to raise funds for endowment. This being our great need, and at a time of great depression, owing to the failure of the coffee-industry and the extraordinary loss of life among our clergy of late years, we are constrained to appeal for help at home. Only last week I heard of the death of another native clergyman in Ceylon, which makes the ninth in four years who has passed from among us. In all these ways, therefore, the necessity is great in Ceylon for building up a Church where we may unite all the various elements, and where we may set before the people who represent the ancient religion of Buddhism, the one true religion of our blessed Lord in all its fulness, in all its purity, and in all its grandeur.

The Right Rev. the PRESIDENT.

I MAY mention that there are present at this moment two clergymen, natives not of India but of Sierra Leone, and members of a deputation sent from the Church there to learn something here as to the working of our own Church. That is, I think, an interesting fact which brings us near to the Churches which are connected with our own in other countries. It is, of course, a platitude to say that the question of missions in India is of the most vital importance. It is a platitude to say that we have at this moment the most wonderful field for missionary labour that ever God vouchsafed to a nation. There never before, I suppose, was a nation which had the marvellous power which England has now over a dependent country with a population of between two and three hundred millions of human souls. Day after day the influence of England in India is growing and growing, and native superstitions and native faiths are being shaken in every way, whilst our own faith is gaining ground. Alas, faith of all kinds is very much shaken in India as it is at home, but still the one faith that is gaining ground is the faith of Jesus Christ. I think our responsibility in India is great and exceptional. It has been a great pleasure to me to hear the great unanimity of opinion amongst the different speakers. It was especially gratifying to hear the ex-Chief Justice of Madras tell us that there was not a failure, as some people assure us there is, in the mission work in India. My right rev. brother, the Bishop of Durham, who has been so often spoken of to-day, once made a speech which was afterwards printed, and which proved that the progress of missions in this present century, and especially in India, was not to be disputed, and that it was almost to be compared with the progress of missions in the early ages of the Church. It was a great satisfaction to me to hear the ex-Chief Justice of Madras bearing impartial witness on the subject concerning that part of India with which he is so well acquainted. Another gratifying thing was to hear those who are connected with our two great missionary societies speaking in almost the same tone. It would, indeed, have been difficult for one to judge from their speeches which belonged to the Society for Promoting the Gospel and which belonged to the Church Missionary Society. In India they always work together, and I think it desirable that at home they should work harmoniously together too, that we should all sink our minor differences in the great work we have to do for Christ and His Church. It is interesting to note that everybody who spoke to-day seemed to think that we ought to aim at having one great Church in India, and not one Church of Europeans, and another of Eurasians, and another of the native races. That would be altogether inconsistent with the Gospel and the Catholicity of the Church. We want a Church, and we want especially a native Church. We cannot have a permanent colony of Englishmen there; we can only have a changing settlement of Europeans there. The great body of the Christians must be natives, and we want a great native Church, with no party and no race distinction. I am sure that every true Christian, whatever his race may be, will gladly join hand and heart with those of the same faith, whatever their complexion or race may be. The higher races of India are really of the same race as ourselves. Time may have darkened the colour of their skins, but the great Arian races of India are the same as the great Arian races of Europe, and they have the same intellectual powers. It has been said, truly again, that we do not want a Western Church there. We want to build up in India a great Eastern Church, and we want not to impress upon it too strongly any particular fancies of our own. We, indeed, hope that Anglican theology will spread throughout India, but we do not want to insist too much upon any particular opinions of our own. Send to them the teachers of the Church, and let the rulers of the Church give them plenty of freedom in developing the Church

so as to meet the wants of the people there. These are lessons which, I think, we must learn from what we have heard to-day, and I trust we shall try and carry out those lessons. Do not let us say we must have the Church of England in India. Let us have a Church in India which shall be a daughter of the Church of England undoubtedly, but not necessarily the same in all her features as her mother. It may be, indeed, that at some future time it will be possible to say of her, O matre pulchra, filia pulchrior. There is nothing grander than the mission field we have in India. We are able to say thanks greatly to the offer of one noble layman in this diocese, Sir Walter Farquhar, who set the subscription on foot with the gift of £1,000, we, of this diocese, were able to found a mission diocese in India, the Diocese of Rangoon.

The Rev. W. L. BLACKLEY, Vicar of King's Somborne, Hon. Canon of Winchester.

