since this is a reason that ought to be removed, so when it is, there will remain none against their incomes being properly reduced. Indeed, if a proper inquiry is instituted into what their incomes originally were, and what they have recently been fixed at by the Ecclesiastical Commission, it will soon be made apparent how inordinate they are. Now we have the means of comparing them with a past æra in a very remarkable manner. By an Act of Parliament passed in the reign of Queen Anne, (6 Anne, c. 27, s. 5,) it is declared that "the first-fruits of Archbishoprics and Bishoprics amount to near the full annual value thereof." Now the first-fruits, as at present paid, are the same as in the time of Queen Anne, consequently they afford us nearly the full annual value" at that period, according to the affirmation of the Act of Parliament, and stronger testimony than the words of a statute need not be required to establish a fact. If, then, by the side of these values, we place the present incomes, as fixed by the Commission, we shall be enabled to judge whether any and what increase or reduction has taken place since that period. 66 in the time of Queen Anne is remarkable on another account. For at the time of her present most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, succeeding to the throne of these realms, and at the revision of the civil list, reference was made to that of Queen Anne, and very great reductions were ordered in various salaries paid out of it. Thus one which had been £2,000 in Queen Anne's reign was reduced to £500; several of £1,000 to £500; and others of £500 to £300. Similar reductions had before been made when his late Majesty, King William IV. came to the throne. The salary of Lord Chamberlaine was reduced from £3,073 to £2,000; that of the Lord Steward, from £2,436 to £2,000; and that of the Master of the Horse, from £3,350 to £2,500. About the same time, also, the salaries of the Lord Chancellor, and the Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, were also reduced; and thus, strange to say, while the incomes of secular men have been diminished, those of the highest spiritual officers have been increased. Thus, the bishopric of London, which, in the reign of Queen Anne, was about £900 a-year, is returned, by the Commissioners, as worth (to its present holder) a net average value of £13,550 per ann., and is to be held by his successor at the reduced income of £10,000 per ann. Under this view of the subject there is evidence enough to show that the present incomes of the bishops, as arranged by the ecclesiastical commissioners are far too high, and need to be diminished. This, again, may be shewn in another way. It is argued by some, that in order to draw men of talent into the ministry, the higher offices therein must be adequately paid, and that consequently, the chief functionaries in the Church ought to receive salaries as large as those in the law and other learned professions. Admitting, for the moment, and for the sake of argument, this weighing of the vessels of the sanctuary in the balance of worldly policy, yet surely no one, even the most extreme defender of high payments, will pretend that spiritual functionaries should be remunerated on a higher scale than others. Equal sala ries, not higher ones, is the very utmost point to which such an argument can be strained. The following table, however, will shew that such a scale as that referred to is not acted upon, but a higher one has been adopted : Lord Chancellor.. £10,000 Abp. of Cant. £15,000 8,000 Abp. of York 10,000 8,000 Bp. of London, 10,000 Even, then, upon this plea, the salaries, as at present fixed, are inordinate. I cannot, however, quit this topic without protesting, in the most solemn manner, against the argument altogether, as one degrading to the ministry, as opposed in principle to all that our Master and His Apostles taught us, and as derogatory to God, whose servants the ministry are. Spiritual duties need not, and ought not to be valued by the standard of temporal, and to deal with them thus is to encourage greediness of filthy lucre, and to barter the highest privileges of Christ's servants for mere silver and gold. There is yet another mode of testing the payments of the hierarchy, and judging whether their incomes are excessive or not, and that is by comparing them with those of foreign ecclesiastics of similar rank and station. Thus, for instance, to refer to our immediate neighbours, the French, we shall find a very great disproportion between the incomes of our hierarchy and theirs. The highest ecclesiastical functionary in France, the Archbishop of Paris, has £1,600 per annum; the other fourteen archbishops have £600 per annum, each; and the bishops, sixty-five in number, have £400 per annum, each. Again, in Belgium the net income of the Archbishop of Malines, is £840 per annum, and of each of the bishops, £588 per annum. Compare these incomes, as in the following table, and many It will be quite evident, then, from all that has been advanced, that the present state of the hierarchy of the Church of England is such, as to demand very considerable reductions of income, whether we compare them with what their incomes formerly were, or what secular officers of the State have, or what other Churches enjoy. But when we bear in mind, at the present time especially, that, by a Committee of the House of Commons, last session, there was a review and reduction of the salaries of of the public functionaries, it cannot be denied that the time is a fitting Ecclesiastical Commission, and to reone again to revise the work of the duce such enormous incomes as have spiritual overseers of the Church of so unwisely been appropriated to the England. Besides the reduction of their incomes, that of their palaces should also be effected; and thus, relieved of their peerages and lordly appendages, with moderate and modest incomes, and with suitable houses of residence, the hierarchy would be relieved of its excesses, and rendered in all respects more useful and beneficial to the Church; because