OLIN I .IBRARY - CIRCULATION DATE DUE iLifiV 1 U isLJL^ ^ ^S^mskJdi!m& «»«w^g H^/^ ! CAVLORD PRINTBOINU.ft.A. Cornell University Library BX5135 .B49 Letters on church matters by D. C. L. Ill olin 3 1924 029 445 909 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http ://www. arch i ve . o rg/detai Is/cu31 924029445909 leI^ers CHURCH MATTERS B. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE " MORNINQ CHRONICLE.' No. I. " The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON : JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 185L CONTENTS. I. LoKD John Kussell and Scotch Episcopacy n. High CiinROHMEN and the Royal Supkeiiacy m. LoKD Ashley and his Meeting . rV. National Club v. The Bishop op London and Mk. Bennett VI. The London Union on Chukch Matteks . Vn. The Bishop op London and Mr. Bennett Vni. Can Convocation be Kepormed . 3 7 12 17 28 33 39 42 LETTERS CHURCH MATTERS. D. C. L. ^ REPRINTED FROM THE "MORNING CHRONICLE." VOL. I IJI; " The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON: JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1852. I\300C|S.^ -yi4) CONTENTS. LETrER PAGE LXVII. Synodical Action and the Metropolitan Church Union 311 LXVIII. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Tablet . 316 LXIX. A New Session of Convocation .... 320 LXX. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Gawthorn . 323 LXXI. The Church of England in her true Light . . 326 LXXII. What will the Bishops do ; 331 LXXIII. Archbishop Sumner's Case as it is . . . . 334 LXX IV. The Archbishop's Letter to Mr. Palmer . . .340 LXXV. Episcopal Government 345 LXXVI. The Bishop of London on Episcopacy . . . 351 LXXVII. High Churchmen and Public Opinion . . .356 LXXVIII. Synodical Action 360 Appendix. — To Members of the Church of England 366 LXXIX. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Rochester 369 LXXX. The Spirit of Popery 375 LXXXI. Intercourse with Foreign Protestants . . . 384 LXXXII. The Bishop of Manchester's Primary Charge . 388 LXXXIII. Opportunities of Churchmen 393 LXXXIV. Lord Ashley and Lord Shaftesbury . . . .398 LXXXV. Education and Toleration— 1 403 LXXXVI. Education and Toleration— II 408 LXXXVII. Education and Toleration— III 411 XXXVIII. Christmas, 1851 418 LXXXIX. Education and Toleration— IV 421 XC. Extension of Church Services .... 426 XCI. The Gorham Judgment as it is . . . . 430 XCII. Education and Toleration— V 436 XCIII. Churchmen, and the coming Session . . . 439 XCIV. Convocation in Action 443 XCV. The Church and a new Ministry .... 445 XCVI. The Australian Church in Synod . . . .448 XCVII. The Pew System 449 XCVIII. A Churchman's Politics 464 XCIX. Cathedrals in America, and Synods at home . . 457 C. The Laity in Synod 463 LETTEES CHURCH MATTERS. I. LORD JOHN RUSSELL AND SCOTCH EPISCOPACY. Nov. 25, 1850. In Lord John Russell's sufficiently notorious letter to the Bishop of Durham upon the new Papal hierarchy occurs the following passage : — " It is impossible to confound the recent measures of the Pope with the division of Scotland into dioceses by the Episcopal Church, or the arrangement of districts in England by the Wesleyan Conference." The first question which most readers of the letter have proba- bly asked themselves is, Why should Lord John have broken the flow of his argument by an abrupt ejaculation about matters which, so far from confounding them with the Pope's measures, we had not so much as thought about ? The answer to this is not quite so obvious, but it is very undeni- able. Qui s' excuse s' accuse. The "recent measures of the Pope" are so easily, viewed politically, to be confounded with at least the division of Scotland, as to be absolutely and entirely parallel with it, and accordingly Lord John's his- torical knowledge made him uneasy, and led him to blurt out what is,' in point of fact, a refutation of his whole letter. In proving this, I shall, it seems to me, be doing good ser- vice to the Church and hierarchy of England. The first requisite A 2 to fight a good battle is to take up a good position. We hare, in the present instance, our choice between the political and the ecclesiastical battle-field. We had, then, best learn, as soon as possible, that the former is untenable, that we may- concentrate our forces upon the latter. To begin with what everybody knows, the Established Church of Scotland repudiates prelacy— that of England, in its theory (however much this feeling has fallen into abey- ance as a popular tenet), holds it essential to a properly con- stituted church. As, therefore, there are Dissenting con- gregations in England, rejoicing in the bland eloquence of Dr. Gumming and others, which are in communion with, and in some sort form a portion of, the Establishment of Scot- land ; so, in the latter country, there are Dissenting congre- gations in communion with, and forming part of the whole of the Church of England, under the governance of certain ofiicers, on whom their flocks have bestowed territorial titles — Bishops of St. Andrews, Glasgow, Moray, &c. — the desig- nations under which the old bishops of the days in which Episcopacy was established across the Tweed were recog- nised as high state ofiicers. You will, in this slight introductory statement, see suffi- cient reason why this state of things might not unnaturally be confounded with that recently introduced into England by the officiousness of Pio None ; but when I shall go on to show you, first, that this episcopal body is the remnant of an old establishment ; secondly, that its ancient territorial hier- archy fell into desuetude after it ceased to be established ; thirdly, that it was for some time governed by bishops, with- out territorial titles ; fourthly, that these bishops, propria motu, in the teeth of the State, re-assumed territorial designa- tions ; that at length they were recognised by the Parliament of England, but not under their territorial designations ; and, finally, that the English bishops, here acting in their spiritual, and not in their political capacity, do, for all that, treat them as territorial bishops possessing the same authority over dis- tricts in Scotland ("governing" them, to borrow a phrase from Cardinal Wiseman), which \Xwj themselves possess over the districts into which ecclesiastical England is divided, I think you must acknowledge that the confusion is on the side of Lord John Russell, and that the theory of episcopacy, as held and acted on by our bishops, makes the present question one of ecclesiastical precedent and canon law, and not one of the Queen's supremacy. I need not recapitulate the ups and downs of episcopacy in Scotland, from the Reformation till ] 688. It is sufficient to say that William III. found an established church in that country, governed by territorial bishops. He made them an offer, through one of their body (Bishop Rose, of Edinburgh), who had come up to London, that if they would recognise his right to the throne, he would maintain the Episcopal Church as the Establishment. Their reply was that their consciences prevented them from violating the oath of allegiance they had taken to James II.,'and accordingly the present established Kirk of Scotland was installed in the temporalities of the Church. Those, however, to whom the episcopacy was a dogma of faith, of course ignored this arrangement — as those to whom the Papacy was a dogma of faith ignored the English Reforma- tion, — and formed themselves into a dissenting body under the pastoral care of the deprived bishops. Episcopacy being the principle of life of this body, it of course filled up the thin- ning ranks of the old bishops by new consecrations. For some time these new bishops were simply given the eccles- iastical office of a bishop, without any definite diocese being allotted to them. At last the old bishops had all died ofi" in the early part of the last century, and the Episcopal Church of Scotland was left governed by what called itself " the College of Bishops," who conjointly exercised an episcopacy, by plurality of vote, over the whole body. This epoch was, ■mutatis mutandis, very parallel to that of the government of the English Roman Catholics by vicars-apostolic. At