“The humble petition of the Rev. Sydney Smith, Canon Residentiary of St. Paul’s, humbly showeth,—That your petitioner has bestowed considerable thought and attention upon the subject of the Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Bill, and prays that the same may not pass into a law; for the following reasons:—
“The Bill applies to the spiritual destitution of the Church, that which was left for the ornaments and rewards of the Church; and in this way gets rid of the burden of supporting the clergy, by tampering with the sacred laws of property; making, at the same time, the multitude believe that they are reforming abuses, while they are only evading duties and weakening principles.
“By lessening the rewards of the Church, it prevents men
of capital from entering into it; and makes the
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“The whole mass of property which the Bill proposes to confiscate, will make the poor clergy a very little less poor, while its confiscation destroys the powerful stimulus of hope, at the beginning of an ecclesiastical life. Two-thirds of the present deans and prebendaries have been curates and small vicars: they would, at the lowest period of their fortunes, have refused to barter their hope of future competence, for the addition of a few pounds to their income; and this is most unquestionably the state of feeling among the lower clergy at the present moment.
“The whole of the Bill supposes that deans and chapters have made a worse use of their patronage than bishops, and this is directly contrary to truth. But what is true of this Bill is, that one order in the Church who have no votes in Parliament, have been completely sacrificed to those who have votes,—that deans and prebendaries, carefully excluded from the Commission, have been condemned to confiscation,—and that the Prelate Commissioners have not sacrificed one shilling of the aggregate income of the bishops to those spiritual destitutions of the Church, which they feel so strongly, but relieve with property not their own.
“The Bill destroys many ecclesiastical offices, which,
with a little care and thought, might have been made eminently useful to
literature; to the present plans of national education; to the care of dioceses
in the de-
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“This Bill habituates the Legislature to the easy and inviting power of tampering with the property of the Church. It is utterly impossible to believe that this will be the last and the worst act of that nature.
“The law, as it now stands, enables dignified clergymen to bestow their patronage on their children and relations, who may be deserving of it. Under this sanction they have given to their sons very expensive educations at the Universities. The present Bill destroys these expectations; sets at nought vested rights; and, instead of applying this provision to future members of chapters, cuts off from their rights the ancient members of those bodies, who have laid out their whole plan of life upon the faith of laws unimpugned and unrepealed for centuries; and this appears to your Petitioner to be a gross act of spoliation and injustice, and contrary to the express provisions and arrangements of the Commissioners themselves.
“To give to every clergyman who has gone through the
expense of an English University, and who is married and settled in the
country, the income which they ought in decency and in justice to receive,
would require, not only the confiscation of all the
cathedral and episcopal property, but some millions of money in addition. A
church provided for as ours now is, can
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“For these reasons, your Petitioner believes the Bill in question (however well intended) to be founded on a very short-sighted policy, and that it will entail great evils upon a Church no longer unfavourable to the civil liberties of mankind—as yet untainted by fanaticism—carried forward by the labours of a highly improved clergy—and now become as useful and as active as any church establishment which the world has yet seen.
“This, as it seems to your Petitioner, is the last of all our institutions upon which an experiment so daring and so dangerous ought to be tried. For these reasons, your Petitioner humbly prays that the Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Bill may not pass into a law.
