CLERGY AND THEIR WORK.

We propose to follow up a paper which appeared in our last numWE ber, under the title of "Our Difficulties, and the way to deal with them," by making some investigation, in the present, into the grounds of those complaints which are so largely brought against the Clergy by a noisy portion of the public, and which certainly present another great difficulty' to those who constitute the active executive of the Church.

It will not be necessary for us to adduce any authorities for the accusation which we shall endeavour to meet with an answer. When, by real or supposed wrong-doing any man or body of men makes itself obnoxious to the public, that public is sure to find some means for expressing its opinion pretty distinctly, be that opinion right or wrong: and the Clergy having fallen more or less into disfavour of late,-whether deservedly or not we are going to inquire, every newspaper reader's eyes have been rejoiced or wearied, as the case may be, with arguments trying to prove, first, that the Clergy are not competent for their work; secondly, that they are an idle race; and thirdly, that whether the two previous propositions are veracious or not, it so happens that the work of the Church is done very badly. We shall consider these accusations in the order in which we have named them, and shall try to consider them with impartiality. In our previous pages we abstained purposely from touching upon the current events of the day but the present portion of our subject is so mixed up with them, that it will be impossible to view it in that abstract form. Though, however, we shall be obliged to make one or two exceptions, our references to persons or events will be as few and as general as possible.

Few, probably, whose criticism is worth notice, will offer any objections to the Clergy on account of general intellectual qualifications. Much has been said about the poverty of sermons; and unfavourable comparisons have been made, most unjustly, between those of Clergymen and Dissenting preachers: it is very probable, however, that even those who have made such comparisons would confess that there is no class of men which can show so large a percentage of good scholars as the Clergy can; nor any which can bring forward so general an array of men who have done their duty in an University course. We shall therefore pass over that question, and consider at once those more special qualifications which belong to the particular profession with which our remarks are concerned.

Now it is certain that there is already some general improvement VOL. XIX.-FEBRUARY, 1857.

H

with respect to the theological part of clerical education during the last few years. Men need not, and probably do not, as a rule, leave the University in which they have graduated, and immediately enter into Holy Orders utterly ignorant of the first principles of that science on which their future work is to be founded. All of us who know anything about the matter, know indeed that it has been so, and that in very recent times. But most of us are aware, that in the transition state under which we are living, the general body of the Clergy are suffering from a stigma which justly belongs only to the more prominently conspicuous men of a generation fast passing away. It is certainly a fact that a great number of popular preachers in London and elsewhere, are, theologically, nobodies. They have gone through their academical course, and made their start in clerical life with the very minutest smattering of theological knowledge; and in many cases, having hardly looked forward with any seriousness to the sacred office which they were about to receive, have made no voluntary preparation for it, nor undergone any set discipline which had reference to its special requirements. Then, when they have found themselves afloat as Curates, with work of a certain kind sufficient to occupy much of their time, there has been little inducement for them to take up the study of theology, and every inducement the other way, that study not having had popular favour on its side of late years. The consequence has been that such men have gone on in their work with no more knowledge of the Divine science than is furnished by Mr. Simeon's grim Calvinistic " skeletons," which each has covered with an exterior individuality of his own creation, sufficient to claim attention from very shallow hearers, but not enough to hide from intelligent ones the general source of such pointless reproductions.

We quite allow that many such men as these, the results of a past system, have held places of mark in which they have been supposed fairly to represent the general character of the clergy: but the great body of the clergy would at no time have been willing to allow that they were fairly represented by them; and least of all would they be so willing at the present time. The exaltation of shallow men to the position of popular preachers has been partly the result of great indifference to practical religion on the side of the laity, and especially of the middle classes. Judging of their clergy chiefly by sermons, they have elected to the highest place in their favour, those who fell in most, without showing it openly, with their own system of indifference. The article most in demand has been supplied to them. They have wanted clergymen who would not criticise their conduct severely, or give them much trouble, and they have had them and it is therefore in a great degree in answer to their own request that they have been flooded with a showy, but utterly unpractical preaching; a pseudo-eloquence which gratified the itching ear without in the least disturbing the torpid heart.

We are heartily ashamed for both laity and clergy while writing thus; for the one, that they have been so sunk in indifference to true religion; for the other, that their body has admitted men capable of pandering to such indifference, and capable of hardly anything else. But, as we before remarked, this is a state of things fast passing away; and the complaints respecting it which have been recently made, properly apply to a period some years gone by, rather than to the present. The laity are generally late in discovering things; and though it is matter of rejoicing that some portion of them, at least, are now fully awakening to the hollowness of such a system, it is by no means wonderful that on first coming to a knowledge of a fault, they should make a good many blunders about the remedy for it. As however the laity speak more loudly than they think deeply about such matters, it will be very unreasonable if they refuse to accept, on trial at the very least, the remedy which thinking clergymen, who have long seen and acknowledged the evil, conscientiously believe to be the true one. remedy, we need hardly say, is the foundation of Colleges for the reception of professed candidates for Holy Orders, where, with (or in some special cases without) a previous university education to build on, they may be trained in a definite manner for the peculiar work of their profession.

