| <Saturday Review, 3 October 1874, 563-4>
| <ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| Those persons who object to the influence of the clergy in their
| parishes at home, and who dislike the idea of being laid hold of by
| the ecclesiastical crook and dragged perforce up steep ways and narrow
| paths, ought to visit some of our little outlying settlements in
| foreign parts. They might take a revengeful pleasure in seeing how the
| tables there are turned against the tyrants here, and how weak in the
| presence of his transmarine flock is the expatriated shepherd whose
| rod at home is oftentimes a rod of iron, and his crook more compelling
| than persuasive. Of all men the most to be pitied is surely the
| clergyman of one of those small English settlements which are
| scattered about France and Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and of all
| men of education, and what is meant by the position of a gentleman, he
| is the most in thraldom.
| His very means of living depending on his congregation, he must first
| of all please that congregation and keep it in good humour. So, it may
| be said, must a clergyman in London whose income is from pew-rents and
| whose congregation are not his parishioners. But London is large; the
| tempers and thoughts of men are as numerous as the houses; there is
| room for all, and lines of affinity for all. The Broad Churchman will
| attract his hearers, and the Ritualist his, from out of the mass, as
| magnets attract steel filings; and each church will be filled with
| hearers who come there by preference. But in a small and stationary
| society, in a congregation already made and not specially attracted,
| yet by which he has to live, the clergyman finds himself more the
| servant than the leader, less the pastor than the thrall. He must
| <p> 'suit,' </p> else he is nowhere, and his 
| bread and butter are vanishing
| points in his horizon; that is, he must preach and think, not
| according to the truth that is in him, but according to the views of
| the most influential of his hearers, and in attacking their souls he
| must touch tenderly their tempers.
| These tempers are for the most part lions in the way difficult to
| propitiate. The elementary doctrines of Christianity must be preached
| of course, and sin must be held up as the thing to avoid, while virtue
| must be complimented as the thing to be followed, and a spiritual
| state of mind must be discreetly advocated. These are safe
| generalities; but the dangers of application are many. How to preach
| of duties to a body of men and women who have thrown off every
| national and local obligation? ~~ who have left their estates to be
| managed by agents, their houses to be filled by strangers, who have
| given up their share of interest in the school and the village
| reading-room, the poor and the parish generally ~~ men and women who
| have handed themselves over to indolence and pleasure-seeking, the
| luxurious enjoyment of a fine climate, the pleasant increase of income
| to be got by comparative cheapness of breadstuffs, and the abandonment
| of all those outgoings roughly comprised under the head of local
| duties and local obligations? ~~ how, indeed? They have no duties to be
| reminded of in those moral generalizations which touch all and offend
| none; and the clergyman who should go into details affecting his
| congregation personally, who should preach against sloth and slander,
| pleasure-seeking and selfishness, would soon preach to empty pews and
| be cut by his friends as an impertinent going beyond his office.
| His congregation too, composed of educated ladies and gentlemen, is
| sure to be critical, and therefore all but impossible to teach. If he
| inclines a hair's breadth to the right or the left beyond the point at
| which they themselves stand, he is held to be unsound. His sermons are
| gravely canvassed in the afternoon conclaves which meet at each
| other's houses to discuss the excitement of the Sunday morning in the
| new arrivals or the new toilets. Has he dwelt on the humanity
| underlying the Christian faith? He is drifting into Socinianism; and
| those whose inclinations go for abstract dogmas well backed by
| brimstone say that he does not preach the Gospel. Has he exalted the
| functions of the minister, and tried to invest his office with a
| spiritual dignity and power that would furnish a good leverage over
| his flock? He is accused of sacerdotalism, and the free-citizen blood
| of his listening Erastians is up and flaming. Does he, to avoid these
| stumbling-blocks, wander into the deeper mysteries and discourse on
| things which no man can either explain or understand? He is accused of
| presumption and profanity, and is advised to stick to the Lord's
| Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. If he is earnest he is
| impertinent; if he is level he is cold. Each member of his
| congregation, subscribing a couple of guineas towards his support,
| feels as if he or she had claims to that amount over the body and soul
| and mind and powers of the poor parson in his or her pay; and the
| claim is generally worked out in snippets, not individually dangerous
| to life nor fortune, but inexpressibly aggravating, and as depressing
| as annoying. For the most part, the unhappy man is safest when he
| sticks to broad dogma, and leaves personal morality alone. And he is
| almost sure to be warmly applauded when he has a shy at science, and
| says that physicists are fools who assert more than they can prove,
| because they cannot show why an acorn should produce an oak, nor how
| the phenomena of thought are elaborated. This throwing of date-stones
| is sure to strike no listening djinn. The mass of the congregations
| sitting in the English Protestant churches built on foreign soil, know
| little and care less about the physical sciences; but it gives them a
| certain comfortable glow to think that they are so much better than
| those sinful and presumptuous men who work at bacteria and the
| spectroscope; and they hug themselves as they say, each man in his
| own soul, how much nicer it is to be dogmatically safe than
| intellectually learned.
| Preaching personal morality indeed, with possible private application,
| would be rather difficult in dealing with a congregation not
| unfrequently made up of doubtful elements. Take that pretty young
| woman and her handsome <hi> roué </hi>-looking husband, 
| who have come <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg>
| knows whence and are <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg> 
| knows what, but who attend the services
| with praiseworthy punctuality, spend any amount of money, and are
| being gradually incorporated into the society of the place. The parson
| may have had private hints conveyed to him from his friends at home
| that, of the matrimonial conditions between the two, everything is
| real save the assumed <p> 'lines.' </p> But how is he to say so? 
