PURPLE AND FINE LINEN

Dean versus Bishop—it is an antinomy as old as the history of Cathedral institutions. The Dean, with a good house and a thousand a year, has always murmured against the Bishop, with a better house and five times that income; and, as he is generally master of his Cathedral, he has before now contrived to make his murmurs sensible as well as audible. Of late years these spiritual strifes (which beautifully link the post-Reformation to the pre-Reformation Church) have been voted disedifying, and, if they continue to exist, they operate surreptitiously and out of public view. But, though Deans have ceased from clamouring, they retain their right to criticize, and the Dean of Norwich has just been exercising that right with a good deal of vivacity. I cull the following extract from a secular newspaper:—

Simple Life for Bishops

"Dean Lefroy at a meeting of the General Diocesan Committee to make arrangements for the Church Congress at Great Yarmouth in October ... commented on the inordinate expense of founding bishoprics, and said that episcopacy in Canterbury Province cost £142,000 per annum, and in York £44,000. He believed that £2000 a year and a residence would be welcome to most bishops. The upkeep of large palaces swallowed up the bishops' incomes. Preserve the palaces, but give bishops the opportunity of living more simply. The surplus might go to poor and starving clergy."

One can picture the tempered gratitude with which the Bishops, and the ladies of the Episcopal household, and the Domestic Chaplains—those "amiable young gentlemen who make themselves agreeable in the drawing-rooms of the Mitre"—must regard this obliging invitation to "live more simply." There is a good deal of human nature even in apostolic bosoms, and a man who has enjoyed an official income of £5000 a year does not as a rule regard with enthusiasm a reduction to £2000. The Bishop in "Little Dorrit," when the guests at Mr. Merdle's banquet were extolling their host's opulence, "tried to look as if he was rather poor himself"; and his successors at the present day take great pains to assure the public that they are not overpaid. The locus classicus on the subject of episcopal incomes is to be found in the Rev. Hubert Handley's book called "The Fatal Opulence of Bishops," and was originally supplied by the artless candour of the present Bishop of London, who in the year 1893 published in the Oxford House Chronicle a statistical statement by an unnamed Bishop. This prelate had only a beggarly income of £4200, and must therefore be the occupant of one of those comparatively cheap and humble Sees which the exigencies of the Church have lately called into being. Out of this pittance he had to pay £1950 for a removal, furniture, and repairs to the episcopal residence. This, to the lay mind, seems a good deal. Hospitality he sets down as costing £2000 a year; but somehow one feels as if one could give luncheon to the country clergy, and satisfy even the craving appetites of ordinands, at a less cost. "Stables," says the good Bishop, "are almost a necessity, and in some respects a saving;" but here the haughty disregard of details makes criticism difficult. "Robes, £100." This item is plain enough and absurd enough. The perverted ingenuity of fallen man has never devised a costume more hideous or less expressive than the episcopal "magpie"; and I am confident that Mrs. Bishop's maid could have stitched together the necessary amounts of lawn and black satin at a less cost than £100. But this exactly illustrates the plan on which these episcopal incomes are always defended by their apologists. We are told precisely what the Bishop expends on each item of charge. But we are not told, and are quite unable to divine, why each of those items should cost so much, or why some of them should ever be incurred. The Bishop of London (then Mr. Winnington-Ingram) thus summed up the statement of his episcopal friend in the background: "It amounts to this—a bishop's income is a trust-fund for the diocese which head ministers. It would make no difference to him personally if three-quarters of it were taken away, so long as three-quarters of his liabilities were taken away too; and it is quite arguable that this would be a better arrangement."

Certainly it is "quite arguable"; but is it equally certain that the change "would make no difference to the Bishop personally"? I doubt it. Married men, men with large families and plenty of servants, naturally prefer large houses to small, provided that there is an income to maintain them. Men who enjoy the comforts and prettinesses of life prefer an income which enables them to repair and furnish and beautify their houses to an income which involves faded wallpaper and battered paint. Men of hospitable instincts are happier in a system which enables them to spend £2000 a year on entertaining than they would be if they were compelled to think twice of the butcher's bill and thrice of the wine-merchant's. Men who like horses—and few Englishmen do not—naturally incline to regard "stables as a necessity," and even as "in some respects"—what respects?—"a saving." If their income were reduced to the figure suggested by Dean Lefroy, they would find themselves under the bitter constraint (as Milton calls it) of doing without a "necessity," and must even forgo an outlay which is "in some respects a saving."

