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ART. VII.-Parochial Work. By the Rev. E. MONRO, M.A. Incumbent of Harrow Weald, Middlesex. Oxford & London: J. H. Parker. 1850.

READER, have you ever set out unwillingly on a weary and anxious journey-beginning from the moment you left home to count the hours that would elapse ere you should see it again, and full of that heavy burthensome care, which occupies minds that know themselves unequal to the work they are setting about? and has it chanced to you in the early morning to have your attention arrested by a labourer singing at his work,singing or whistling with all his might and main, as people do when they are deep in their task, yet thoroughly enjoying themselves in it? and were you not loth to pass him by? did you not look back with a sort of envious wistfulness, longing to join him in the field, or change places with him? and if duty chased that feeling away, yet it may be the remembrance of such a moment was afterwards a stay and comfort to you, and helped you to sing inwardly, when your trouble was at the highest. Somewhat of the like wholesome and cheering effect we may well imagine to have been produced in many a mind by the appearance, just at this time, of such a book as Mr. Monro's. In our daily fight and trouble, in our prayer and strife for the very being, and not only for the well-being of the Established Church of England, endangered now by a heresy which amounts to no less than the denial of all Sacramental Grace: it is a great thing to have attention called to such a specimen of Parochial Work in that Church; to read the report, and to believe, as we have all reason to do, that, allowing for human imperfection, it gives a faithful picture of the parish and of the man. In one respect, indeed, it may be far from cheering to most of us as each man, in the Sacred Ministry especially, shall compare his own doings and his own arrangements with what he finds here, well may it serve to depress and confound him, as all good and great examples do in proportion to our own conscious deficiency. But if there be any manliness in the heart, this will be a wholesome depression and confusion, and the effect will soon show itself in more regular and self-denying ways, and in a happier state of things between the pastor and his flock. For ourselves we must own, that were it not for some such hope, the very perusal of the work, much more the task of reviewing it, would seem almost too much for us. As it is, we are fain to undertake it as we may.

We are fain, in the first place, (however it may put the greater part of us, clergy and laity, to shame,) to recommend

this short treatise, for the points to which it refers, as the best 'Country Parson' that has appeared in our times: the most effectual help towards bringing our authorized machinery to bear in special on our present tasks and emergencies. We could wish to see it studied, (with the exception perhaps of one portion, which we need not specify more particularly, than by saying that its very title in the margin implies it to have been intended for the eye and thought, almost exclusively, of the guides of souls, and, therefore, we have sometimes doubted whether it had not better have been written in Latin :)— with the exception of those pages, we could wish to see Mr. Monro's work very familiarly known to all among us, who love God's Church and His poor. We know of no such help, for the points to which it refers:-a necessary limitation, since it does not profess to be a complete Treatise on Parochial Work. all earnestness and reality it is limited to what the author knows of his own knowledge: chiefly, therefore, at least primarily, it treats of the condition of poor agricultural parishes; and while it abounds in original views, and deep sayings of Philosophy and sacred Polity, enforced often with most touching eloqence, it is marked throughout with that which is perhaps the most unequivocal note of reality and truth-that its generalizations are everywhere visibly bound to the author's own definite and clear experience in his widest range he never loses sight of the cottage fire-side, or school-room, or confessional chair, whence the course of thought on which he is employed had its origin : like the poet's lark;

- while the wings aspire, both heart and eye

Are with his nest upon the dewy ground.

Type of the wise, who soar but never roam,

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.'

In

This is his tone and manner-the very tone and manner (if we may venture so to speculate) which indicate one naturally gifted to become a propagator of the Church's Sacramental system to whom it is a recommendation, not an offence, when he finds much made of very cheap and ordinary symbols: whose joy is rather to begin from the smallest event or reality around him, and trace it upwards and onwards to something very great, than to imagine perfect things at a distance, and long and try to bring the facts of his condition into more exact logical accordance with them. To this, as to so many other points of character, we may perhaps without irreverence apply the Divine maxim, they that are most like little children are meetest for the Kingdom of Heaven-best prepared to teach and work in the Church. For we all know how local, personal, and domestic little children commonly are, both in their speculations and in their

attachments and what a reality this gives to 'heir sayings and doings, compared with those of the full-grown and conceited world.

In substance, then, Mr. Monro's work may be described as a series of earnest and original remarks on the subjects which shall be now set down in their order. First, the sad and fallen state of English society: concerning which, he says generally :-

To do more than sketch the evil which exists to be remedied would

exceed our present space. It is the alarming and astounding fact of millions of baptized Christians, living, in cities and villages around us, either in utter ignorance of the religion they profess, or the victims of a deep-rooted and withering infidelity. By the side of the splendid palaces of luxury and ease in the metropolis and other large cities, and within a stone's throw of their doors, are alleys and darkened streets, where in garrets and cellars whole families are grouped, in squalid poverty, filth, and disease, and what is far worse, in a state of ignorance of their awful responsibilities and future destinies which would appal a Hindoo. And often in a space which, if for a moment cleared and unoccupied, would present the features of scarcely more than a small yard of ordinary dimen sions, have arisen piles of benighted dwelling-places, whose very mazes and intricacies give one the idea of magnitude, whose occupants never mention the Almighty's name but to curse it, or look on death with any other feeling than as the escape from the miseries of life into nothingness and annihilation; theatres, gin palaces, and gambling houses, have far outnumbered schools and churches; and long after the latter have closed their doors for the day, the former pour forth floods of light to lead thousands into their accustomed resort of sin and intoxication. Churches stand dark and silent against the night sky, while these houses of vice blaze with light till the streets cease to echo to the feet of the passing traveller. Nor is the power of evil active alone to satisfy the sensual tendencies of men. Their intellectual yearnings are gratified with an activity, an energy, a zeal truly surprising and worthy of a better cause; schools are open throughout the hours of the evening, where socialist teachers inculcate their tenets and preach their doctrines to thousands, who feel they have rational powers, which no other body has attempted to call out or give food to. In this way a population is fast growing up around us, bound by no law of God, under the influence of violent passions, far too strong for human law to restrain, ready to burst forth beyond all control against the checks of authority and the call of order; this is the evil, and this evil many men hope to remedy by the lowest form of mental education. The result will show the wisdom of their expectation; a far more effective remedy seems to me to lie in the full and active working of the parochial system.'-Pp. 5-7.

