Page:The Parochial System (Wilberforce, 1838).djvu/24

 taking an average of thirty-four parishes, we find the proportion of pastors to their flocks to be one to 15,100. Such is the condition of our metropolis. Many of the manufacturing and commercial towns are not much less destitute. In two parishes in Liverpool there are but four clergymen to 34,000 souls; in Macclesfield, three to 23,000; in Oldham, four to 32,000; in Leeds, nine to 71,000; in Sheffield, the same number to 73,000. In other instances we find large districts (not towns, and therefore called villages), where, from the discovery of coal, and other causes, a scattered population has rapidly accumulated; and a flock of ten or fifteen thousand dispersed over a surface many miles in extent, are still entrusted to a single pastor.

In all these cases our parochial system is little more than a delusion; we retain the name and the form, we call the incumbents the pastors of the whole flock, they are charged by the bishop with the spiritual care of the whole; but in the sight of God and man they are not, and cannot be, responsible for the performance of impossibilities. They are the ministers of their own churches—they are the heads too of a sort of mission, bound to labour according to their power for the spiritual good of the multitudes around them; but to require that they should penetrate the mass, and become personally acquainted with the thousands who compose it, that they should distinguish the several