The Parish Clerk | Page 5

the clerk was indignant. His musical autocracy had been overthrown. At one church--Swanscombe, Kent--when, in 1854, the change had taken place, and a kind lady, Miss F----, had consented to play the new harmonium, the clerk, village cobbler and leader of parish orchestra, gave out the hymn in his accustomed fashion, and then, with consummate scorn, bellowed out, "Now, then, Miss F----, strike up!"
It would have been a far wiser policy to have reformed the old village orchestra, to have taught the rustic musicians to play better, than to have silenced them for ever and substituted the "grinstun" instrument.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE CHOIR]
Archbishop Tait once said that there is no one who does not look back with a kind of shame to the sort of sermons which were preached, the sort of clergymen who preached them, the sort of building in which they preached them, and the sort of psalmody with which the service was ushered in. The late Mr. Beresford Hope thus describes the kind of service that went on in the time of George IV in a market town of Surrey not far from London. It was a handsome Gothic church, the chancel being cut off from the nave by a solid partition covered with verses and strange paintings, among which Moses and Aaron show in peculiar uncouthness. The aisles were filled with family pews or private boxes, raised aloft, and approached by private doors and staircases. These were owned by the magnates of the place, who were wont to bow their recognitions across the nave. There was a decrepit west gallery for the band, and the ground floor was crammed with cranky pews of every shape. A Carolean pulpit stood against a pillar, with reading-desk and clerk's box underneath. The ante-Communion Service was read from the desk, separated from the liturgy and sermon by such renderings of Tate and Brady as the unruly gang of volunteers with fiddles and wind instruments in the gallery pleased to contribute. The clerk, a wizened old fellow in a brown wig, repeated the responses in a nasal twang, and with a substitution of w for v so constant as not even to spare the Beliefs; while the local rendering of briefs, citations, and excommunications included announcements by this worthy, after the Nicene Creed, of meetings at the town inn of the executors of a deceased duke. Two hopeful cubs of the clerk sprawled behind him in the desk, and the back-handers occasionally intended to reduce them to order were apt to resound against the impassive boards. During the sermon this zealous servant of the sanctuary would take up his broom and sweep out the middle alley, in order to save himself the fatigue of a weekday visit. Soon, however, the clerk and his broom followed Moses and Aaron, the fiddles and the bassoons into the land of shadows.
No sketch of bygone times, in which the clerk flourished in all his glory, would be complete without some reference to the important person who occupied the second tier in the "three-decker," and decked in gown and bands delivered somnolent sermons from its upper storey. Curious stories are often told of the careless parsons of former days, of their irreverence, their love of sport, their neglect of their parishes, their quaint and irreverent manners; but such characters, about whom these stories were told, were exceptional. By far the greater number lived well and did their duty and passed away, and left no memories behind except in the tender recollections of a few simple-minded folk. There were few local newspapers in those days to tell their virtues, to print their sermons or their speeches at the opening of bazaars or flower-shows. They did their duty and passed away and were forgotten; while the parsons, like the wretch Chowne of the Maid of Sker, live on in anecdote, and grave folk shake their heads and think that the times must have been very bad, and the clergy a disgrace to their cloth. As with the clerk, so with his master; the evil that men do lives after them, the good is forgotten. There has been a vast amount of exaggeration in the accounts that have come down to us of the faithlessness, sluggishness, idleness, and base conduct of the clergy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and perhaps a little too much boasting about the progress which our age has witnessed.
It would be an easy task to record the lives of many worthy country clergymen of the much-abused Hanoverian period, who were exemplary parish priests, pious, laborious, and beloved. In recording the eccentricities and lack of reverence of many clerics and their faithful servitors, it is well to remember the many bright lights that shone like lamps in a dark place.
It would be a difficult task