the more its enormities of all kinds were abated, the more would the episcopacy shine forth, and maintain its own pure and spiritual influence, unsullied by any of the factitious tinsel and display of worldly pomp and splendour. In immediate connection with the hierarchy, and gradually descending from it, there are a variety of dignitaries, the benefit of whose offices is, to say the least of them, exceedingly questionable. The special work of our Master, when on earth, was "to seek and to save them that were lost;" and since the disciple should not be above the Master, the ministry, his commissioned disciples, should not be placed in any position in which they should be exempted from the cure of souls. Deans and Canons, however, as well as other cathedral functionaries, are in this position; and, although they have some occasional duties of preaching the Word and ministering in the public service of God, they have not that care of souls, nor that opportunity for the exercise of their most important labours, which, as parochial ministers, they would. All chapters, then, ought to be so remodelled, as to be made profitable to the people amongst whom they are placed, and to be reduced in numbers where the population is not large enough to require the services of all. Another class of functionaries, who also need to have their position and office recast, is that of Archdeacons, who are a kind of subaltern to the bishops, having jurisdictions and courts even of their own, independent altogether of the bishop, and yet acting in some sort as suffragans, without the episcopal function and office. It sometimes happens that these independent authorities, in the same diocese, clash the one with the other; and even when they work most harmoniously, their ordinary duties and powers are so similar, that they might well and safely be amalgamated with considerable advantage to the Church at large. But in order to understand properly the manner in which these several offices should be dealt with, we must pass on to the consideration of another principle that needs to be well developed and understood. 3. A third principle for which we would contend is, the simplification and extension of the Episcopacy. It has been already shewn how the existing hierarchy might be relieved of its parliamentary duties, its lordly station, its excessive incomes, and its palatial dwellings; and it has also been shewn that Archdeacons, Deans, and Canons, might all usefully be either done away with, or merged in the parochial clergy. Let it now be seen how the English Episcopate should be both simplified and extended. The Scripture only gives us three offices, at most, in the ministry, as placed permanently in the primitive Church,-bishops, priests, and deacons. Priests or deacons we have in all our parishes; and bishops, to oversee them, we have a comparatively small number of; while of dignitaries, besides their Lordships, there are, as we have seen, archdeacons, deans, canons, and other cathedral officials. It would, however, be far simpler to go back to the primitive pattern, and to limit the ranks and degrees of all our spiritual officers to the orders of the first Church,- bishops, priests, and deacons. Since, however, archdeacons do, according to their functions, lighten the labours of bishops, it would not be well to throw upon the latter, in many instances already overburthened, such additional labours. The number of bishoprics, then, should be very considerably increased, certainly doubled, not improbably even multiplied to a greater extent. There seems to be in the minds of many a very great unwillingness to increase the number of our bishops, on the ground that the Church is already overburthened with its present hierarchy; and certainly if the proposition were to multiply the rich and lordly prelates that we now have, I should be one of the first to exclaim against it. But my proposition is to reduce prelacy, in order to extend episcopacy. My plan is to relieve the prelates of their peerages, palaces, and excessive incomes, and so to leave them free to exercise none but their episcopal functions. My design is to disencumber the bishops of all those temporal and worldly things that hinder them in their work, and impede their best efforts; and thereby to enable them to give their whole and undivided attention to their dioceses and the Church. Bishops, without palaces to maintain, peerages to sustain the dignity of, and parliamentary duties to involve them in town expences, would be handsomely provided for at £1,000 per annum; or, for those resident in the metropolis, where there ought to be four at least, £1,500 per annum. Such spiritual functionaries as these, relieved from worldly pomp and display, resting for power and authority on the virtues of their office and station alone, would be bishops having a very different appearance and aspect from the prelates that now form the hierarchy; and, though doubled in number, would not be regarded with jealousy, and, in truth, by being made more numerous, and therefore more common, would excite less of that mere worldly admiration with which many are apt to regard them. Thus, the more that the parade of prelacy was reduced, so much the more would the true glory of the episcopacy shine forth; and the more that the episcopacy, "then most adorned when unadorned the most," should exhibit itself in its own scriptural simplicity and primitive grace, so much the more would its Founder, our gracious and blessed Master himself, shine forth, and be Himself displayed to the world, through the ministry of the Church, as the great "Shepherd and Bishop of souls. Moreover, let it be borne in mind, that our plan reduces deans and chapters to the position of parochial clergy, that is, to the proper office of priests having cure of souls; and entirely gets rid of the office, jurisdiction, and expence of archdeacons ;-and it will at once be apparent how beneficial and effective would these changes be, and how much would be done in the way of restoring the Church to the primitive and scriptural pattern. The reduction of deans and chapters as proposed, has been admirably exemplified by an Act passed in the last session of Parliament, entitled the Manchester Rectory Act, and which has made the very same changes in the cathedral establishment there that is suggested above for all other places in England. What has been done at Manchester may easily be done everywhere else; and the principle there put in force is one that may be made effective in all other cases. 