OF NO class of men can it be more truly said that the good they do dies with them, and that the evil lives—in the memory of men—than the country parson. Of the thousands of old rectors and vicars of past generations, how they have all slipped out of the memory of men, have left no tradition whatever behind them, if they were good! but the few bad ones did so impress themselves on their generation, that the stories of their misconduct have been handed on, and are not forgotten in a century.

In the floor of my own parish church, in the chancel, is a tombstone to a former incumbent. The name and the date have been ground away by the heels of the school-children who sit over it, but thus much of the inscription remains—

Not less effaced than the name is all tradition of the man whose monument proclaims his virtues. Now, I take it, for this very reason the tombstone bears true testimony. If it had told lies, every one would have known about it, and related this fact to their children; would have told anecdotes of the parson who was so unworthy, but concerning whose virtues his stone made such boast. That our old country parsons were not, as a rule, a disreputable, drinking, neglectful set of men I believe, because so few traditions of their misconduct remain.

There was a clever, pleasant book published at the beginning of this century, entitled, The Velvet Cushion. It was written by the Rev. J. W. Cunningham, Vicar of Harrow. The seventh edition, from which I quote, appeared in 1815. This book professes to tell the experiences of a pulpit cushion from pre-Reformation days to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Here is what the Cushion says—"Sir, you will be anxious, I am sure, to hear the history of some of your predecessors in the living; and it is my intention to gratify you. I think it right, however, to observe, that of a large proportion of them no very interesting records remain. Mankind are much alike, and a little country village is not likely to call out their peculiarities. Some few were mere profligates, whose memory I do not wish to perpetuate."—But it is precisely these, and only these, that the less charitable memory of man does perpetuate.—"Many of them were persons of decent, cold, correct manners, varying slightly, perhaps, in the measure of their zeal, their doctrinal exactness, their benevolence, their industry, their talents—but, in general, of that neutral class which rarely affords materials for history, or subjects of instruction. They were men of that species who are too apt to spring up in the bosom of old and prosperous establishments, whose highest praise is, that they do no harm."

No one can accuse this description as being coloured too high. It is, if I may judge by early recollections, applicable to those who occupied the parsonages twenty and thirty years later.

In my own parish in which I was reared, Romaine, one of the most brilliant luminaries of the evangelical revival, acted as curate for a while, but not the smallest trace of any tradition of his goodness, his eloquence, his zeal did I discover among the villagers. At the very time that Romaine was in this parish, there was a curate in an adjoining one who was over-fond of the bottle, and was picked up out of the ditch on more than one occasion. Neither his name nor his delinquencies are forgotten to this day.

I take it that the state in which the parish registers have been kept are a fair test as to what sort of parsons there were. Now certainly they were very neglectfully kept at the Restoration and for a short while afterwards. That is not to be wondered at. During the Commonwealth they had been taken from the parsons and committed to lay-registrars in the several parishes, who certainly kept them badly, and at the Restoration they were not at once and always reclaimed, but continued to be kept by the clerk, who stepped into the place of the registrar appointed by the Commonwealth. But in the much-maligned Hanoverian period they were carefully kept by the clergy, and as a rule neatly entered. If such an indication be worth anything, it shows that the country parsons did take pains to discharge at least one of their duties. He that is faithful in a small matter, is faithful also, we may conclude, in that which is great.

I presume that Dr. Syntax may be regarded as typical of the class, and Combe says of him—

And when he dies—

What a charming picture does Fielding draw in his Joseph Andrews of Mr. Abraham Adams, the parson—gentle, guileless, learned, and very poor. And Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield—was ever a purer, sweeter type of man delineated? The description given of his parsonage and mode of life is valuable, and must be quoted; for it shows what a change has come over the parsonage and the parson's manner of intercourse with his parishioners since Goldsmith's time.

"Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and prattling river before; on one side a meadow, on the other a green. My farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land, having given an hundred pounds for my predecessor's good-will.... My house consisted of but one story, and was covered with thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness; the walls on the inside were nicely whitewashed, and my daughters undertook to adorn them with pictures of their own designing. Though the same room served us for parlour and kitchen, that only made it warmer. Besides, as it was kept with the utmost neatness, the dishes, plates, and coppers being well scoured, and all disposed in bright rows on the shelves, the eye was agreeably relieved, and did not want richer furniture. There were three other apartments—one for my wife and me, another for our two daughters, within our own, and the third, with two beds for the rest of the children."

Our old parsonage houses precisely resembled this description, but hardly any remain. They have given way for more pretentious houses; and with the grander houses the habits and requirements of the parsons have grown.

