Anonymous

“ It is quite within the bounds of possibility that the number of church attendants may turn out to be near four millions, while that of the Dissenters may not much exceed two.
Looking at all the facts of the case, there is every reason why the Church should take courage. Never since the Reformation has she had so much real power for good—never has she been so free from abuses. Each year sees thousands returning to the fold from which they or their parents had strayed; each year sees her enemies more and more “dwindle, peak, and pine.” ”

“ Horace Mann on the Census of Religious Worship has filled the writer with equal surprise and concern. For a period of nearly three years, hardly a week has passed without some injurious step on the part of the Government, some disastrous admission on the part of a friend, some daring rhodomontade on the part of a foe—all of which have owed their origin more or less directly to the false and mistaken view of the Church’s position engendered by the still more erroneous and misleading statistics so widely disseminated by the Census report. ”

“ There is another view of the case which ought not to be overlooked by statesmen who regard a religious Establishment as a mere matter of police. Granting that Dissent teaches men to be neither drunkards nor thieves, is it calculated to make them as good citizens and as good neighbours as the Church? The answer must surely be a negative. The common consent of mankind has pronounced the famous descriptions of the old Puritans in “Hudibras” to be almost as applicable to modern Dissenters as to their ancient prototypes. ”

“ Surely it is time that members of both Houses of Parliament, who resent so jealously any attempt on the part of Government officials to exceed or fall short of the precise instructions given them, in making returns, should raise their voices against the system of publishing with official statistics the crude, and, as it has been seen, the nonsensical but pernicious theorizings of the persons entrusted with the task of compiling reports. ”

“ Sometimes we are told that the Clergy are not abler men because they are not better paid. We have actually lived to see it stated by the Times, that the Clergy of the Church of England—the men who a few short years ago were reported to be rolling in wealth—are worse rewarded in this life than persons belonging to any other profession whatever! ”

“ Of course, men are often much better than the system to which they belong. There are hundreds—nay, thousands—of Dissenters whose Dissent is a mere accident of birth and education, and who are truly catholic at heart; but of Dissent in the abstract, no one who has either studied its history or is acquainted with its practical working will deny the applicability to it not only of Butler’s portraiture, but of another yet more famous description, qualified in the latter case, however, with the insertion or omission throughout of the important word—“not.” ”

“ The short reign of the Puritans so confounded religion with cant that at the Restoration it had come to be thought a sort of virtue to be ungodly. The Church set itself manfully to resist the evil, and no doubt it would soon have been successful; but, unfortunately, the Nonjuring difficulty supervened. Now, it is the misery of a crisis of that description, that the community in which it occurs suffers every way. The men whose labours it actually loses are necessarily amongst the most conscientious, and, therefore, the most valuable, of its ministers ”

“ Thirty or forty years ago, the popular estimate of what was called the Established Religion was as low as can well be conceived. The laity, for the most part, regarded Churchmanship as a mere empty tradition, or at best as a political symbol, and an excuse for lusty choruses in praise of “a jolly full bottle.” The Clergy, unless they were grievously maligned, had but two objects in life—the acquirement of “fat livings,” and the enjoyment of amusements not now considered clerical. Of course, there never was a time when there were not hundreds of exemplary persons in holy orders ”

“ We are constantly hearing that the great towns monopolise the intelligence of the age, and that it is they which are to govern the country. What then, has been the verdict of the great towns on the question—Church versus Dissent? According to these tables, the Church, in the large towns, has provided only 747,027 sittings to meet an increase in the population of 5,621,096 souls. Dissent, in the meantime, has furnished 1,873,305, or more than twice as many. The Church’s increase is not two-thirds the number of sittings she originally possessed; the increase of Dissent is more than sevenfold! ”

“ In modern times, however, we are forced to act differently. The sudden increase of population, and the utter unpreparedness of the Church to grapple with the difficulty, have produced an emergency of which our forefathers had no experience. We adopt the continental custom from sheer necessity, just as in London a third of the population are obliged, though much against their will, to live in lodgings. We build our churches large because that is the cheapest mode of supplying our immediate wants. ”

“ Mann’s tables, could not, by dint of the utmost exertions she is ever likely to put forth, find accommodation for half the souls who are year by year added to the population. On the other hand the Dissenters, who are far less wealthy, and have few endowments, provide without difficulty and without fuss more than twice the amount of new accommodation supplied by the Church. The irresistible inference in the mind of a mere statesman would be that Dissent ought to be aided and encouraged. ”

“ After all, the number of sittings a religious body can open in the morning is the real test of its strength. Amongst persons of every denomination there is a strong feeling that they ought to frequent their own place of worship in the morning, but in the after part of the day many persons do not consider themselves called upon to attend again, or they feel themselves at liberty to visit other churches or meetings. ”

“ Church extension, as far as it goes, tends to compose differences. The consecration of a new church is almost invariably regarded as an occasion when party differences should be laid aside—the opening of a new meeting-house is too commonly the crowning act of an irreparable schism.
Another lesson which the report of Mr. Mann ought to teach Churchmen is the necessity there is for insisting upon the next religious census being made a complete and accurate one. ”

