ment of rates, which in turn are exacted from the nation at large, the only pecuniary support the nation lends to the church; for its endowments are of private origin as strictly as those of an hospital or an alms-house. We have sometimes amused ourselves with thinking what would be the amount of fees which the other learned professions would receive for the discharge of offices such as these -the time, the mileage, the material, all taken into strict account; the daily life of a clergyman, it should be remembered, being in fact the daily life of a professional man of the best education in great practice.

Another consideration there is, not altogether distinct from the last, yet sufficiently so, perhaps, to deserve a separate notice. The parish priest has hitherto been accustomed to look upon himself as the pastor of his whole flock, however some of them may have strayed from his fold, inasmuch as he is a pastor of the Established National Church. Accordingly, he has held himself in duty bound to render to all the poor within the limits of his parish his helping hand, without much discrimination, searching and endeavouring to relieve the wants of any distressed member of a family, which, however large, he still regards as in some sort his own. We do not suppose it will be denied that good accrues to the labouring class in general from this disposition of things; and though we do not believe that any circumstances will induce the clergyman to discontinue such promiscuous intercourse with his people, we nevertheless do think it unwise in the legislature to tempt him to it by drawing distinctions for him, and in spite of him, which he would never seek to draw for himself, and so make him feel that indiscriminate charity is not so much an act of duty in him as of forbearance. But if ever there was a time when the clergy of the Church of England, independently of their calling as ecclesiastics, were rendering essential service to the state at large, without respect of party or profession, in both those capacities to which we have adverted, as functionaries and as philanthropists—if ever there was a time when the Establishment was fairly earning a national church-rate for national benefits imparted, it is now, when the new Poor Law Bill is furnishing so ample a field for its profitable intervention. We are not at present contemplating the clergy as directly exercising the office of guardians under this bill, though this, we perceive, they are doing in many instances; but we are contemplating them as moderators-a position, in our opinion, in which they are of much greater use, and one vastly more suited to them. Here they stand between the guardians and the poor, and hold the balance between them ;-they have opportunities by personal communication with both classes, such as fall to the lot of no other persons, and in our rural districts especially,

of

of encouraging consideration on the one side, and content on the other; of upholding authority and abating resistance; of explaining objections, correcting mistakes, healing heart-burnings, and removing, in short, by the word in season, a thousand obstacles to the success of this great experiment. So much for them as advocates, with reference to this bill; then as almoners,-none but those who live amongst the poor, as the parish priest does, and witnesses the workings of this austere enactment in detail, can tell the revolution it is effecting in their habits, and the sufferings they have to undergo in the process of their regeneration. In all parishes there have grown up under the old laws a number of people who lived upon them or by them; some as dependents, some as subordinate administrators. The recoil upon private charity, arising from these parties being, as it were, disbanded upon the country, the most helpless of discarded placemen, and without pensions too, is very great; and if trade were less prosperous than it is, a contingency for which we must be prepared, it would be much greater. The applications to the minister of the parish for his ticket of admission to the county hospital; for his name and support to petitions, such as we have already alluded to; for the means of discharging a doctor's bill-of providing a child with clothes before it can go to place-of rescuing a poor family from ejectment for arrears in rent-are multiplying fast; and whatever scruples many of these applicants may have about going to the church, they have none whatever about going to the parsonage -nor, as matters stand at present, need they have any. Should circumstances render this resource less open to them, we think they would feel the change both in the amount the parsonage contributes, and in the example it sets; and we repeat, that however it might be done with impunity, it is better for all not to practise experiments upon the generosity of the clergy over much, or put their feelings as churchmen, which are strong, and which have been a good deal tried of late, in array against their feelings as citizens.

If we suppose, then, the government to retain the principle of upholding the churches out of the public purse, which we have shown to be a defensible principle, it becomes a question whether it is best to do it by a grant from the consolidated fund, or by the continuance of church-rates-a question of expediency alone. We confess that the system of rates seems to us far the better course to adopt. It is established, which is something. It has worked tolerably well till wilfully disturbed; and when once more affirmed to be the abiding law of the land, we doubt not will work well again; more especially as the dissenters have by this time disco

vered

vered in the contests they have waged, or refrained from waging, on this subject, that they had considerably over-rated their strength. An application to any fund set apart by government for the repair of all the churches in England would necessarily be cumbrous and expensive-the measure which Lord Althorp contemplated would have been eminently so. There must be an apparatus of surveyors, and estimates, and approval of estimates, which would waste both time and cost; for church-work, which has ever proverbially gone upon crutches, would be doubly halt under such embarrassments. Then again, small repairs would be beneath the attention of a process so majestic. A pane of glass is broken-a spout is stopped-a tile is damaged by the wind-a lath or two have been rotted by the snow;-the churchwarden on the spot is aware of the mischief as soon as it shows itself; applies (what in such repairs above every other is true economy) the timely stitch; and by an outlay of a shilling or two on the instant prevents the necessity of renewing a casement or stripping a roof in the end. Were the application for repairs to be made to some distant quarter, the damage would be allowed to accumulate till there should be a case worthy of such august intervention; and the ruin of the churches would proceed rapidly, whilst the sum spent upon resisting it would be infinitely greater than at present. Meanwhile, the obvious interest of the churchwarden and vestry would in general suffice to check all lavish expenditure; and if such restraint were thought insufficient, nothing could be more easy, as nothing would be more just, than to define with accuracy the purposes to which a rate was to be confined, and prune, if you will, the luxuriance of the over-zealous official.