"Nor were we without guests; sometimes Farmer Flamborough, and often the blind piper, would pay us a visit, and taste our gooseberry wine. These harmless people had several ways of being good company; for while one played, the other would sing some soothing ballad—Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night, or The Cruelty of Barbara Allen."

Crabbe, himself a clergyman, does not give the most favourable sketch of the village parsons; and yet his country vicar is a man of perfect blamelessness.

Clever, true, and cutting. Crabbe knew the class, its excellences and its weaknesses. We are considering the excellences now; we will recur to the weaknesses later.

Fielding does, in his Joseph Andrews, give us a study of another type of parson—Trulliber, "whom Adams found stript into his waistcoat, with an apron on, and a pail in his hands, just come from serving his hogs; for Mr. Trulliber was a parson on Sundays, but all the other six might be more properly called a farmer. He occupied a small piece of land of his own, besides which he rented a considerable deal more. His wife milked his cows, managed his dairy, and followed the market with butter and eggs. The hogs fell chiefly to his care, which he carefully waited on at home, and attended to fairs; on which occasion he was liable to many jokes, his own size being with much ale rendered little inferior to that of the beasts he sold.... His voice was loud and hoarse, and his accent extremely broad. To complete the whole, he had a stateliness in his gait when he walked, not unlike of a goose, only he stalked slower."

But this parson was only a boor, he was not disorderly.

I have an old coachman, near eighty, who has been in the family since he was a boy, and of whom I get many stories of how the world went at the beginning of this century. Said he to me one day, "My old uncle he lived in Maristowe; he was bedridden nigh on twenty years, and in all those years Parson Teasdale didn't miss coming to see and read and pray with him every day, Sunday and week-day alike."

We make much fuss about parochial visiting now, but is there any visiting like that? In The Velvet Cushion, a dialogue between the Vicar and his wife is chronicled.

"'I am not sure,' said the Vicar, 'that it is not a presumptuous reliance upon the goodness of God,—an abuse of the doctrine of Divine mercy, that has kept me at home to-day, when I should have gone to visit old Dame Wilkins. An' so now, my dear, let us go to Mary Wilkins' directly.' Her bonnet was soon on, and they hobbled down the village almost as fast as if their house had been on fire. Mary Wilkins was a poor good woman, to whom the Vicar's visit three times a week had become almost one of the necessaries of life. It was now two hours beyond the time he usually came; and had she been awake, she would really have been pained by the delay. But, happily, she had fallen into a profound sleep, and when he put his foot on the threshold, and in his old-fashioned way said, 'Peace be with you,' she was just awaking. This comforted our good man, and, as he well knew where all comfort comes from, he thanked God in his heart even for this."

The old parsons lived more on the social level of the farmers and yeomen than of the squires, but they were in many cases men of very considerable culture. It was not, however, those who were the best scholars who were the best parsons. I will give presently my reminiscences of one of the last of the old scholar-parsons. Unfortunately, scholarship is on the decline, at all events among those who occupy country parsonages.

It has been often charged against the old parsons, that they preached mere morality, and above the heads of their people, interlarding their sermons with quotations in Greek and Latin. As for preaching morality—I do not care to apologize for their doing that. Nothing better can be preached; nothing was more necessary to be preached in the last century. Judging by the registers of baptisms in parishes, at no time was there so much immorality among village people than at that period when our country parsons were charged with preaching morality—excepting always the present. Those who made this a matter of accusation, meant that the Gospel, as they called their peculiar view of religion, was not insisted on; forgetting all the while that the Gospel is pretty well stuffed with exhortations to morality, and above all, that model for all sermons, the one preached on the Mount. But I do not believe that mere morality, apart from Christian faith, was preached. There is a pretty passage in The Velvet Cushion descriptive of a sermon at the beginning of this century, which I cannot take to be a description of something quite extraordinary and out of the way.

"'My love,' said the Vicar, 'this fact is worth a thousand arguments—the common people heard Christ gladly. Socinianism never fails to drive them away. A religion without a Saviour is the temple without the Shechinah, and its worshippers will all desert it. Few men in the world have less pretensions as a preacher than myself,—my voice, my look, my manner, all of a very ordinary nature,—and yet, I thank God, there is scarcely a corner of our little church where you might not find a streaming eye or a beating heart. The reason is—that I speak of Christ; and if there is not a charm in the word, there is the train of fears, and hopes, and joys which it carries along with it. The people feel, and then they must listen.'"

