CHAPTER XLI.

TWO RIVALS--CANTERBURY AND ROME.

METROPOLITAN Life has its religious phases, also. London contains about 410,000 dwelling-houses, places of business, and public buildings, and in this vast agglomeration of brick, stone, and mortar--there are about seven hundred edifices devoted to public worship. In this number are comprised places of worship for all sects: Roman Catholics, Protestants of the Established Church of England, Baptists, Presbyterians, Independents, Jews, Greeks, Moravians, Quakers, Socinians, Wesleyan-Methodists, and even Hindoos, who have a temple of their own.

There are two hundred and eighteen parishes in the Metropolis, under the jurisdiction of vestries and parochial bodies who, in turn, are subject to the Bishop of London, sitting as a temporal and spiritual peer in the House of Lords. He is Provincial Dean of Canterbury, and Dean of the Chapels Royal at Whitehall and the Savoy.

The Bishop of London ranks next to the Archbishop of York and Canterbury, and has an income of £10,000, annually, and the free gift of one hundred and nine livings, ranging in value from £2,000 to £30 a year. As Dean of Canterbury his income amounts to £2,000 a year. The clergymen of the Established Church receiving the largest salaries in the City of London, whose livings are in the gift of the Bishop of London, are those of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, £2,290, St. Olave's, Hart street, Bloomsbury, £1,891, and St. Giles, Cripplegate, £1,580.

The smallest salary is that received by the pastor of St. Bartholomew the Less, who only gets £30 a year, although his work is far harder than that of the Dean of Westminster, who receives £4,000 a year. The salary of the Archbishop of Canterbury is £20,000, and he has half a dozen palaces throughout the country. The Archbishop of York receives about £15,000 a year, and has two Episcopal and palatial residences.

[Sidenote: SPURGEON AND "APOCALYPSE" CUMMING.]

Spurgeon, the great Baptist divine, who ranks somewhat like Henry Ward Beecher, receives a salary of $18,000 a year for his preaching, and his congregation, in 1860, erected for him a grand tabernacle at Newington, on the Surrey side of the Thames near the Elephant and Castle, and in one of the roughest districts of London, at a cost of £25,000. The design is simple; the dimensions 85 by 174 feet, and here, every Sunday evening, nearly six thousand persons assemble to listen to the vehement eloquence of Spurgeon, who has his congregation drilled like a company of infantry, and can move them to tears or laughter, as he chooses.

In Crown Court, Strand, is the Free Church of Scotland, a well-built and commodious edifice, where the Scottish Presbyterians attend. The pastor of this church is known all over the world by his writings and his prophetic denunciations of the coming destruction of the world, as "Apocalypse" Cumming. Thousands of pages have been written by this eminent divine, and hundreds of sermons have been preached by him, in which he has identified the Pope of Rome with the "Scarlet Woman" and the "Beast," having the mark on her forehead, yet at the call of the Ecumenical Council, he was the first Protestant divine in England, who, in a manner acknowledged the Pope's jurisdiction by writing to him for admission to the Council as a Priest or "Presbyter." Dr. Cumming is a very energetic preacher, and his services are always well attended by the disciples of his church, as well as by strangers, in London, who manifest a great desire to hear the illustrious Scotch divine.

One of the most talked-about people in London is the famous "Father Ignatius," whose design is to bring over English Episcopalians to the Roman Catholic Church, although he does not say so ostensibly. This man is evidently sincere in his efforts to bring back the English Church to the place of its departure, for the Reformation--as far as the ceremonial goes. It is very little different, that old-fashioned church of St. Mary-le-Strand--where I saw Father Ignatius officiating one Sunday afternoon, in the midst of incense, ringing of silver bells, and kneeling worshippers, who went through all the most devout genuflections of Roman Catholicism--from the Mother Church, in its ceremonial. Father Ignatius wore a vestment, with a huge cross down the back, his head was shaved on the top like that of a monk, and his face and eyes, as he descended the steps of the altar, which was surmounted with a Gothic cross, covered with flowers, and blazing with lights, had an ascetic aspect, which is not commonly seen in the features or eyes of a clergyman of the State Church. At every motion of the body he made a low reverence to the Crucifix over the altar. This Father Ignatius does not believe in a married Clergy, or in Lay or Congregational administration of a Church--in fact he does everything that a Roman Catholic Priest does, including the hearing of confessions, yet he dares not acknowledge the Supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, excepting in a negative sense. He is an advanced soldier of a large and growing party in the Church of England, who gravitate with tremendous strides daily towards the Church of Rome, but do not know that they are thus gravitating, or knowing, will not acknowledge the fact. This puny, slab-faced, and livid-looking Priest, has suffered, too, with steadiness, has been stoned and mobbed by angry crowds, yet he perseveres in his work, and has many thousand followers, male and female, among the brightest, best, bravest, and most cultivated of England's aristocracy.

