Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 40
CHAPTER XL.
Disestablished, but Vivified.
Had the long-talked-of disestablishment of the Church of England been carried out in the years preceding the Revolution of 189—, that great, highly-cultivated, and in some sense national religious body would simply have been reduced to the level of other denominations; and no place or pretext would have been found now for violent innovations affecting it, and it alone. Family ties, formed in parsonages, but ramifying thence all through the upper strata of English society, would have counted heavily against depriving the established clergy of their social status after they were disestablished; courtesy and regard would have made good the loss of caste decreed by the law, and probably the zeal of adherents would have more than made good the pecuniary loss by disendowment.
But, as Napoleon is reported to have said, Les Anglais sont toujours trop tard. As in the case of Irish Home Rule, so in this case the needful change, instead of being made in good time with a good grace, was deferred until it became compulsory and came with a crash. And now in the mêlée of the Revolution, the disestablished and disendowed clergy felt that they had no longer any professional dignity to lose, and had nothing but a flimsy, dubious fence of religious, or rather doctrinal, principle between themselves and the inducement to run riot among those allurements of this life which formerly it had been their business to denounce. That in many cases the fence broke down, and some singular results followed its breaking, is no matter for surprise, but the contrary; in a subsequent chapter we shall instance the most important of these cases.
Yet, after all, it would have been a pity had the change come quietly, instead of being precipitated by the Revolution; two considerations will show this. In the first place, as things were now, a meteoric display of talent which had been buried under the mounds of uniformity and routine—talent as various as the variety of faces—shot forth from thousands of rustic retreats, where its existence had been unsuspected. Incumbents whom their neighbours had never imagined to be anything beyond hum-drum country parsons proved to be artists, mechanicians, agriculturists, economists, financiers, lawyers, first-rate men of business, the real character could now come out from under the parson’s cloth, because, the etiquette and prejudices having been swept away, every clergyman felt that he could put off his clerical profession at pleasure, or make it merely auxiliary to the occupation which his heart really was in. No doubt there were those to be found whose heart was really in a religious life, but they were not plentiful; the iron mask undone revealed a class of men the far greater part of whom had adopted the profession from motives more or less worldly.
But in the second place, the Revolution had promulgated a law which gave the married clergy a direct interest in disestablishment. Every clergyman’s widow could now enjoy for her life-time the income and residence of her deceased husband, on condition of succeeding him in his clerical office and undertaking, either in her own person or in that of a sister or daughter, the whole offices of the ministry without exception. This could be in no case difficult, because the ritual could now be altered in any manner or direction according to the opinions and taste of each individual minister, male or female, and no authority could impugn this right. More than this, a clergyman could at any time appoint any competent woman to undertake for him the whole or any part of his services, including the ministration of sacraments. It may well be supposed that the optional institution of clergywomen in place of clergymen produced a powerful effect upon large portions of society. For instance, the churches filled with men who before had turned their backs upon everything religious; for the sake of kneeling to girls as their ministers, they would put up with forms of words which they could not endorse. Whatever the National Church may have been during its reign, at its lapse it was become an undeniable blessing, a lever of genuine progress.