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Clergymen Of The Church Of England

<h2>IX. THE IRISH BENEFICED CLERGYMAN.</h2> The difference between an Irish and an English parson is greater, perhaps, than that which exists between Irishmen and Englishmen of any other special denomination, and is of a nature exactly contrary to that which generally marks the distinctive character of the Milesian and the John Bull. The normal Irishman is a jolly fellow; but the normal Irish Protestant clergyman is a severe, sombre man, one who speaks of life in sad, subdued tones,—unless when he is minatory in the pulpit,—one who looks at things around him with a continual remembrance that life is but a span long, that men are but grass of the field, that the sickle is ready and the oven heated, and that it is worth no man’s while to be comfortable{106} here on earth. He is preaching every moment of his life, preaching in his gait, preaching in every tone of his voice, preaching in every act that he does, preaching in every turn of his eyes. Find him asleep, and you will find him preaching with a long-protracted, indignant, low-church, Protestant snore, very eloquent as to the scarlet woman. But an English parson, let him be ever so much given to preaching, preaches only from his pulpit. He may scold, advise, or cajole in the school, the cottage, or the drawing-room; but he keeps his sermons for his Sunday work. An Irish clergyman does not shake hands with you without leaving a text or two in your palm,—with his own special comments on their tenour as regards the Pope. The reason of this is not far to seek. The Irish clergyman does not live in the midst of Protestants with whom he sympathizes, but is surrounded by Roman Catholics with whom he cannot sympathize, and against whom he is driven to feel almost a personal enmity, not only by reason of their creed which he sorely hates, but by reason also of the anomalies of his own position which are so hateful to them. He is always in a state of feud,—in a state{107} of feud, not only against the devil, as should be the case with all of us whether clergymen or laymen, but against Antichrist on the Seven Hills, against the scarlet woman who goes about devouring, against the Pope who is to him a ravenous old woman as to whom he cannot say whether he is most ravenous or most old-womanish, against a creed which has for him none of the attractions of Christianity,—in which he sees only the small points of divergence from his own, and which is, therefore, worse to him than the creed of Mussulman or of Jew. He is therefore always serious, as is a soldier who is ever buckling on his armour, and somewhat sad, as is a soldier who cannot get his enemy down so that he may take away his standard and trample on him. The Irish Protestant clergyman is ever longing to lead troops of the Roman Catholics of Ireland in triumph to the top of the Tarpeian rock of conversion; but they succeed in bringing thither but one and another, and these one and another are such that they hardly grace the chariot wheels of their victors. The popular idea of an Irish clergyman in England is, we think, somewhat incorrect. He is{108} often supposed to be an idle man, listless for want of occupation, given to self-indulgence, ill-educated, eager only in defence of his temporalities, and warmly attached to the party politics of Protestants, rather than to their religion. Such men may doubtless be found among the holders of livings in Ireland, as they may also in England; but such is not the general character of the Irish clergyman. He is a man always active, though unfortunately his activity has but small field of usefulness. His air is not the air of a listless man, but of a man disappointed,—as it may well be. As he goes on in life he may come to love too dearly his slippers and his armchair, and perhaps to feel, as disappointed men will feel,—will feel but not acknowledge,—that the consolations of the dinner-table are, and that none others are, reliable; but such is not his normal condition of body or mind. I will not say that he is generally well-educated,—because the word means so much. But the Irish clergyman has generally read as much as his brother in England, though his reading has been of a different nature. Of reading applicable specially to his own profession he has{109} probably endured more than his brother in England. In short he is more of a clergyman and less of a man of the world than the English parson,—with this misfortune, that his clerical activities are always at work against enemies and not on behalf of friends. There would not be space for me to say much, in this short sketch, of the now acknowledged anomalies of the position of the Church of England as established in Ireland; but I will endeavour to describe the outward form and bearing of the clergyman whom these anomalies have produced, begging my readers to believe at the outset that the Irish clergyman may be regarded, nine times out of ten,—ninety-nine out of a hundred I think we might say,—as a sincere man, as a man with strong convictions, who has no shadow of doubt in his own mind that the surest road to heaven, if not the only one, is by that special