[Sidenote: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.]

It is a strange, old-fashioned, and conservative Church, this State Church of Great Britain. It has lasted three hundred years, with its feasts and fasts, its liturgy, its prelates, spiritual peers, and Thirty-Nine Articles.

Englishmen have always, until of late days, been conservative, and this old-fashioned Church, with its grave ceremonial, its Canons, and Deaneries, with its Westminster Abbey, its St. Paul's Cathedral, and its Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, has, in every way, satisfied the English people--at any rate, it has served the purposes of the ruling classes.

But the Church of England, like all other things in this world, has received some heavy blows in the course of its existence.

First came the Great Civil War, in which Charles I lost his head, and with him the Church of England lost its revenues, and its great prestige departed when Laud ascended the scaffold.

Then came the Restoration, which brought with it a dissolute King, a dissolute nobility, and worst of all a dissolute clergy. The horse-riding, beer-drinking, and gambling parsons of the reigns of Queen Anne, William, and the Georges, such as Thackeray has so well described, in his Parson Sampson, were morally unfit to join issue, in a spiritual encounter, with such earnest, plucky, and aggressive Christians as Wesley, Whitfield, and Bunyan, proved themselves, and consequently the Established Church lost its hold on half of the working men and the agricultural classes of England toward the first decade of the Nineteenth century. In particular, the manufacturing towns lost all respect for the faith of the King and court, and such places as Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Birmingham, became strongholds of Dissent, while the pews of the rural churches, where the poor of the parishes had never been welcome, since the days of the dissolution of the monasteries, by Henry VIII, were left untenanted, and a brutal ignorance took the place of implicit faith among the English masses.

And to cap the climax, a year ago a bill was brought into Parliament for the destruction of the Established Church of Ireland, a church which never had been accepted by the Irish people, and though the English Churchmen, the Ministers, and the Tory party, rallied to save the doomed edifice, yet it was swept away in a night, despite the maneuvers of the leaders of the House of Lords, who wisely fought the bill as long as they could, believing it to be the first great blow delivered at the Established Church and the English aristocracy since Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

At present there is a terrific struggle going on in the Established Church. One half of the clergy, among whom are the best educated and most scholarly divines, secretly lean to the Catholic Church, and belong to the "Ritualistic" party, with its incense, flowers, banners, and Protestant Sisters of Mercy and Nuns; and the other half are again divided into those who doubt the inspiration of the Scriptures, and openly denounce the entire books of the Bible as a tissue of fables, with Colenso, and a third party, who having sprung from the people, and having no connection with any of the great beneficed Church families, and being incumbents of £100 livings, or less, cannot support their families or educate their children properly. This last faction is a growing one, and though less educated than the other two parties, they are equally earnest, and eagerly await the day when they can join the ranks of the Baptists, Independents, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, or Methodists, for the purpose of forming a "Liberal" or "Broad" English Church, such as Dean Stanley is supposed to represent in his theories.

[Sidenote: ROMAN CATHOLIC STATISTICS.]

In the mean time the Roman Catholic Clergy are sleepless, indefatigable, and aggressive in their movements, and as they do not hope to convert the middle classes of the English people, who are all staunch Protestants, they have laid siege to the souls of the two extreme bodies, the aristocracy and the very poor and destitute, as well as the working classes. And they are making great progress--in fact alarming progress, as I will show here.

In 1380, when England and Wales had been Catholic countries for more than seven hundred and fifty years, there were more than 14,000 parish churches, and 2,000 religious houses in the kingdom; there was one parish church to every four square miles throughout the kingdom, and one religious house to every thirty square miles; and there were 40,000 priests, monks, and friars. The whole of these churches and convents were taken away or destroyed during the Reformation; and, as I have said, when the church was at last again set free, she had to commence her work anew. In the half century since her hands were fully untied, she has built more than 1,000 churches and chapels, and something like 300 monasteries and convents, and she has over 1,700 priests ministering at her altars. If this be the work of fifty years, how much less is it, proportionately, than the work accomplished by the same church in the first seven hundred and fifty years of her life.

