In speaking of a college fellow, a fellow of a college at Oxford or Cambridge is the fellow of whom we intend to speak. There may, probably, be other fellowships going in these prolific days, as there are other universities, and degrees given by other academical bodies; but we will claim, for the moment, to belong to the old school in such matters, and will recognize as college fellows only those who are presented to us as fellows by the two great sister universities.

When a man becomes a fellow various possessions and privileges are conferred upon him, such as a certain income, a certain rank in his college,{79} a residence within his college, and a place at the high table in hall; and among these privileges and possessions is the great privilege—of a title to orders. In respect to some fellowships this privilege may be enjoyed or neglected according to the will of the individual fellow. In respect to others the fellow must avail himself of it, and must become a clergyman, if not absolutely at once, then within a short period of his election. And there is a third condition, such as that which prevails at the greatest of all our colleges, namely, Trinity, Cambridge, in accordance with which certain years of grace are allowed, and a fellow may remain a fellow for a period of years without taking orders. But, as we believe, at all these colleges a fellowship confers a title to orders,—the right, that is, on the part of the fellow to demand ordination from the bishop; and, as a rule, this privilege is enjoyed. As we are dealing in these sketches with none but clergymen, the fellow who has availed himself of this title is the fellow whom we will keep in view.

All our readers will know what is meant by taking orders,—the process by which a layman{80} becomes a deacon or a priest under the bishop’s hands; and most of them will understand that a title to orders is the possession in prospect of such sacerdotal position as will justify a bishop in turning a layman into a clergyman. Thus, for instance, a man has a title to orders who can show that there is a living waiting for his enjoyment and for his services. The offer of a curacy confers a title, and this is the title by which the great body of aspirants to the sacerdotal profession claim their right to admission. Such claimants the bishop is bound to ordain, providing that they show themselves to be fit;—but without a title, or recognized place of clerical duty ready for the candidate as soon as he shall become a clergyman, no bishop will ordain any one. And among other titles there is the title conferred by a college fellowship. The fellow of a college goes before a bishop demanding to be ordained simply because he is a fellow,—and the bishop ordains him. It is a great privilege, for that man is Reverend from that time forth for evermore. In all future ages he will be written down as having been Reverend.{81}

There can be no doubt that when this pleasant arrangement became a portion of college law there was good reason for it. The colleges were ecclesiastical bodies, generally if not entirely under ecclesiastical governance, and a fellow not an ecclesiastic would have been very much in the way at most of them. Men who were clergymen, and men who were not, differed much more strongly then than they do now, both as to the inner life of the man and the outward appearance of the man. And it was then recognized as a part of the great Church system of the day, that in many places ecclesiastics, who were of course unmarried, should live together, passing their time in that state which was then considered to be for them the most salutary and to others the most useful,—saying prayers for the laity which the laity could hardly be got to say for themselves, and maintaining by their continued presence at the universities something of the result of their education, and some show of learning and piety. In those days the fellows of our colleges were monks of a favoured order,—especially favoured because they were, or were presumed to be, especially{82} learned. Looking at our Church, our colleges, and our religion, as they then existed, we shall feel little doubt as to the propriety of fellows having been clergymen in those days. But now,—now that things are so much altered in our Church and in our colleges and in our religion,—sometimes a doubt does creep upon us as to the expediency of this title to orders which a fellowship conveys, and the use which is made of this title.

In the Roman Catholic Church worship seems to have been ordained for the gratification of God. The people were, and indeed are still, taught that God and his saints like prayers and incense and church services, and will reward those who are liberal in bestowing them. It is, therefore, natural that in the Church of Rome there should be,—or, more natural still, that there should have been when this idea was more prevalent in Roman Catholic countries than it is now,—legions of priests whose church administrations were performed with a view to their effect on the Creator, and with no view to any effect on man. But in Protestant countries worship is used, as we suppose, simply for the use of man. It is the duty of the{83} clergyman, as clergyman, to assist other men in worshipping rather than to achieve anything by worship on his own part. If such be the case,—and such appears to be at any rate the existing theory of our own Protestant Church,—it is difficult to conceive how any man can become a clergyman of the Church of England who has no intention whatsoever of helping others to worship,—who has not before him any prospect of performing the duties of a clergyman.

It will be said, doubtless, that the statement here made is wrong and untrue, because the clerical fellow of a college has always before him the prospect of succeeding to a college living, and does generally end his days as the parson of a parish to which he has been presented by his college in the regular order of good things accruing to him. It is quite true that the clerical fellow does in this way become a real clergyman, or a parson proper if I may so call him, in the latter half of his life, when at forty or forty-five he begins to feel that he would like to have something softer near to him than his gyp or laundrywoman, and bethinks himself of some Eliza whom he has long half loved, but would never before allow himself{84} to love altogether,—because of his fellowship. The fellow then drops his fellowship, and takes a living, and goes to his parish and becomes a real clergyman. But the fact that he does so offers only another and a stronger objection to his original ordination, while it does not, in truth, at all invalidate that already stated. It is true that the fellow becomes a clergyman at last; but who will maintain that any man has fitly used a profession to which he has never applied himself during those years of his life in which his energy was the strongest, and which he embraced without any view to using it at all? The fellow of a college is ordained in order that he may hold his fellowship,—because in old days, when the fellowship was instituted, fellows were supposed to live the life of monks. We do not think that any existing fellow of a college at Oxford or Cambridge will declare that he has undergone ordination with an express view to the living to which he may succeed after ten or fifteen years.

