378 ART. IV.-Census of Great Britain, 1851. Religious Worship. THE same machinery that was employed for the house-to-house enumeration of all residents in Great Britain, on the 31st of March, 1851, was also made use of to collect every information possible with regard to the religious worship of the people. The result is now before us, and has from the time of its publication excited very general interest. No similar attempt has been made at any former census; neither has there been, for many a year, so universal a concern as now exists among the leading minds of the age, to make the practical religion of the country a matter of earnest inquiry. Both the novelty of the thing itself, and the present inclination of the public mind, are alike favourable to its reception. Nor, doubtless, will its publication have been lost labour, or end merely in the gratification of idle curiosity. Many future efforts will be stimulated and directed by it, and many convincing arguments, of a nature peculiarly taking in this age of statistics, will be deduced from the study of this mass of figures. Indeed, we anticipate being overburdened and wearied with the continual reference to numbers gathered from these pages at all religious meetings and in the discussion of every religious scheme. Yet, although religion will never be a servile handmaid of statistic rules and partitions, it is most desirable that the prominent facts now brought to light should be well canvassed, and practical lessons derived from them. The real value of these numbers and facts can hardly yet be estimated. They must be read and commented on by the public; many explanations must be looked for with regard to particular statements, and some general assumptions on which all the calculations are based need to be examined, before the results are to be implicitly trusted. Comments, indeed, have been made already in many religious newspapers, challenging the fairness of the numbers with regard to the Church of England. It has been stated that the Sunday on which the census was taken, being Midlent Sunday, was most unfavourable to attendance in many rural districts of Yorkshire and elsewhere, it being the custom to go from home on that day to visit relations, thence called Mothering Sunday. It also appears that the congregations of union workhouses were not counted, which probably would add as many as 200,000 to the list of voluntary attendants on the service of the Church of England. It has also been conceived that an anti-church bias pervades the whole army of registrars, from Mr. Horace Mann, to whom the drawing up of this Report was entrusted, downwards to all the local agents employed. The mode of procuring the returns was not indeed, in our judgment, satisfactory, inasmuch as zealous partisans of particular sects were too free to overdraw the statement of attendants at their own places of worship. All was left to the voluntary enumeration of some official connected with each church, or place of worship, who received from the Registrar of the district certain papers to be filled up. Churchwardens, we believe, were generally the persons entrusted with these papers on the part of the Church, who, as a class, were far less likely to be influenced by various inducements to exaggerate, or procure a forced attendance, than would the persons connected with dissenting bodies, who are more apt to assume a pushing character, in the advocacy of their cause. The Roman Catholics especially ought to explain their large number of attendances. The indefinite distinction between sitting and standing is not, we think, sufficient cover for the enormous returns which are made of attendants, as compared with sittings. All the Roman Catholic churches which we happen to have seen, are as full of sittings as other places of worship, yet on the plea of a certain margin of standing room, and of frequent services, their returns for the morning services alone will in some cases require us to believe that more than three times the number of persons attended than could be accommodated with sittings at one time. No doubt their system of frequent and short services, at every hour of the forenoon, is a most valuable hint to other religious bodies, but we were not quite prepared to hear of the amazing success which attended their efforts in this respect. In the registration district, under the head of Liverpool, 8,806 sittings are returned, and 27,650 attendants during the morning only. In Manchester there are returned 5,876 sittings, and 17,642 attendants. The most striking disproportion of all is in S. Giles', where with sittings but for 460, 3,000 are made to attend. More of this, however, in its place at present we are only reviewing the general fairness of the returns, and the value to be attached to some of the numbers. In the enumeration of places of worship, it has also been stated that it is not fair to make a cathedral or a large parish church count only as of the same value with a hired room occupied once a day by a body of ranters. This indeed is partly corrected by the number of sittings for each town or union being also given in a separate column, but even here no mention is made of the naves of cathedrals, as applicable for religious worship. We cannot blame the compilers of the Census for this; they have to take things as they are, not as they might be; and the fact is too obvious, that cathedral naves are not at present used as places of religious worship. It is, of course, competent to any sect mentioned in the list to make better use of opportunities than hitherto, but if the Church herself takes no account of cathedral naves, as serviceable for public worship, we can hardly expect a secular officer to indulge in any statements founded on another principle. These considerations, and no doubt several more, have had a tendency to depreciate the powers and usefulness of the Church in the present Census; but, if it is remembered that the present is the first attempt at anything of the kind, and that the questions were in the first place framed without any experience of what could be answered, and what distinctions could be made, and therefore that original intentions had to be departed from, because the questions were not sufficiently explicit, we think that on the whole the Church of England may accept the general results as not a very untrue picture. The attempt (to adduce an instance of failure in the questions asked) to obtain a return of incomes was altogether abandoned; again, the distinction between free and appropriated sittings was so variously understood by the officers of different places of worship, as to render this column of but little value, or to leave but a general presumption, that those said to be appropriated were much more really so, and were, in proportion to the numbers, of far more value