That

The idea of such colleges is by no means new. At the time of the dissolution of monasteries Archbishop Cranmer "projected that in every cathedral there should be provision made for readers of Divinity, of Greek, and Hebrew, and a great number of students to be exercised in the daily worship of GOD, and trained up in study and devotion, whom the bishop might transplant out of this nursery into all parts of his diocese. And thus every bishop should have had a college of clergymen under his eye, to be preferred according to their merit. Those who observed things narrowly judged that a good mixture of prebendaries and of young clerks bred up about cathedrals under the Bishop's eye, and the conduct and direction of the Dean and Prebendaries, had been one of the greatest blessings that could have befallen the Church, which not being sufficiently provided of houses for the forming of the minds and manners of those who are to be received into Orders, has since felt the ill effects of it very seriously." So wrote Bishop Burnet nearly two hundred years ago, and as the remedy was not supplied in all that period, one may see how the evil must have been augmented, and how its "ill effects" continued to be felt very sensibly.

About the same period at which this measure was contemplated by Cranmer, it was actually put in practice in the Church of Rome in obedience to a Canon of the Council of Trent,1 and, if the complaints of opponents are a test, with no small success. It is wonderful indeed that such a plan has never been revived until our

1 Sess. xxiii. c. xviii.

own days; and that even yet we can point to three dioceses only in which it is carried out. Diocesan Colleges are, in fact, the great want of the day in the matter of clerical training. While every department of state, and almost every profession, has its distinctive system of education to direct the energies of a well stored mind into its proper professional channel, the Clergy are almost unprovided with such a resource; and in its absence too frequently enter upon their duties with only the scholarship and general knowledge gained in the ordinary road to a Master of Arts degree. Undoubtedly University education is very desirable for the Clergy, but it never was intended to turn out men at once fitted to undertake the work of parish priests, and that, practically, is what all do undertake on first entering into Holy Orders. University education was intended to form a broad intellectual foundation on which many a varying superstructure could be raised, according to the particular calling to which he who had undergone such training was appointed. One does not expect physicians to emerge from Oxford or Cambridge fully armed with all that practical knowledge and skill which are necessary to an efficient pursuit of the healing art. Neither is it reasonable to expect that in a place of general education, such a course of training could ever be contrived, such special appliances accumulated, such strict moral discipline undergone, as are necessary for the very exceptional calling of the priest's office. The words of the passage we just quoted are well expressive of the object which should be had in view in such a class education as is really required. The exercise of the daily worship of GOD, the training to habits of study and devotion, these are absolutely essential to the formation of a good parish priest; and however possible it may be to attain these in the midst of a bustling University, it would be far better that their attainment should rest on more certain ground, and that men should have opportunity of doing so in colleges where each member has taken his place with the professed object of preparing for the work of the priesthood. And where, of all places, should such a college be situated but under the shadow of the cathedral church, and within reach of what ought to be, (and it may be hoped will be to the next generation, if not to this,) the pattern of Christian worship for the Diocese in order, beauty, constancy, and reality of devotion. A technical initiation in Theology, that is, the moulding of the mind to the capacity for a deep and thorough insight into Holy Scripture,-this, of course, we are presupposing as the very essence of such a system. But beyond this, what men preparing for Holy Orders require is, the fixing of a devotional moral habit which will enable them without effort to do all they have to do as the work of the Chief Pastor, and not their own; to labour, not only well, but on the highest Christian principles.

The preliminary training of our Clergy ought also to comprehend a kind of instruction, the necessity for which is very much under

valued by the laity, we mean a technical training in the ritualistic duties of the priesthood. Such duties are not to be learned by instinct any more than the duties of other professions. They do not consist merely, as some seem to think they ought, in the reading of certain formularies out of the "reading desk," and certain manuscript essays out of the pulpit. It is unnecessary for us here to enter into a specific detail of what they do consist in, it is suffieient to point to the direction at the close of the Service for the Ordination of Deacons, which directs that every Deacon shall remain in that order a whole year "to the intent he may be perfect and well expert in all things appertaining to the ecclesiastical administration."1

Now, as we said before, a newly ordained Clergyman almost always enters upon "full duty," as far as a Deacon can, immediately. That year, therefore, which was formerly regarded as a kind of noviciate or apprenticeship, is in the present day of high pressure on the clergy, a year in which full energy and knowledge are required almost as much as at any subsequent period. And until our clergy are twice or thrice as numerous as they are, we do not see how it can be otherwise. The apprenticeship therefore ought to be gone through beforehand: and for the purpose of enabling men to go through it Diocesan Colleges are a most valuable institution in the Church. After all such a training as is there given for the work of the Church is only what Dissenters have long given to their young men for the work of the meeting-house. If, according to the standard they set before themselves, Dissenters have good preachers among them, it is because preaching has been the chief exercise in which their youths have been trained in the colleges set apart for the purpose. And why our clergy should not be trained up in an equal degree not only to preaching, but to all other duties of the parish priest's office, none can explain but the opponents of Diocesan Colleges. One of the most recent of these opponents makes the objection that if such colleges are founded in the neighbourhood of cathedrals, our young clergy will become so familiar with the usages of cathedrals that they will wish to carry into their parishes a tone of worship not befitting country churches. That is just it: our clergy would become enlightened as to their duties, and anti-Tractarianism cannot afford to let men be taken out of the dark. If they are brought up,-as Cranmer wished them to be, and Burnet too-in the cathedral close, they would stand a chance of learning by use what our Prayer Book

1 We would also refer to the chapter on "the Rubrics and Canons" in the late Professor Blunt's valuable work on "The Duties of the Parish Priest," a book which it would be well for the laity to read, that they might see what is the real extent of a Clergyman's duties and obligations in the opinion of a man so moderate as the Author of the "History of the Reformation in England." Some remarks on the subject were also made in our review of Mr. Blunt's work, at p. 367 of Vol. XVIII. (1856.)