The Rev. Dean Hole iii 



reforms were needed, what with the viscous system of plural 

 livings and the inevitable result — non-resident parsons. In many 

 cases even the curates they employed to do their work lived 

 miles outside their parishes ; but Bishops are kittle cattle ! 



Dean Hole's idea was to have frequent and bright services, 

 with plenty of good music ; he liked to see bands and other 

 forms of instrumental music in church in addition to the organ, 

 and he had some quite exciting times with the " No-Popery " 

 people. The first parsons to adopt the white surplice were 

 often hooted at, and the Primitive Methodists held meetings 

 with great clamour outside his church as a sort of protest. This 

 went on until some genius thought of an effective counterblast. 

 They held a bell-ringing practice whenever the Methodists 

 clamoured, and it proved so successful that the enemy had to 

 remove its meeting elsewhere. 



At the time that Hole was a curate, earning £100 a year, he 

 heard village orators assuring their hearers that he was a 

 bloated aristocrat with a salary of £1,000 a year, and was also 

 an intimate friend of the Pope. It seemed as if nothing the 

 clergy could do was right — a position, it seems to me, that was 

 not peculiar to that era alone. Again and again I have noticed 

 in villages that if the parson visits his parishioners he is called 

 a busybody, and if he does not, he is slack and they wonder 

 what he is paid for. Hole said clergymen were like the flying 

 fish, that are seized by albatrosses if they fly and are devoured 

 by dolphins when they return to the water. 



His views on the temperance question were strong, and he 

 opposed the prohibitionists tooth and nail, believing that the 

 proper way to combat drunkenness was to improve public- 

 houses and educate the populace out of bad ways. I have heard 

 vitriolic prohibitionists describe this attitude, which is the one 

 generally adopted by the " moderates," as being ready to do 

 anything to mitigate the evil except cure it ; which seems 

 rather unkind, but I am content to leave its refutation to abler 

 scribes. 



Dean Hole died in 1904, at the age of eighty-five, one of the 

 best-loved and most respected men of his generation. 