If, however, in spite of the principle of a national provision for the repair of the national churches being so defensible, and the application of that principle by means of a rate being so comparatively free from objection, the congregations of the Church of England should be left nevertheless to maintain their places of worship for themselves, and we should profess the anomaly of having a national church unsupported by the nation, let us consider whether the probable consequences would be such as would be satisfactory to the dissenter-whether the measure he seeks with so much pertinacity and violence would not be, if carried, a suicidal measure after all. On the whole, we believe it will be found that the wealth of the country is principally in the hands of members of the Established Church. The lists of benefactors to our charitable establishments throughout the land, which have of late been published from time to time, to meet a challenge thrown out by the enemies of the church, have proved this; unless we are to suppose that the dissenter has indeed the means, but not the will,

to

to contribute to hospitals, infirmaries, asylums, and the like-an imputation which we will not indulge, but presume rather that the wealth of the country is with the church; that its members, in short, are the parties amongst us who are the chief buyers. On the other hand, a great proportion of what dissenters there are will be found, we think, to belong to the class of retail dealers; or, in other words, a very large division of the dissenters are sellers rather than buyers. As matters have stood in times past, churchmen have made no distinction in their dealings-they have resorted to the shop of the churchman and dissenter alike, only having respect to the honesty of the party and the quality of his merchandise. Indeed, so long as the dissenter was content with his position in the state, which was that of complete toleration, and did not seek to disturb the establishment, his scruples were respected, which were the rather supposed to be conscientious, because they subjected him to some additional charge-a small one, it is true, but some additional charge-in supporting a place of worship of his own; and a friendly feeling was accordingly entertained towards him. But once exempt him from church-rates, and the case will be altered. The churchman will then naturally do his best to uphold the man who upholds the church-it would be exceedingly unreasonable to expect that he should do otherwise; to do so would give just cause of complaint to his own allies. We have no manner of doubt that the abolition of church-rates would be the signal for a separation between the churchman and dissenter, complete as soon as present engagements or connexions should cease to operate. Now we submit that the dissenter would not have cause to rejoice in this result. As it is, by contributing perhaps a crown to the repairs of the church, he secures to himself the advantageous handling of scores, perhaps of thousands of pounds in the year. Retaliate he cannot, because, in the first place, the funds, as we have said, are chiefly on the churchman's side; and, in the next place, the dissenter does already, almost to a man, spend whatever he has to lay out with his brother in dissent, and with none besides; he cannot do more. We would appeal to dissenting tradesmen in towns where resistance to church-rates has been attempted, and ask them whether they have found their books improved by the agitation of the question, or whether many good customers have not since left them, and whether many others whom they had reason to believe might have become so, have not held their hand. We have no sort of doubt that in a profit and loss view of the matter the dissenters are far more deeply interested in the continuance of church-rates on their present footing than the members of the church themselves; and that, if their friends in power should

give them their wish, they will be the first to exclaim, Pol! me occidistis, amici!

We can assure our readers that we have discussed this great question-which is, in truth, though under a new disguise, no less a one than that of the severance or non-severance of Church and State-without any apprehension about the pecuniary loss the church would sustain by the relinquishment of church-rates. Indeed, our bias lies quite another way. As Englishmen we may grieve to see society, which has so long been tolerably harmonious, split into parts; but as churchmen we are rather tempted to hail than to proscribe any measure by which the members of our own communion may be made to stand confessed as such, and the Church of England be gathered up again. By a desire to meet the dissenter on neutral ground-(how vain a desire, if conciliation was the object, events have shown!)-we have for some time sunk the sin of schism by mutual consent, as if there was not a word about it in all Scripture; and given occasion to many to surmise that those who sign the Articles do so rather because they hold livings than hold them. The present process of legislation is applying a succession of tests to churchmen by which they will be eventually sifted clean. The new Municipal Corporation Bill has done much for this; the new Marriage and Registration Bills will do more; but the abolition of church-rates would do most of all. Every man will soon have to take up his ground; and the Church of England will have at length to know herself again; to feel that she has nothing to do with other men's opinions, but must be true to her own; that in all her proceedings she must keep within the compass of her own constitution, and abate no jot of that; that her immortal founders set her feet in a large room,' expressly that her members might be under no temptation to stray out of it; that they contemplated her in their construction of her, as the single accredited agent through which all religious operations at home and abroad were to be conducted, so that the household was to be visited, the congregation to be taught, the colony to be quickened, the heathen to be converted, but still through her-through her, a noble instrument for the work if effectually wielded, and made to develope the resources that are in her:-That those her founders imagined they had left ample scope for the exercise of zeal the most intense, for the promulgation of doctrines the most evangelical, for the application of labours the most abundant and the most devoted, strictly within the confines of the church they marked out; and that they never contemplated, as they never would have allowed, a compromise, direct or indirect, of the great principles it involved for any object

however