Our Nonconformist neighbours know all about such cases, and cannot understand why they should exist. They know that a Wesleyan or a Congregational minister who should underlie any grave suspicion would infallibly disappear from the neighbourhood in a week. Why should the rector of Z----, whose intemperance has been clearly proved, be allowed to return to his parish after his term of suspension, and begin again to minister among the same people whose sense of decency he has outraged till it was past all bearing? You tell your Nonconformist friend that it cannot be helped because the reverend sot has got a freehold in his benefice. “Oh, it can’t be helped, can’t it?” he answers; “that’s it, is it? The law ain’t to blame, and the bishop ain’t to blame, and the churchwardens ain’t to blame, and, according to that, the parson ain’t to blame neither, except that the old fool’s been and got found out.” These people know that such scandals are impossible at the chapels; they are not impossible at the churches; they know that the deacons, and the elders, and the conference, or whatever the power may be that keeps up the discipline, comes down with swift severity in the one case, and the rural dean and archdeacons and the bishops are all but powerless in the other. In many cases the influence of a bad example, or the memory of a shameful reputation, is avoided by giving an incumbent indefinite leave of absence; but this is, after all, only a confession of weakness, and the fact that the parson still takes the income of the benefice, though his work is done by another, that itself is a scandal. Ecclesiastical reformers, lay or clerical, who stop short of dealing with the subject of the parson’s freehold, are merely hacking and lopping the branches in the vain hope of saving the tree. If the thing is rotten, let it die placidly, or let it be cut down bravely. Where you have not the pluck to do the one thing, why fidget about the other? Happily, however, we are not much troubled with “criminous clerks,” we country parsons. The regular out-and-out bad ones usually retire into holes and corners, and they are but few and far between. We hear of them much more from our Meetingers than from any one else. The Meetinger keeps himself posted up with the last clerical escapade, and fires it off at us when he gets a chance, and the old argument has to be gone over again, and the parson goes home feeling that he was born to be badgered, and that he must expect it even to the end of the world.