length, as in the one body so in the other, there arose a party who clamoured for a distinct territorial episcopacy, as the only complete and satisfactory form of episcopal government. It seems, by the revelations which have of late come to light, that this very natural ebullition of national feeling among the English Roman Catholics was at first cold-shouldered by the vicars-apostolic, who preferred their condition of .depen- dency on Rome. So in Scotland, the territorial party was opposed by a clique among the bishops, known as the College party, who fought for the retention of that temporary and unsatisfactory development of the hierarchy, from the feeling that this organization would render them more dependent upon St. Germains than the territorial one. ■ They, in short, were Erastianising Establishmentarians upon the Jacobite hypo- thesis ; their opponents, the party who were anxious for the security of spiritual liberty. At length, the latter party pre- vailed ; and the Scotch bishops, at that time a sect barely tolerated by the State, reassumed, deep in the first half of the last century, the ancient territorial designations of the old Scottish Episcopal Church, before and since the Kefor- mation. In a few years came the Eebellion of 1745, and the Episcopalians showed themselves, for the most part, ad- herents of the old family ; and their scanty toleration -v^as changed into active persecution, by an Act of Parliament, in which that august body, of whose 528 members in the Lower House, 513 were at that time, by law, in the communion of the Church of England — decided that to celebrate the service of that Church of England across the Tweed to more than three persons, should be penal — punishable, if I remember right, by transportation. In the face of this legislation, the territorial episcopate in Scotland transmitted itself till more tolerant days came. Successive Acts of Parliament gave it more and more of State recognition, the last of which was the 3rd and 4th of Victoria, chap. 33, in which its prelates are described as " exercising episcopal functions within some district or place in Scotland." Such is the legal authoriza- tion and style of seven clergymen, who govern about a hun- dred scattered congregations in Presbyterian Scotland, and who are universally known in society, addressed and treated as, and sign themselves by the imposing mediaeval titles of. Bishop of Aberdeen, Bishop of Edinburgh, Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway, Bishop of St. Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dum- blane, Bishop of Brechin, Bishop of Moray and Boss, Bishop of Argyle and the Isles. Nay, more, the Bishops of the United Church of England and Ireland, who as Peers of Parliament are only cognizant of them as above quoted, as spiritual fathers, addressed them by their assumed appellations, and deal with them as filling within Scotland the same religious position which they themselves occupy in England. Not many years since a refractory clergyman, of English ordina- tion, but settled in Scotland, gave his bishop considerable trouble. The late Archbishop of Canterbury was appealed to, and he, the Peer of Parliament who had brought in what became by royal assent the 3rd and 4th Victoria, chap. 33, in his reply, lays down that English Episcopal clergy- men, if they settle in Scotland, are bound, in conscience, to give the territorial bishop, under whom they may place themselves, that same obedience which, while in Eng- land, the law would have compelled them to render to tlieir territorial bishop here — he being a bishop appointed by the Queen, " the fountain of honour" — those of Scotland leaders of a dissenting sect, elected by that sect, and self-appointed to their dioceses. I need not, sir, trespass longer upon your columns. I have, 1 think, sufficiently shown that Lord John Russell's repudiation of the Scotch parallel is nugatory, and I have also shown that our bishops, in making (as they have made within the last fortnight) the invasion of the Queen's pre- rogative their chief argument against this aggression of the Church of Rome, have relied upon the weakest part of their case. They have a legitimate arena all their own — the spiritual rights they have acquired over their dioceses. Let them boldly entrench themselves there. I do not think that the polemics of the Flaminian Gate will easily carry their bulwarks, and the generous spirit of Churchmen will back them up. But let them continue to rely upon the clap-trap cry of the invasion of the Queen's prerogative, and they will in the end be acknowledged, I fear, to be neither very con- sistent logicians, nor very courageous chief pastors of the flock. IL HIGH CHURCHMEN AND THE ROYAL SUPREMACY. Dec. 9, 1850. Various have been the stratagems adopted by the par- tisans of Lord John Russell to convert the anti-Papal excitement of the day to a little private advantage, by the ignominious expedient of turning the popular indignation against a party in the Church, which happens not to be generally understood, and which the Premier therefore thinks he can readily crush, and so gain a cheap popularity with the rest of the world, who may not have taken the trouble to ascertain what the real opinions of that party are. Amongst these stratagems, none has been more openly practised, and none has proved more generally successful, than the attempt to prove that they are enemies to the Queen's prerogative, and desirous of denying her right to be " Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor in these her realms and all other her dominions and countries, over all persons in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as temporal." History shows us how very touchy the English people are when they think the honour of their Sovereign is assailed, and opponents have never scrupled to ventilate this charge against any party which they may desire to crush. To go no further back than the present cen- tury — the suspicion of disaffection attaching to the principal partisans of the two causes was one very great reason which so long postponed the two necessary measures of Roman Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform, and it is still, though somewhat rusty and not a little blunt in the edge, the favourite weapon for one of your morning contemporaries to brandish about. Your columns, an honourable contrast, are willing to take an impartial view of the present conjunction of affairs, ecclesiastically as well as politically, and I therefore venture confidently to intrude upon you with some arguments to show that this charge is not merely incorrect, but absolutely contrary to the fact, and that, if rightly understood, the "High Church" theory of the Royal supremacy in matters ecclesi- astical is the only one which can hold good, and therefore the only one which the Sovereign can hope to preserve in these times. The Royal Supremacy is thus succinctly laid down in the 37th Article:— " Where we attribute to the King's Majesty the chief government, by which titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended, we give not to our princes the ministering of God's Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing the injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen do most plainly testify ; but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly prmces in Holy Scriptures, by God himself, — that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be ecclesi- astical or temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil doers." This definition of the supremacy is the law, both secular and ecclesiastical, for it is the law of the Thirty-nine Articles, which are in force as well by act of Convocation as by act of Parliament. Were there any ambiguity in its expressions, this would be entirely removed by the first and second Canons of 1603, likewise the joint act of Church and State:— " . . . . The King's power within his realms of England, Scot- land, and Ireland, and all other his dominions and countries, is the highest power under God, to whom all men, as well inhabitants as born within the same, do, by God's laws, owe most loyalty and obedience, afore