than those under the more indefinite head of free, or, as in many cases was meant, simply unlet. One distinction contemplated in the formula we regret was not observed, though it would probably have told very much to the disadvantage of the Church: we mean the separate enumeration of Sunday schools. Numerically, the crowds of little children who are driven to all our churches, make an imposing effect if classed with the rest of the congregation, but the distinction between the one and the other is so considerable in any estimate we should form of the Church's real strength in a place, that great allowances must be made. And this applies more to our own Church than to many other sects, with which the attendance of Sunday scholars is not so uniform an accompaniment of public worship as in our morning and afternoon services. It is common indeed with dissenters to have Sunday schools open during the whole afternoon, the children of which are consequently not attending public worship. We would illustrate the effect of this by the parish of Mary-le-bone. The number of attendants in the various churches was 19,305 at morning service, and in the evening only 7,649. In such a district, however, it is probable that the evening adult congregations were far more important, as compared with the morning, than would here be implied. In explanation of this discrepancy, we find the afternoon attendance to have been 6,537, nearly equal to the evening, whereas it is well known that the afternoon adult congregations in London are very small as compared with those of the evening. The presumption, therefore, is, that the afternoon congregations consisted chiefly of children, who had swelled out the morning numbers by the same amount, but left the adults to themselves in the evening. In the same district, the morning congregations of all other religious bodies were about 15,000, while the afternoon were under 2,000, 1,300 of whom were Roman Catholics and Irvingites, and the evening ones were 10,000. Here then it is obvious that our method of dealing with Sunday schools is to the apparent advantage of the Church in the Census Tables. The same result is seen in the parish of S. Pancras ; among dissenters the morning and evening congregations are more equal, while in the churches there are large congregations in the morning, which seem to be afterwards divided into afternoon congregations of children, and evening of adults, producing in the total about the same number as the morning lists. Without in this place enumerating any further imperfections in the actual statistics before us, but rather commending the whole production as a great fact, from which each cause and interest must derive its own benefit, making its own corrections, we shall direct attention to the Report by which these statistics are introduced. This Report is of considerable length, and bears the impression of having been drawn up with great care and labour, as well as with a praiseworthy anxiety to perform so important a public work with all the energy and zeal which the author could command. It has not been done by one whose only ambition is to get through, in a respectable manner, an arduous task; but it is the work of a mind more anxious to exceed than to fall short of its appointed task. He looks forward to his words being read throughout Europe, and therefore occasionally is more explicit than would be necessary in writing only for his own countrymen; and, for the benefit of this extended circulation, he deals in doctrinal summaries and historical abstracts, which are often delicate ground. Indeed, it rather took us by surprise to find the official Census of 1851 prefaced by a history of the religion of England, methodically commencing with the age of the Druids, and boldly rushing on through every doubtful period of the Church's annals, abounding in broadly stated assertions about individuals and classes, and stamping, as it were, with the Registrar-General's seal, a certain random abstract of popular notions on the history and doctrines of our Church. We are disposed to leave other sects to deal with their own doctrines as here defined; but we cannot forbear noticing, on our own parts, what now goes forth to the world as an authorized account of the whole position of our Church. It is first stated that there are, 'thirty-five different religions in England and Wales-twenty-seven native, and nine foreign;'which looks like thirty-six. The former are principally subdivisions of the four great non-conforming bodies, known under the titles of Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Methodists, together with the Society of Friends, Unitarians, Moravians, Glassites, New Church, and Brethren. Among the latter are some small congregations of foreign Protestants; but the only important sect, in respect of numbers, is the Roman Catholic Church. The list concludes with the Catholic and Apostolic Church,' the Latter-day Saints, and the Jews, these three being apparently difficult of classification, and altogether rather unmanageable. As popular misconceptions are entertained of the tenets of these various bodies, Mr. Mann attempts to set each before the public in its true colours, commencing this large subject with the landing of Cæsar on the coast of Britain. After a short notice of Jupiter and Apollo, and then of the Druids, he arrives at the introduction of Christianity, giving various opinions as to when this took place, and the degree of influence possessed by the Church during the first centuries of the Christian era. The tribute given to the ancient British Church is fair and satisfactory. Its early struggles and its independence of Rome are acknowledged, though but few details of its history can be given. The tide of Saxon paganism drove, however, these early fruits of the Christian religion into Cornwall and Wales; and England, for a time, worshipped those different conceptions of divinity, which have by a singular fate left their trace in the names by which we distinguish the days of the week, and even the great Christian festival of Easter. But the Sun, Moon, Woden, Friga, and Eostre, all in their turn, were banished from the island as objects of worship, and the Church was again triumphant. The landing of S. Augustine and his forty coadjutors, in the year 596, gradually prepared the way for the universal acknowledgment of the Christian religion about 681. The history of the Saxon Church, its unceasing efforts at national freedom, its methodical ordering of ecclesiastical rules and canons, need not be here discussed; nor shall we be drawn too far into the general subject of Church history by any such comments as the following, on a critical portion of our history, about which no one probably ever thought of consulting even the Registrar-General, much less his deputed officer: |