Parochialism

“ We have suffered a half-heathen population to arise among us, for want of churches and parochial endowments, and we hope to remedy the evil, by violating the sanctity of those other endowments whereby men who had carefully provided churches and ministers for every portion of the existing population, went on to secure the perpetual daily intercessions of the cathedrals, and the maintenance of a learned clergy, who, secluded from the cares of a parish might be, and have often been, the defenders of sound doctrine and the champions of the Church. ”

“ And such is not only the case of irreligious persons or of those who are ill-affected towards the Church; nor is it the result of their own choice; but it is of necessity the condition of great numbers of sincere, devout, and conscientious churchmen. Our actual condition, therefore, presents this startling inconsistency; that while we maintain the importance, and even the necessity, of the parochial system, and while in name we retain it, we have suffered the inhabitants of our cities, in many respects the most important part of our population, to be wholly deprived of its blessings. ”

“ How many have become dissenters almost of necessity; have been allured to the meeting not from the Church, but from the streets and the alehouse, and remain there partly from habit, partly because the claims of Christ's Church, and the blessedness of her children, have never been set before them. Let our parochial system be made universally efficient, and we may hope that we shall soon find them among us. ”

“ The bishops of the English Church, with the co-operation of the clergy and laity, have full power to put them into immediate operation. We require no legislative authority; we need wait for no political change. We want only Christian liberality and self-denial, with a spirit of unity and order. And how might the moral condition of our land be changed. Our parochial system once restored to efficiency, the Church would arise like one raised up from a seizure of paralysis, whose every limb is once more instinct with life and energy. ”

“ The idea of the parish priest taking the oversight of his flock, and ministering to each member as the shepherd of the people, is a grand one, but it is an idea which can be realized, and then only approximately, in the village community. In the towns of the Middle Ages the parochial system, except as a _civil_ institution, had broken down. ”

“ Thus, monk, and friar, and hermit, and recluse, and rector, and chantry priest, played their several parts in mediæval society, until the Reformation came and swept away the religious orders and their houses, the chantry priests and their superstitions, and the colleges of seculars, with all their good and evil, and left only the parish churches and the parish priests remaining, stripped of half their tithe, and insufficient in number, in learning, and in social status to fulfil the office of the ministry of God among the people. ”

“ The civilising and moralising influence of the clergyman in his parish, the simple, unostentatious, unselfish zeal with which he educates the ignorant, guides the erring, comforts the sorrowing, braves the horrors of pestilence, and sheds a hallowing influence over the dying hour, the countless ways in which, in his little sphere, he allays evil passions, and softens manners, and elevates and purifies those around him—all these things, though very evident to the detailed observer, do not stand out in the same vivid prominence in historical records, and are continually forgotten by historians. ”

“ From the comparative poverty of the parish priests, and the shade into which they are thrown by the upper clergy, the power of the first is so limited, that the most bigoted and violent among them can give but little trouble to the laity. The true priest of old times is only to be found among those ecclesiastics, who to a dignified office join that degree of fanaticism which makes men conceive themselves commissioned by Heaven to weed the world of evil, and tear up by the roots whatever offends their privileged and infallible eyes. ”

“ In all these cases our parochial system is little more than a delusion; we retain the name and the form, we call the incumbents the pastors of the whole flock, they are charged by the bishop with the spiritual care of the whole; but in the sight of God and man they are not, and cannot be, responsible for the performance of impossibilities. They are the ministers of their own churches—they are the heads too of a sort of mission, bound to labour according to their power for the spiritual good of the multitudes around them ”

“ But how easy—how pleasant, to mix up together all sorts of information in due proportions into one whole, in the shape of an octavo—epitomizing every kind of history belonging to the parish, from peer's palace to peasant's hut! What are clergymen perpetually about? Not always preaching and praying; or marrying, christening, and burying people. They ought to tell us all about it; to moralize, to poetize, to philosophize; to paint the manners living as they rise, or dead as they fall ”

“ The nobles were following on the same lines, when they made one chaplain steward, another secretary, and another tutor, in addition to their not burdensome duties in the maintenance of Divine worship. So the people resorted to their parish priest to advise them in their domestic difficulties and extraordinary matters of business, to arbitrate in their differences, and make their wills, for the simple natural reason of his wider knowledge of affairs, his greater experience of mankind, his disinterestedness, and, not least, his sacred character. ”

“ The want or remoteness of churches seems never to have occurred to them as favouring the cause of dissent; and in recommending deeds of Christian munificence, the erecting of them is not enumerated, even when they speak of strictly religious charities, as "erecting schools, maintaining lectures of divinity, erecting colleges of religion, and retirement from the noise, and more frequent temptations of the world [15] ." In their eyes the parochial system of the Church appeared to be a victory already gained, a strong hold already set up. ”

“ I used to feel what an advantage 305it would have been if the parish church, endowed and glorified with some of the money spent on the district churches, could have been the centre of a large staff of clergy, and have offered freely to all comers the noblest aids to worship. A feeling of patronage is incompatible with a feeling of worship, and the district church, with its constant need of money and its mean appearance, is always calling for the patronage of the people. The grandly built and imposing building, which gives the best and asks for nothing, provokes not patronage but reverence. ”

“ It may have been conformable to the spirit of the church during the reign of popery, that the priest should assist at the executions, and, in the case of a heretic, be the first to apply the blazing torch to the pile of fagots. But the time, we hope, is not far distant when the custom to which we have alluded, and which is actually at variance with the purity and sanctity of the ecclesiastical character, will not longer be known to exist as a stigma upon the first city of the world. ”

