A Bachelor Clergy

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 43, 22 October 1903, Page 18

A Bachelor Clergy

The school of experience is commonly a hard one, its fees are high, its lessons are slowly learned and at the cost of many a mistake and 'blunder. The idea of a celibate clergy was for nearly three centuries sufficient to throw the leaders of the various Reformed creeds into spasms, handsprings, and convulsions, accompanied commonly by • langwidge ' of a particularly unparliamentary kind. But experience has at least convinced many of them of the extreme desirability of an unmarried clergy for such circumstances as epidemics and poverty-stricken parishes at home and the pagan mission-field abroad. In his recent synodal address, the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch suggested, for lean parishes, the institution of bachelor clergy, living in community, after the manner of Catholic priests. Dr. Needham Cust, the greatest living authority on Protestant missions to the heathen, urges the following rule in his « Missionary Methods ' (p. 294) : ' Let no male missionary marry till he has ten years' service in the field. Encourage brotherhoods and sisterhoods, as a matter of administrative convenience and economy.' ' It is all very well,' says he elsewhere in the same book (p. 12), writing of Africa, •to talk of a missionary's home, with his wife and six children, as a beautiful object-lesson to the natives. They cannot see it in that romantic light, nor could I, though I have visited scores of missionaries in their homes. Altruism is the object of missions ; egoism is the very essence of family life. I unhesitatingly pronounce brotherhoods and sisterhoods to be a good method.'

It took our Reformed friends a long course of teaching in the school of experience to relearn the old truth prea"ched long agflu by St. Paul, to which, like Nelson, they long and persistently turned their blind eye : ' He that is without a wife, is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife is solicitous for things of the world, how he may please his wife ; and he is divided. And the unmarried woman and virgin thinketh on the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she that is married thinketh on the things of the world, how she may please her husband.'