and above all other powers and potentates on the earth. " Whosoever shall hereafter affirm that the King's Majesty hath not the same authority in causes ecclesiastical that the godly kings had amongst the Jews, and Christian emperors of the primitive Church, or impeach any part of his regal supremacy in the said causes restored to the Crown, and by the laws of this realm therein established, let him be excommunicated ipso facto, and not restored, but only by the Archbishop, after his repentance, and public revocation of those his wicked errors." This, sir, is my case, as it is the case of Lord John Russell. You will sec that in it are established these points — that the Sovereign has not the ministering of God's Word, 9 nor of the Sacraments, but that he or she possesses that only prerogative which we see to have been given to all godly princes in Holy Scripture by God himself, td godly kings among the Jews, and to Christian emperors of the primitive Church — that of ruling all estates or degrees, ecclesiastical or temporal, and of restraining with the civil sword all stubborn and evil doers. When these definitions were framed, the law of England was only cognizant of one religion as a State possibility. To be an English subject was to be a member of the Church of England. Our courts only took notice of "malignant Popish recusants" and of " nonconformists," as of the sub- jects for fine and imprisonment, as of human bodies upon which were to be put in force the tortures of the rack and the gibbet, the thumbscrew and the stake — heads whose ears were to be cropped off, trunks that were to be disembowelled. Accordingly there would be no ambiguity as to what the Supremacy meant — it must have been a supremacy over the Church of England, and that alone. It would have been absurd to have guarded people against the notion that the Monarch laid any claim to minister sacraments, the ministra- tion of which was a capital offence ; and there could be no doubt that, among the stubborn and evil doers whom the civil sword was called in to restrain, were included all who did not conform to the Church of England. But time has developed, happily, a wiser and more merciful state of things. Instead of hunting Dissenters and Eoman Catholics for torture and death, the Queen's courts hold out to them the same equal protection of life and limb which they do to all other loyal subjects, and exercise an equal tutelage over their property, whether private or devoted to the support of their different religious opinions. The civil sword (to apply the phrase to the coercive jurisdiction of civil as well as of criminal courts), which is held out to pro- tect the religious endowments of Nonconformists, is the same which protects those of Churchmen — ^just as that denial of the Sovereign's right to minister God's Word and the Sacra- ments, which is the essence of nonconformity, is, by solemn act of Church and State, guaranteed to the Churchman. How, then, does the " High Churchman," and how does Lord John Eussell, apply the statements of the Articles and of the Canons to existing circumstances ? The former en- deavours to do so upon the principle of fair play. He asserts that, as all religious denominations, if sincere, must hold their form of faith most dear to them, so the limitation which 10 is imposed upon the Sovereign not to interfere with the ministration of God's Word and the Sacraments among them must be equal and stringent for all (with of course the self- evident exception of such sects as may violate primary laws of morality or natural religion in their tenets). So, on the other hand, all denominations have an equal claim upon the Sovereign, as the fountain of justice, to see that right is done to them within their respective limits — that is, to see that their own recognised governing powers impartially act up to their own by-laws in carrying out the polity necessary to the sustentation of tlie corporate character of the particular denomination. To the Eoyal Supremacy, so understood, the High Churchman is willing to bow implicitly. It appears to him a thing tolerant, wise, and plainly needful to sustain the framework of society, and he conceives that, in vindicating it for all denominations in common with his own, he is doing them a service, and has the right to claim that they shall aid in establishing it for him. He denies the right of his Sovereign to interfere with the primary doctrines of his creed — so he denies that the Queen has the power to tamper with the provisions of that confession which is so sacred to the Presbyterian. He claims that she shall not contravene the old canonical process of confirming bishops of the Church of England — so he claims that she shall not attempt to force the Wesleyans to elect their president in any way contrary to their constitution. He claims, moreover, alike for those who deny that the bishop was rightly confirmed or the presi- dent rightly elected according to their respective by-laws, a fair hearing in the courts of Westminster, and, if successful, a mandamus that right be done in virtue of that same supremacy over all men in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as temporal, in the one case as the other, which is our gracious Sovereign's birthright. As sternly does he deny that the Queen, or the Courts of Westminster, or a com- mittee in Downing Street, can tamper with the doctrine of the Church of England, or of the Wesleyan Connexion, or fairly proceed with the final adjudication of the case, if it prove to be one not of the party impugned, till this point shall have been cleared up elsewhere. Now, sir, how does Lord John Russell deal with the same question? We have not, that I am aware of, any essay of his upon the subject ; but in his case the old ^tvoxcvh— deeds, not tvords — comes in very opportunely. With regard to Churchmen, he interprets the supremacy as it affects the ministering of God's Word and the Sacraments, by making 11 a Cabinet question of the rejection of a bill brouglit in this year by the Bishop of London, which provided that in any case where the doctrine of the Church of England was affected, the court of appeal should be her bishops, and not a com- mittee of lay judges, of whom the majority need not be members of the Church of England — this bill being pro- fessedly grounded on the dissatisfaction raised by a recent judgment of that committee, which had handled the doctrine of one of the Sacraments contrary to the formal judgment of the Metropolitan's Court, and in a way repugnant to the known opinions of most of the Bench of Bishops. This was one of Lord John Russell's deeds. Another of older date, but not forgotten, was, allowing the Queen's mandate to go forth for the consecration of a bishop of whose orthodoxy there were such grave suspicions, that his University had put him under a severe and lasting stigma for printed statements — whose election by the chapter was doubtful, and at whose confirma- tion an opposition according to all the forms of law had been made. Lord John Eussell has not hitherto had the opportunity of showing by his deeds whether he interprets the supremacy as vigorously in the case of dissenters. If he does so, it requires no prophet to foresee a disturbance ; if he does not, it noway demands a philosopher to say that his ideas of equity are peculiar. Such, sir, is the common-sense explanation of that " High- Church" (as it is called) theory of the Supremacy, which has been the butt of so much ill-natured and ignorant comment of late. Such is implied, and no more, in a paper which certain clergymen put forth not long ago. Whether that paper were as clear as it might have been, I do not pretend to say; whether the phrase " temporal accidents of spiritual things," about which so many brainless criticisms have been concocted, carries with it its own meaning to readers not conversant with the. precise language of the schools, I do not claim to decide ; but that the meaning of the document was what I have endeavoured to draw out, I fearlessly assert. And I go on to assert likewise, that those who hold the Supremacy so defined, are her Majesty's most truly loyal subjects, and the