CHURCH PATRONAGE.

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LETTERS TO ARCHDEACON SINGLETON.*

BISHOPS AND PATRONAGE.

NEVER dreaming of such sudden revolutions as these, a prebendary brings up his son to the church, and spends a large sum of money in his education, which, perhaps, he can ill afford. His hope is (wicked wretch!) that, according to the established custom of the body to which he (immoral man!) belongs, the chapter will (when his turn arrives), if his son be of fair attainments and good character attend to his nefarious recommendation, and confer the living upon the young man ; and in an instant all his hopes are destroyed, and he finds his preferment seized upon, under the plea of public good, by a stronger churchman than himself. I can call this by no other name than that of tyranny and oppression. I know very well that this is not the theory of patronage; but who does better?-do individual patrons?-do colleges who give in succession?-and as for bishops, lives there the man so weak and foolish, so little observant of the past, as to believe (when this tempest of purity and perfection has blown over) that the name of Blomfield will not figure in benefices from which the names of Copleston, Blomberg, Tate, and Smith, have been so virtuously excluded? I have no desire to make odious comparisons between the purity of one set of patrons and another, but they are forced upon me by the injustice of the commissioners. I must either make such comparisons or yield up, without remonstrance, those rights to which I am fairly entitled.

It may be said that the bishops will do better in future; that *Letters to Archdeacon Singleton on the Ecclesiastical Commission,

1837.

now the public eye is upon them, they will be ashamed into a more lofty and anti-nepotic spirit; but, if the argument of past superiority is given up, and the hope of future amendment resorted to, why may we not improve as well as our masters? but the commission say, "These excellent men" (meaning themselves) "have promised to do better, and we have an implicit confidence in their word: we must have the patronage of the cathedrals." In the meantime, we are ready to promise as well as the bishops.

With regard to that common newspaper phrase, the public eye -there's nothing (as the bench well know) more wandering and slippery than the public eye. In five years hence, the public eye will no more see what description of men are promoted by bishops, that it will see what doctors of law are promoted by the Turkish Ulhema; and at the end of this period (such is the example set by the commission), the public eye, turned in every direction, may not be able to see any bishops at all.

In many instances, chapters are better patrons than bishops, because their preferment is not given exclusively to one species of incumbents. I have a diocese now in my private eye which has undergone the following changes. The first of three bishops whom I remember was a man of careless, easy temper, and how patronage went in those early days may be conjectured by the following letters; which are not his, but serve to illustrate a system:

My dear Lord,

THE BISHOP TO LORD A

I have noticed with great pleasure the behaviour of your lordship's second son, and am most happy to have it in my power to offer to him the living of ***. He will find it of considerable value; and there is, I understand, a very good house upon it, &c., &c.

This is to confer a living upon a man of real merit out of the family; into which family, apparently sacrificed to the public good, the living is brought back by the second letter:

My dear Lord,

THE SAME TO THE SAME, A YEAR AFTER.

Will you excuse the Liberty I take in soliciting promotion for my grandson? He is an officer of great skill and gallantry, and can bring the most ample testimonials from some of the best men in the profession: the Arethusa frigate is, I understand, about to be commissioned; and if, &c., &c.

Now I am not saying that hundreds of prebendaries have not committed such enormities and stupendous crimes as this (a decla

ration which will fill the whig cabinet with horror); all that I mean to contend for is, that such is the practice of bishops quite as much as it is of inferior patrons.

The second bishop was a decided enemy of Calvinistical doctrines, and no clergyman so tainted had the slightest chance of preferment in his diocese.

The third bishop could endure no man whose principles were not strictly Calvinistic, and who did not give to the articles that kind of interpretation. Now here were a great mass of clergy naturally alive to the emoluments of their profession, and not knowing which way to look or stir, because they depended so entirely upon the will of one person. Not otherwise is it with a very whig bishop, or a very tory bishop; but the worst case is that of a superannuated bishop; here the preferment is given away, and must be given away, by wives and daughters, or by sons, or by butlers, perhaps, and valets, and the poor dying patron's paralytic hand is guided to the signature of papers, the contents of which he is utterly unable to comprehend. In all such cases as these, the superiority of bishops as patrons will not assist that violence which the commissioners have committed upon the patronage of cathedrals.

