ENGLAND AND WALES.
58,323 square miles and a population (1901) of 32,526,075. The established Church is the Church of England (see England, Church oF), but all other religious bodies are fully recognised and tolerated, and no civil disability attaches to any class of British subjects because of their religious beliefs or unbelief. Since no religious census of Great Britain has recently been taken, the statistics of the present article are drawn from year-books and other sources, so that the figures represent not only different years, but also refer sometimes to England alone, sometimes to England and Wales, and sometimes to the British Isles.
In the Established Church in England and Wales there are two archbishops, thirty-five bishops, thirty suffragan and two assistant bishops. Under the bishops are thirty-two deans,
ninety-five archdeacons, and eight hundred and ten rural deans. For the management of ecclesiastical 8,ffairs, each of the archbishoprics, or "provinces," has a council, or Convocation (q.v.), consisting of the bishops, archdeacons, and deans in person, and of a certain number of proctors as the representatives of the clergy. These councils are summoned by the respective archbishops in pursuance of the king's command. When assembled, they must have the king's license before they can deliberate and also the sanction of the crown to their resolutions before they are binding on the clergy, so that their actual power is extremely limited. The number of civil parishes (districts for which a separate poor rate is or can be made) was 14,900 at the census of 1901. These, however, seldom coincide with ecclesiastical parishes, which, during recent years, have lost their old importance, the ancient parishes having been frequently divided into districts, each of which is virtually an independent parish. Of such parishes there were 14,080 in 1901, including those of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Since 1818 the Church Building Society and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners have formed upward of 3 000 new ecclesiastical parishes. Each parish has its church, presided over by an incumbent in priest's orders, and known as rector, vicar, or perpetual curate according to his relation to the temporalities of his parish. Private persona possess the right of presentation to about 8,500 benefices; the patronage of the others belongs mainly to the king, the bishops and cathedrals, the Lord Chancellor, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The census returns for 1901 gave the number of the clergy of the Church of England as 25,235. In 1905 there were 14,029 incumbents and about 7,500 curates and unbeneficed clergy, while the non-active list comprised about 4,000. The church accommodation, according to returns by 13 948 incumbents, was as follows: in pariah churches, 5,774,608; in chapels-of-ease, 674,038; in mission-rooms, etc., 733,607; total 7,182,253. The number of communicants was estimated at 2,223,207; of Sunday School teachers at 209,338; of Sunday School scholars at 2,467,902. The gross annual income of the clergy in 1904-05 was estimated at £4,539,350, and the net income at £3,574,430. The amount of the voluntary coniributiona|
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