the church under any
circumstances whatever, except with the consent and under the license
of some external authority. But that implies that the ownership of the
church should no longer be vested in a _corporation sole_. It brings us
again face to face with the whole question of the parson’s freehold,
and how long is that mischievous legal fiction--which is, however, a
very stubborn legal fact--to be endured?

If I were to go on in this vein, and dwell upon all the parson has to
suffer from his _predecessors_--the man who built the house two miles
from the parish church; the man who added to it to find room for a
score of pupils; the man who loved air, or the man who loved water, or
the man who loved society, or the man who bred horses, or the man who
turned the rectory into a very lucrative lunatic asylum--I should tire
out my reader’s patience, and the more so that there are other trials
about which it is advisable that I should utter my querulous wail.

I know one clergyman who, though ordained some forty years ago, has
never written or preached a sermon in his life; but I only know one.
His is perhaps a unique case. As a rule, we all begin by being
curates--that is, we begin by learning our business as subordinates.
It would be truer to say we used to begin that way; but subordination
is dying out all over the world, and in the ministry of the Church
of England subordination is a virtue which is _in articulo mortis_.
Nowadays a young fellow at twenty-three, who has become a reverend
gentleman for just a week, poses at once as the guide, philosopher, and
friend of the whole human race. He poses as a great teacher. It is not
only that he delivers the oracles with authoritative sententiousness
from the tripod, but he has no doubts and no hesitation about anything
in earth or heaven. He fortifies himself with a small collection of
brand-new words which you, poor ignorant creature, don’t know the
meaning of. You feel rather “out of it” when he gravely calls your
gloves _Mannaries_ (he does not wear them)