best upholders of her prerogative; claiming, as they do for her, that Ecclesiastical Supremacy which extends over all denominations of her subjects alike, and which is such that common sense and common convenience will confirm it to her ; while that, on the other hand, of Lord John Eussell's assertion, is one which can only apply to the members of the Church of England, and is so intolerable in ]2 its application to them that it is impossible that it can long endure. The first is the living reality of the free constitution headed by a Sovereign of the House of Hanover in the nine- teenth century, and the other the impossible reminiscence of the State domineered over by a Tudor monarch of the sixteenth. III. LORD ASHLEY AND HIS MEETING. " Dec. 10, 1850. In your leading article of last Friday, you ably expose the fallacy contained in that sentence of Lord Ashley's speech in which his lordship announces his preference to " worship with Lydia on the banks of the river side, rather than with hundreds of surpliced priests in the temple of St. Barnabas ;" implying, as it did imply, taken with its con- text, that the said hundreds of priests, real or imaginary, were to be turned out upon the banks of the river side, and not the imaginative orator. This sentence was clearly consi- dered as the gem of the meeting, for we learn from the report that, " at the close of this sentence, which the noble lord had to repeat, the whole meeting simultaneously rose and testified their satisfaction by loud and most prolonged cheering." One almost regrets to spoil the after-taste of such a satisfac- tion, but truth and grammar must be heard, even above the double recitation of a well-concocted flourish and the din of "loud and most prolonged cheering." Lord Ashley's mag- nanimous resolve was simply a piece of sonorous nonsense, founded upon ignorance of that Greek original which I hope it is not Popery to prefer to the authorised version. The noble orator read in the latter that St. Paul worshipped with Lydia by a river side, " where prayer was wont to be made," and his imagination at once pictured to him the spectacle of some- thing like what we never see in these days, except at a Primitive Methodist revival — and with a very safe fore- thought he closed with this, rather than with the worship of the church or " temple " of St. Barnabas. You must permit me to assert that his lordship cannot have read, or, if he has read, must have forgotten, what St. Luke really wrote, which was, od ivoni^sro Trpoatixv ^ivai, — "where there was a customary proseuche," that is to say, a house or station of prayer, in other words, an oratory — the ac- knowledged meaning of the term proseucM ; so that, instead 13 of having bound himself to turn out upon the river's bank where he listed, his lordship only asserted his preference for frequenting some stated house of prayer by the water side, which might be less gorgeous than St. Barnabas, and might be more so. So much for Lord Ashley's Greek, and his success in making an antithesis. Still, that he would not be seen within " the temple of St. Barnabas," even to save a Sunday's after- noon by the side of the Thames, I am perfectly willing to believe. Once, and only once in my life, I happened to go to church at the Chapel Koyal, St. James's. The worship con- ducted at this chapel you probably know. There is an altar, upon which are placed, with other plate, two huge silver candlesticks, and the chanting is performed by surpliced priests, surpliced " gentlemen," and a set of boys, who wear not merely the surplice, but coats of scarlet and gold. Once, I say, and only once, was I present at this service. It was on a Sunday afternoon, rather late in the summer, and, besides the surpliced officiators, not a dozen people were present. Amongst this scanty congregation, just opposite to me, stood Lord Ashley. Whether or not the noble lord is in the habit of deserting his parish church for the Chapel Eoyal, I have no means of ascertaining. All 1 can say is, that having once been at that chapel, and having on that occasion seen Lord Ashley there, his lordship is, in my mind, indelibly mixed up with the ceremonial of the Chapel Eoyal. I should be very glad to see a request made to Lord Ashley to explain the subtle lines of demarcation existing in his mind, which can, on the one hand, lead him to reject his own parish church for the Chapel ■ Royal, with its silver candlesticks, its chanting, and its surpliced priests and choir- men, and boys in surplices, with gold and red, moreover ; and, on the other hand, induce him to prefer the Thames banks to worshipping in " the temple of St. Barnabas." In short, sir, to any person even moderately acquainted with Church history, allusions like the one to worshipping with Lydia on the bank of the river side, when employed as against the theory of ceremonial worship, are absolutely worth nothing. Rightly or wrongly (as the case may be in the eyes of Lord Ashley and Mr. Bevan), the early Christian Church always inclined to ceremonial whenever it could. In the ear- liest days of its existence, when the assemblies of the faithful had to be held by stealth, in fear of their lives, it was, of course, plainly impossible to carry out this to much extent; but, with 14 the very first blush of quiet times, the natural tendency of the religious mind to honour God with the best of worldly things, broke out. The prelude to the terrible persecution of Dio- cletian was characteristic. At Nicomedia, the then seat of the government of the Eoman, as London is of the British Empire, was a church, like " the temple of St. Barnabas," richly adorned, and these adornments, like those of " the temple," were the voluntary offerings of the pious. As in London, so in Nicomedia, intimation was given from govern- mental quarters that the Christians were no longer to follow their own tastes in their own churches ; and as in London, so in Nicomedia, a mob was easily found to carry out the hint. In the latter case, the populace was more scientifically disci- plined, and more really in earnest, and the police more sub- servient, and accordingly the church was sacked ; a more business-like way, I cheerfully acknowledge, of carrying a point than convoking a public meeting. In truth. Lord Ashley and his colleagues have had the boldness, or the blindness, to embark upon a crusade, the extent of which, if they mean eiFectually to cover their ground, is little appreciated by any of the possessors of those lungs which so turbulently welcomed the idea of the noble lord worshipping upon the bank of the river side, at the risk of all the disturbance which the method no less than the matter of their interposition will occasion. They may put down this tendency or the other to ceremonial worship in the Church of England ; but it will require nothing less than a a revolution to eradicate the principle, and to prevent a recurrence of what they are pleased to call a grievance in that community. In any religious body like the Established, or the Free Kirk of Scotland, or the Congregationalists in England, where the worship consists merely of an extempore prayer and a sermon — both of them the literary effort of the same man — and of a hymn sent out from the united mouths of several hundred worshippers, ceremonialism is not an essential, though even there we find it creeping out from all sorts of unexpected corners. But, with a worship like that of the Church of England, so eminently varied in its contex- ture — with its confession made by the united congregation, its absolution pronounced by " the priest alone," its cheerful invitation to united psalmody, its recurring course of psalms, its readings of Holy Scriptures, intercalated with a prose hymn — one of the noblest of uninspired productions ; its united profession of the " Catholic faith ;" its sentences where minister, bidden to uprise, and people reciprocate pious 15 ejaculation; its longer collects, each acknowledged by the assent of the congregation ; its anthem " in choirs and places where they sing ;" its alternating litany ; its communion service, referring to the previous worship, and perforce per- formed elsewhere — that