Had

hundred and nine churches anapels have been completed, and one hundred and five more are in crent stages of progress: what is the whole number intended to be ted, or the total expense nobody can tell, for the Commissioners haveen recently incorporated, and in all probability their pious labours vbe protracted for ages to come. the rich clergy contributed theist share to the First Fruits Fund there would have been no necessityr imposing this additional tax on the public. But the first out-lay far from being the worst part of this extraordinary proceeding. Åthose new churches and chapels will have to be kept in repair by rs levied on the parishioners-dissenters as well as churchmen, and tl though many have opposed their erection as unnecessary. Then re is the stipends of ministers, clerks, beadles, pew-openers, and theh last, not least, the guzzlings and feedings of sextons, churchward, and chapelwardens to be provided for; for though the patronage ofie new churches is given to the patron or incumbent of the mother-crch, yet the salaries of the minister and other officials, instead of beg deducted from the income of the rector or vicar, are to be raised a charge for the rents of pews. Only think of this holy device or raising funds! Notwithstanding the immense sums levied for t maintenance of the established religion, and though the frequenters f the new churches are actually compelled to pay tithes to the incumints of their parishes, yet they are obliged to contribute an additiona sum to enjoy the benefit of the national communion, and if they desire a third serce on Sundays they must contribute additional for that too.* How much the revenu ses of the clergy will be ultimately augmented from this source, we have not the means of estimating. The incomes settled on some of the new ministers by the Commissioners are very considerable; that of the minister of St. Peter's, Pimlico, is £900 a year; and those of the rectors of the three new churches in the parish of St. Mary-le-bone are £350 per annum each. By an act of last Session that portion of the Crown-lands, called Sunk Island, in the Humber, was constituted into a parish and the minister perpetually endowed with the interest of £8,333 three per Cent. Consols. Suppose the annual charge of each new church £450 per annum, it will shortly add to the other permanent revenues of the church a yearly sum of £94,050.

We shall now collect the different items and exhibit a general statement of the revenue of the Established Clergy. The sum put down for tithe is church-tithe only, after deducting the tithe of lay-impropriations and allowing for abbey-land and land exempt by modus from tithe. The church-rates are a heavy burden on the people, but being levied at uncertain intervals, for the repair of churches and chapels, they do not form a part of the personal income of the clergy, and are

omitted.

Church-Building-Acts the 58 Geo. III. c. 45; 59 Geo. III. c. 134; 3 Geo. IV. c. 72; 5 Geo. IV. c. 103; 7 & 8 Geo. IV. c. 72; 9 Geo. IV. c. 42.

48

Estates of the deans and chapters.

Revenues of the Established Cly of England and Wales.

Church-tithe

Incomes of the bishoprics

Glebes and parsonage-houses

250,000

Perpetual curacies £75 each

75,000

Benefices not parochial £250 each ••

32,450

Church-fees on burials, marriages, chstenings, &c...

500,000

Oblations, offerings, and composition for offerings at

the four great festivals

80,000

College and school foundations

682,150

Lectureships in towns and populous faces

60,000

Chaplainships and offices in public intitutions
New churches and chapels

Total Revenues of the Establisled Clergy ·

cluding

We are confident several of these sourtes of emolument are rather under-rated. Perhaps it may be alleged that some items do not properly appertain to ecclesiastical income-that they are the rewards pro opera et labore extra-officially discharged by the Clergy. But what would be said if, in stating the emoluments of the Duke of Wellington or Sir George Murray, waited ourselves to their military pay, without also in their civil appointments? The sums placed to the account of the clergy are received by them either as ministers of religion, or from holding situations to which they have been promoted in consequence of being members of the Established Church. There are several sums annually raised on the people which we have omitted, but which, in strictness, ought to be placed to the account of the Clergy. Large sums are constantly being voted by Parliament for building churches in Scotland, as well as in England; more than £21,000 has been granted for building churches and bishops' palaces in the West Indies; £1,600,000 has been granted for the aid of the poor clergy, as they are called, and who have been also favoured by their livings being exonerated from the land-tax; nearly a million has been granted for building houses and purchasing glebes for the clergy in Ireland; upwards of £16,000 a-year is voted to a society for propagating Church of Englandism in foreign parts;† and more than £9,000 is

The see of Sodor and Man is not in charge in the King's Book, and is omitted in this estimate.

