any place of worship at all. Neither the Church, nor the dissenters either Protestant or Romanist, can, or at least do, attract that numerous and influential body of men. Of the dreadful results of an entire absence of religious instruction, undergraduates will be less able to form an adequate idea than clergymen and those who have seen with their own eyes something of working life.

Many of the subscribers to The Eagle are destined to take Holy Orders, and it is to those chiefly that the following remarks may prove interesting, although the subject is one which comes home to every one in a greater or less degree.

The

The present coldness of the working classes in religious matters cannot but lead to disastrous results. If any one imagine that great masses of men can live on from day to day without public worship and its concomitant blessings, and yet not be in danger of succumbing to all kinds of vices, and becoming gradually but surely brutalised, he must be at a loss to account for the existence of a Church at all, and more especially for its divine foundation; for the repeated injunctions not to forget the assembling of ourselves together, and for the command to preach the gospel to the poor. The Church is absolutely necessary for the temporal as well as for the spiritual welfare of the nation. The Church exists and is flourishing: but, sad to say, to a large portion of the nation it is as if it were not. Dissenting chapels abound; but these same classes are not to be seen there. Romanist offers his gorgeous ritual; the working-man turns his back on it. Large meetings have been held in Cambridge and many other towns by the working classes themselves to investigate the reasons for this general indifference, and numerous simultaneous sermons have been preached with the object of stirring up greater endeavours to put an end to so melancholy a state of things. The reasons for non-attendance at Church given by the working-men themselves in their congresses are generally vague, and can hardly be satisfactory even to those who advance them. But, whatever the cause may be, there is one practice in vogue which certainly tends to foster the evil and to make its cure almost impossible-the practice of appropriating sittings in parish churches to certain persons or families or houses, whether for fixed sums of money or for other considerations.*

Appropriation, or the pew system, has been defined as the division of a Church into private tenements, and the tenancy or

It is thought by some that, until the pew system is swept away entirely, all attempts to influence the working classes to any great degree by means of clerical agency will be pretty nearly hopeless. These declare that the pew system must go; churches must be free and open to all alike, without any distinction of rich and poor; that otherwise nothing can be done; for, under the present arrangement, the lower classes are absolutely debarred from taking part in the national worship; it is simply out of the question; there is not sufficient accommodation for them in the churches; richer men have outbid them, and bought up the holy place; the working-man must go elsewhere.

Others affirm that the poor keep aloof from a different cause altogether; they are confident that no good would be got by preventing the appropriation of pews; much harm might follow: for those who attend the services at present would be annoyed at losing their accustomed seats and at being mixed up with strangers, and might gradually be driven themselves from the churches.

These conflicting opinions cannot both be right. It is for churchmen to decide whether appropriated or free sittings. are more suitable to the dignity and purity of the Church Catholic, and better calculated to enable the national religion to be brought home to the greatest number of people, so as to confer the greatest advantage on the nation at large. Let us therefore examine the arguments of those who advocate the retention of the practice of buying and selling sittings in churches.

In the first place, say they, the English are pre-eminently a domestic people. Families love to worship together, which

ownership of such tenements by private individuals in the same sense in which lawyers and others speak of the tenancy or ownership of a house. Or, again, in the Church Dictionary of Dr. Hook, pews are described as "enclosed seats in churches, which enable people to attend church and hear sermons comfortably and luxuriously." We would say that appropriation is religion made easy to the minority, and impossible to the majority of the community. Under this system, the occupants regard their pews or appropriated seats, no less than their houses, as their castles. Equally-to say the least in both cases they resent intrusion. They claim, not merely a right of exclusive occupancy for themselves, but the power also to repel all others at their will.-Rev. T. P. Browning, Essay I. p. 1, On the Evils of the Appropriation of Parish and District Churches.

they can always do if they have pews of their own; whereas if all the seats were free, the chances are that a whole family would never be able to sit together. Besides, they continue, it is very disagreeable not to know where one is going to sit. It is a great addition to the pleasures of a service to be able to go straight to a definite place, and there sit or stand or kneel free from molestation. But in free churches, if the service is more attractive, or if the preacher is more earnest and eloquent than elsewhere, many people from the neighbouring parishes will flock to hear him, and the parishioners to whom the church really belongs will be ousted from their rights, or at least inconveniently crowded and disturbed. At all events, they argue, it will be allowed that at watering places such as Brighton, to which many thousands of strangers flock every Sunday, and especially during the season when great numbers of permanent visitors take up a residence of two or three months at the sea side and inundate the churches, each of the parishioners must have a seat secured to him, or he runs a good chance of seeing his place filled Sunday after Sunday by some wretched excursionist. Besides, in almost all churches free seats are set apart for the poor, and it is useless to tell us that they require more room when we can see with our own eyes that the seats already assigned to them are seldom entirely filled. You cannot expect, they say, refined gentlemen and delicate ladies to tolerate being mixed up with common folk: whether it is absurd or unchristian, or whatever else you please to call it, a well dressed person cannot attend to the service if he has to sit between a couple of chimney sweeps. Then invalids ought to have seats of their own: a comfortable seat, or a footstool of a peculiar shape, may make all the difference in the world to a person enfeebled by illness. Besides all this, they urge that, of course, one could not leave books in the church; but would have to drag them to and from home every time one went to service. Such objections, they are prepared to hear, sound trivial, but still everyone is alive to them, and does not feel them the less powerfully because he cannot entirely justify them. In free churches there would be such an amount of crowding and scrambling for places that many decent people would refuse to go to church at all. And suppose the whole of the sittings were made entirely free, they think that the result would be, that the crinolines would fill up the whole place, and the poor would be as badly off as before. What they dread most is, that the parishioners would gradually cease to look upon any one