elsewhere " the Lord's table" — cere- monialism is absolutely inextinguishable. It is of the essence of the whole affair ; and if ceremonialism is inextinguishable, so, as a sequitur, is a considerable amount of gorgeousness in it. The natural tendency of refined human nature is towards beauty of form, of colour, and of sound. The very face of the world, its mountains, its varied flowers, its song of birds, teaches this ; and wherever some gloomy fanaticism does not warp this natural tendency, we find it to be a first impulse of piety to offer something of all this beauty, which it prizes so much, to the worship of its great and beneficent Creator, whose gift, in truth, it is : and most especially do we observe this tendency in religions whose worship is for- mally ceremonial. Happily, then, the Church of England possesses and prizes ceremonialism and beauty of worship, in spite of my Lord Ashley. The overburdensomeness of the ante-Reformational worship might not unnaturally have led, at the recoil of the great change of the sixteenth century, to its being cast away. But it was otherwise, though not without an undercurrent of Lauries at all times, one of whom — by name Patch, and by profession fool to Queen Elizabeth — broke the "superstitious" fittings of her private chapels, at the instigation of some great folks of the same way of thinking — no wiser man, so history relates, having been found who would undertake the work. Lord Ashley and his friends proclaimed themselves lay members of the Church of England, and not of the Presbyte- rian or Independent body; so, of course they must abjure the doings of the Roundheads, and hail with satisfaction the resti- tution of that Church in 1660. I appeal to their candour, and not to their cheers, if the immediate result of that resti- tution (which had so soon a terrible call to show its practical bearings in the rebuilding, after the Great Fire, of nearly all the churches of the City) was not towards gorgeousness of external religion. To take but one instance. When the Cathedral of St. Paul's had to be rebuilt, of all conceivable places of worship in the world the one which was adopted to -serve as its model, and to be the object of its emulation, was "The Temple" of St. Peter's at Rome. Accordingly the church was reared, with its lofty vaults, its Litany desk, its eagle from which the lessons are so ceremoniously read, and 16 its numerous stalls rich with Gibbon's carvings to serve as the receptacle of all those hundreds of surpliced priests who have from that day to this continued to chant ("mutter," according to the infallible Lord John) the service. We have even heard that the dangerously Papistical clergyman, who is at present dean of that cathedral, dreams of the abominations of painted glass and painted walls. To give only one more instance from London. There stands on Oornhill a church called St. Peter's, rebuilt after the Fire, and containing what, it seems, is an especial object of aversion to Lord Ashley's friends — a high chancel screen. The consecration sermon of this church was preached by the famous Bishop Beveridge, who absolutely referred with pecu- liar satisfaction to this especial fitting, expressing " wonder why it was not observed in all other churches besides this," as having been "the practice of the Universal Church" "for thirteen or fourteen hundred years." It is true that during the last century the performance of religious worship had degenerated too generally into a cold and slovenly monotony ; but this was the result of the general decay of religious zeal. This, in time, revived; at first, I am glad to own, from the exertions of truly pious and religious men, whose dwarfed successors and representatives are the party that appeared at Freemasons' Hall on Thursday last. A disciple of these now rules, as Metropolitan, the Indian Church, and he has in his city of Calcutta carried through the building of a cathedral — of whose consecration he has himself written the account, from which I send you some extracts : — " The beautiful picture of the Crucifixion rising above them in the great eastern window ; the holy table, with her Majesty's superb service of communion plate ; the stalls for the clergy on the south and north sides of the choir. " In a moment the organ burst forth, and the procession began. Forty clergy were present, and twenty divinity students. " At the offertory nearly 2,000 rupees were collected. " The Holy Communion then commenced. The clergy kneeling round the sacred table, all in their surplices, as in cathedrals at home, was a most touching scene." Supposing Lord Ashley, by some change of politics, to find himself Governor- General of India, would he be prepared to worship by the banks of the river side of the Hoogley, rather than with all the surpliced priests he might find in "the temple" reared by Bishop Daniel Wilson? One more remark, and then I will conclude. Mr. Bennett, in the postscript of his letter to Lord John Russell, has inserted 17 a communication conveying the somewhat startling fact that the recently reformed "evangelic" liturgy of Prussia orders a crucifix, lighted candles, and the sign of the cross as re- quisites for the Sunday service. Mr. Bennett omitted to remind his noble correspondent and parishioner, that the prime adviser in this reformed liturgy is by common consent allowed to have been a gentleman well known in England, little suspected of Papistical or " Tractarian" leanings — the fellow-worker of Lord Ashley himself in their joint darling scheme of the Jerusalem bishopric — the Chevalier Bunsen ! IV. NATIONAL CLUB. Dec. 14, 1850. Their juxtaposition, in Lord John Russell's famous letter, has given a sort of currency to the junction of the adjectives "insolent and insidious," quite independent of the proceeding of which they were originally predicated. They could not help dancing before my eyes while I perused a document recently put forth by a body which calls itself the National Club. This august society has its habitation in a house in Old Palace-yard. It has not yet aspired to rear itself a palace of its own, and we are not aware of M. Soyer ever having been solicited to preside over its kitchen; but, to compensate, the National Club has a knack of writing and publishing quite unknown to its gorgeous but silent rivals. The churchwardens of England have either by this time received, or will, I understand, all receive, from this dignified body, a pastoral letter, accompanied by a note also in print, in which, with admirable modesty, "the committee" requests "immediate consideration" to its hrochure, and a conference with the leading laymen of the parish. It assumes that the receiver can have but one opinion about carrying out the ukase, which it playfully terms "Suggestions," and, in conclu- sion, opines that he will "perhaps be good enough to com- municate as early as possible with the committee." The whole is given under the hand of Mr. W. H. Bellamy, their secretary. There is no doubt a very obvious motive in all this — that of getting the enclosed paper read from curiosity, if from nothing else, to see who this Mr. Bellamy can be who writes so authoritatively, and under what character he insti- B 18 tutes his Visitation, whether as Archdeacon, Special Commis- sioner, or Cardinal Archbishop. The document itself is a pamphlet of seven pages, headed, with all the ingenuity of Roman and of Gothic letters, "Sug- gestions offered to the Lay Members of the Church of England on the best Mode of putting a stop to Eomanizing practices within the Church, by the Committee of the National Club," — and is composed of a short manifesto, bearing the signature of the Duke of Manchester, as President of the Club; and, supplementary to this, a report, addressed to His Grace, by Mr. J. C. Colquhoun, in the name of some sub-committee of the Club. You will see what a daring position is taken up, A volun- tary body of little notoriety and little weight assumes the fact of injurious practices in the Church, and sows broad-cast sug- gestions — not to persons in authority — not to the clergy — not to the Legislature — but to all the laity, to put a stop to them. A