Evelyn in his Diary says, in 1683, "A stranger, and old man, preached—much after Bishop Andrews' method, full of logical divisions, in short and broken periods, and Latin sentences, now quite out of fashion in the pulpit, which is grown into a far more profitable way of plain and practical discourses, of which sort this nation, or any other, never had greater plenty or more profitable, I am confident."

Pepys is hardly to be quoted as a judge, as he went to church to see pretty faces, not, or not mainly, to hear sermons, and his criticism is not always to be trusted.

"1667, 26th May, the Lord's Day. I went by water to Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective glass up and down the church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till the sermon was done."

"1667, 20th August. Turned into St. Dunstan's church, where I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again,—which seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours ended also."

"1667, 25th August, Lord's Day. Up and to church, thinking to see Betty Michell, and did stay an hour in the crowd, thinking, by the end of a nose that I saw, that it had been her; but at last the head turned towards me, and it was her mother, which vexed me. So I back to my boat."

No, Pepys was no judge of a good sermon, his mind was otherwise engaged.

Sermons now-a-days produce little or no effect, because there are too many of them. The ears of hearers have been tickled till they are no longer capable of sensation. One hears curates boast of having preached some seven sermons in one week, and miserable stuff it must have been that flowed so freely; and yet good enough for the hearers, who, by accustoming their ears to be always hearing, are unable to appreciate a really good discourse, or if they appreciate, allow it to produce no effect whatever upon them. Our audiences in church are like those who live in railway arches, who become so accustomed to the rush overhead of trains, that none ever rouse them, and they cannot sleep without the intermittent rush to lull them.

The sermons of the end of last century and the beginning of this do not please us, because they are cast in a different mould, they generally appeal to a different side of us than do those of the present day. They were addressed to the natural, healthy conscience, and to plain, everyday common-sense, such as all men possess. Modern sermons are appeals to the feelings, amiable, sentimental emotions, and these amiable, sentimental emotions have become accustomed to be scratched, like cats, and purr when that is done. It was an epithet of scorn launched on Pope Damasus, that he was "ear-scratcher" to the ladies,—such is, however, the highest glory of a modern preacher.

Crabbe undoubtedly hit the old country parsons on their weak point when he said of his vicar, that his main characteristic was timidity. He was infinitely blameless, but also immeasurably afraid.

Courage is born of conviction, and our old English country parsons had no definite convictions, a sort of vague, nebulous, inchoate notion that Christianity was all right, and that the Church of England was a via media, and they deprecated anything like giving precision and outline to faith, and assuming a direct walk which was not a perpetual dodging between opposed errors. I ventured in one of my novels, Red-Spider, to sketch this sort of parson, who never in the pulpit insisted on a doctrine lest he should offend a Dissenter, nor on a duty lest he should make a Churchman uneasy. And it was characteristic of the race. In the Faroes there are sixteen different names for fogs, and the articles of the Christian faith were only varieties in fogs to these spiritual pastors. The nebulous theory prevailed in astronomy, and in divinity as well. Some old-fashioned people resented the resolution of the nebulÆ into fixed stars; and so also in that other province do they look on it as next to sacrilege to give to faith definition.

It is, however, only since parsons have begun to see definite ends that they have assumed any steadfastness in their walk and directness in their course. In Fielding's time the country parsons wore their cassocks as a usual dress. "Adams stood up," he relates, "and presented a figure to the gentleman which would have moved laughter in many, for his cassock had just fallen down below his great-coat, that is to say, it reached his knees, whereas the skirts of his great-coat descended no lower than half-way down his thighs."

The bands were always worn, the makeshift for the old Steenkirk tie of fine white linen edged with more or less deep lace. Knee-breeches, buckled shoes, and a black cocked hat completed his attire.

Some of the old Derby Uncle Toby jugs represent the beer-drinking parson of an age a little later. The cassock has disappeared, and he wears a clerical long black coat, with bands and white stockings. The apron of the bishop is the reminiscence of the cassock, as the hat tied up with strings of the archdeacon is the last survival of the cocked hat.

The parson and his parishioners were on very good terms. When the Vicar of Wakefield came to his new cure, the village turned out to meet him with pipe and drum. Nevertheless there was occasional friction, mainly, if not altogether, relative to tithe gathering. There is a harvest-home song Dryden wrote for, or introduced into his play, King Arthur; or, The British Worthy, in 1691, which forms part of the enchantments of Merlin, and is sung by Comus and a set of peasants—

There can be little question that the parson did get cheated over and over again, and bore it without a murmur.

