XLVII.

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As the Lady Abbess of St. Albans might have said, there was an abomination of parsons in the county town; some schoolmasters who were not in clerical practice, but cleric; some in actual service. They did not in those days wear livery as servants, not necessarily apostles, of I.H.S. Two of them I still see talking automatically, faster than they could think; one of these with the nose and mouth of Punch. I still see another, a pale-faced pulpiteer and a screamer; the confidence-reservoir of single ladies turned forty odd; a man who met you with a twirl of his glove by its finger, and a sort of whistling smile that seemed to say to itself, “I have done him before I have begun.” The men did not care for him because what gossip is to some was censoriousness in him; still the women liked him, and thought five of his ten toes were already in heaven.

The parsonics are the only professionals who do not seem able to get their own living by going into practice—they like to be endowed. Some are glad to get a hundred pounds per annum for life; some, doing the same work as they do, bid for two, four, six, eight, and ten hundred; others, with yet less work, accept much more than this; but they have uncles. Why don’t these guaranteed rats set up for themselves in practice like the nonconformists? They would be found churches. Doctors do so, and lawyers. They should obtain the licence like these, then preach what they liked within limits, prescribed by the Royal Church. Doctors do all this within the rules of their royal colleges.

Imagine the great profession of physic endowed, and its baronets, arch-doctors of Canterbury and York, giving away livings to their nephews and nieces: the doctor of St. James’s £1000 per annum, the doctor of St. Giles’s £150. It is a little so with the law—the chancellors, attorney-generals, and judges are endowed, but not so the barristers, except with wit; and what poor creatures would these be compared to what they are, if they had to begin on curacies, and, perhaps, end on them, say of £100 per annum, unless they had influence enough to get themselves made vicars of law, rectors of law, as well as deans of arches?

But no Church has ever reformed itself: non possumus is the motto of them all.

But the Church has got its large fortune safely invested, and in the best order, as if to make confiscation easy. Its proprietary consists of human beings not differing from others, and rich in worldly wisdom. If they really wished to save the Church, they would do their utmost to throw off the State and take their money with them, and reform themselves on the model of the civil service and the army, dividing the revenues into livings of equal amount, to be gained by competitive examinations. But human nature must have its way; it will last their time, and after them the deluge. In two or three more new parliaments they will be too late.

In the present condition of clericism, many do not know what to be at. An intimate of mine who would have liked to steal a spiritual march on me, which no man ever did yet, was a curate of twenty years’ standing, and so far a perpetual one in the sense of being the hireling of vicars and subject to a month’s warning, like the moon. He had subscribed his mite of belief to the doctrine of eternal punishment.

This good personification of humanity had a vivid notion, together with an unwholesome fear, of our modern Hades, formed originally out of a few metaphors of Scripture, and improved by Dantesque and Miltonic talent, though its latitude and longitude is still undiscovered among the heavenly bodies.

This well-meaning teacher, some two or three years after my accident (a leg divided against itself so that it could not stand, and made into two unequal halves at the socket), suggested persuasively that I must have felt very grateful to the Almighty at not being killed outright. But he was so much at fault that I avoided the discussion, and answered, “I am my own chaplain, and transact all my spiritual business myself, under my own frontal bone (os frontis); but should I be in want of spiritual assistance, my inclination would be to apply to the Archbishop of Canterbury or to the Bishop of London as the best authorities in Divine practice. However, not to be over reticent, I may tell you that no sense of future favours as regards gratitude arose in my mind; for we cannot entertain two ideas at once, and mine was to ask myself, as a scientific physician would do, whether my leg was as I last left it, or whether the head of the femur and the shaft had parted company. As to thankfulness at not having lost my life, that would have involved an emotion functionally incompatible with the faintness and pain that got hold of me. The pain has continued; I am taken prisoner by it, and condemned to an armchair for life. Not unfrequently, therefore, I think how much better it would have been for me had I been killed off at once. So you must perceive that your forecast is made without any knowledge of the facts.”

A doctor never gives his opinion of another without being called in; why, then, should a parson? But it was well meant, though deficient in the greatest of delicacies, called tact.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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