proceeding in its essence so democratic, a policy so daring ought in its details to bear the impress of extreme moderation and caution, and it ought, above all things, to make good its grounds of accusation before putting in operation so terrible an engine as the laity of all classes, stirred up by invective and unguided by information. Let tis see how far the Duke of Manchester and Mr. Colquhoun are mindful of this primary law of morals. His Grace, assuming with the dignity of his station in state and club the whole subject-matter, passed on, with a watered recapitulation of its practical portion, to the report; and in that report we find the catalogue of grievances which has called for the hyper-metropolitan interference of Mr. Bellamy, unblushingly summed in statements, every one of which I declare to be either devoid of foundation or so coloured as to be worse than mere invention. After some prefatory matter, the document gives it as the sub-committee's opinion, that " the characteristic of the Church of England" is that "it embraces persons of various shades of theological opinion," and "pre- sents a platform, ample as God's word, on which Calvinist and Arminian, High Church and Low Church, alike may stand." In the same breath it goes on to give its own inter- pretation of this tolerant definition by branding "a large party" standing on that platform with " being permitted to retain its benefices, while they abandon its doctrines" — that is, with straying beyond the platform which is capacious enough to hold in comfort Calvin and Arminius ; and yet, for mer- cenary motives, claiming to share advantages reserved to 19 that standing ground. This party is next charged with keeping their places within the Church of England, "while, in heart and sentiment they have seceded to the Church of Eome." " Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour," said a higher authority than the National Club. How, then, does that body justify this monstrous charge, involving, as it does, imputations of false doctrine, deceit, and sordid motives, which it dares to disseminate through England to breed suspicion in every parish? "Their pro- ceedings may be briefly described ;" that is to say, we will make our accusations, and shirk the proofs on the score of brevity. "In the formalities of their worship — in the decorations of their churches — in the gestures and ob- servances of their ministers, they copy the practices and ritual of Rome." The letter of mine, to which you gave insertion on Tuesday, is, I conceive, an implicit reply to this charge. The worship of the Church of England is, as I have there shown, essentially a ceremonial one; and, fol- lowing the laws of ceremonial worship in every religion, is one admitting of, and naturally running into, external splen- dour. Further, which I did not state there, it must never be forgotten that our Reformers did not spin a new Prayer Book out of their own heads. They took the old English Prayer Books, Breviary, and Missal. They retrenched what they thought superstitious, or superfluous, or burdensome, and they explained the law of these changes in their prefatory matter. They then published the Prayer Book in that compendious form which requires other help than what is definitely laid down in the Rubric, to put the literal carrying out of that rubric into working order. This authority, to which we are to look for this help, is mainly to be found in the rubric which comes immediately before " the Order of Morning Prayer." "And here it is to be noted that such ornaments of the church and ofthe ministers thereof, at all times of their ministration, shall be retained, and be in use, as they were in the Church of England, by the authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI." This rubric is, I believe, little read, and less understood. " The temple of St. Barnabas" is a great advance towards compliance with it — but it is not compliance. Will Lord Ashley, Sir Edward Parry, and the Popes of the National Club believe me when I tell them that the ornaments of the minister herein ordered, as specifically as anything else is ordered, are not merely the surplice, but, at the time of Holy Communion, the cope or else the vestment — that is, the B 2 20 chasuble, the dress in which the Roman Catholic priest says mass. This " large party," anxious as it is for the sake of duty to obey the rubric literally, has yet abstained from doing so in this case, from a dread of scandalising their congregations by such a change, the reasons for which they might not be able to apprehend. I do notblame them for this inconsistency, for inconsistency it is upon their professed principles. On the contrary, I think it shows a prudent and a forbearing spirit; but when I see men, who, for the sake of conciliation, have so sedulously abstained from the strict compliance with their strict code of by-laws, thus accused of copying the practices and ritual of Eome, the time has come to speak out and dare their accusers to the proof. We have seen that the English Prayer Book is an abridgment of the ante-Refor- mational ones (speaking generally) ; one proof of which is, that those Sunday Collects which I doubt not Lord Ashley piously and gratefully makes use of whenever he attends church, are translations, with very few exceptions, from the Collects of the Sarum Missal. The selection, too, of the epistles and gospels comes from the same source, and so on for many other portions of our services. It has so happened that, contemporaneously with the stricter observance of the rubric, has arisen a general taste for Gothic architecture, the solid proof of which is the New Palace of Westminster ; and so all classes. Low Church and High Church, and Romanists also, not to add various sects of Dissenters, have been for some years past copying the architecture of those Gothic churches which our ancestors bequeathed to us. This is now tortured by men who have themselves given into the taste, into a charge of Romanising. The Book of Common Prayer is, we all know, statute law, by the Act of Uni- formity of Charles IL, as it is Church law by the Act of Convocation ; and I apprehend any clergyman might be put into court for not wearing at the time of Holy Communion his cope or vestment. Is this what Mr. Colquhoun points at, when, later in his report, he lays down as one of the alternative remedies for his pet grievance, an appeal to the authorities to carry out the rubric and the penalties for its transgression ? I called your attention in my last letter to those observ- ances which are in force in the "Evangelic" (such is the present legal designation of the Prussian Establishment) "Church" in Prussia — not merely lighted candles, but a crucifix, which the " large party" has never thought of setting up in our churches, although there was one in Queen 21 Elizabeth's Chapel till destroyed by Patch. Supposing the National Club to appeal to the Prussian Consistory to abate this Romanising ritualism, what do you suppose the answer would be? — I opine — Mind your own business, and let us follow our own ritual. Such, I trust, will be the answer of the Church of England to this meddlesome interference. We follow our rubric because it is our rubric, without questioning whether this rite or that rite may, or may not, be also found at Rome, just as we maintain the titles of archbishop and bishop, and dean and chapter, and canon and archdeacon, all of them also existing in the Roman Church, and we do the one with as clear a conscience as the other — Honi soit qui mat y pense. But these misrepresentations, gross and unfounded as they are, are nothing to what follows : — " They" (the " large party") " avow its leading doctrines" — those of Rome, that is — " that tradition is ,of equal authority with Scripture ; that the commands of the Church are to be taken as the commands of God ; that God's Word is not to be studied as the sole rule of our faith, but that the priest's word must be taken by all as the guide of their conduct." What the " large party" does hold I will endeavour to draw out in the words of the formularies of the Church of England. They hold that they must be visibly members