pathway of which he professes to have the clue. There is no reservation within his mind, as to his religion with its intricacies being good for the ignorant, for instance, though perhaps not altogether needed for the educated. He has no doubts. The Eureka with him is a certainty. That{110} men will be saved and will be damned as they live remote from or attached to papistical teachings is to him a reality. Now it is something that a man should be capable of a sincere belief, and that he should succeed in attaining to it. The Irish beneficed clergyman has almost always been educated at Trinity, Dublin, and has there been indoctrinated with those high Protestant principles with which he has before been inoculated. He is, of course, the son of an Irish Protestant gentleman, and has therefore sucked them in with his mother’s milk. He goes before his Protestant bishop and takes his orders with a corps of other young men exactly similarly circumstanced. And thus he has never had given to him an opportunity of rubbing his own ideas against those of men who have been educated with different proclivities. He has never lived at college either with Roman Catholics, or with Presbyterians, or with Protestants of a sort different from his sort. In his cradle, at his father’s table, at school, at the university, in all the lessons that he has learned, in all the games that he has played, in his converse with his sisters, in his first soft, faint, whisperings{111} with his sisters’ friends, in his loud unreserved talkings with his closest companions, the same two ideas, cheek by jowl, have ever been present to him,—the State ascendancy of his own Church, and the numerical superiority of another Church antagonistic to his own. When we consider all this, and look at the training which the Irish clergyman has undergone, how can we wonder at his idiosyncrasies? Irish clergymen are thus bound together more closely than clergymen in England, chiefly from the want of opportunity for divergence. Not only education goes always in the same course, but the circumstances of professional career attach themselves very closely to one form. The livings are more generally in the gift of the bishops than with us, and the Irish bishops, perhaps, are more inclined to give promotion solely on the score of merit than are the English bishops. There is, we believe, less of Church patronage,—or rather of the exercise of Church patronage for the furthering of private ends; and if this be so, the Irish Church in that respect is superior to our own. But as the Irish curate is to get his living from the Irish bishop, and is to receive{112} it as a reward for his clerical zeal, and not because he is his father’s son, it is absolutely incumbent on him to work as a curate up to the established diocesan mark. And this mark or standard will not be the standard fixed exactly by the bishop himself. Bishop’s predecessors and bishop’s chaplains, and the very air round the bishop’s residence, will have been for years impregnated with high Protestant principles. And even a bishop who may himself be lacking in that fiery Protestant zeal which is regarded as Church of England orthodoxy in Ireland, will not find himself able to subdue the strength of the atmosphere in which he is called upon to live. There have been bishops sent to Ireland,—nay, there still are bishops in Ireland, placed over dioceses there because they have been considered to be,—we will not say anti-Protestant, but liberal in their tendencies towards Roman Catholics and Presbyterians; but the clergymen who come forth ordained from under the hands of the liberal Whatelys are nearly of the same form as those who, from time out of mind, have been given to us by the orthodox Trenches and the orthodox Beresfords. The stream runs too strongly to be{113} stemmed by any bishop;—so that the Irish clergyman who desires to swim must, almost of necessity, swim with it. The clerical aspirant becomes first a curate. One would be disposed to think that there could be no great need for curates in Ireland,—that as the population of the country is chiefly Roman Catholic, and as not much above one-half even of the Protestants conforms to the Church of England,—so that the proportion of even nominal church-goers is less than one in eight,—and as there is a beneficed parson in every parish, whether there be much, little, or nothing to do,—curates could not be needed in addition to rectors and vicars; but curates seem to be as common in Ireland as they are in England,—the souls of men requiring, we must suppose, more surveillance, and the work, we must presume, being more closely done. The young clergyman almost always becomes a curate, and then looks to his bishop for a living. Depending thus on the bishop, he lives strictly, works with energy, is constant in his adherence to all the exigencies of his cloth, and in the ripeness of time is blessed with a living of, we will say, two hundred and fifty{114} pounds a year with a glebe. Irish livings are thought to be very good, but the value here named is above the average. In the rich diocese of Meath, perhaps of all the Irish dioceses the richest, the endowment of more than one-half of the livings