The Motor and the Church.

Progress, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2 November 1908, Page 23

The Motor and the Church.

When bishops all over England are buying and selling and getting presentations of motor curs, and the Roman Curia has publicly conceded the right (long withheld on the score of the undignified incompatibility of the flying madness) to the cardinals and prelates, to say nothing of the clergy who are sure to follow suit along the line of greatest convenience, it comes with something of a shock to read that the motor is the sign and symbol of the class antagonism that divides the Anglican clergy from poorer members of their flocks.

But the limits of human thought are yet to be traced, if we may gather information on the subject from a recently published letter. The writer signing himself "A Working Parson" puts the pith of his subject into the following sentence : — ' ' What I want to point out is that the motor to our working people stands for a class. Absurd, do you say? Very Avell, then come and see, and live among them, and you will very soon see and hear. The motor has come to stand for a class; a class that can indulge in senseless folly and luxury while they want for bread; a class that ruthlessly disregards other people's comfort; a class that rushes through the streets and lanes, scaring their lives, sometimes killing their children, and leaving behind noxious fumes and blinding dust." He adds that he writes after an experience of twenty years, which has convinced him that the unhappy motor car has emphasised more than anything else the separation of the classes. Which is not bad. for a vehicle which has not been in existence much over ten years, and has not done any emphasising of the

kind mentioned for much over seven, if indeed for more than five. The "Working Parson must have been reading Marie Corelli. who, in one of her later books, has lashed the conduct of the senseless motor driver with tremendous force, and perhaps a trifle of exaggeration. However, he has received a brief and remarkably practical reply, from one bearing a well-known name. This is so crushing that it is worth giving in extenso. Here it is: — -"Your correspondent, in spite of the fact that bishops who use motor cars can command the area of their dioceses in a way impossible hitherto, and can thus be

brought into far closer touch with their clergy and people, says that they are identifying themselves with ' ' a class, ' ' and so imperilling their position as clergy of the working masses. But why does he attack the bishops only? The "General" of the Salvation Army has already made a more extensive use of the motor-car than the whole bench of bishops; and during the election of 1906 the leaders of political dissent were disporting themselves in all directions through the length and breadth of the land, if, haply, they might catch votes, as the car of the classes sped them from town to village, and from village to hamlet. It would really seem that, whilst a Nonconformist may steal tho aristocrat itmotor, a Churchman may not look over the motor-house door. — Tour obedient servant, W. J. Humble-Crofts." It reminds one somehow of one of Thackeray's minor verses. "Nothing more to be done; nothing more to be said; Lord Tomnoddy went home to bed." Which, on the whole, seems the best place for the overworked parson.