CHURCH RATES—RESOLUTIONS. (Hansard, 10 March 1859)

§ SIR ARTHUR ELTON
said, he rose to move the Resolutions of which he had given notice with respect to Church Rates. He was anxious to explain to the House what he meant by these Resolutions, and also what he did not mean. He did not mean to place himself in any antagonistic position to the hon. Member for Tavistock (Sir John Trelawny) for he considered the principles of these Resolutions were quite compatible with the Bill which the hon. Baronet intended to carry into effect; but, he wished that those principles should be thoroughly discussed and ventilated in that House to enable him or some Member better qualified, to base on these Resolutions a Bill, having for its object, not merely the abolition of church rates, but due provision for the maintenance of parish churches throughout the country. It gave him pain to vote yesterday against the Bill of the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Walpole), because he entertained the highest respect for him—a respect which he believed was shared by the whole House, and by no means diminished by recent events. He put every faith in the right hon. Gentleman's sincerity in bringing forward the measure in question, but the more he examined the provisions of that Bill the more he was satisfied that it was calculated to do harm instead of good; that it would open the door to fresh strife, and, instead of closing the wounds caused by church-rate contests, would rather tear open wounds which were already half healed. His own opinion was that the abolition of church rates must form the main ingredient in any Measure brought forward upon this subject. The ground had been so often travelled over 1654 that it would not be becoming in him to trespass long upon the House, but he did desire to place before them the reasons why church rates should be abolished, for the sake of the peace of society and the welfare of the Church, as soon as possible. He based his reasons for that proposition, first, upon the continuous strife caused by the impost, and secondly upon the great difficulty of making and levying church rates. During the recess there was a great meeting at Cheadle in Cheshire upon the occasion of its being proposed, after two or three years' discontinuance of church rates, to levy a rate. The meeting having been called, 2,000 or 3,000 persons assembled, and when the Church authorities, struck by the appearance of so great a multitude, proposed to make the rate voluntary, they were treated with contempt, and the meeting adjourned sine die. The people afterwards went round the place in omnibuses and other conveyances, with bands of music playing "See the conquering hero comes." At Woolwich, a churchwarden, whose duty it was to uphold the Church, had himself voted against a church rate, an example which of course had a demoralizing tendency. Upon the ground of the strife caused and the injury done to the welfare of the Church, he strongly advocated the abolition of church rates. There were four ways in which a church rate might be frustrated—by electing for churchwarden a Dissenter, pledged not to levy a rate; by throwing out the proposition in vestry; by disputing the legality of the rate in the Ecclesiastical Court; and, lastly, by persons preferring to go to prison rather than pay the rate. It might be asked, why should they not allow the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Tavistock (Sir John Trelawny) to pass purely and simply without making any provisions for the maintenance of the Church at all? But upon that point he contended that Churchmen had a right to be heard. It appeared to him that in that House Dissenters were treated with a great deal more civility and patience than were Members of the Church of England. He had great respect for the Dissenting body; they formed a most useful and important body in great towns; but they ought not for that reason to ignore the feelings and rights of Churchmen. Therefore, while the first of the Resolutions which he should submit to the House, set forth that church rates should be abolished, the second Resolution provided the machinery, which he thought of the greatest importance for giving free scope to the libe- 1655 rality of the laity when the compulsory system was abolished. He was sorry to perceive that in some quarters there was an unwillingness to meet Churchmen's feelings on this subject. He appealed to all fair-minded Dissenters whether it was just that they should deprive the Church of the compulsory means of raising funds for the maintenance of the parish church, and at the same time insist on fettering Churchmen when they desired to act with due liberality towards the Church. The object of his second Resolution was simply to improve the existing quasi corporation consisting of the churchwardens; and to render it a corporation with a common seal, by which means they would be able to bind their successors—an important matter when the management of property was concerned—and property bequeathed to one set of churchwardens would descend, not to their natural heirs, but to their successors in office. Great objection was made to tying up the property of the country, but the endowments which he contemplated were no new things, but existed in many parts of the country, and were, no doubt, found to be very useful, and much preferable to church rates. He did not propose to go as far as the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Walpole) proposed by the