THE subject of Clergy Pensions has, as most of my hearers are aware, become one of very prominent clerical interest within the last few years. Various meetings were held for its discussion at different times and places, and in January last, a Conference, presided over by Archdeacon Hessey, appointed a committee of twenty-four members, consisting of such clergy and laymen as seemed to have taken the most earnest part in the study of the question, to draw up a report on the best means of establishing a Clergy Pensions Fund. After holding several meetings, that committee appointed a sub-committee, to embody their resolutions in a report, which, when drawn up, was agreed to by twenty-two out of twenty-four members, and, when presented to the adjourned conference, held at the National Society's House, on June 16th last, was unanimously adopted. The sub-committee were also requested to continue their labours, to make such alterations and additions to the report as might be found necessary by them, and to take such steps as might be desirable for its circulation at the earliest period.

It is in pursuance of this unanimous resolution that, feeling that no better means could be imagined for circulating the proposals of the new and needed clergy pensions scheme amongst the clergy of our Church, whom it most of all concerns, our committee applied for and obtained from the Subjects Committee of the Church Congress the opportunity, which we most thankfully acknowledge, of bringing this subject before the meeting of to-day.

As its objects and methods will be set before you, by specially quali fied readers and speakers, who will follow me, I shall limit myself to the

consideration of a few points in the proposals most likely to be objected. to by persons who have not studied the question in all its aspects.

I. Some persons object to our proposals as not sufficiently comprehensive. "Why a pension fund only," they say, "and not an endowment fund for widows and orphans as well?" The answer is: We must walk before we can run. We can see our way at present to providing pensions for the clergy themselves. This is easily calculable; it depends on no conditions of health. If an unhealthy man contracts for a deferred annuity the fund benefits in security by his shorter life. But annuities for widows and children, receivable over many years of possibly robust life, and becoming claimable all the earlier if the husband and father die before the average date, would simply add an almost prohibitive initial cost to the estimate of any fund to be established.

II.—Again, some people say, Why not advocate a compulsary pension, obliging every man in orders to secure one for himself? This view is strongly held by a few of our clerical brethren, and even, as I think you will hear by and by, by one or two of our own committee. It might be sufficient to say, within my short twenty minutes, that our committee, consisting more or less of experts, after debate in which all the arguments in favour of compulsion were thrashed out as ably, and at far greater length than they can be here to-day, decided by more than ten to one against the practicability of any present compulsion in the matter; I might point out that no advocate of compulsion has yet ventured to put forward one single practical suggestion as to how it might conceivably be enforced on all the clergy; or, I might appeal to my own known opinions in favour of compulsory self-provision against pauperism, as proving my objection to compulsory clerical pension provision to be due to no fantastic theories in favour of the liberty of bad subjects to live on the earnings of good ones, or to no crocheteering wish to trim the fading lamp of foolish laissez faire; but, as this question of compulsion seems to be the only one at all likely to impede the progress and the utility of the carefully thought out, soundly based, much needed, and the very hopeful scheme which will be explained to you by its actuarial elaborator, Mr. Duncan, I will only press one point of the matter as forcibly as I can upon the attention of my hearers. It is this: To do nothing till a fair and practicable way is known of compelling all clergy to make pension provision, is simply to leave matters as they are indefinitely; while, to establish a good voluntary system at once, would bring the possibility of a compulsory one nearer to acceptance than a century of preliminary talk could do. Our voluntary scheme appeals so strongly to the general interest and common sense, as to make the majority of the clergy join it for their own sakes; and its success, with the great majority, would give the strongest argument for its being hereafter made compulsory on the small minority. Moreover, whether that argument were used or no, we should be doing good instead of doing nothing. In a word, are all the anxious men, who long to secure a pension, to be condemned to do without it, till all who do not need it, or desire it, are compelled to pay their contributions? Are all the guests at a picnic to do without dinner because one has brought no basket, or are the many to starve because the few are not hungry?

Compulsion by an ad valorem tax on livings, would simply require most men, who had made their own provisions already, pay for all who had neglected that duty. This would be a communistic re-enactment, for the special demoralisation of the clergy, of a Poor Law, which would, like its great national namesake, create more pauperism than it could relieve. This is a theoretical objection; and a practical one lies in the fact, that existing clerical incomes are too small to provide, by any possibility, sufficient retiring funds for all existing clergy.

This assertion leads me to illustrate, briefly, the reason why, to effect the desired object promptly, instead of waiting forty or fifty years for the present generation of unprovided clergy to die out, a good claim can be urged upon the Church laity, for the Church's own good, to help out the clergy pensions measure in its first inception.