| They have made
| themselves valuable members of his congregation, and give larger
| donations than <rege orig=”any one”> anyone </reg> else. 
| They have got the good will of the
| leading persons in the sacred community, and, having something to
| hide, are naturally careful to please, and are consequently popular.
| He can scarcely give form and substance to the hints he has had
| conveyed to him; yet his conscience cries out on the one side, if his
| weakness binds him to silence on the other. In any case, how can he
| make himself the Nathan to this questionable David, and, holding forth
| on the need of virtuous living, thunder out, 
| <p> 'Thou art the man!'? </p> Let
| him try the experiment, and he will find a hornet's nest nothing to
| it.
| How too, can he preach honesty to men, perhaps his own churchwardens,
| who have outrun the constable and outwitted their creditors at one and
| the same time? How lecture women who flirt over the borders on the
| week days, but pay handsomely for their sittings on Sundays, on the
| crown with which Solomon endowed the lucky husband of the virtuous
| woman? He may wish to do all this; but his wife and children, and the
| supreme need of food and firing, step in between him and the higher
| functions of his calling; and he owns himself forced to accept the
| world as he finds it, sins and shortcomings with the rest, and to take
| heed lest he be eaten up by over-zeal or carried into personal
| darkness by his desire for his people's light.
| Sometimes the poor man is in thrall to 
| <reg orig=”some one”> someone </reg> in particular rather
| than to his flock as a body; and there are times when this dominant
| power is a woman; in which case the many contrarieties besetting his
| position may be multiplied <hi> ad infinitum </hi>. 
| Nothing can exceed the
| miserable subjection of a clergyman given over to the tender mercies
| of a feminine despot. She knows everything, and she governs as much as
| she knows. She makes herself the arbiter of his whole life, from his
| conscience to his children's boots, and he can call neither his soul
| nor his home his own. She prescribes his doctrine, and takes care to
| let him know when he has transgressed the rules she has laid down for
| his guidance. She treats the hymns as part of her personal
| prerogative, and is violently offended if those having a ritualistic
| tendency are sung, or if those are taken whereof the tunes are too
| jaunty or the measure is too slow. The unfortunate man feels under her
| eye during the whole of the service, like a schoolboy under the eye of
| his preceptress; and he dare not even begin the opening sentences
| until she has rustled up the aisle and has said her private prayer
| quite comfortably. She holds over his head the terror of vague threats
| and shadowy misfortunes should he cross her will; but at the same time
| he does not find that running in her harness brings extra grist to his
| mill, nor that his way is the smoother because he treads in the
| footsteps she has marked out for him.
| Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary; sometimes she objects
| to any approach to chanting; and if certain recalcitrants of the
| congregation, in possession of the harmonium, insist on their own
| methods against hers, she writes home to the Society and complains of
| the thin edge of the wedge and the Romanizing tendencies of her
| spiritual adviser. In any case she is a fearful infliction; and a
| church ruled by a female despot is about the most pitiable instance we
| know of insolent tyranny and broken-backed dependence.
| But the clergymen serving these transmarine stations are not often
| themselves men of mark nor equal to their contemporaries at home. They
| are often sickly, which means a low amount of vital energy; oftener
| impecunious, which presupposes want of grip and precludes real
| independence. They are men whose career has been somehow arrested; and
| their natures have suffered in the blight that has befallen their
| hopes. Their whole life is more or less a compromise, now with
| conscience, now with character; and they have to wink at evils which
| they ought to denounce, and bear with annoyances which they ought to
| resent. In most cases they are obliged to eke out their scanty incomes
| by taking pupils; and here again the millstone round their necks is
| heavy, and they have to pay a large moral percentage on their
| pecuniary gains. If their pupils are of the age when boys begin to
| call themselves men, they have to keep a sharp look-out on them; and
| they suffer many things on the score of responsibility when that
| look-out is evaded, as it necessarily must be at times. As the
| characteristic quality of small societies is gossip, and as gossip
| always includes exaggeration, the peccadilloes of the young fellows
| are magnified into serious sins, and then bound as a burden on the
| back of the poor cleric in thrall to the idle imaginings of men and
| the foolish fears of women. One black sheep in the pupilary flock will
| do more damage to the reputation of the unhappy pastor who has them in
| hand than a dozen shining lights will do him good. Morality is assumed
| to be the free gift of the tutor to the pupil; and if the boy is bad
| the man is to blame for not having made that free-gift betimes.
| Look at it how we will, the clergyman in charge of these foreign
| congregations has no very pleasant time of it. In a sense
| expatriated; his home ties growing daily weaker; his hope of home
| preferment reduced to <hi> nil </hi>; his liberty of 
| conscience a dream of the
| past; and all the mystical power of his office going down in the
| conflict caused by the need of pew-rents, submission to tyrants, and
| dependence on the Home Society, he lives from year to year bemoaning
| the evil chances which have flung him on this barren, shifting,
| desolate strand, and becoming less and less fitted for England and
| English parochial work ~~ that castle in the air, quiet and secure,
| which he is destined never to inhabit. He is touched too in part by
| the atmosphere of his surroundings; and to a congregation without
| duties a clergyman with views more accommodating than severe comes
| only too naturally as the appropriate pastor. The whole thing proves
| that thraldom to the means of living, or rather to the persons
| representing those means, damages all men alike ~~ those in cassock and
| gown as well as those in slop and blouse ~~ and that lay influence can,
| in certain circumstances, be just as tyrannical over the clerical
| conscience as clerical influence is apt to be tyrannical over lay
| living.