Bill which was thrown out yesterday. He did not propose that tenants for life should have power to saddle their property with charges for the benefit of the Church, for that appeared to him to be an extravagant notion. He considered that the Mortmain Law should be relaxed to a certain extent, but not to the extent of there being an unlimited power to grant or devise land for Church purposes. He only proposed that there should be such a reasonable licence as the Church might fairly expect. Some people seemed to think the Mortmain Law a natural state of things, whereas it was an artificial restriction, and a restriction which ought to be removed when they deprived the Church of the legal means of procuring support which it had when this Mortmain Law was imposed in George II's reign. It would be no injury to the Dissenters to relax that law, and that being so, it was unreasonable that a measure which would benefit the Church should be rejected by those who did not belong to the Church. He would rather, however, rely on the spontaneous benevolence of the parishioners than upon any charges by landowners upon their land. In St. Matthew, one of the districts of Bethnal Green, there was a very poor popula- 1656 tion, consisting of about 10,000 persons, of whom 1,000 went to church; yet this population contributed sufficient funds to defray all the expenses of maintaining the fabric and of Divine worship. The people who earned 12s. or 14s. a week contributed small sums quarterly for that purpose. There was one instance of two poor men who sold mats about the streets, and who each contributed 6d. a quarter. This afforded encouragement for relying for aid for supporting the Church upon the benevolence of the parishioners. In his third Resolution he proposed that the payment of a certain sum should give a seat in the church vestry; and he thought that a low figure should be named, for the Church would get more by that means. The vestry or Committee should audit the accounts of the past year, determine the amount of outlay for the next, and generally co-operate with regard to the raising of the necessary funds. This church vestry or committee would not necessarily exclude Dissenters. Any Dissenter who might choose to contribute the small annual sum which might be fixed, would be free to become a member of the vestry, and join in the management of the parish church. But when he was told by Dissenters that they looked on the National Church as national property, and that they had a right to enter the vestry and take part in its proceedings, he could not understand why Dissenters should in that case conscientiously object to pay for a church any more than for a road, a bridge, or even for the House in which they were then assembled, or any other national purpose. However, he met this by proposing that all who chose to show their interest in the parish church, by paying the small sum necessary for its repairs, should belong to the body which regulated the disposal of the money. It would be manifestly unjust that any man should have a share in the management who had contributed nothing towards the fund. In his last Resolution he proposed that churchwardens should be chosen exclusively from the members of the church vestry, and that their purely secular duties be performed by the overseers. He relieved the churchwardens of their secular duties. Those duties were nearly obsolete. Churchwardens seldom acted with the overseers, except as a matter of form. Their other secular duties, such as receiving fines for drunkenness, heating parish boundaries, and so on, were obsolete. Their ecclesiastical duties were of a most important character. They not only took charge of the 1657 fabric of the parish church, but they had to maintain order during service, provide necessaries for Divine services, see that the clergyman did his duty, and in the event of the living becoming vacant, take care of the glebe. But he did not object to a Dissenter being a churchwarden, if the church vestry thought proper to elect him. He wished the parishioners to meet, and put shoulder to shoulder, to provide the funds which were now raised by the clumsy and ineffective machinery of the law, but which he believed would flow in more abundantly from a sense of duty and from the impulse of zeal and liberality. Any Bill which would embody the principles he had thus imperfectly enunciated might properly contain other provisions of a more or less useful and practical character. The question of pews was a difficult one, and required thorough investigation. In many parts of the country the pew system had been grievously abused, and had led to a large increase of dissent and a breach of good feeling between family and family. In the parish of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, Sunday after Sunday, during the recent recess, there was a squabble in the parish church arising from a strong-minded lady who insisted on going every Sunday early to church and taking her position in a pew that was claimed by some one else; and the result was that the churchwarden had, Sunday after Sunday, to take her by the shoulders, sometimes probably with more violence than was agreeable, and walk her down the aisle and to the outside of the door. As an instance of the evils of the pew system, when abused, he might refer to the blue book of the Lords' Committee on "Means of Divine Worship." A clergyman went into one of the metropolitan churches and inquired what portion of the seats were free. The