3i6 NEW SOUTH WALES. 



amount of study and preparation would fit young men for professional 

 or commercial life, Avliere tlie emoluments are so much, greater andtlie 

 prospect of comfortable domestic life is more assured. The average 

 stipends of clergymen hardly guarantee this, and since the payment 

 is contingent on public interest or good will, or the personal popu- 

 larity of the minister, the element of uncertainty and dependence 

 about it is not alluring to the self-helpful young Australian. And 

 then, if the critic finds the general temperament lacking in religious 

 enthusiasm, a question is invited as to how far that enthusiasm finds 

 itself encouraged. Have the Churches since they were thrown on their 

 own resources by the withdrawal of State aid developed sufiicient 

 attractive power of their own to make their influence personally felt ? 

 It has been said that the education of the average Australian clergy- 

 man as compared with his fellows in other places left something to be 

 desired, that services lack attractiveness, and that church organisa- 

 tion is wanting in that element of effectiveness which is necessar}^ to 

 make it part of the life of the people. How far their assertions are 

 true may be judged to some extent by the progress and present posi- 

 tion of the various denominations. Certainly, the colonies labour 

 under the disadvantage of being comparatively new. Bourget, in 

 remarking upon this subject in the United States, has something to 

 say about the modernness of it all, — its buildings, its traditions, its 

 methods, and its associations. His remarks apply to us. We have no 

 venerable buildings, no church life of centuries to look back upon, no 

 associations with an historic or personal past to kindle an interest and 

 a sentiment. Eeligion in the colonies, like the institutions and the 

 towns and cities themselves, is new and modern. It has its history 

 and its traditions still to make. These pioneer conditions which made 

 the colony what it is are productive of a material and practical spirit, 

 and it would hardly consort with the fitness of things to expect that 

 the personal effort and public activity which have had so much to do 

 to make the country fit to live in, would have left much time for the 

 cultivation of a temperament over-favourable to the encouragement 

 of the religious or literary or artistic mood. This consideration must 

 be borne in mind in connection with our present subject ; and yet, 

 after making every allowance, it is by no means certain that the Colony 

 of New South Wales has been behindhand in the development of 

 religious institutions. 



The detailed figures of this subject are best shown in the census 

 returns of 1891, though later figures are of course available. From 

 that source we learn that for the year named, while the total population 

 of the Colony was returned at 1,123,954, the number of persons not 

 specifically included in one or other of the religious bodies was made 

 up from returns under various headings as about 30,000, while about 

 14,000 others either objected to state their religious belief or failed to 

 define it. Putting the whole at under 50,000, it will be seen that the 

 return does not show such a mixed condition of things as would be 

 reasonably probable, considering the various and widespread sources of 

 population, and the necessary difference between religious organisations 

 in Australian communities and elsewhere. Twenty years ago or more 

 Mr. Anthony Trollopc, in the book he wrote about the Colonies, had a 

 sentence to the effect that he felt bound to record his opinion that 