It is because the clerical profession is wrongly supposed to be a wealthy one, while, as a matter of fact, there is no profession of educated men nearly so badly remunerated as our own. A very common cry on this subject is, that the Church is very rich, while some only of the clergy are very poor. In other words, that a fairer division of Church property would remedy all the financial shortcomings of the profession. That the average gross income of the clergy, from their benefices, is under £250 a year, justifies the assumption, in round numbers, that their average net income does not exceed £200, and I call the attention of my hearers to the following comparisons with other callings in life. Take the legal profession. The barristers and solicitors in England number together only 17,000, while the clergy of the Church of England number 21,000. We will set the Chancellorship and the thirty-three Judgeships, for this much smaller number, against the thirty-one Bishoprics receiving a far lower general income, and will also set the County Court Judgeships, many though they be, and each worth £1,500 a year net, against our thirty Deaneries, one of whose worthiest occupants is receiving nothing a year, while liable for his predecessor's retiring pension.

Eliminating, then, all the so-called great prizes of the two professions, I find from Whitaker's Almanack, that, exclusive of numberless commissionerships, and other posts in Government offices, only tenable by barristers, there are in the law offices, registries, and police-courts of London alone, 130 appointments over £1,000 a year, and averaging £2,340; while the Archbishop and Bishops among them, can dispose of less than fifty livings over £1,000, and averaging one half the average value of the London law appointments. Again, I look through all these appointments to find any law officials whatever receiving so microscopical a net salary as £200,, the average net income of all the clergy, and find only four individuals in that dismal category, of whom three are junior clerks, and the solemn and important duty of the fourth, is a train-bearer, to hold up the tail of the Lord Chancellor's robe.

Take the Army and Navy, again; without desiring to begrudge due honour to merit, we must note that successful generals and admirals, besides the promotions, titles, and other glories they receive, are often gifted with large sums of money, £20,000, £30,000, or £100,000 beyond their pay or stipulated pension, drawn from direct taxation by their grateful country. But who has ever heard an instance of the

grateful race of Englishmen, whose clergy pay never cost the nation one farthing of taxation, presenting a meritorious clergyman, for a whole life spent in the truest service of his country, with 20,000 halfpence, however liberally they bestow upon him the proverbial uncivil substitute for such copper coin.

Lastly, apply the average earnings of clerical workers to those of persons in less easily compared pursuits of life. Take the bankers, the merchants, the stock-brokers, how many of them would be toiling till old age in their avocations if the average income obtainable by all their work from twenty-five years of age till seventy was strictly limited to so small a sum as £200 a year?

Let it be remembered that I press these striking contrasts, not in the interests of the clergy who want pensions, but of the Church 'which wants resignations of aged incumbents, as the only conceivable means of quickening promotions of the younger and more active men, and making our Church more effective than ever.

III. But here, again, objection may be taken to our scheme on the wrong assumption of its appearing to be of an eleemosynary nature. We answer, firstly, that any one who chooses may make his provision by its means in an entirely independent manner. He will not be bound

There

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to receive the large accretions derived from well-wishers to the Church and her work, and his abstention will make matters better for those who, feeling that the labourer is worthy of his hire, and that the hire is specially precarious for present aged labourers, may only too thankfully receive the aid of churchmen offered to meet their own efforts. fore there is no necessary eleemosynary character in our proposal. if it be argued that no clergyman should receive any aid whatever, we reply that such a statement implies a fallacy-namely, that the present incomes of all the clergy are sufficient not only to provide for their present existence, but for their future pensions. It is perfectly obvious that, whatever young men may do in a proper spirit of independence, it is too late for the older ones to pay for their own pensions entirely. And, therefore, we can honestly plead for help to them; and, by this means, for an earlier quickening of resignation in the true interests of the Church. For there is no greater mistake than to imagine the clergy generally to be wealthy men-an error which only arises from the greater systematic self-denial in almsgiving and charities which their holy profession teaches them, and which leads the ignorant to suppose that, because they give more away than average laymen, they must have a larger stock to draw on for their gifts.

In fact, if we ask churchmen generally to help this scheme by benefactions, it is, as you will shortly hear from others, chiefly to remove existing and otherwise insurmountable difficulties. If our Church sees and does its duty, it may practically endow its workers with more or less security in old age; but its aid, first given to those most needing it, will only come last in time and least in measure to those who are able to aid themselves to-day; and when those now more aged are passed away, a less and less amount of extraneous aid will be required to secure the resignation in good time of those to whom this beneficial. machinery will have given an opportunity of secure independent provision-an opportunity which never was within the most distant reach