The English have an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost unacquainted, and it is in daily use, for the church bulks large in public affairs over there. Such terms as /vicar/, /canon/, /verger/, /prebendary/, /primate/, /curate/, /non-conformist/, /dissenter/, /convocation/, /minster/, /chapter/, /crypt/, /living/, /presentation/, /glebe/, /benefice/, /locum tenens/, /suffragan/, /almoner/, /dean/ and /pluralist/ are to be met with in the English newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom encountered. Nor do we hear much of /matins/, /lauds/, /lay-readers/, /ritualism/ and the /liturgy/. The English use of /holy orders/ is also strange to us. They do not say that a young man is /studying for the ministry/, but that he is /reading for holy orders/. They do not say that he is /ordained/, but that he /takes orders/. Save he be in the United Free Church of Scotland, he is never a /minister/; save he be a nonconformist, he is never a /pastor/; a clergyman of the Establishment is always either a /rector/, a /vicar/ or a /curate/, and colloquially a /parson/.
In American /chapel/ simply means a small church, usually the branch of some larger one; in English it has the special sense of a place of worship unconnected with the establishment. Though three-fourths of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths), and the Protestant Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in the country is still a /chapel/ and not a /church/.[14] So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large it may be, though now and then /tabernacle/ is substituted. In the same way the English Catholics sometimes vary /chapel/ with /oratory/, as in /Brompton Oratory/. A Methodist, in Great [Pg113] Britain, is not a /Methodist/, but a /Wesleyan/. Contrariwise, what the English call simply a /churchman/ is an /Episcopalian/ in the United States, what they call the /Church/ (always capitalized!) is the /Protestant Episcopal/ Church,[15] what they call a /Roman Catholic/ is simply a /Catholic/, and what they call a /Jew/ is usually softened (if he happens to be an advertiser) to a /Hebrew/. The English Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain name as that which afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race in America.[16] "News of /Jewry/" is a common head-line in the /London Daily Telegraph/, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had many Jews on its staff, including Judah P. Benjamin, the American. The American language, of course, knows nothing of /dissenters/. Nor of such gladiators of dissent as the /Plymouth Brethren/, nor of the /nonconformist conscience/, though the United States suffers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get on without /circuit-riders/, /holy-rollers/, /Dunkards/, /Seventh Day Adventists/ and other such American /ferae naturae/, and are born, live, die and go to heaven without the aid of either the /uplift/ or the /chautauqua/.