An amusing ballad is sung to this day in the west of England relative to the way in which parsons were treated by their parishioners—

There was non-residence undoubtedly previous to the Act against holding more than one living at a time, unless near together. Men of birth and influence obtained a good deal of preferment, but never in post-Reformation times to the extent that this abuse existed before. To take but one instance. Thomas Cantilupe, who died in 1282, was Precentor and Canon of York, Archdeacon of Stafford and Canon of Lichfield, Canon of London, Canon of Hereford, and held the livings of Doderholt, Hampton, Aston, Wintringham, Deighton, Rippel, Sunterfield, and apparently also Prestbury. Pretty well! It was never so bad in the maligned Hanoverian period.

I had a living in Essex which was held formerly by a certain Bramston Staynes, who was a squarson in Essex, and held simultaneously three other livings; there was one curate to serve the three churches. The rector is said to have visited one of his livings twice only in the twenty years of his incumbency—once to read himself in, the other time to settle some dispute relative to the payment of his tithes.

I can recall several instances of the old scholar-parson, a man chap-ful of quotations. One, a very able classic, and a great naturalist, was rather fond of the bottle. "Mr. West," said a neighbour one day, "I hear you have a wonderfully beautiful spring of water in your glebe." "Beautiful! surpassing! fons BlandusiÆ, splendidior vitro!— water so good that I never touch it—afraid of drinking too much of it."

Some twenty-five years ago I knew another, a fine scholar, an old bachelor, living in a very large rectory. He was a man of good presence, courteous, old-world manners, and something of old-world infirmities. His sense of his religious responsibilities in the parish was different in quality to that affected now-a-days.

He was very old when I knew him, and was often laid up with gout. One day, hearing that he was thus crippled, I paid him a visit, and encountered a party of women descending the staircase from his room. When I entered he said to me, "I suppose you met little Mary So-and-so and Janie What's-her-name going out? I've been churching them up here in my bed-room, as I can't go to church."

When a labourer desired to have his child privately baptized, he provided a bottle of rum, a pack of cards, a lemon, and a basin of pure water, then sent for the parson and the farmer for whom he worked. The religious rite over, the basin was removed, the table cleared, cards and rum produced, and sat down to. On such occasions the rector did not return home till late, and the housekeeper left the library window unhasped for the master, but locked the house doors. Under the library window was a violet bed, and it was commonly reported that the rector had on more than one occasion slept in that bed after a christening. Unable to heave up his big body to the sill of the window, he had fallen back among the violets, and there slept off the exertion.

I never had the opportunity of hearing the old fellow preach. His conversation—whether addressing a gentleman, a lady, or one of the lower classes—was garnished with quotations from the classic authors, Greek and Latin, with which his surprising memory was richly stored; and I cannot think that he could resist the temptation of introducing them into his discourse from the pulpit, yet I heard no hint of this in the only sermon of his which was repeated to me by one of his congregation. The occasion of its delivery was this.

He was highly incensed at a long engagement being broken off between some young people in his parish, so next Sunday he preached on "Let love be without dissimulation;" and the sermon, which on this occasion was extempore, was reported by those who heard it to consist of little more than this—"You see, my dearly beloved brethren, what the Apostle says—Let love be without dissimulation. Now I'll tell y' what I think dissimulation is. When a young chap goes out a walking with a girl,—as nice a lass as ever you saw, with an uncommon fresh pair o' cheeks and pretty black eyes too, and not a word against her character, very respectably brought up,—when, I say, my dearly beloved brethren, a young chap goes out walking with such a young woman, after church of a summer evening, seen of every one, and offers her his arm, and they look friendly like at each other, and at times he buys her a present at the fair, a ribbon, or a bit of jewellery—I cannot say I have heard, and I don't say that I have seen,—when, I say, dearly beloved brethren, a young chap like this goes on for more than a year, and lets everybody fancy they are going to be married,—I don't mean to say that at times a young chap may see a nice lass and admire her, and talk to her a bit, and then go away and forget her—there's no dissimulation in that;—but when it goes on a long time, and he makes her to think he's very sweet upon her, and that he can't live without her, and he gives her ribbons and jewellery that I can't particularize, because I haven't seen them—when a young chap, dearly beloved brethren—" and so on and so on, becoming more and more involved. The parties preached about were in the church, and the young man was just under the pulpit, with the eyes of the whole congregation turned on him. The sermon had its effect—he reverted to his love, and without any dissimulation, we trust, married her.

The Christmas and the Easter decorations in this old fellow's church were very wonderful. There was a Christmas text, and that did service also for Easter. The decorating of the church was intrusted to the schoolmaster, a lame man, and his wife, and consisted in a holly or laurel crutch set up on one side of the chancel, and a "jaws of death" on the other. This appalling symbol was constructed like a set of teeth in a dentist's shop-window—the fangs were made of snipped or indented white drawing paper, and the gums of overlapping laurel leaves stitched down one on the other.