Again, the anonymous Bishop returned his outlay in subscriptions at a fraction over £400 a year. I do not presume to say whether this is much or little out of an income of £4000. At any rate it is a Tithe, and that is a respectable proportion. But, supposing that our Bishop is a man of generous disposition, who loves to relieve distress and feels impelled to give a lift to every good cause which asks his aid, he is of necessity a happier man while he draws £4000 a year than he would be if cut down by reforming Deans to £2000.

I venture, then, with immense deference to that admirable divine who is now Bishop of London, to dissent emphatically from his judgment, recorded in 1895, that the diminution of episcopal incomes, if accompanied by a corresponding diminution of episcopal charges, would "make no difference to the Bishop personally." I conceive that it would make a great deal of difference, and that, though spiritually salutary, it would be, as regards temporal concerns, one of those experiments which one would rather try on one's neighbour than on oneself.

An ingenious clergyman who shared Dean Lefroy's and Mr. Handley's views on episcopal incomes, and had an inconvenient love of statistics, made a study at the Probate Office of the personalty left by English Bishops who died between 1855 and 1885. The average was £54,000, and the total personalty something more than two millions sterling. "This was exclusive of any real estate they may have possessed, and exclusive of any sums invested in policies of life-assurance or otherwise settled for the benefit of their families." Myself no lover of statistics or of the extraordinarily ill-ventilated Will-room at Somerset House, I am unable to say how far the episcopal accumulations of the last twenty years may have affected the total and the average. It is only fair to remember that several of the Bishops who died between 1855 and 1885 dated from the happy days before the Ecclesiastical Commission curtailed episcopal incomes, and may have had ten, or fifteen, or twenty thousand a year. On the other hand, it is to be borne in mind that, since Sir William Harcourt's Budget, the habit of "dodging the death-duties" has enormously increased, and has made it difficult to know what a testator, episcopal or other, really possessed. But it is scarcely possible to doubt that, if the public were permitted to examine all the episcopal pass-books, we should find that, in spite of the exactions of upholsterers and furniture-removers, butchers and bakers, robe-makers and horse-dealers, the pecuniary lot of an English Bishop is, to borrow a phrase of Miss Edgeworth's, "vastly put-up-able with."

Just after Mr. Bright had been admitted to the Cabinet, and when the more timid and more plausible members of his party hoped that he would begin to curb his adventurous tongue, he attended a banquet of the Fishmongers' Company at which the Archbishops and Bishops were entertained. The Archbishop of York (Dr. Thomson) said in an after-dinner speech that the Bishops were the most liberal element in the House of Lords, seeing that they were the only peers created for life. This statement Mr. Bright, speaking later in the evening, characterized as an excess of hilarity; "though," he added, "it is possible that, with a Bishop's income, I might have been as merry as any of them, with an inexhaustible source of rejoicing in the generosity, if not in the credulity, of my countrymen." To this outrageous sally the assembled prelates could, of course, only reply by looking as dignified (and as poor) as they could; and no doubt the general opinion of the Episcopal Bench is that they are an overworked and ill-remunerated set of men.

Yet there have been Apostles, and successors of the Apostles, who worked quite as hard and were paid considerably less, and yet succeeded in winning and retaining the affectionate reverence of their own and of succeeding generations. Bishop Wilson of Sodor and Man lived, we are told, on an income which "did not exceed £300 a year." By far the most dignified ecclesiastic with whom I was ever brought in contact—a true "Prince of the Church" if ever there was one—was Cardinal Manning, and his official income was bounded by a figure which even the reforming spirit of Dean Lefroy would reject as miserably insufficient. "It is pleasant," wrote Sydney Smith, "to loll and roll and accumulate—to be a purple-and-fine-linen man, and to be called by some of those nicknames which frail and ephemeral beings are so fond of heaping upon each other,—but the best thing of all is to live like honest men, and to add something to the cause of liberality, justice, and truth." It is no longer easy for a Bishop to "loll and roll"—the bicycle and the motor-car are enemies to tranquil ease—and, if Dean Lefroy's precept and Bishop Gore's example are heeded, he will find it equally difficult to "accumulate."