remind us all of our deficiencies, and to point out the best way of securing improvement. He advocates "liberality and progress;" liberality in the practical, prosaic meaning of the word, and progress in deeds as well as in principles. We fear that his sanguine temperament has somewhat underestimated the difficulties which have to be surmounted. The very principles on which the financial system of our churches is based must be revised. A complete revolution is needed in the ideas of the great mass of the people about the pecuniary necessities and claims of the ministry. The change can only come as the result of very patient and persevering labour.

We shall not in this article plunge into the thorny controversy about the possibility of harmonizing the administration of a great supplemental aid fund, with the free action of independent churches, or discuss the merits of the weekly offering scheme; our chief object being to deal with the preliminary question, whether it is desirable that the poverty of our ministers should cease.

We believe that there are very many good people, thorough going Protestants, and uncompromising noncomformists in all their other opinions, who still retain a lingering affection for the old Romish fancy about the sanctity of poverty. The hair shirt, fasting, flagellation, celibacy, are quite abandoned. Dissenters have learnt the lesson which John Owen taught so well when he said that ascetics imagine they are mortifying the sinful body when they are only mortifying the natural body; but the sanctifying power of poverty is still part of their creed. Not that they ever dream of divesting themselves of their wealth, abandoning the luxurious mansions in which many of them live, and adopting the garb of pauperism, and choosing a garret or a hovel for their home; they leave to the ministry all the discipline of pecuniary anxiety, and, while untroubled by their own perils, fear that if their pastors' houses became more comfortable their hearts would become less zealous and devout. If "the care of this world and the deceitfulness of riches" are unfriendly to the growth even of that measure of piety which is expected in the pew, it is supposed that wealth, or even comfort, must be utterly fatal to the spirituality expected in the pulpit. And hence, when we plead for an increase of ministerial salaries, we are not unfrequently met with hints about the importance of an unworldly spirit and the peril connected with the enjoyment of the luxuries of life. We "ask for bread," aye, literally for "bread," and they give us, not indeed "a stone," but something still less substantial, and quite as cold and hard-hearted-a sermon. The most obvious, and, perhaps, the best reply to all this is,

THE STIPENDS OF NONCONFORMIST MINISTERS.

that poverty in itself is an evil, and that although God has a right to employ it in order to purify and spiritualize the hearts of his servants, they have no right to employ it to sanctify each other. The "Father" may chastise his children in order that the "peaceable fruit of righteousness" may be seen in them; but brothers and sisters have no right to use the rod upon each other. Sickness is, perhaps, a still more effectual discipline of holy principles than poverty; but we should think it odd if churches manifested their anxiety for the spirituality of their ministers by taking care that the walls of the chapel-house were damp, and that the vestry was built over a sewer; by giving unaired beds to ministerial guests and by ingenious devices for inflicting on an indolent or sluggish pastor, the small-pox or the scarlet-fever. The troubles of ministers will be quite heavy enough, no matter what may be the generosity of their flocks; and the deeper sources by which the heart of a faithful pastor is tried are more likely to chasten his spirit, to purify his motives, and ennoble his work, when his mind is free from the distraction of temporal anxieties.

Moreover, we seriously question the healthy influence of the pecuniary straits in which some good men live from the day of their ordination to the day of their death. The heart of a minister ought to be full of genial affection towards his people; but his generous sympathies are likely to be chilled when he passes the handsome carriage of one of his deacons or sees afar off the costly silks of "devout and honourable women," and remembers how shabby his wife's best dress is getting, and how she was obliged to stint herself in the purchasing of warm clothing last winter. Doubtless he ought to give his undivided heart to the spiritual welfare of his church; but his prayers will be often hindered and his preparation for the pulpit often disturbed, if his mind is racked with anxiety about how to avoid debt. People wonder how it is that his public devotions are a little flat and his sacramental addresses rather cold at times; that he does not throw his whole soul into his preaching, as of old; they do not know that there is a vision haunting him more terrible than Macbeth's spectral dagger-a file of unpaid bills!

How often have we heard admirable observations on the evil of a minister's dividing his attention and distracting his energies by lecturing about the country to Mechanics' Institutes; but what can be done if the lecturer, when he receives the next application from an admiring committee-man or entreating secretary, is lured by the prospect of the two or three guinea fee which will enable him to get a new coat, pay his next month's butcher's bill, send a remittance to a poor relation, or

purchase a long-coveted copy of an ancient philosopher or divine? This reviewer's craft of ours is rather friendly, we think, if exercised in moderation, to the vigour, freshness, and variety of a minister's pulpit and platform work; but we are sure the flock will not be better cared for if, night after night, the busy pen of their pastor is scratching away through the welcome and stimulating silence on the merits of a new poet, the heresies of a new theologian, the absurdities of a new India bill, or even the scholarly excellence of a new Greek Testament; and yet, we ask again, what is to be done, if, when courteous "Mr. Editor" suggests a new subject for an article "which would just suit your taste, and which I can trust to your hands with peculiar confidence," &c., &c., &c., the flattering words are radiant with the reflected lustre of the cheque which will brighten the good wife's eyes and gladden her heart by enabling her to fulfil without any qualms of conscience some secret and mysterious plans about additional furniture for the nursery or some cherished desire to visit dear old friends far away?

