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a Socialist Government is in office. When the late Mr. Branting formed his second ministry there in 1921 he appointed a committee of investigation into national enterprises, and last year it reported in favour of reconstructing the State railways in the direction indicated. The change cannot therefore be fairly ascribed to the wickedness of capitalism.

The most complete form of denationalisation is the return to ordinary private enterprise, and this also is going on elsewhere than in Russia. In Italy the telephone and parcels post have been transferred from the Post Office to private enterprise; in France, railway workshops, the mercantile fleet, arsenals, and the wireless service have gone the same way, while coal mines, potash mines, ammonia factories and hydro-electric works have been placed under a system of mixed control. In Queensland some of the State enterprises inaugurated by the Socialist Government have reverted to private enterprise and some others have been abandoned. The Commonwealth Government has decided to sell the fleet. It appears that the old Collectivism is becoming obsolete.

A. SHADWELL

APPOINTMENTS TO COUNTRY LIVINGS

THE

HE need for increased revenues, especially in view of the desired pensions for the clergy, is a matter which is greatly exercising the minds of Churchpeople. The Report of the Commission on Church Property and Revenues* (at first presided over by Lord Cave) which was published in the early part of last year, laid great stress upon the necessity of obtaining a larger revenue for Church purposes. Additional money is required in increasing quantities; efforts must be made to increase parochial quotas and private donations. "All the witnesses who gave evidence before the Commission agreed that funds sufficient for all ordinary needs would be secured if well organized methods of systematic contributions were instituted and worked vigorously in the dioceses and parishes." The Church Congress, held a few months later in Oxford, gave expression to the same view, but there was coupled with it the suggestion that if more money is now asked for from the laity, there must with that request be offered to them a fuller control over the way in which the money is to be spent. This is the recognition of a very important point, and one which has been recently discussed in the Northern Convocation. For many years there has been a gradually growing demand on the part of the laity for fuller control in the management of the affairs of their Church, and it is more and more clear that no extensive funds will be subscribed until this demand is satisfied. It is this question of fuller control on the part of the laity that I wish to consider briefly, and more especially as it concerns village life. Cecil Rhodes is said to have remarked: “I attribute the greatness of England to her village Churches." There may be more truth in that statement than appears on the surface. At any rate the spiritual life of the nation, as of all nations, is very intimately bound up with the spiritual life of the country parish. Christianity itself began in a village and gathered its strength in the villages rather than in the towns of Palestine.

There is no desire whatever on the part of the great majority

* This report was issued on May 12, 1924.

of villages to have a fuller voice in doctrinal matters; nor in the far away discussions in Convocation. These are the big things which happen in London. The matter which is of deep concern to village people is what man is to be their parson and to live among them. As George Eliot expresses it, they do not care so much for a living demonstration of the benefits attached to a national Church as for a man whom they can respect and love, who "preaches short moral sermons, and acts pretty much up to what he says religion's something else besides doctrines and notions." And whether they contribute their little mites to the funds now required or not, they ought in these more enlightened days to have some voice in the appointment of the incumbent who is for weal or woe to live so near to them and who is likely to exercise a very vital influence in their lives. They are said to be simple folk; perhaps they are not as simple as their reputation. They may not-and very often do not-attend Church services, except on the great occasions in their lives, their marriages, baptisms and harvest festivals; they have however an immense pride in the old village church, where their fathers—now buried near by—for past generations worshipped.