churchwarden replied that, according to the Act of Parliament, one-third of the seats should be free. The clergyman looked round, and seeing none, asked the churchwarden where they were; and the churchwarden looked round, too, and confessed that he did not see any either; but at last he pointed with his stick to a little flap fixed to a pew door, and said, "That is a free seat." The clergyman inquired if it was used, and the churchwarden replied that he used it to put his hat on. Now, these were evils of the pew system. It was a fact, however, that in some parishes, families preferred sitting together in a pew 1658 to being scattered abroad among the congregation. This was the feeling we must all respect; it was an English feeling; but, at the same time, there were parishes in the country where any attempt to introduce the system of letting pews would be highly objectionable. He wished to ask the hon. Baronet the Member for Tavistock whether he did not think that those who most earnestly desired the abolition of church rates ought to approach the subject in a more conciliatory spirit than they had hitherto done? He wished to ask those hon. Members, who desired to secure the abolition of church rates, whether there was the smallest probability of their abolition being effected unless they sent up to another place a Bill which, whilst it provided for the abolition, should not refuse to take into consideration the just claims of Churchmen? He was convinced that those who desired to see a speedy settlement of this painful question should meet the members of the Church of England in an equitable and just spirit. He was supported in his Resolutions by many clergymen and friends of the Church of England, who were ready to give up the rates if only they were given some reasonable machinery to enable them to bear the burden which, after the abolition of church rates, would devolve upon them. And knowing this, he felt it to be his duty to bring the subject forward for discussion in that House. It was most important that means be taken to secure the passage of a Bill with this object safely through "another place;" and he was convinced that there would be more delay, year after year, unless the House of Commons sent up a Bill which should protect—he would not say merely Churchmen, but all those who contributed towards the funds of the Church—from interference on the part of those who did not contribute. This was the great principle he had at heart—that those who contributed to the parish church fund should be protected in the distribution of that fund. This was the principle on which he set the greatest store; and by the side of which he did not consider the other provisions of his Resolutions of equal importance. He asked hon. Members, therefore, of, whatever party, to consider whether they ought not to take into account the wishes of Churchmen on this subject. Granting the abolition of the church rate, ought they not to concede what Churchmen thought reasonable as a sort of substitute for the rate that was taken from them? He had felt 1659 reluctance in trespassing on the House, because he was sure that hon. Members must be wearied by the discussion which took place yesterday on the same subject; but he was in a manner pledged to bring it forward, and he should, whether sucessful or unsuccessful, feel that he had done his duty as far as it lay in his power to do so.

§ MR. SOTHERON ESTCOURT
said, he was willing to give the hon. Baronet full credit for having acted with a sincere desire to discharge what he felt to be a duty. No doubt he had proposed his Resolutions from a desire to mitigate a calamity which be believed to be impending over the Church, but he did not think the time for introducing them was well chosen. As he understood them, the Resolutions proposed to effect by an abstract declaration that which at a later period of the evening it was proposed to do by means of a Bill. The hon. Baronet assuming that church rates were abolished, thought it desirable to provide some machinery by which the benevolent contributions of Churchmen might be gathered and distributed. But that was assuming what as yet had not been ratified by the voice of that House. He (Mr. Sotheron Estcourt) did not know whether he might not hereafter, if the hon. Baronet the Member for Tavistock (Sir John Trelawny) succeeded in obtaining a second reading for his Bill, propose to do so in Committee. If the total abolition of church rates should be agreed to he would be thankful to any one who would propose some machinery for providing those funds which it would be necessary to obtain from Churchmen. But he would submit to the hon. Baronet that he was rather putting the cart before the horse in proposing those Resolutions at present. The hon. Baronet no doubt desired to point out the machinery he thought would best answer the purpose in the event of such a calamity—for so he (Mr. Sotheron Estcourt) must regard it. The hon. Baronet had had the opportunity he sought, and had discharged what he considered to be his duty in a manner that must have given 1660 equal satisfaction to himself and the House, but looking at the state of the paper, and the fact that the previous day had been occupied by a debate upon the very same subject, and bearing in mind that the Resolutions if agreed to could have no practical effect, he (Mr. Sotheron Estcourt) hoped the hon. Baronet would be content with having brought his propositions before the House, and would not press them further.

