Would that it were possible to enforce upon the bishops, as a part of their duty, the task of furnishing annually a statistical return which should show what proportion of the clerical duties in their dioceses was done by curates, and what proportion by other clergymen; and also what payment had been made to the curates for the work so done, and what payment to those who were not curates. Such statement might show us for instance, in a tabulated form, how many morning services and how many evening services had been performed by each curate, how many sermons preached by him, how many children baptized, how many dead men buried, how many marriages celebrated, and, above all, how many cottages visited.{93} Then, if we could see, together with all this, what amount of the payment received could be justly appropriated to each task performed, we should have some clear idea of the manner in which the revenues of the Church are divided among those who do the work of the Church. We all know that no such statistical information is within our reach. The bishops are altogether beyond our power, and cannot be ordered by any one to do anything. The idea of comparing the work done with the payment given for the work would be horrible to the imagination of every beneficed clergyman in the Church of England. It would be horrible even to the imagination of the curates themselves, who, like the needy knifegrinder, have no adequate conception of the injustice they are themselves suffering; and who are, as a body, so well inclined towards the rules and traditions of the profession to which they belong, that they have not as yet taught themselves to wish for a change. No clergyman in our Church has, as yet, taken it into his head that there should be any analogy, or any proportion, between work and wages in his profession, as there is such analogy and such{94} proportion in all other professions. There is a something of revolutionary tendency in the suggestion that clergymen should be paid in accordance with their work, which is almost profane to the mind of a clergyman, and which vexes him sorely as being subversive of that grand position which he holds as the owner of a temporal freehold. The very irregularity of the payments still made to parish parsons, and formerly made to bishops, half justifies a latent idea that clergymen, though they work and receive payment, are not labourers working for hire. A second son inherits his living as the elder son inherits his estate;—and the rector who receives his living from his bishop is equally firm in his possession. He may be blessed with 1,000l. a year for doing very little, or have 200l. a year for doing a great deal; but in either case what he receives has no connection with what he does, and therefore no such statistics as those of which we have spoken can be supplied. No revelation will be made to us tending in any degree to give us the information for which we ask.

That there will come an adjustment between work and wages in the Church, as in all other professions,{95} is certain. Indeed, much has been done towards this adjustment already, though not after the fashion above proposed. The incomes of all bishops have been arranged on such an idea,—to the great detriment, as has before been explained, of episcopal magnificence. Deans and canons have fallen beneath the levelling hands of ecclesiastico-political economists. And out of the funds which have been acquired by these adjustments and curtailings of ecclesiastical wealth, certain incumbents working in populous parishes have received augmentations of pay, making their incomes up to the very modest stipend of 300l. per annum. But nothing in all this has touched the great body of the clergymen of the Church of England, or has as yet shown any general recognition of the principle that the hire of the labourer should be proportioned to the labour done.

In speaking of the work and wages of curates, it must of course be admitted that in all professions and all trades the beginner should be contented to work his way up, taking at first, and being contented to take, a modest remuneration for the very best that{96} he can do. The young barrister does not get fifty-guinea fees at once, nor does the young medical practitioner jump at once into the good graces of the old ladies and gentlemen who make the fortunes of mature doctors; but at the bar, and in the profession of physic, there is at least some proportion kept. The man who gets the most money is generally the hardest-worked man;—or if, in some cases, it be not so, the lower man who works harder than him above him receives something like a fair share of the spoil. If he be successful in work he is successful in pay also. Being successful in work, he will not work without success in pay. But the curate, let his success in work be what it may, does not even think that he has, on that account, a claim to proportionate remuneration. If he can get to the soft side of his bishop, if he have an aunt that knows some friend of the Lord Chancellor, or a father who has means to buy a living for him,—and he be not himself of too tender a conscience in the matter of simony,—then he may hope to rise. But of rising in his profession because he is fit to rise he has no hope. The idea has not, as yet, come home to him that he{97} has a positive claim upon his bishop because he has worked hard and honestly in his profession.

It is notorious that a rector in the Church of England, in the possession of a living of, let us say, a thousand a year, shall employ a curate at seventy pounds a year, that the curate shall do three-fourths or more of the work of the parish, that he shall remain in that position for twenty years, taking one-fourteenth of the wages while he does three-fourths of the work, and that nobody shall think that the rector is wrong or the curate ill-used! All the world,—that is to say, the rector’s friends and the curate’s friends also,—have been so long accustomed to this state of things, the bishops have had it so long under their eyes, the idea of a temporal freehold in a living being a good thing for the parson instead of a good thing for the parishioner has got such a hold of us all,—that we none of us see the injustice of the present practice, or stop to inquire how it grew up among us, originating in a practice that was not unjust. When the rectors and vicars were very many among us in comparison to the curates, when a curate was needed in but few parishes,{98}—the ordinary tenure of a curacy was, of course, short. There have been instances, no doubt, since the earliest years in which curates were employed, of curates who have remained curates till they were old men; but the succession from the smaller number of the inferior grade to the much larger number of the superior grade was, of course, rapid, and a clerical babe would be contented to take a curacy even at seventy pounds a year, who might reasonably expect to be r............