgotten Origins of the Ecumenical Movement in England: The Grindelwald Conferences, 1892-95,” Church History, Vol. 70, No. 1, March 2001, p. 74). The purpose of the Review was to: “facilitate discussion among all Protestant denominations and prepare the way for eventual reunion” (ibid, p. 80).
[2] This article, signed by R. W. Perks, was published as the second of three papers in this issue of the Review under the heading: The Round Table Conference — VIII: “The Parson and the Agricultural Labourers.”
[3] Perks was at this time living in Chislehurst in Kent. “Who’s who?’, or All in a fog” was a one Act farce written by Thomas J. Williams and appears to have been popular for performance by amateur theatrical groups during this period. The performance Perks refers to here was presented at the Schoolroom adjoining St. Mary’s church, Plaistow on several evenings in early January 1892. (The Bromley Chronicle, 14 January 1892, p. 2 and The Bromley and District Times, 15 January 1892, p. 6.) A resumé of the plot appeared in The Leinster Reporter, 13 August 1891, p. 1. It centres upon two parallel cases of characters being mistaken for persons who they are not.
[4] The paper immediately preceding Perks’s in this “Round Table” was by an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. J. Frome Wilkinson. He had begun his paper: “Believing, as I do, that in the life of our villages the parson is the labourer’s best friend, and often only friend …” (op. cit., p. 170).
[5] The speech Perks quotes from here was given by John Bright at a large meeting (c. 15,000 people) in Birmingham on 25 January 1875 (see Yorkshire Post, 26 January 1875, p. 8). The legislation Bright was referring to was The English Church Act of 1874. The Bill that led to that Act had been brought into the House of Lords by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and supported in its passage through the House of Commons by the Disraeli government.
[6] The paper Perks quotes from here was titled “The Church in relation to the rural populations: the chief causes of weakness and the best means of remedying them.” It was presented on 6 October 1886 to the Church Congress held at Wakefield. Its writer was John Charles Ryle (1816-1900), Bishop of Liverpool from 1880 until his death. The paper was reported upon widely across the British press, with some newspapers reproducing it in full. See, for example, The Coleshill Chronicle, 16 October 1886, p. 8; and 23 October 1886, p. 8.
[7] In his posthumously published Notes for an autobiography, Perks stated that his uncle Charles Thomas Perks (c. 1825-1894) had once made a serious offer to pay to obtain for him a country “living” in Shropshire: “When I was about seventeen years old the living of Madeley came into the market. My uncle in Australia offered to purchase it for me if I would become an Anglican clergyman. I always thought that my father was to some very slight extent attracted by the idea, but I felt I had no call to the ministry in any Church and so I put an extinguisher at once upon my uncle Charles’ benevolent idea.” (p. 46). Speaking in Bury St. Edmunds in 1916, Perks seemed to indicate that his uncle had actually made the purchase of the Madeley advowson: “One of his relatives held a parsonage in Shropshire, and for some occult reason thought he (Sir Robert) was a very suitable person for that parsonage. His father, who was a man of common-sense … thought he would suit the situation. His mother [did not]. He did not go to the parsonage, and he had always thanked God that he had that narrow escape from being an Anglican parson.” (The Bury Free Press, 22 July 1916, p. 7).
[8] The Liberal Congress of agricultural labourers was a one-day event held on 10 December 1891. The Western Daily Press editorial on the Congress commented: “Some of the speeches were marked by keen distrust of the present ruling authorities in the villages. Some hard things were said of the squires, and much harder of the parsons. … In many districts the rector has a power in his hands which demands the virtues of a saint and the wisdom of a judge to administer with perfect fairness, and it would not probably be to his ultimate disadvantage nor that of his church if some of those powers were transferred to a representative body, and the people had the consciousness that they were their own masters in matters affecting their citizenship” (11 December 1891, p. 5).
[9] These lines were quoted by George M. Ball at the annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation held in Newcastle-on-Tyne in October 1891, during the session titled “The Condition of the Rural Population.” Perks had also been a speaker during that session — see note 14 below.
[10] Perks appears to have been quite fond of recounting this incident to Methodist audiences. In a “letter to the editor” published in The Banbury Guardian of 12 January 1888 (at p. 7) he stated that “the clergyman who jocosely pictured the devil running across the parish churchyard with a Methodist on his back was the Rev. J. West, for many years Vicar at Winchelsea, Sussex. … Mr West, to do him justice, was in private life not so intolerant as his creed. He was a frequent visitor in the house where I used to stay; and was in the habit of explaining the perplexing doctrine of pre-destination with no little humour.” The Rev. James John West became Vicar of Winchelsea in October 1831, having been presented with the living by his uncle, Sir William Ashburnham. West remained Vicar of Winchelsea until his death in August 1872. The “family party in the big square manor house pew”, referred to by Perks here were his uncle and aunt, Samuel Griffiths (c.1814-1881) and Rebecca neé Perks (1818-1866), and their children. The account of the incident given in Perks’s Notes for an autobiography (pp. 42-43) suggests that it occurred at some time during the mid-1860s.
[11] The President of the W. M. Conference, Dr. Bowman Stephenson, made this public censure of the Bishop of Truro while preaching at St. Just in Cornwall on 29 February 1892.
[12] The Burials Act of 1880 granted Nonconformists the right to have their own ministers and order of service at interments in parish graveyards. “But the 1880 Act did not end disputes over burials … The parochial incumbent remained entitled to fees for interments even if he had not officiated … Furthermore, clergymen were sometimes reluctant to observe the 1880 Act” (David W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics 1870-1914, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1982, pp. 30-31). Perks had been appointed secretary to the Wesleyan Methodists’ Committee of Privileges in 1882, and in that capacity had taken on responsibilities for monitoring (and gathering information on) the situation regarding the functioning of the burial laws (see ibid, pp. 32-33).
[13] Perks was particularly well-informed regarding the facts and figures of the situation in Lincolnshire as a result of his having been the Liberal party’s candidate for the Louth constituency of that county for over four years at this stage. Endorsed by the Louth Liberal Association in October 1886, he had put a substantial amount of his time into attending meetings within the constituency, meeting and talking to the electors, and gathering information on their concerns. Perks was elected M.P. for the Louth division in July 1892.
[14] This had been one of Perks’s themes when he spoke at the annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation held in Newcastle-on-Tyne in October 1891, in the session titled “The Condition of the Rural Population.” Referring to “that curious rural archaism — the clerical magistrate,” Perks stated that: “he objected to have upon the Bench gentlemen who would be far better engaged in attending to their ecclesiastical duties, and who, he regretted to say, were as remarkable for the ferocity of their sentences as for their ignorance of law” (p. 85 of Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the National Liberal Federation).