“ In the first place, it is the surprising peculiarity of the present Church controversies that the noisiest, if not the weightiest, disputants are not Churchmen at all. In the next place, those who are Churchmen, and enter with any bitterness into the strife, are remarkable neither for their number nor their influence. ”

“ Even at this moment many good Churchmen are reproached with a love of filthy lucre because they do not follow a few who once thought with them, but who have apostatized from the faith of their fathers; whereas, if there be a man in the world to whom secession under any pretext is impossible it is the consistent Anglican—the distinguishing tenet of whose school is the spiritual equality of bishops, and the consequent indefeasible authority of that episcopal line which has from time immemorial been in possession of a given country. ”

“ In every class which by any stretch of the term can be called “respectable,” parents do supply their children with what they consider a sufficient education; and their idea of what is sufficient is, after all, not much lower, everything considered, than prevails amongst the middle classes, who, in a country like this, must always fix the standard. The result of the Census goes to show that the Legislature has adopted the right course—that the way to obtain as large a number of attendants at school as possible is to subsidise, not to supersede, private exertion ”

“ For all practical purposes it may be asserted that at least half of the new population were as much beyond the reach of the Church of England as if they had settled in the woods of Canada or on the plains of Hindostan. Year after year the evil went on increasing, until at last the number of Englishmen who did not belong to the Established Church became so great that a Parliament of Churchmen were obliged to surrender their exclusive right of legislation and government. ”

“ What, on the other hand, is the status of a majority of the 20,390 buildings returned to the Census office as “chapels” may be guessed from the fact that the total number of professional dissenting ministers of every description in 1851 was only 8,658.
A very tangible mode of settling the question which body has done most to evangelise the people would be to inquire how much each has spent? The “Society for the Liberation of Religion,” in a tract they have put forth, grounded on the Census report, states that the achievements of voluntaryism during the half century have been “astonishing.” ”

“ It is found that if by better modes of tuition a child can be made sooner to acquire what its parents think sufficient for it to know, it is only so much the sooner taken away. It would therefore be vain to expect that the school per centage will ever be much higher than it was in 1851—at least, until the middle classes raise their own standard. Of the children on the schoolbooks in 1851, the per centage of actual daily attendants was 83—91 for the private, and 79 for the public scholar. In America, where the schools are wholly free, the per centage was still less. ”

“ Every one knew that the Church was strongest in the country and Dissent in the towns; and seeing that the rural and the urban population were about equal, the public could scarcely be surprised to learn that the two bodies were also of nearly equal strength. According to the census, the Church had in 1851, 5,317,915 sittings, and the Dissenters 4,894,648; but the Bishop of Oxford has shown that there are good reasons for believing that the Church sittings have been unfairly diminished, while those belonging to Dissenters have been much exaggerated. ”

“ In 1662 no fewer than 2,000 ministers were ejected under the new Act of Uniformity; and as at the last census there were only 6405 professional Protestant Ministers, it will be seen that the ejected preachers alone formed a larger body, in comparison with the existing population, than the Protestant Dissenting Ministry does now. It cannot be doubted that every one of those men had a greater or less following; and it must be remembered that in the days of the Commonwealth there was always a rabble of sects who might even then be called Dissenters. ”

“ The object of the present essay is to strike at the very first step in the sorites—to show that the Church, since the great revival, so far from having proved a failure, has proved herself more than equal to the situation; and finally to point out how grievously both the public and the Legislature have been deceived by the data which have been published for their guidance.
It need hardly be observed that the unfavourable impression to which allusion has been made has been entirely created by Mr. Horace Mann’s Report on the Census of Religious Worship. ”

“ Under any circumstances, the Church, deprived of her parliament, must have greatly suffered; much more so in the face of those vast changes which have come about in the extent and distribution of the population. The machinery of the existing Church Establishment was designed for a population of five or six million souls. By 1821 the inhabitants of this country had increased to twelve millions. A new population exceeding the old one had thus been introduced, for which the Church as a body had no means of providing a single additional bishop or a single new sitting. ”

“ How small was the church-feeling of Parliament at the Revolution may be gathered from a curious fact mentioned in Mr. Macaulay’s third volume. It was proposed that the Commons should sit on Easter Monday. The Churchmen vigorously protested against the innovation; but they did not dare to divide, and the House did sit on the festival in question. Without at all straining the inference to be drawn from this incident, it would be difficult, indeed, to suppose that Churchmen had matters their own way. Even under the penal laws, the Dissenters must have been a large body ”

“ The increase in the number of church sittings during the past half century may be considered as nett, for there can be no doubt that nearly all the new buildings have the double service. At all events, if there are any that have not, they are more than compensated for by those ancient churches where there was formerly only one service on the Lord’s Day, but where there are now two. On the other hand, the Dissenters are not able to open quite three-fourths of their sittings on the Sunday morning ”

“ For, if there are two men under precisely the same obligations, and one of them feels compelled for conscience’ sake to surrender all his worldly prospects, people will never be persuaded that the other, who does not follow the same example, has not sacrificed his convictions to his material interests. ”