of the Church of God, and they find this visible Church thus defined in the nineteenth Article — " The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same." Holding this ex animo, they turn themselves to find out what those things are which are of necessity requisite to the due administration of the Sacraments according to the Church of England's rule and practice. With regard to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, they find out that one thing is of rigorous necessity — namely, that the adminis- trator shall be either a bishop, or a priest having received Episcopal ordination, and they find that the feeling of the Church of England is so very strong on this head that she allows bishops and priests of the Episcopal Churches of Rome and Greece, on their conforming to her and signing her Articles, to minister as bishops and priests in the Church of England— while she only admits conforming ministers of the non-Episcopal Protestant bodies, under any circumstances, as laymen. Hence the "large party" draw the inference that the Church of England holds what is compendiously termed 22 "the Apostolic Succession" to be necessary for the preserva- tion of the due administration of that sacrament, and hence liliewise holds that the "visible Church" must be composed of bodies of Christians possessing that succession. This visible Church is also called the " Catholic Church," from a word which, in Greek, (the language of the New Testament,) means universal. The "large party" protests strongly against Eomanists calling themselves, exclusively, Catholics, and denying the title to the Church of England ; and they think they have a good right to do so, as every time they repeat the Apostles' Creed they profess their belief in " the holy Catholic Church;" and every time they repeat the Nicene Creed, "in one Catholic and Apostolic Church;" and every time the Athanasian Creed comes round they are told what is " the Catholic faith." And yet people, like the National Club, twist this love for the good old word Catholic into an accusation of Komanising, while our thinking ourselves to be Catholics is so great a difference between us and Rome. But there is another limitation, the preaching of the pure word of God — how is this to be ascertained? The next Article furnishes the answer to this question. " The Church" (of course that Yisible Church defined as it is in the last Article) "hath authority to decree rites or ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith." The interpretation of this Article is to be found in the solemn acceptance by Con- vocation, in Queen Elizabeth's time, of the first four General Councils as truly such. Therefore all Episcopal bodies cut off by them (there are several of such bodies in the East) from the visible Church hy the voice of the visible Church, are, according to the Church of England, not of the visible Church. The case of all remaining Episcopal Churches she of course leaves to the voice of such General Council, when- ever it may be obtained, as the only means of ascertaining the opinion of the visible Church — rejecting many alleged General Councils of later date, by one of which, that of Trent, she is herself asserted to be separated from the visible Church. The twentieth Article goes on to state that the visible Church has not the power "to order anything con- trary to God's word written. ' Of course it has not ; and this the " large party" vigorously assert, and they further assert that a fortiori no priest's word against the Word of God can be their guide of conduct, be he High Church or Low, bishop or archbishop, nor (less than the priest's word even) the word of a Prime Minister or of a club. This view of what the Church of England does hold is not a new one, excogi- 23 tated by the "large party," but one inherited by them, as they have proved, and are ready to prove again, when called upon in a different spirit from that of this circular, by the most eminent English divines from the Eeformation to the present day. But enough of this charge. The next one is, " that we are to carry to the priest the constant confession of our sins, seeking at his hands absolution and peace." The "large party" say nothing of enforcing constant confession, which is the practice of the Romish Church, but they do say, in the words of one of the exhortations of the Communion Service of our Church, " If there be any of you who by this means (self-examination) cannot quiet his own conscience herein, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned minister of God's word, and open his grief, that by the ministry of God's holy word he may receive the henejit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience, and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness." It observes that the public absolutions are ordered to be pronounced by the priest alone. It also reads in the Service for the Visita- tion of the Sick this rubric : " Here shall the sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which confession the priest shall absolve him if he humbly and heartily desire it, after this sort : ' Our Lord Jesus Christ, toho hath left power to his Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Mm, of his great mercy forgive thee thine offences ; and by his authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the Father, Ac. Amen.'" They likewise read in the form of "the Ordering of Priests," in the words used by the bishop in the act of ordaining — " Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained. ' The next clause in the report is — I am sorry to use such a phrase — a deliberate perversion of truth and reason :_ " that we are to draw our views of truth, not from our Scriptural articles, but from Tridentine decrees." Mr. Colquboun, when he penned this accusation, must have known that the " large party" protests against the Tridentine decrees, and this in the strongest way, by their whole life, as well as their words. They continue' in the Church of England, which 24 rejects the supremacy of the Pope, because they are fully persuaded that she is a true and living branch of the one Catholic Church ; the Tridentine decrees cutting us, and all who will not own that supremacy, from the Catholic Church. In the next few words he strays into a clear and explicit statement of seriptural truth, as held by the Universal Church—" that grace is to be sought in the Church's ordi- nances alone, and invariably in her sacraments." While holding this, the "large party" fully believe that though God wills grace to be sought in the ordinances of His Church, yet that He mercifully accepts the intentions of those who in faith and humility seek grace from the ordinances of their communion, which they believe to be a portion of the visible Church, albeit it may not come within the definitions which they hold the visible Church itself has given of its own cre- dentials ; and they also reject the notion of a person who goes to a Church Sacrament in wilful unbelief or hardness of heart gaining benefit from it, a doctrine which they had laid down in our 29th Article. We next find the following statement, " that the Holy Communion is a propitiatory sacrifice offered by the priest, in which Christ is really present in the elements — elements, therefore, to be adored." This is meant as a round-about- way of saying, those men believe in the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. This the " large party" does not hold. It, in common with the Church of England, rejects that material- ising explanation of a great mystery, but, with the Church of England, it as fearlessly holds the totally independent doc- trine of a real presence. For the proof that the Church of England holds this, they can quote from the Communion Office in prayer before the one for the consecration of the elements : — " Grant us, there- fore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear son, Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood." They can also cite from the prayer of Consecration — "Grant that we, receiving these Thy creatures of bread and wine, according to Thy son Jesus Christ's holy institution, in remembrance of His