church as their own, since any of the neighbouring churches are equally open to them, and thus that the parochial system would be subverted, which is one of the finest institutions in England. In fact, they are sure that we should find that the advantages gained by the change would be entirely at the expense of those who, by their regular attendance, shew that they appreciate the services, and for the imaginary benefit of a class of people who are chiefly conspicuous by their absence.

Such are the objections which are generally urged against the abolition of the old pew system-plausible enough, but not very formidable when examined more closely.

It may, perhaps, be not inexpedient to give some instances of the practical working of the system as well as to discuss it theoretically; for as the Rev. Stephen Saxby observes in his admirable essay on the subject, "the experience of every day shews us the difficulty of redressing an abuse merely on the grounds of its discrepancy with first principles. The fact is, there are many things which work fairly well, in spite of their demonstrable inconsistency with sound theory. This paradox is forced upon us in civil jurisprudence, in diplomacy, and even, though somewhat against our will, in some few matters of church polity; nor will any observant man be surprised at meeting an instance of it, in affairs small or great. The obvious explanation of it is, that the theory is constructed for men as they ought to be, while the practice deals with them as they are. It is, therefore, instinctively felt by the community at large that it is not enough to prove unsoundness in principle: if we are to bring about any material change in public feeling, we need also to shew that the thing of which we complain is working badly." Thus, until it has been undeniably shewn, not only that the principle of the pew system is faulty, but also that its actual results are bad, that nothing good can be effected by it which would not attend the opposite system in a greater degree; and that, on the other hand, infinite harm is being produced by it, which the free system obviates, words will only have been thrown away. To those who are under the impression that the pew system works well, it is useless to assert that it is contrary to the spirit and letter of the English laws, and a direct violation of the teaching of the New Testament.* To the first objection they answer that the law may be altered; to the second, that the Epistle of St. James was

* See Epistle of St. James, chap. ii. St. Matthew, xxiii. 6.

addressed to a particular church, and that we in the present day are only compelled to obey it in things general, not in matters which each society of Christians is at liberty to arrange in any way which it finds suits it best.*

Objection 1. Families like to worship together.

In the first place it may be observed that the pew holders do not constitute the English nation, nor even a majority of it. They are, in truth, a very small minority indeed. The general argument, then, derived from the domesticity of the English nation, can by no means be admitted to be hostile to the system of free churches. Our opponents assert that a system which prevents families from worshipping together, is to be condemned. We say that the free system has no greater tendency to produce that inconvenience than the system of appropriation. Nay, we even declare war upon the pew system on this very ground, that it is a great barrier to the very desirable blending together of national and family worship on the part of the great majority of the community. For even allowing that in some cases it may enable the pew holders, who, be it remembered, are only a very small minority, to sit together by families, yet no provision is made for a similar luxury on the part of the majority, who are, forsooth, to content themselves with the free seats, if there are any. Now, as the advocates of appropriation object to all the seats being made free, on the ground that families would find it difficult to sit together under that arrangement, with what consistency can they condemn the greater part of the nation to use free seats only? Their own objection tells against themselves: they cut their own fingers with the sword destined for their enemies. even in appropriated churches, it is doubtful whether this advantage is secured even for the minority. The Rev. W. R. Wroth deposed as follows at the Anti-Pew meeting held in Bath in March, 1864:

But,

"That families sat together much better in his church than in pewed churches, because it was often difficult to seat all in a pent-up pew. They could not make the pew expand with the family. It was difficult, as families enlarged, to find a pew just large enough for a certain number of people to go to. The pew system was, he firmly believed, a great separator of families in churches." In general it is found

Essay on the English Pew System, by Rev. Stephen Saxby, M.A. Essay on Evils of the Appropriation of Parish and District Churches, by Rev. T. P. Browning, p. 46.