Then passing to the state of the agricultural poor in particular, he speaks of their notions of Prayer, of the Sacraments, of Doctrine, their want of reverence, their impurity and dishonesty. We cannot deny that in what he says there is a great deal of sad truth: still we must hope that in very many parishes his statements would appear almost too highly coloured; it perhaps would have tended to mitigate them, had he been all his life conversant with this section of the poor, which we rather apprehend has not been the case. For instance, he is disposed to think a good deal of their calling the Creed a Prayer, and using

:

:

it as such now this, we apprehend, is simply a relic of the old form of devotion, used from time immemorial in all branches of the Catholic Church ;—the form of adding the Credo to the Pater Noster and their calling it a prayer is no proof that they mistake its meaning: 'prayer,' in their usage of the word, means much the same as our phrase 'devotional formulary' it is said on their knees, and said to God, and that makes it, in their sense, a prayer:' they do not stand upon the logical difference between prayer,' 'thanksgiving,' and 'confession of sin, or of faith' any more than Jesus the son of Sirach did, when he gave the title of Prayer to the eucharistical and moral hymn at the end of Ecclesiasticus. And surely the Creed, said solemnly as in God's presence, is to all intents and purposes a prayer: it is bringing our spiritual armour, day by day, and night by night, to be blessed: it is making the Sign of the Cross, so to speak, upon our very souls: and who will doubt that such acts have in God's sight the force and virtue of a Prayer? We are the more earnest on this point, because we are quite sure that in some cases the using the Creed as a Prayer, and so denominating it, is no such token of ignorance, as Mr. Monro's saying would seem to imply and it is very undesirable, for many reasons, that our people's state should be made out worse than it is; very undesirable, also, most assuredly, that anything should be said which might have the effect, however indirectly, of discouraging the use of that form of sound words in our devotions, which have need of all possible help against Evil Spirits. Any such result, we are sure, must be the farthest from Mr. Monro's intention: he is well aware that in all our best and most authoritative books of devotion, since the Reformation as well as before, the Creed is prescribed as part of morning and evening prayer. Before the Reformation the Ave Maria was prescribed also: why has not this been continued by our people, as well as the other, if they were merely clinging to a relic of their ancient usages? In fact, they returned at that period, in this as in many other particulars, to the rules of the Anglo-Saxon time: when it was specially enacted in this Church that every one imbued with the Christian faith should imbue ' his children also with the same faith, and teach them the Pater "Noster and the Credo.' And again, that every one should learn the Pater Noster and Credo before he be buried in consecrated ground, or judged meet to receive Holy Communion, or to be sponsor to a child, or to be confirmed.2 No, mention at all, it will be perceived, of the Ave Maria; which in English canons of a few centuries later is carefully inserted into the like

Can. 17, sub Edgaro. ap. Hard. tom. vi. 661. 2 Ib. can. 22, A.D. 967.

enactments. All this makes it credible, that the customs of our English peasantry concerning the Creed are no token of special ignorance, but arise from the same kind of traditional sense of duty, which works such wonders elsewhere in keeping up the Roman system.

Again, in respect of another usage, which he seems to regard as merely childish, and we have no doubt that it is so in a great many, perhaps in most instances: I mean, the sort of invocation to the Four Evangelists, which comes into some part of very many of our poor men's devotion :—

'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,

Bless the bed that I lie on :'—

we could wish to bring to his notice a passage in S. Chrysostom on 1 Cor. Hom. 43, § 7, Oxf. Transl. S. Chrysostom recommends an alms-chest near the place of prayer, and says, 'As ' often as you enter in to pray, first deposit your alms, and then 'send up your prayer, . since not even the gospel hanging by our bed is more important than that alms should be laid up 'for you; for if you hang up the gospel and do nothing, it will do you no such great good: but if you have this little coffer, you 'have a defence against the devil, you give wings to your prayer, 'you make your house holy, having meat for the king there laid up in store; and for this cause let the little coffer be placed 'also near the bed, and the night will not be troubled with 'fantasies.' With somewhat of the like feeling, it seems to have been usual in ancient councils (at Ephesus, for example, A.D. 431), to 'set the Holy Gospel on a throne in the very midst, indicating the presence among us of Christ Himself." (Hard. i. 1441.) May not then the familiar couplet alluded to be regarded as a wish or ejaculation addressed to the Almighty, rather than as an invocation, properly so called, to the Saints: a wish, in meaning akin to that ancient Benediction of the Church, May the reading of the Holy Gospel be to us salvation and protection?' According to this interpretation, (and why should it seem unreal or far-fetched?) our people are no more superstitious in their use of this, than of any other formula, the words of which they do not properly understand: neither can it be strictly called 'an address to objects short of God.'

Under this head, it startles us a little, as an instance of verbal incaution, to find Mr. Monro saying, 'the forms in use are equally deficient [with the postures]: with the exception of the Lord's Prayer, no other is generally in use, but,' &c.: as if the Lord's Prayer were a slight exception. Our own experience, again, would not confirm his implied statement, that in principle

Ib. tom. vii. 278 E, A.D. circ. 1237.