Therefore, the Roman Catholics, while they held supreme sway in England, built 14,000 churches, which is less than twenty in each year, while during the last fifty years they have built 1,000 churches, which is also twenty in each year; but during this period, it must be remembered that the public sentiment of Great Britain had been overwhelmingly Protestant, while in the previous period referred to, a Protestant was unknown.

And now for the social status and influence of the Romanists in England.

There are, in the first place, 33 Catholic peers, 48 Catholic baronets, and 36 Catholic members of Parliament. There are lords and lords, and one lord differeth from another in glory as one star differeth from another. It is unquestionably true that the Roman Catholic peers and baronets are the representatives of the oldest, most noble, and most influential families in the kingdom. The reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth, James I, and William and Mary, were marked by the extinction of the greater part of the Roman Catholic houses. The nobles, who clung to the ancient faith, were slain by the axe of the executioner, driven into exile, or beggared by the confiscation of their estates, which passed into the hands of the comparatively mushroom aristocracy that sprang up upon the ruins of these illustrious families. But a few of the old nobility contrived to escape the fate of the majority.

There are in the United Kingdom 27 dukes, 32 marquises, 194 earls, 55 viscounts, and 220 barons--in all, 528 noblemen. But as I have ascertained by dint of patiently reading through Burke's peerage, 228 of these are the holders of titles which are the "creations" of the present century; 163 date back only to the eighteenth century; 89 to the seventeenth century; 17 to the sixteenth century; 20 to the fifteenth century; 3 to the fourteenth century; 4 to the thirteenth century; and 1 to the twelfth century. This last is Baron Kingsale, whose title dates from 1181, and who is the twenty-ninth of his name.

The most ancient dukedom is that of the Duke of Norfolk, created in 1483. The Norfolks, throughout all their history, remained faithful to the Roman Catholic church. The present Duke is the fifteenth of the name, and is "Earl Marshal, Premier Duke, and Earl of England." Of the three nobles whose creation dates back to the fourteenth century, two are Roman Catholics; of the twenty who date from the fifteenth century, six are of that religion; and of the seventeen who date from the sixteenth century, three are of the old faith. Out of the four hundred and eighty whose titles are less than 270 years old, only twenty-two are Catholics. And of the forty-eight Roman Catholic baronets, about half of the number are the descendants of gentlemen to whom this hereditary rank was given in the early part of the seventeenth century.

The ancient Roman Catholic hierarchy in England ended in 1584, with the death of Thomas Watson, Bishop of Lincoln, who died in prison in that year. The hierarchy was not restored until Sept. 9, 1850, when the present Pope erected it by establishing all England as the "Province of Westminster," embracing thirteen dioceses, and presided over by an Archbishop. During this interval of 266 years, the Roman Catholic Clergy in England were at first under the direction of an Archpriest.

In Scotland the hierarchy has not yet been restored. It ended with the death of the last Archbishop of Glasgow, who died in exile at Paris in 1603. Since then the Catholic Church in Scotland has been under the charge of Vicars-apostolic.

[Sidenote: A SKETCH OF "LOTHAIR."]

The greatest conquest made by the Roman Catholic clergy, of late years, is that of the young Marquis of Bute, the original of Mr. Disraeli's "Lothair," in his social and politico-religious novel of that name. This young and noble lord was born on the 12th of September, 1847, and is now in his twenty-third year. His father, the second Marquis of Bute, married Lady Maria North, eldest daughter and co-heir of George Augustus, third Earl of Guilford. This estimable lady died childless, in 1841, and the old Marquis married again in 1845, Lady Sophia-Frederica-Christina Hastings, second daughter of the first Marquis of Hastings. The young Marquis was unfortunate in losing his mother when he was in his twelfth year. Lord Bute has been a great traveler for a man of his age, and being an only child he has had the best of tutors that Europe could afford.