And then how reasonable it is for warm-hearted friends to protest when they learn that their minister, who left home for his annual holiday quite pale and weary, has been preaching every Sunday during his absence, instead of taking necessary rest! Why did he not go to the Lakes or to Scotland, or up the Rhine to Heidelberg, and on to the dark forests and glittering snowdrifts and glaciers of the glorious Alps? Why? Because by arranging to supply a vacant pulpit or to preach for his old college chum, he not only yielded to his love of work, which is a passion with some men, but had his holiday at less cost to his purse. He would have come back, however, with a coolerbrain, stronger nerves, and a firmer step, if he had been able to spend all the month among the mountains, or idly floating on lake and river, or inhaling fresh life and vigour every moment while he wandered under the shadow of mighty cliffs or pulled an oar with a queer old boatman in a foaming sea.

But we have spoken of the devices by which the most happily placed ministers supplement what are regarded by hundreds as enviable salaries. Dreary, dreary is the destiny of good men who by their inadequate incomes are driven to sacrifice family quiet by receiving half-a-dozen noisy boys to instruct in the rule of three and the Latin Delectus, and whose minds are disturbed at night while seeking solace and stimulus in the pages of Sir Thomas Brown, John Howe, or a borrowed volume of Ruskin, by the remembrance of the vexatious and inexcusable stupidity, in the afternoon, of Master Charles Heavy head over his French exercise. And more dreary still is the lot of multitudes besides, the pensioners of

charitable trusts, the recipients of the ten or fifteen pounds doled out by their associations, the representatives of insurance societies, the agents for Scotch publishers, and canvassers on behalf of new periodicals or flattering schemes for issuing, in parts, popular Biblical cyclopædias, or impressions, in folio or quarto, of the Sacred Book itself. It would be better by far that a good man who is just kept half an inch above starving point by incessant watchfulness for windfalls of this kind should put on an apron and engage himself to weigh sugar and candles over the counter of his friend and archdeacon, the principal grocer in the High Street.

We have shrunk from unveiling the scenes of suffering which we know exist in the family of many a poor minister. Have our readers ever tried deliberately to estimate what is left to buy bread and meat for a minister and his wife, with four or five children, after his black coat and the cheap materials in which she and the boys and girls are dressed have been paid for, after the house-rent and the taxes have been met, and sundry other little items attended to, which are grievous burdens to a poor household, though the wealthy never feel their pressure? If not, will they be kind enough to sit down, the first spare half-hour that falls in their way, and learn from their own calculations what must be the condition of a frightfully large number of our ministers, men who once had their high hopes and their elastic energy, but whose spirit has been crushed out of them by a protracted struggle for the bare necessaries of life. Who will dare to say that this disheartening destiny is favourable either to the intellectual vigour or spiritual earnestness demanded by the duties of the pastorate?

We venture to suggest another test of the respective advantages of comfort and of hardship in connexion with ministerial work; for the conviction of the grave injuries to be apprehended from "the deceitfulness of riches" is too deeply rooted in some minds to be easily dislodged. The test we propose is a practical one; let experience determine whether it is necessary that the ministry should be poor in order to be devout. The saintly Fenelon not only wore a mitre, but was surrounded by the pomp and splendour of the most magnificent of European courts. The unearthly piety of Jeremy Taylor shone with undimmed lustre among the coronets of English nobles. Howe was familiar with Whitehall. John Owen wrote some of the most precious and beautiful of his devotional works while Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. But the list might fill pages instead of a paragraph, and still be incomplete.

From the dead let us turn to the living. Who are the ministers that are regarded with most admiration, listened to with deepest delight, requested most frequently to preach on all kinds of occasions, and boasted of as the very crown and glory of their respective denominations? We never heard that our friends who are in such fear about "the deceitfulness of riches," and have such faith in the spiritualizing power of ninety or a hundred a year, regard the pastors of Bloomsbury Chapel and the Diorama with distrust, and yet these excellent gentlemen occupy "golden stalls" when compared with some of their brethren. In the sister denomination we have heard it whispered-how truly we do not pretend to say-that the eloquent and ardent minister of Surrey Chapel, presiding over a church of more than a thousand members, has an annual income of a thousand pounds; that the venerable author of the "Anxious Inquirer" drives one of the most comfortable broughams in Birmingham; and that the genial and generous pastor of Great George Street, Liverpool, lives in a style worthy of the large and wealthy congregation to which he preaches. It is passing strange that these are precisely the men who are most warmly loved and most deeply respectedand deservedly so-by the very persons who are most anxious to keep the ministry poor, in order to prevent it becoming worldly.

But were not the Apostles poor, and may it not be supposed that the condition which God chose for these illustrious men would be the best for the ministers of Christ in all ages? A plausible argument. But shall we abandon our civil liberty because apostles were persecuted; invite oppression because imprisonment strengthened rather than enfeebled their earnestness, and stoning made their Christian graces shine out with dazzling lustre? It is one thing to endure poverty through the malignity of enemies, and another to endure it through the neglect of friends. There is a paragraph in the preface to Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," which we commend to the careful meditation of those who advocate poverty for the clergy. on the ground of the apostolic precedent. Mr. Hallam, we remember, questions Hooker's right to the epithet "judicious;" for our own part we are willing for the sake of the last sentences of our extract, which we have italicised, to grant him every title of honour that the most enthusiastic of his admirers have ever claimed for him :--

"The chiefest thing," writes the grave old Churchman, "which lay-reformers yawn for is, that the clergy may through conformity in state and condition be apostolical, poor as the Apostles of Christ