“ The parochial system, though shaken by the fatal poor-law, is still the most ancient, the most comprehensive, and the most popular institution of the country; the younger priests are, in general, men whose souls are awake to the high mission which they have to fulfil, and which their predecessors so neglected ”

“ The parochial system, when enforced to the extent of prohibiting the preaching of the gospel within a parish where the incumbent was opposed to it, led him to consider the whole system a hindrance to the proper work of the church and therefore anti-Christian ("Thoughts on the present position of the Home Mission," Coll. Works, i. 78) . And the waste of power implied in the refusal to sanction lay preaching seemed to him to lead to the conclusion that an official ministry was a refusal of the gifts of the Spirit to the church ("On Lay Preaching," Coll. Works, p. 200) . ”

“ Our steps must be retraced; and as the evil has arisen from the neglect of our ancient parochial system, the remedy must be its restoration. We must supply to the dwellers in every street and lane and cottage of our land, efficient pastoral superintendence, and the public ordinances of the Church; and having done this, we shall still find abundant scope for the labours of every layman. "He that gathereth most shall have nothing over."
And the work by God's blessing is already begun. New churches have arisen in every part of our land, and are everywhere rising ”

“ That society is at once the most beautiful and the most powerful which is composed of the largest variety of temperaments, exercising their various faculties in unity and mutual helpfulness. Some persons imagine that the most desirable parochial life is where all the parishioners are of one stripe, instead of that in which there is a finely disciplined diversity. A parish of dead uniformity would be comfortable but not educative, quiet but colourless and insipid. ”

“ For general parish work there is room for every one; for the cultured landowner, the doctor, the teacher, and for every intelligent man, and also for every intelligent peasant. When an association of this kind bears the character of clericalism, being under the guidance of the Church, it is rooted deeper, and has higher objects, than when it is in private hands, where the interests are often purely egotistical or trivial. ”

“ Where is the ministering of doctrine and of the Word, and of the Sacraments? Where is the care of discipline and morals? Where is the consolation of the poor? where the rebuke of the wicked? Alas for the fall of Rome! Alas for the ruin of a flourishing Church! The bishops are neither chosen nor called; but by canvassing, and by money, and by wicked arts they are thrust upon their government. ”

“ It is idle to talk as if the Church were co-extensive with the nation, or as if the inhabitants of a parish were all worshippers in the church fabric. If a man now does not like the ritual or the doctrine offered to him in his parish church, he leaves it, and goes where he finds what he wants. ”

“ The peasantry and the great mass of the people believed with implicit and intense faith whatever they were taught. The parochial clergy, differing little from the people in their manner of life, and having received an education so nearly worthless that it can scarcely be said to have raised them above the common level, were for the most part as superstitious and as ill-informed as their flock. ”

“ If we are as impartial as it is possible to be, you surely do not expect more. If there should be a parish containing nine hundred churchmen and a hundred dissenters, if there should, in that parish, be a school connected with the Church, if the dissenters in that parish should be too poor to set up another school, undoubtedly the school connected with the Church will, in that parish, get all that we give; and the dissenters will get nothing. ”

“ In an ordinary parish, a presbyterian clergyman would be in possession of the benefice, to attempt {343} an irritating but ineffectual discipline and haggle over tithes, while in the same place there would be a knot of ‘common-prayer men’ with an excluded minister at hand to stimulate their zeal, and a congregation of baptists or independents, who, now that their friends were in power, would see no reason why their enemies should be beneficed. ”

“ We have some general reflections to make on these three chapters on Domestic Chaplains, Chantries, and Gilds.
The appropriation of so many parochial benefices to the religious houses in the twelfth century had greatly reduced the provision for the parochial clergy on whom the burden of the parochial care of the people rested. The institution during the thirteenth century of vicars in the appropriated parishes, with perpetuity of tenure, fixed endowment, and responsibility to the bishop, had done something to alleviate the evil. ”

“ All these sects were bound together by their common aversion to the clergy—not only the wealthy, worldly, immoral, tyrannical, but the decent yet inert priesthood, who left the uninstructed souls of men to perish. ”

“ To secure the full and free access of all classes, "without respect of persons," to churches hereafter to be built in populous districts.
To enforce the fundamental principle of the parochial system,—the common and equal right of all parishioners to worship in their Parish Church. ”

“ The rule of conduct of the parochial clergy has appeared to me to be to keep their influence over their flocks in purely ecclesiastical matters, and run no risk of straining that influence by interfering with their personal morality, or by making Christianity the difficult rule of life which it is in Puritan countries. ”

“ And again because numbers of our parochial endowments are miserably small, there are not wanting men, honest and respectable in other parts of their conduct, men too of whom we cannot but hope that they fear God, and desire his favour ”

“ But man stops short at the symbolical act. And the church or the hierarchy, which here sets itself in the place of the Holy One, is, besides, any thing but sacred and sanctifying. That which I heard of the belief, or rather the disbelief, and of the morality, or rather immorality, of the priests, especially of the higher priest- hood here, and in other places in Italy, is by no means edifying, and in certain cases their influence in families has been dreadful. ”

“ As to our being 'miscellaneous,' we churchmen have no communion with the sects, though you delight to identify us with them, and though some disloyal teachers among us may 'apply the call of dissent to their own lost sheep, and tinkle back their old women by sounding the brass of the Methodists,' 1 our Church, unswerving, still maintains the old, catholic faith, and earnestly entreats deliverance from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism. ”