is less than the sum above named. Then begins the real battle of his life. Of course our Irish clergyman marries, and of course he has a family, and, even in Ireland, the support of a wife and family upon two hundred and fifty pounds a year is not easy. His glebe is probably remote from any town, and far removed from the houses of other gentry. The parish squire is a personage who, as such, hardly exists in Ireland. Here and there a resident landowner is to be found with a large house and a wide demesne; but the parish squire who has interests in the parish almost identical with those of the parson does not exist. The clergyman, therefore, located in the country lives alone, and his nearest neighbours are the rectors and vicars of other parishes. He lives alone, and the solitude of his life does not tend to make him jovial, or even satisfied with things around him. But he has his religion, and he tells himself that that should suffice for him;—that that{115} should be all in all to him. He has his religion, and he endeavours to make the most of it. It is to be not only his guide through life to things spiritual, but his chief comfort in things temporal. He must abide by it in every phase under which it has been presented to him; he must hang to it as the politician does to his party; he must trust to it,—not merely for the God and Saviour whom he knows through its assistance, but for his very politics, thoroughly believing that all its doctrines and all its formularies are essentially necessary, and that they must be taken with the exact tenets and with all the twists which have been given to them by his side in church disputes. Of all men the Irish beneficed clergyman is the most illiberal, the most bigoted, the most unforgiving, the most sincere, and the most enthusiastic. He is too often an unhappy man, being poor, aggrieved, soured by the misfortunes of his own position, conscious that something is wrong, though never doubting that he himself is right, aware of his own unavoidable idleness, aware that when he works he works to little or no effect, feeling that prayers said and sermons preached to his own family, to three policemen and{116} his clerk, cannot be said to have been preached to much effect. It is a life-long grief to him that in his parish there should be four hundred and fifty nominal Roman Catholics, and only fifty nominal members of the Church of England. But yet he is staunch. There is a good day coming, though he will never see it. He consoles himself as best he may with the certainty of the coming triumph; but cannot refrain from sadness as he tells himself that it certainly will not come in his days. There is nothing more melancholy to a man’s heart, nothing more depressing to his feelings, than a doubt whether or no he truly earns the bread which he eats. The beneficed clergyman of the Church of England in Ireland has no doubt as to his right to his bread,—as to his right either by the law of man or by the law of God; but he cannot but have a doubt as to his earning it. He tells himself that it is the fault of the people,—that it comes of their darkness; that he is there if they will only come to him. But they do not come; and he has on his spirit the terrible weight of wages received without adequate work performed. It is a killing weight.{117} To preach to three policemen is as hard as to preach to three hundred educated men and women,—nay, perhaps it is much harder; but he who so preaches feels that his preaching is nothing. He is as the convict labourer who moves sand from one hole to another;—and who can get no comfort from his work. And he is daily told,—this Irish beneficed clergyman of the Church of England,—that of all men he is the most overpaid. Newspapers which he cannot but see, speakers on public platforms to whose orations he cannot entirely stop his ears, are telling him constantly that he is a drone, growing fat upon honey which he does not help to make, threatening him with Parliamentary annihilation, and invoking against him all the ardour of all the Radicals. In the meantime, he knows that he and his are barely able to subsist on the pittance which the Church allows him. He has terrible temporal grievances in poor rates, charges for his glebe, deductions on this side and on that, till he knows not how to pay his butcher and his baker, and the wife of his bosom is driven to painful, stringent economies. He has not, he tells{118} himself, half of that which a liberal Church in old days had intended for the parish, and yet they tell him that he is robbing the public! He is there to do his duty. Why do not the people come to him? For what he receives, whether it is much or little, he is ready to work, if only his work might be accepted. But his work is not accepted, and there is no slightest sign in Ireland that it will be accepted. The anomalies of the Church of England in Ireland are terribly distressing, and call aloud for reform. But to none can they be so distressing as to the beneficed clergyman in Ireland; and in the behalf of no other class is that reform so vitally needed.{119} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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