+ The efforts to promote Church of Englandism by expensive establishments is attended with as little success in the Colonies as in the mother country. In Upper Canada, out of 235 clergymen, only 33 are clergymen of the Church of England. The Moravians are the sect whose mission is most successful in the West Indies. They mix familiarly with the Indians, instruct them in the arts of agriculture and building, and thus hold out to them advantages more readily comprehended than the mysteries of the Trinity, election, and the incarnation.

granted to some other Society for Discountenancing Vice, -a duty which one would think especially merged in the functions of our paid pastors. All these sums have been omitted; they certainly tend to augment the burthen imposed on the public by the Church: but as it is to be hoped they do not all form permanent branches of ecclesiastical charge, they are excluded from our estimate of church income.

The next consideration is the number of persons among whom the revenues of the Church are divided. It has been already shown that the number of prelates, dignitaries, and incumbents, is only 7,694, and by this diminutive phalanx is the entire revenue of £9,459,565 monopolized, affording an average income of £1,228 to each individual. Except the clergy, there is no class or order of men whose incomes average an amount like this. The average pay of officers in the army or navy will bear no comparison with that of the Clergy. Take the legal classes-the most gainful of all professions; add together the incomes of the lord-chancellor, the judges, the barristers, conveyancers, proctors, special-pleader, and every other grade of that multitudinous. craft-the pettifogger of most limited practice included—and divide the total by the number of individuals, and it will yield no average income like that of dignitaries, rectors, and vicars. Still less will the fees and gains of the medical classes-the physician, surgeon, and apothecarybear a comparison with the Church. The pensions, salaries, and perquisites of employes in the civil department of government are justly deemed extravagant; but compare the united incomes of these with ecclesiastics, from the first lord of the treasury to the humblest official in the Stamp Office, and the difference is enormous. The Church is a monstrous, overgrown CRESUS in the State, and the amount of its revenues incredible, unbearable, and out of proportion with every other service and class in society.

An average estimate of the income of the Clergy, however, affords no insight into the mode in which the enormous revenues of the church are squandered among its members. Next to pluralities, the greatest abuse in the establishment results from the unequal amount of income possessed by individuals of the same rank in the ecclesiastical order, and the unequal burthen of duties imposed upon them. The incomes of some bishops, as those of Llandaff, St. Asaph, and Bangor, barely equal that of a clerk of the Treasury, or of rectors and vicars whose conduct they are appointed to superintend; while the incomes of others exceed those of the highest functionaries in the land. Yet we are told, by Mr. Burke, that the revenues of the higher order of ecclesiastics are to enable them to rear their "mitred fronts in courts and palaces to reprove presumptuous vice." But if one bishop requires a large revenue to support his dignity in high places, so does another. Among the archdeacons is like inequality, their incomes varying from £200 to £2000 a-year. And among the dignitaries and members of cathedral and collegiate establishments is similar disproportion. Many of the deaneries, as those of Westminster, Windsor, St. Paul's, Salisbury, Lincoln, Exeter, and Wells, are very valuable, yielding, probably, to

E

their possessors incomes of £12,000, £10,000, £7,000, £2,000, £1,900, and £1,500 respectively. The prebendaries and canonries vary in amount from £250 to £2,000 a-year. Some of the precentorships are worth not less than £900 a-year; and many of the chancellorships, treasurerships, succentorships, and we know not how many other official ships, afford snug incomes of £400, £500, and £800 per annum. The minor canons some of them have £250; the vicars-choral £350; the priest-vicars, the chanters, and sub-chanters, and a hundred more popish names and offices, are all amply, though unequally, remunerated for their services.