MR. COWPER
said, that the hon. Baronet had done well in propounding a complete scheme for systematically organizing the voluntary maintenance of churches. The House was evidently advancing towards the total abolition of church rates. It must be total, but it need not be unconditional. Before they agreed to the abolition, they were bound to consider whether the voluntary principle could have free scope amidst existing institutions; and what conditions must be admitted in order to secure to it liberty of action. He had no doubt that if the maintenance of the fabric of the Church of England was thrown on the voluntary zeal and liberality of Churchmen there would be a satisfactory and efficient response to that appeal, and that few churches would fall into decay, at least in places where they were needed. But if a Bill of the hon. Baronet the Member for Tavistock for the total abolition should pass in its present shape, how could it be expected that a parish church would be maintained by persons who did not know to whom they were to entrust their contributions, who did not know how the money was to he spent, who had no machinery by which their zeal could attain the desired object. The hon. Baronet suggested a plan by which the parish churches in England, could be placed on an equality, and have the same advantages as the chapels built under trusts, whether belonging to the Church of England or to Dissenters. And such a plan as he bad sketched out was calculated to attain the object. It would secure a permanent corporation, with perpetual succession in every parish, and would give to persons who took sufficient interest in the Church to contribute their money to its maintenance—the security that their money would be spent under the control and by the direction of those who contributed it. But under present circumstances he joined in the suggestion that had been made, that the hon. Baronet would not attain any useful object by persevering in his Motion.

§ MR. NEWDEGATE
said, that as a very humble member of the Church of England, he wished to express his concurrence with what had fallen from the right hon. Member who had just spoken. In fairness to the members of the Church of England, who valued the Establishment, which afforded accommodation to all who chose to avail themselves of it, he begged of the hon. Baronet to leave their hands free to provide what was necessary, if it should be the will of Parliament to alienate without compensation the provision hitherto made by the law for the service of the Church. The hon. Baronet, unintentionally no doubt, would place a limit on the really liberal feeling of Churchmen. He (Mr. Newdegate) valued the Church as a national Establishment, and as such he humbly tried to support her. He did not wish to confine the government of that Church to those who professed themselves to be Churchmen; but, trusting that she would continue to be the national Establishment, he hoped the hon. Baronet would not try to restrict the Church of aid from voluntary sources. He merely wished to enter his protest against what appeared to him to be a limit on the charitable benevolence of individual Churchmen which he was sure the hon. Baronet did not intend, but which might still be inferred from his Resolutions.

§ SIR ARTHUR ELTON
said, he should deal with the question of church rates very differently from what he had done if it were now before the House for the first time. But as a Bill for the repeal of the rates had been carried in that House last Session by a large majority, he had presumed that the House was in favour of the abolition of church rates; and he, there fore, taking that as a starting point, proceeded to examine what reasonable machinery might be provided to aid and encourage Churchmen in maintaining the fabric of their churches. He had no wish, as appeared to be supposed by the hon. Gentleman opposite (Mr. Newdegate), to prevent Dissenters from contributing to the church fund, as many had already done, and as many would, in all probability, continue to do. He did not wish to absolutely prohibit Dissenters from attending church vestries. He conceived that a Dissenter would be justified in contributing the small annual sum he proposed to fix, just as a Churchman might, on the ground that it was a national Church, and that therefore he was interested in its maintenance and 1662 welfare, and that the money he paid was not compulsory but voluntary, and was intended to give him the right of attending the church vestry. He had no intention, he repeated, of excluding Dissenters. On the contrary he contended that the vestry ought to be open to any one who would contribute to the expenses of the parish church. He begged further to say, in explanation, that the Resolutions were intended simply as a basis on which to proceed hereafter, that they contained the elements of a Bill, and were not intended to interfere with the Bill of the hon. Member for Tavistock. He would not, therefore, press his Resolutions upon the House. He had done his duty in bringing them forward; and if he had succeeded in directing attention to this important question he should feel amply satisfied.