WESLEYAN MINISTERS AND THE TITLE OF “REVEREND.”

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4559, 30 October 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

WESLEYAN MINISTERS AND THE TITLE OF “REVEREND.”

(From the Daily Nem, August 2.) Sir Robert Phillimore has declined to annul the Bishop of Lincoln’s refusal to permit a Wesleyan minister to describe himself on a tombstone as “ Reverend.” The churchyard, said Sir Robert Phillimore, is the freehold of the incumbent, who enjoys the_ charming privilege of pasturing animals do not injure the bodies interred, and also of interfering with epitaphs and tombstones which offend his religious or artistic sentiments. It is not quite clear what the sort of animals may bo whoso grazing would interfere with the bodies. ... The word reverend, as applied to a man who by any sect of his Christian fellow-country-men is looked on as a spiritual pastor and master, is more sanctioned by ordinary usage than the application of the word esquire to “ everyone who keeps a gig.” The mere word has been used in application to judges, statesmen, officers in the army and navy, gentlemen and gentlewomen, and even to the reverend front of that tall pile. But Mr. Keet is supposed to have wished the title of reverend engraved on his daughter’s tombstone, not because the word may bo applied at large to everyone of a certain character, nor because social usage justifies its application to any spiritual pastor of a Christian flock, but because he thinks himself “ specially entitled to it as being a Wesleyan minister.” Hoes this mean that Wesleyan ministers think they have a monopoly of the title in dispute, or that they alone of all English dissenting bodies share the right with the clergy of the Established Church ? This is conceivable by the imagination, but we are not awaro that it is true, as a rule, or at all, of Wesleyan ministers. All religious bodies have to struggle with the temptation to think themselves, and themselves only, the Church. They alone have kept out of right-hand backslidings and left-hand fallings off. The tendency has been ridiculed a hundred times, and reduced ad aismdwn in the case of douce Davie Deans, and of the old Scotchwoman who admitted that she held the Church to consist of “ herself and John Maophorsou, and was no that sure of John." Where such tendencies prevail, they naturally produce in their victims a desire to select separate names for brethren of their own persuasion. The Cameroniana were “ The Godly,” their ministers were “The Saints,” “the precious Mr.

Cargill, and so on. We shall be very much surprised to learn that Wesleyan ministers think themselves a people so peculiar that they have a special title to the name of reverend. Such Pharisaism, in the sense of proud separatism, is not unknown in England, and very petty and ridiculous it is. But its best examples belong to that sacerdotal party in the Church of which Bishop Wordsworth is the ornament and defence.

There is no necessity to believe that Mr. Keet had the word reverend recorded as a title of his on the tombstone because he wished to assort a legal claim to it, still less a special claim. It was his ordinary way of describing himself; it was the title which courtesy assigned to members of his sacred profession, the superscription by which Ministers of State had addressed Wesleyan ministers. It makes but little difference whether John Wesley admired and approved of the title or not; his later disciples have adopted it under the influence of that law of usage which slowly wears away sharp distinctions in matters of etiquette and courtesy. The Bishop of Lincoln, in his letters to Mr. Keet, made a great point of John Wesley's notions on the subject. The Bishop ought to remember that one church has ns good a right to claim the power of change—“development the wise it call”—as another. In such matters of form the growth of custom and change of taste very often cause a religious body to slip, in a perfectly blameless and well understood way, from the intentions and ideas of its founder. The question is entirely one of etiquette and courtesy, till the legal element is brought in by the incumbent's refusal to permit the erection of the offending tombstone. If an incumbent bo jealous of his own title and status as a consecrated priest of the mystic Church of Christ, if he considers that when a Wesleyan minister calls himself reverend on a tombstone, he is usurping a sacred dignity and stealing a mysterious sanctity as it were from the consecrated shadow of the incumbent, then he acts very naturally when he stops the erection of the tombstone. The incumbent is in his right, if Sir Robert Bhillimore be right; whether he is inheriting the blessing promised to peacemakers is another matter. The question is partly social, partly sacerdotal; on one side it irritates a natural harmless sentiment, on the other side touches a whole theory of mystic transmitted virtues. To stir in such a business is to act in an aggressive and exclusive spirit—a spirit remarkably well developed in a section of the English clergy, who have borrowed terminology and properties from a church which does not acknowledge them even as allies. Their position is one which cannot but damage their practical work as ministers of religion.