The plea for fuller control must be met, and will be in time, even if not in the immediate future: it was indeed supported by clergymen in the Congress at Oxford. People are less willing than in the past to be shepherded blindly; the universal education of the past fifty years is beginning to count in unexpected ways; it is counting enormously in political life. The days are gone by in which people can be expected to give more support to any organization, without some assurance or some faith that their selfsacrifices will result in increased efficiency and a richer vitality in the cause for which these sacrifices are made. What guarantee have they at present, and what guarantee is offered? Indeed, on what ground can the Church ask for larger taxation of the laity without at the same time offering an adequate voice in the way in which the money raised is to be spent? Educated people are not found only or mainly in the Church, as in pre-Reformation days, nor are the affairs of the Church any longer regarded mainly as a matter for bishops and priests. The Enabling Bill, of which the Parochial Church Council measure is the outcome, fully recognises this fact: the very raison d'être of the Bill was the recognition of the imperative need of giving to the laity larger

powers in the management of their Church. "It shall be (it says) the primary duty of the Council in every parish to co-operate with the incumbent in the initiation, conduct, and development of Church work, both within the parish and outside." This co-operation between priest and people is the corner-stone of the measure. It recognises a need, but gives no power to satisfy it. Yet when a demand is made on the laity for more money, surely it is reasonable to offer in return more power-such power as is exercised over and over again in every other profession and business, in every other concern of life? The House of Commons centuries ago justly demanded the right to control the way in which supplies voted by it should be spent.

I repeat, it is not that village folk wish to exercise control over matters of doctrine: they are quite willing to leave such high matters to specialists. Like many other people they have not made much advance beyond Adam Bede's point of view: "I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means and whether folks are saved by God's grace or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will to 't was no part o' real religion at all." If the right man is in the right place such deep matters do not really count. A story told at the Plymouth Church Congress sums up the gist of the whole matter. A stranger went to a village church and found a very elaborate service; afterwards he said to an old woman : "Your parson plays a lot of antics." "Yes," she said placidly," he do, but we loves he and we antics along o' he."

My special plea is that the people who are to be ministered unto ought to have a voice in the appointment, and equally in the dismissal, of the person whose office it is to minister to them. It is quite impossible for the lay mind to understand why dereliction of duty is no less neglect because a man is a clergyman. For the parishioners to have a voice in appointing and dismissing a vicar would, so it is alleged, lead to grave abuses and divisions. This is at least possible, but it would be the lesser of two evils; there can be no greater abuse than that which gives security of tenure, an absolute freehold to one who is either not worthy of or unsuitable for his office. And there are at present so many misfits, known chiefly to those who suffer from them, and the sufferers are unable to apply any remedy. More money in itself would not produce the change or relieve the tragedy which is being

enacted to-day in many a village: it would be a help only in so far as it attracted more men of the desired type and thus gave a wider field of choice when livings have to be filled.

This question of fuller control is obviously to a certain extent dependent upon the number of available men; and the sad poverty of the Church, all the more marked in these days of heavy taxation, high wages and the increased cost of living, is affecting the supply. It is proving a serious deterrent to many of those who might have been possible ordinands under different conditions. The Bishop of Birmingham stated recently in a Church paper : "For thirty years our ordinands, taken as a whole, have been defective in quality and deficient in quantity." "Defective in quality" is a hard saying, but there is no doubt that the status of parish priests to-day is different from what it was. The number of clergymen who have been educated at our great and famous schools, and afterwards at Oxford and Cambridge, is much less than in the past; and no society can lose contact with these schools and universities, for centuries intimately bound up with all that is greatest and best in our national history, without suffering grievously from the loss.

Forty years ago at Cambridge, just after the large Divinity Schools had been built to accommodate the crowds of undergraduates whom Lightfoot attracted, the lecture rooms were thronged week after week by the possible ordinands who attended the lectures of Westcott. To-day there is no need whatever for these rooms for that special purpose: where there were a hundred students then there are not ten to-day. The lists published at each ordination reveal much the same change at Oxford. I do not mean to say that men educated in the famous schools and in the older universities are necessarily better fitted to be spiritual pastors than those from modern foundations, but the chances are greatly in favour of the older schools and universities. There is an indefinable something, the gift of age and of noble tradition, in these venerable institutions which, if it be absorbed into a man's character, will add to his spiritual power, be he clergyman or layman. There is, however, no need to labour the point. Not one bishop only but several have deplored the fact that the Church is no longer attracting men of the desired type : and if this be so it is a matter rather of gladness than of regret that there is also a deficiency in quantity. It is better, much

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