Waste :  usefulness ::  12-1/2 :  1.

They threw away this opportunity; they could not tear away the ecclesiastical rags with which the new foundation of 1827—­the mock St. Katherine’s—­has been wrapped in imitation of the old.  In an age when the universities have been secularized, when the Fellows of colleges are no longer required to be in Orders, when every useless old charity is being reformed, and every endowment reconsidered with a view to making it useful to the living as, under former conditions, it was to the dead, they actually proposed to increase the uselessness and the waste by adding a fourth Brother (which has not been done), and raising the stipends of Brothers and Sisters.  They also recommended the establishment of an upper school, with ’foundation boarders.’  Considering that the upper and middle classes have already appropriated to their own use almost every educational endowment in the country, this proposition seems too ridiculous.  The whole Report is indeed a marvellous illustration of the tenacity of old prejudices.  Yet it did one good thing; it recommended that the accounts of the Hospital should be submitted every year to the Charity Commissioners, thus distinctly recognising the fact that the new foundation is not an ecclesiastical institution, but a charity.

The Report mentions several propositions which had been laid before the Commissioners during their inquiry for the application of the revenues.  The Committee of the Adult Orphan Institution thought that they should like to administer the funds; the Rector of St. George’s-in-the-East thought that he should very much like to use them for the purpose of converting that parish into ’a collegiate church, under a dean and canons, who, with a sisterhood, might devote themselves to the spiritual benefit, etc.’; others suggested that a missionary collegiate church should be established ’as a centre of missionary work for the East of London, with model schools, refuges, reformatories, etc., conducted by the clergy.’  Others, again, pleaded for the use of the money in aid of the crowded parishes near the Precinct.

The Commissioners were of a different opinion.  The Hospital, they said, never had a local character.  This is the most startling statement that ever issued from the mouth of a Lord Chancellor.  Not a local character?  Then for whom were the services of the church held?  Where were the Bedeswomen found?  Where the poor scholars?  Where did the church stand?  Who got the doles?  Not a local character?  We might as well contend, for example, that Rochester Cathedral and Close and School have no local character; that Portsmouth Dockyard has no local character; that Westminster School has no local character.  St. Katherine’s Hospital belonged to its Precinct, where it had stood for some hundred years.  As well pretend that the Tower itself has no local character.  The ‘local character’ of St. Katherine’s grew year by year:  the founder thought only to make a bridge for her children from purgatory to heaven by the harmonious voices of the Master, the Brothers, and the Sisters; but purpose widens.  Presently purgatory disappears, and the whole ecclesiastical part of the foundation, except service in the church, vanishes with it.  There remain, however, the revenues, and these belong, if any revenues could, to the locality.