Nearly every young lady of wealth and rank in England set her cap for the young Marquis when he attained his majority; but this nobleman is very unlike the Marquis of Waterford or the Duke of Hamilton, who by the way are distant relatives of his. He is not fond of dissipation, and since his boyish days he has been of a reflective turn of mind, with deep religious yearnings--yet withal he is not guilty of cant, and does not bore one with his religious views. He is good looking, but is not showy in his dress, and just now he is the lion of fashionable Europe from the fame which attends him everywhere as the hero of Disraeli's novel. The Marquis was reared a Presbyterian with decided Church of England leanings, and was converted one year ago, to the Roman Catholic faith through the efforts of Monsigneur Capel, who has also a niche in "Lothair," under the title of Monsigneur Catesby. He is a most accomplished ecclesiastic, who unites with a fascinating exterior the greatest ability and perseverance.

[Sidenote: BUTE, MANNING, AND NEWMAN.]

The income of the Marquis is about £380,000 annually, and he has decided to give one year's income, which is nearly two millions of dollars, toward the construction of a Catholic Cathedral at Oxford, in which all the glories of the Medieval Gothic shall be renewed. The roll of this young nobleman's titles is enough to startle an American. They are as follows: John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, Marquis of Bute, Earl of Windsor, Viscount Mountjoy in the Isle of Wight, Baron Mount-Stuart of Wortley and Baron of Cardiff Castle, Wales, in the Peerage of Great Britain. He is also Earl of Dumfries and Bute, Viscount of Ayr and Kingarth, Baron Crichton, Lord Crichton of Sanquhar, Lord Mount-Stuart of Cumbrae and Inchmarnock, and Hereditary Keeper of Rothesay Castle (formerly a Royal residence). Besides, he is a Baronet of Nova Scotia among the Blue-Noses.

Through his mother he is a Crichton, which is a royal House, and by his father he comes of the equally royal House of Stuart, and he holds the title of "Lord of the Isles." The motto of his family is "_Avito viret honore_." (He flourishes in an honorable ancestry.) The motto of the Hastings family, with which Lord Bute is connected, is "Trust warrants troth."

The most beautiful woman of the English nobility is Lady Victoria-Maria Louisa Hastings, who is now in her thirty-third year. This lady was a great pet of Queen Victoria, and when a child Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Kent, the mother of the Queen, held the pretty baby in her arms as sponsor at the baptismal font, for the sake of a dear friend, Lady Victoria's mother, who was Stephanie, Duchess of Baden, and a relation of the Emperor Napoleon. The young girl grew up, and is now the wife of John Forbes-Stratford Kirwan, Esq., of Moyne, County Galway, Ireland.

The Marquis of Bute is a relation of the late Baron Stuart de Rothesay, for many years English Ambassador at Paris.

It has been variously hinted and rumored that the Marquis of Bute was at one time engaged to the Lady Albertina Hamilton, a daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, and also to a young lady of the Sutherland-Leveson-Gower family, which has for its head the Duke of Sutherland. It is said that the "Lady Corisande" of "Lothair," is none other than a daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, the former firm friend of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

If the Marquis of Bute was indeed a suitor for the hand of a daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, I am quite sure that he might have succeeded in his endeavor, for I believe that that worthy nobleman has been blessed with ten daughters and four stalwart sons, who can all answer to the Slogan of the Hamiltons.

The young Marquis has residences and castles, and immense domains, at Mt. Stuart; Isle of Bute, at Cardiff Castle, Glamorganshire, at Dumfries House, and he has a town house in London; besides, his name is inscribed on the registers of four London and three Parisian Clubs.

The ablest man in the English Roman Catholic Church is Archbishop Manning, who has been such a firm supporter of the Papal Infallibility in the Ecumenical Council. In due time, no doubt, this prelate will have the Cardinal's red hat conferred upon him for his services.

The greatest scholar in the Roman Catholic Church, in England, is Dr. J.H. Newman, the celebrated Oxford Tractarian, or Puseyite, who became a convert to Catholicism, with Manning, and since 1840 has devoted his brains to the service of his new Mother Church with great learning and zeal. His picture shows one of the most spiritual faces in England--it is almost weird in its nature.

There is a monument erected to a man named Dow, in St. Botolph's Church (Church of England) Aldgate, who bequeathed a sum of money to the clerk of the church, to pay him for ringing a bell at midnight, on the occasion of the execution of a criminal at Newgate. This was to call the attention of the condemned man to his soul.

It was this same Robert Dow who left, by will, in the year 1612, the sum of £1 6s. 8d., annually, as a fee to the Sexton of St. Sepulchres, which is just opposite Newgate Prison, for pronouncing two solemn exhortations to condemned criminals on the night preceding and on the morning of their execution, as they passed the church-door on their way to Tyburn-Tree.