QUESTION. OBSERVATIONS. (Hansard, 14 July 1893)

LORD STANLEY OF ALDERLEY

asked the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Earl Stanhope, as an Ecclesiastical Commissioner, whether, having regard to the wide-spreading distress amongst the clergy of the Church of England, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners might be recommended to extend the usefulness of their funds by requiring more than an equivalent benefaction to obtain their grants without regard to population; and that, instead of extending their grants to benefices of £300 per annum, the augmentation standard for the next few years, at all events, should be reduced to £200; and, further, as few men of private means now enter the Church, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners should in future restrain the clergy from building or buying parsonage-houses of great cost, and that, if possible, a building limit of some £1,400 should be prescribed? He said he should have thought that with the £100 of tithes below £75 it would not have been necessary to prove that the clergy were in distress, or to justify the words in the Notice respecting the poverty of the clergy; but not only had it been disputed that fewer men of means entered the Church now than formerly, but it had also been stated, by the right rev. Prelate who presided over Chester, that the clergy of the Church of England were self-supporting, and that their private means exceeded their stipends. In the four dioceses of Norwich, Ely, Peterborough, and St. Albans there were 1,336 clergymen whose stipends were under £200 a year net, and of those 223 had no residences. In 1863 the Schedule of Lord Westbury's Act had embraced most of the small benefices in the gift of the Lord Chancellor, and nearly all those had been augmented by that Act. Now there were 433 more, of benefices belonging to the Lord Chan- 1553 cellor, under £200 a year net, and 35 under £100 a year, 59 of them without houses, all clamouring to be added to the Schedule of Lord Westbury's Act of 1863. He would say with regard to the houses that clergymen living in towns who had not residences were better without them, for clergymen could better suit themselves by hiring houses convenient to the size of their families, whether large or small. It was not easy to prove either that more or that fewer men of means now entered the Church, but the general belief was that there were fewer. The numbers of those who went to Oxford and Cambridge, and of those who went to the smaller and less expensive Colleges, showed that men of means had diminished. In 1861 350 went to the two Universities, and 173 to the Colleges, such as St. Bees and Lampeter. In 1891 there were 437 University men and 315 non-University men, and the percentage of University men had altered from 67 to 58 per cent., although the total of candidates for ordination had increased. Notwithstanding that, the right rev. Prelate who presided over Chester had asserted in a Pastoral Letter, read in the churches of his diocese, on the 11th of June last, that— The Income Tax Returns are said by a competent authority to show that, in the shape of private means, they (the clergy) bring to the service of the Church considerably more than they receive in the shape of stipend. This statement had been taken from Crockford's Clergy List of 1891, and the person said to have been a competent authority was certainly in his lifetime hostile to the Church. Crockford's preface stated that the clergy paid Income Tax upon a total of £9,000,000, and that, as their stipends only amounted to £3,000,000, that proved they were in receipt of £6,000,000 from private means. After Mr. Gladstone's failure, through quoting ill-digested and misapplied Income Tax figures, one might have expected that the right rev. Prelate would have been warned, and would have taken the warning, not to tread on such dangerous ground. An Inland Revenue authority had written to him as follows:— It is not known in the least what competent authority is referred to by the Bishop, or how the Income Tax Returns can possibly show what it is stated they do. Nothing is known at Somerset House of the private means of the 1554 clergy, except from claims of exemption or abatement, or for life insurance, and they are not tabulated. My own opinion is that, so far as Income Tax is concerned, it must be the opinion of an incompetent authority founded on figures which are not correctly understood. And I think the statement is likely to do a great deal of harm, if it should lead the clergy and others to infer the possibility of Income Tax Returns, which are of an essentially confidential nature, being made use of for purposes which they were not intended to serve, and for which they ought not to be used. It was not clear what object the right rev. Prelate could have had in supporting the editor of Crockford and his unknown authority for the excess of the private means of the clergy over their stipends, since this assertion had been made in the middle of an appeal for contributions to four clerical charities. He asked the First Ecclesiastical Commissioner to require more than an equivalent benefaction to obtain their grants, because for some years Queen Anne's Bounty had not been able to make grants equal to the benefactions, and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners had been more lavish than Queen Anne's Bounty in building houses larger than were required. He also asked them for the present to restrict their grants to benefices of £200 instead of £300, since the poorer benefices had a prior claim to be augmented; and further to limit the building of houses to £1,400. As an illustration of the poverty of the clergy and of the effect of overbuilding their houses, he might cite the case of a rector who appeared by the Clergy List to have £800 a year, but who now received £619. His obligatory expenses reduced this to £201. He had to pay last year £127 to Queen Anne's Bounty for the mortgage on his house. This house was larger than he required, and cowhouse and stables had to be built, though he could not afford to keep either horse or cow. If certain so-called voluntary expenses, such as Church Rate, school treats, and prizes, which a rector was obliged to incur, were deducted from the balance of his income, this would be further reduced to £167. The rector in question kept two curates, and was not married. Those who said that residences built for the clergy were in excess of what was required could urge the cost entailed thereby upon the incumbents of poor livings, for rates, taxes, and repairs, and for keeping up stables which could not be 1555 used. There was a case lately where £1,400 had been spent by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for a house where the benefice was only worth £85 a year; and stables had been built, and more rooms than the incumbent wanted. It had been built away from the road in a wet field, and two winters ago the cellars were full of water. It had been said that this clergyman had private means; and he had asked him how much. He replied, £28. How far would that go for a horse and gig? The Commissioners' Office, however, was not to blame for this site; for the Bishop's Secretary had given the Bishop's approval of the site. Nobody expected the Bishops to visit these sites themselves; but it seemed that the Archdeacons were to blame if a bad site was selected, and the expenditure not restricted. On the other side it was argued that without good houses men of means would not take these poor livings, and also that a roomy house would enable the incumbent to take private pupils. It was not reasonable, however, to expect that men of means would bury them-selves in small, out-of-the-way, rural parishes; for it was in such parishes that these poor livings were mostly to be found, and there were but few incumbents who were fit to take pupils: and since competitive examinations, the crammers got all the pupils. He could only see two remedies for the poverty of the small benefices. One was that, wherever practicable, those benefices not exceeding £100 a year should be united to an adjoining benefice. He believed that some right rev. Prelates complained that lay patrons would not assist to promote this consolidation. As this measure was for the benefit of the Church, it would only be right that the Bishops should yield a point and meet their lay patrons more than half way. If they were to offer them two presentations out of three in the case of the uniting of a benefice, the lay patrons would not be likely to refuse their consent. He was afraid that the fault of the Prelates was that of the proverbial Dutchman—"giving too little and asking too much." The other remedy he suggested was that the Lord Chancellor should add a new Schedule to the Act of 1863, and that the right rev. Prelates should take powers under the 1556 same Act to dispose when they thought fit of their poorer benefices. The proviso, "if they thought fit," would leave them free to make any conditions they pleased in the conveyances: for instance, that if the property were broken up and sold, which had given the landowner an interest in the well-being of the parish, and which had induced the right rev. Prelate to part with the patronage, it should revert to him. Conditions might also be made that the advowsons should not be parted with without their consent. In short, there was no limit to the conditions which might be imposed for the benefit of the Church to prevent the livings falling into bad hands. With regard to right rev. Prelates not being able to make arrangements with lay patrons, he might mention that in his own case, at the request of the former Bishop of Bangor, he had joined with him in uniting two parishes, but had not received an equivalent number of presentations to the values of the livings. If he had stood out for his rights, he supposed he would have been called impracticable.