ADVICE TO BISHOPS.

THERE is a practice among some bishops, which may as well be mentioned here as anywhere else, but which, I think, cannot be too severely reprobated. They send for a clergyman, and insist upon his giving evidence respecting the character and conduct of his neighbour. Does he hunt? Does he shoot? Is he in debt? Is he temperate? Does he attend to his parish? &c., &c. Now, what is this, but to destroy for all clergymen the very elements of social life-to put an end to all confidence between man and man --and to disseminate among gentlemen, who are bound to live in concord, every feeling of resentment, hatred, and suspicion? But the very essence of tyranny is to act as if the finer feelings, like the finer dishes, were delicacies only for the rich and great, and that little people have no taste for them, and no right to them. A good and honest bishop (I thank God there are many who deserve that character!) ought to suspect himself, and carefully to watch his own heart. He is all of a sudden elevated from being a tutor,

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CHRONICLE OF DORT.

dining at an early hour with his pupil (and occasionally, it is believed, on cold meat), to be a spiritual lord; he is dressed in a magnificent dress, decorated with a title, flattered by chaplains, and surrounded by little people looking up for the things which he has to give away; and this often happens to a man who has had no opportunities of seeing the world, whose parents were in very humble life, and who has given up all his thoughts to the Frogs of Aristophanes and the Targum of Onkelos. How is it possible that such a man should not lose his head? that he should not swell? that he should not be guilty of a thousand follies, and worry and tease to death (before he recovers his common sense) a hundred men as good, and as wise, and as able as himself.

THE DUTCH CHRONICLE OF DORT.

I MET, the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage so apposite to this subject, that though it is somewhat too light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of the translation: "And there was great store of bishops in the town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of the state were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse, the Merve, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of Beverlandt, and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my lords the bishops, Simon of Gloucester, who was a bishop in those parts, disputed with Vorstius, and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many propositions made, and it waxed toward twelve of the clock, my lords the bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in which was great store of good things, —and among the rest a roasted peacock, having, in lieu of a tail, the arms and banners of the archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured the church-and then the archbishop would say a grace, as was seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished, a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were gathered under the window, cried out, Bread! bread! for there was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three

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times the ordinary price of the sleich; and when they had done crying Bread! bread! they called out No bishops!—and began to cast up stones at the windows. Whereat my lords the bishops were in a great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did devour the meats with great appetite; and then you might have seen my lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, 'Good, my lords, is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who count lower in the church than you do, should feast and fluster? Let us order to us the dinner of the deans and canons, which is making ready for them in the chamber below. And this speech of Simon of Gloucester pleased the bishops much; so that they sent for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the public good, and he, much fearing the bishops, brought them the dinner of the deans and canons; and so the deans and canons went away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town, because they had not put any meat out of the window like the bishops; and when the count came to hear of it, he said it was a pleasant conceit, and that the bishops were right cunning men, and had ding'd the canons well."

YOUNG CRUMPET'S ASCENT TO ST. PAUL's.

I AM surprised it does not strike the mountaineers how very much the great emoluments of the church are flung open to the lowest ranks of the community. Butchers, bakers, publicans, schoolmasters, are perpetually seeing their children elevated to the mitre. Let a respectable baker drive through the city from the west end of the town, and let him cast an eye on the battlements of Northumberland House, has his little muffin-faced son the smallest chance of getting in among the Percies, enjoying a share of their luxury and splendour, and of chasing the deer with hound and horn upon the Cheviot Hills? But let him drive his alumsteeped loaves a little farther, till he reaches St. Paul's Church

* A measure in the bailiwick of Dort, containing two gallons one pint English dry measure.-Author's Note. The whole passage from the Chronicle, of course, a pleasant invention.