In the incomes of the parochial clergy there is similar diversity and injustice. Many rectories, as before observed, are more valuable than bishoprics, having incomes from £8,000 to £10,000 a-year. The same may be said of the vicarages, being possessed of large glebes or large endowments, and sometimes both. While, again, it cannot be denied that there are some rectories, and in particular vicarages, whose tithes are in the hands of laymen, and without even a parsonage-house. In some instances, the deficiency of income has been so great, that it has been found necessary to unite the incomes of two or three parishes to produce an adequate maintenance to the officiating minister, who, in the care of so many churches, cannot have time to officiate at any of them properly; and thus, no doubt, are many souls lost which might be saved; some, straying into the fold of sectarianism, become jacobins and dissenters, to the great injury of the mother church, and the eternal reproach of the right reverend bishops, the very reverend deans, the venerable archdeacons, and other reverend dignitaries, who waste, in the pomp, vanities, and luxuries of the world, the sums which ought to be appropriated to the augmentation of these poor livings.

The penury of one part of the church is not less objectionable than the bloated and sinecure opulence of another. At the establishment of Queen Anne's bounty, in the beginning of the last century, there were 5597 livings (above one-half of the whole number) whose incomes did not exceed £50 per annum. The Diocesan Returns in 1809 give the following classification of poor livings under £150 per annum:

It is by grouping these poor livings with the rich ones, and averaging the whole, that a plausible case is often attempted to be made out in favour of the clergy. One writer, for instance, whose statement has been often quoted, makes the average income of each living in England and Wales only £303 per annum. The Rev. Dr. Cove, adopting different principles of calculation, makes the average income of the parochial clergy only £255 each.† Both these estimates, it is apparent from what has been advanced, are very wide of the truth. There are 11,342 benefices, and only 7,191 incumbents; and these incumbents engross the entire revenue of the parochial clergy arising from tithe and other sources. Turning to the statement at page 48, and deducting from the total revenues of the established clergy the incomes of the bishoprics and ecclesiastical corporations, it will be found that the parochial clergy alone have a total revenue of £8,668,450, which, divided by the number of benefices and the number of incumbents, gives £764 for the average value of each benefice, and £1,205 for the average income of each incumbent. From this enormous income, the paltry stipends of £20 or £40 a-year, paid by some of the beneficed clergy to their curates, are, of course, to be deducted.

The representation which the Quarterly Review, and other misleading publications, is desirous of impressing on the public is, that there are about 10 or 11,000 benefices, held by about as many individuals-rectors, vicars, and perpetual curates-whose average income is the very moderate sum of £255 or £303 each. Such a statement, if true, would render the amount of the revenues of the clergy, and the distribution of these revenues, very little objectionable indeed. But we will soon show this is all mystification and delusion.

The real situation of the Parochial Clergy is this: in England and Wales there are 5098 rectories, 3687 vicarages, and 2970 churches neither rectorial nor vicarial; in all, 11,755 churches. These churches are contained in 10,674 parishes and parochial chapelries; and, probably, after a due allowance for the consolidation of some of the smaller parishes, form about as many parochial benefices. Now, the whole of these 10,674 benefices are in the hands of 7191 incumbents; there are 2886 individuals with 7037 livings; 567 with 1701 livings; 209 with 836 livings; 64 with 320 livings. Look again, at page 27, and the whole mystery of parochial monopoly is solved. Or let any one look into the Ecclesiastical Directory, and he will find nearly one-half the whole number of incumbents are pluralists. Some are rectors at one place, vicars at another, and curates at another; some hold three or four rectories, besides vicarages and chapelries; some hold two vicarages, a chapelry, and a rectory: in short, they are held in every possible combination. But what does the secretary to four bishops, Mr. Wright,

Quarterly Review, vol. xxix. p. 554.

+ Essay on the Revenues of the Church, p. 124.

# Archdeacon Plymley's Charge to the Clergy of the County of Salop.