And now we will venture to say a few words as to that stronger objection to the practice of ordaining fellows which we maintain is to be found in this{85} practice of their succeeding to college livings by rotation. When we employ a doctor or a lawyer or an architect, we select a man who knows his profession, and who has proved that he knows it by his practice. Young men entering these professions make their way upwards to that reputation which will bring them practice by attaching themselves to those who are older and more experienced, or by consenting to practise for a while, as it were, experimentally, without much view to income. And in the Church generally the same order of things prevails. It is admitted on all hands within the church, by bishops, by archdeacons, by all working parish clergymen,—by all men who have interested themselves on the subject,—that the only fit education for a parish parson is to be found in a parish curacy. As a man to be a good bishop should have been a parish parson, so to be a good parson a man should have been a curate. That we take to be good clergyman’s law; but that law is infringed on every occasion on which a college living is taken by a resident college fellow. A college fellow may, of course, become a curate, and when such a one succeeds to his living{86} all is well. But the man who does so should have been ordained on the title of his curacy, not on the title of his fellowship.

Does any man believe that that very pleasant fellow whom he has known at college, and who has sparkled so brightly in common room, who has been so energetic in the management of the college finances, and in the reform of college abuses,—who has gradually succeeded during his fifteen years of residence in putting off all those outward clerical symbols which as a novice he found himself constrained to adopt, and who during his annual visit to London has become a well-instructed man of the world,—can any one, we say, believe that such a one at the age of forty can be fit to go into a parish and undertake the cure of the parochial souls? There are, we fancy, some who do so believe; but they are those who think that nothing is necessary to make a parson but orders and a living,—that the profession of a clergyman is unlike any other trade or calling known, requiring for the due performance of its duties no special fitness, no training, no skill, no practice, no thought, and no preparation.{87}

The Reverend Joseph Brown stands senior on the list of the fellows of St. Lazarus, within the walls of which happy institution he has lived as fellow and bursar for the last thirty years. No man understands better than the Reverend Joseph Brown the proper temperature of port wine, or the amount of service which a college servant should render. But at the age of fifty-five he falls into unexpectedly tender relations with an amiable female, and on that account he undertakes the pastoral care of the souls of the parish of Eiderdown! What if Eiderdown got its doctor in the same way, or its butcher? What if the ladies of Eiderdown were bound to employ a milliner sent to them after some such fashion? But no man or woman can conceive the possibility of any workman presuming to attempt to earn his bread by his work after such a fashion as this,—excepting always a clergyman. In the Church, because it is so picturesque and well-beloved in its old-fashioned garments, we can put up with anomalies which elsewhere would be unendurable. A bishop uses his patronage as personal property, and college fellows become clergymen and succeed to livings by right, as{88} though in this business of the cure of souls, and in this business only, there were no necessity for that progress in skill and efficiency which all other callings demand! There was a time when men became captains of ships and colonels of regiments in much the same way; but the picturesque absurdities of the army and navy were less endearing than those of the Church, and they therefore have been made to succumb.

It will probably be admitted that the Reverend Joseph Brown, much as he was liked by all who knew him at St. Lazarus, and much as he was respected by those who were brought into collegiate relations with him, was not the very best pastor whom the Church of England could have given to the people of Eiderdown; but many who will admit this will still think that in being ordained as a young man on the title of his fellowship, he did that which was becoming to him as one who had passed through his university education with honour and success. Fellows of colleges always have been clergymen, holding high characters as such in their profession, and why not the Reverend Joseph Brown? Is it not{89} also known to us that such a man, located as a bachelor in his college, is more likely to lead a good and sober life as a clergyman than he would do as a layman? Such, probably, would be the arguments used in defence of clerical fellowships; and we will admit that the Reverend Joseph Brown has throughout his whole career given support to such arguments by his conduct. But yet he has never in truth been a clergyman. Though an ordained priest, he has done no priestly work, and has always been somewhat angry when any one has suggested to him that he should take a part in any clerical duties. At first, indeed, he was somewhat careful in maintaining outward clerical symbols, and was occasionally anxious to feed himself with inward clerical thoughts, having been moved thereto by the terrible earnestness of his ordination,—by the solemnity of a ceremony which, though he had determined to regard it simply as the means of placing him in the possession of certain temporal advantages, so impressed itself upon him as being personal to himself, that he could not at once escape from its bonds. But gradually he overcame that weakness, and found himself{90} enabled to live, as any other gentleman might live, an easy pleasant life, with nothing of the clergyman about him but the word Reverend attached to his name on his cards and letters. The colour of his lower vestments approaches perhaps nearer to black than it would have done had he not been so encumbered, and men in the world at large are perhaps a little less free in their remarks before him than they would be before other men. This he regrets painfully; but it is all that he has to regret. The fellows, his predecessors in the old days,—who were, in fact, monks as well as fellows,—were called upon to live in accordance with certain monastic and ascetic rules, which they either obeyed to their supposed glory, or disobeyed to their supposed peril. Matins, lauds, nones, vespers, complines, and what not, were their lot,—and came upon them heavily enough, no doubt, if they did their duty; but now-a-days we do not care much, even at our universities, for lauds and complines. Undergraduates indeed must “keep” so many chapels a week, but the clerical fellow is under no such bond. Even if he were under such bond he could say his prayers in his{91} college chapel as well as a layman as he can as a clergyman. And one may suppose that as a layman he would abstain from doing so when the opportunity is provided with an easier conscience than he can have as a priest. But his conscience is easy, because he knows that in fact he is no clergyman. He has simply undergone a certain ceremony in order that he may enjoy his fellowship,—and hereafter take a living should the amiable and tender relationship of matrimony fall in his way.