4. Our previous enquiries will have prepared us for the consideration of a principle which, without them, we might not have been ready either to appreciate or to admit. There are in our Church two equally extraordinary anomalies. If, on the one hand, we have had, as above, to protest against the enormously excessive incomes of the hierarchy, and the lavish expenditure of ecclesiastical funds on dignitaries that do not properly subserve the office of the christian ministry, because they have no cure of souls; so, on the other hand, there is great reason to complain of the ill paid and neglected condition in which a large number of the parochial clergy are left. To remedy this latter evil, the principle we have to propound and maintain is, the restitution to the parochial clergy of their own legitimate parochial funds. If we have had to deplore the evils of an over-paid hierarchy, how much more shall we have to grieve, when we come to understand, as we now shall, that, for the most part, these excessive and ill proportioned incomes are derived from parochial funds, which ought to have been conserved for the maintenance of those who justly earn them by their labours in the parishes whence they arise, and which ought, to the very utmost extent possible, to be restored to those to whom, by all right, human and divine, and notwithstanding all law to the contrary, they do most righteously belong; because "the labourer is worthy of his hire,' and because this is his natural and just wage. Many have been the attempts to explain away and get rid of the force of this anomaly, and to turn our sympathies for the ill paid clergy into some other channel than they ought properly to take. [To be continued.] Correspondence. [The Editors are not responsible for every statement or opinion of their correspondents, at the same time, their object is to open the pages of their Magazine to those only, who seek the real good of that Protestant Church with which it is in connexion.] To the Editor of the Christian Guardian. SIR,In continuation of my last letter, I think I need not add much on the second point to which I adverted, that is to say,— 2. The importance of a diligent, prayerful, and faithful improvement of our position and advantages, when we know them. The best things are useless and vain, if they be not duly used. Our scriptural Articles, Homilies, and Liturgy, will be our heaviest condemnation, — if we do not humbly and faithfully endeavour to preach and pray, and act and live, according to them. That we should be compelled to an indiscriminate use of some of our Services, is indeed a burden. We may fitly protest against that. But, even under present circumstances, much may be done by a truly wise and faithful clergyman, to relieve his own conscience, and to mitigate, if not remove,—existing evils, by laying the whole responsibility upon those to whom it belongs, instead of taking it upon himself,- -as many, I think, are far too ready to do: and the consequence is, that they grievously burthen their own consciences with needless troubles: for, in all or dinary cases, the whole responsibility rests upon those who come to the sacraments, and not upon those who administer them. But to make those who come to them understand their own responsibility, is the matter about which we should be really anxious. And this can only be expected as the result of much plain and faithful preaching, and much earnestness and constancy in pressing christian and scriptural instruction upon the mind and conscience. We want much more of this. We want much more of regular, wise, and systematic preaching from the pulpit. We want much more of catechetical instruction from house to house. The latter I will not here enlarge upon; having said much in a work which I have recently published, and having done what I could lent catechism, well suited to the to supply my brethren with an excelpurpose. But something I must add in regard to the pulpit: I do not think we have much of enlarged apprehension as to the vast responsibility which rests upon us in regard to it. Some ful to preach well digested and weighty goodly number of us, I hope, are caresermons. But how many of us are there who even think of preaching well digested and well arranged courses of sermons?-so as to bring frequently the main doctrines, in their connexion, dependence, and scriptural evidence, before the minds of our people?-and sometimes the whole range of Christian and Protestant Doctrine, as it is set forth in our Ar ticles and Homilies? tangible matters, of the highest pracIn doing this, as the sacraments are tical importance, is it not absolutely necessary that we should take especial care to give our people full and accurate instruction respecting their true nature? their own responsibility in regard to them? and the necessity of receiving them "rightly, worthily, and with faith," if they would have them to be accompanied with a blessing, and not with a curse? And one very important part of such instruction would be, to insist much and often upon the necessity of applying to Baptism, which we find expressly the same principle of solemn warning laid down in regard to the Lord's Supper in Article XXIX., and forcibly illustrated in the first Exhortation with which we should accompany the notice of the administration of the Communion,-"Dearly beloved, on day next I purpose," &c.,-the plainness and faithfulness of which might well be studied by every one who desires so to preach as to deliver See "The Heidelburg Catechism of the Reformed Christian Religion," which was reviewed in your Number for September, 1850,p. 438. |