A Lecture On Curates.

I need not explain that the legal aspect of this important matter is not in my view. Not long ago I listened, in the library of Ridley Hall, to an instructive lecture, by a diocesan Chancellor, on the law of Curates; one of a series on Church Law delivered under the sanction of the University. The Lecturer informed the audience, certainly he informed me, of many points of practical moment not clearly known to us before. He gave a sketch of the history of the licensed Curate as an institution, and made us aware that he is a modern institution, comparatively speaking. Before the Reformation the numerous host of "chantry-priests" was largely used to supplement the offices of the parochial Clergy. After the Reformation, for a very long while, the pastoral arrangements did not include a special institution of Assistants. Then, as the unhappy system of pluralities grew large and common, such as it was all through the eighteenth century and beyond it, "the Curate" meant not the active assistant of the resident Pastor but the substitute for the non-resident--the Curate-in-Charge. It was not till well within these last hundred years that men were commonly to be found doing what we now understand so well as Assistant-Curates' work. The presence in the Church of us Assistant-Curates (I hold a licence myself, and am therefore one of the company) is at once an effect and a sign both of the great increase of population and of the concurrent increase throughout the Church of England of the desire for fuller and more laborious ministrations.