A very good story was told of this old parson, which is, I believe, quite true. He was invited to spend a couple of days with a great squire some miles off. He went, stayed his allotted time, and disappeared. Two days later the lady of the house, happening to go into the servants'-hall in the evening, found, to her amazement, her late guest—there. After he had finished his visit up-stairs, at the invitation of the butler he spent the same time below. "Like Persephone, madam," he said,—"half my time above, half in the nether world."

In the matter of personal neatness he left much to be desired. His walled garden was famous for its jargonelle pears. Lady X—, one day coming over, said to him, "Will you come back in my carriage with me, and dine at the Park? You can stay the night, and be driven home to-morrow."

"Thank you, my lady, delighted. I will bring with me some jargonelles. I'll go and fetch them."

Presently he returned with a little open basket and some fine pears in it. Lady X— looked at him, with a troubled expression in her sweet face. The rector was hardly in dining suit; moreover, there was apparent no equipment for the night.

"Dear Mr. M—, will you not really want something further? You will dine with us, and sleep the night."

A vacant expression stole over his countenance, as he retired into himself in thought. Presently a flash of intelligence returned, and he said with briskness, "Ah! to be sure; I'll go and fetch two or three more jargonelles."

A kind, good-hearted man the scholar-parson was, always ready to put his hand into his pocket at a tale of distress, but quite incapable of understanding that his parishioners might have spiritual as well as material requirements. I remember a case of a very similar man—a fellow of his college, and professor at Cambridge—to whom a young student ventured to open some difficulties and doubts that tortured him. "Difficulties! doubts!" echoed the old gentleman. "Take a couple of glasses of port. If that don't dispel them, take two more, and continue the dose till you have found ease of mind."

But to return to our country parson, who had the jargonelles. His church was always well attended. Quite as large a congregation was to be found in it as in other parish churches, where all the modern appliances of music, popular preaching, parish visitations, clubs and bible-classes were in force. Perhaps the reason was that he was not too spiritually exacting. Many of our enthusiastic modern parsons attempt to screw up their people into a condition of spiritual exaltation which they are quite unable to maintain permanently, and then they become discouraged at the inevitable, invariable relapse.

We suppose that one main cause of dissent is the deadness and dulness of the Church service before the revival of late days; and we attribute this deadness and dulness to the indifference of these bÊtes noirs, the clergy of last century. I doubt it.

At the time of the Commonwealth our churches had been gutted of everything ornamental and beautiful, and the services reduced to the most dreary performance of sermon and extempore prayer. At the Restoration, a very large number indeed of the Presbyterian ministers conformed, were ordained, and retained the benefices. Naturally they conducted the Common Prayer as nearly as they could on the lines of the service they were accustomed to. They had no tradition of what the Anglican liturgy was; they did not understand it, and they served it up cold or lukewarm, as unpalatable as possible. They did not like it themselves, and they did not want their congregations to become partial to it. The old clergy who were restored were obliged to content themselves with the merest essentials of Divine worship; their congregations had grown up without acquaintance with the liturgy—at all events for some nineteen years they had not heard it, and they did not want to shock their weak consciences by too sudden a transformation.

When Pepys went to church on November 4, 1660, he entered in his Diary, "Mr. Mills did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer, by saying Glory be to the Father, &c., after he had read the two psalms; but the people had been so little used to it, that they could not tell what to answer." The same afternoon he went to Westminster Abbey, "where the first time that ever I heard the organs in a cathedral."

Evelyn enters, on March 22, 1678, "now was our Communion-table placed altar-wise," that is to say, not till eighteen years after the Restoration! so slowly were alterations made in the churches to bring them back to their former conditions of decency and order. Whatever has been done since has been done cautiously and with hesitation, lest offence should be given.

It was not practicable in our village churches to have the hearty congregational singing that now prevails, for only a very few could read, and only such could join in the psalmody.

I have in my possession a diary kept by a kinswoman in 1813. She makes in that year an entry, "Walked over this Sunday to South Mimms church to hear a barrel-organ that has just been there erected. It made very beautiful and appropriate music, and admirably sustained the voices of the quire, but I do not myself admire these innovations in the conduct of Divine worship." What would she have said to the innovations that have taken place since then, had she lived to see them! And they have been, for the most part, in a right direction; but we must be thankful, not only for them, but for the evidence they give that the clergy are somewhat emerging from that condition in which they were, as Crabbe describes them, when "Fear was their ruling passion"—