death and passion, may be partakers of His most blessed body and blood ;" and further on, at the Consecration itself, the recita- tion of the words — "Take eat, this is my body which is given for you;" and " Drink ye all of this, for this is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins." They likewise can quote that, in the distribution of the elements, the priest says, " The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, given for thee, preserve thy 25 body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat ikis," What substantive is the antecedent of this ? and so for the other element. In the Church Catechism, which I hope the members of the National Club have all learned, we find the following questions and answers : — " Q. What is the outward part or sign of the Lord's Supper? — A. Bread and wine, which the Lord hath commanded to be received. Q. What is the inward part or thing signified? — A. The body and blood of Christ, which are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper. Q. What are the benefits whereof we are partakers thereby? — A. The strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the body and blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the bread and wine." (Something, it seems to me, very like seeking grace at the Church's ordinances.) Finally, they can appeal to the 28th Article, which plainly states that the Lord's Supper is not a sign, but a sacrament ; the definition of the word sacrament in the Catechism, including "an outward and visible sign," and " an inward and spiritual grace ;" the description of which two component parts of this sacrament I have just quoted from the same authority. Further on, too, this same article lays down how the body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in that sacrament — namely "in a heavenly and spiritual manner." As for the count of the " large party" holding this sacrament to be a sacrifice, my reply is very brief. Centuries before the idea of transubstantiation had ever been ventilated, the Universal Church held and taught that that sacrament was an unbloody commemorative sacrifice. In common with the Universal Church, the Church of England believes the same ; her great writers, her Andrewes and her Wilsons, for instance, proclaim it, and with them, rather than with Mr. Oolquhoun and the National Club, the "large party" desires to take its stand. To this again I say, Honi soit qui mal y pense. The National Club having settled the public doctrines of the Church and her teachers, now condescends to play the part of inquisitor, and to spy into the private devotions of individuals: — "That our devotions will be aided by cruci- fixes, by rosaries, by the invocation of the Virgin and the Saints, by manuals of Romish worship, by the records and the practices of monastic life." I have never used either crucifix or rosary, but I say, with regard to the former, that what Queen Elizabeth did in her chapel, and what the Evan- gelic Church of Prussia does in its public services, cannot be esteemed Popery when employed in private devotions ; 26 and, as for the rosary, I cannot, from personal knowledge, speak to the fact of a single person using one. Perhaps some do ; but is the use of a rosary inconsistent with alle- giance to the Church of England ? Mr. Oolquhoun would, I think, find it difficult to say that it is. I do not say that using a rosary, considering the popular associations connected with it, is a very wise thing. I am inclined to think it might as well not be thought of, and I have no proof that any one has ever thought of it. But what intrinsic disloyalty to the Church of England does it imply? A rosary is commonly thought to be a string of beads intended to help the memory of a person saying his prayers. So, even if a person thought proper in his own room to allow himself the aid of this arti- ficial memory, the National Club hold themselves justified to violate his privacy, and stir up the passions of the en- tire body of the Church of England against a "large party" in it. But the real meaning of a rosary is a series of prayers, and in this sense it is that a certain individual, peculiarly aimed at, has recommended it. The next accu- sation is a simple mis-statement of a fact which Mr. Colquhoun clearly never cared to inquire into. The "large party" never has sanctioned the invocations of the Virgin and the Saints. " Manuals of Romish worship ! " What does this mean? It is true that amongst religious books lately pub- lished, some have been drawn from the publications of Con- tinental Churches, carefully expunging all that in them militated against the Church of England. Their compilers conceived, I believe, that in so doing they were but following the precedent of the framers of the Book of Common Prayer, and doing no more than has for centuries been blamelessly done by divines of all schools. Whether all the compilations were equally successful is another point ; they were each of them, I suppose, the work of some individual. The "records of practices of monastic life" — what Mr. Oolquhoun means by this is difficult to understand. Church history has been more read of late than it used to be, and the result is, that it has been found that those records were not all of them annals of vice and corruption. It was found, for instance, that the restorer of Christianity to Saxon England was the monk Augustine. These records and these practices, like all other human things, are, I believe — and I fancy the "large party" believes — a mixed tissue of good and evil. Among the latter, I do not remember that it was the practice of any monastic society to stir up popular hatred by the cir- culation of insidious and falsified statements. 27 Now comes the interpreting clause — " These views are held, some of them by all, by many altogether." This sen- tence, of course, furnishes a very convenient loophole to the Club to get out of its charges, when any individual proves them untrue. They will at once say, " We did not mean you." Mr. Oolquhoun dilates upon what he supposes the differ- ences existing between different sections of the " large party," but I will not weary you with continuing the analy- sis. The specimen I have given is quite sufficient to show what trust can be placed in it. The report continues to pro- pound some practical suggestions towards driving the " large party" from the platform. After running through the ordinary catalogue of remon- strances, meetings, addresses, committees, &c., among which, by the way, is that appeal to the authorities for rubrical uni- formity upon which I have remarked in the earlier part of this letter, the report concludes with sundry oracular sentences, manifesting a clear wish to expel those who differ with the National Club fi'om the Establishment by means of the laity, as a last resource, taking the matter into its own hands, and assuming throughout that the proscribed clergy will find no laity to sympathise with them, but that the contest is one between a tyrannical sacerdotal caste and an oppressed people — a view not true and not original, for it is the identical weapon which Voltaire and the whole philosophical party in France brought, with such deadly effect, to bear upon Chris- tianity itself. Hitherto High Churchmen and Low Churchmen have co- existed in the bosom of the Church of England. The former party, at all events, has never thought of expelling the other, although believing that their own view of that Church was the truer one. They have used the legitimate weapon of persua- sion to bring round members of the Low Church side to theirs, and with a success which may in part furnish the clue to this extraordinary document. But they have not done anything further. Let the Low Church party assert them to be traitors to the Church of England — they will continue to assert, as calmly as before, but more loudly, that they are convinced that the truth is on their side. But let their "opponents proceed from word to action — to that only form of action which can be con- strued to be the meaning of Lord John Russell's letter and the report of the National Club — and they will blow the flame of a fearful conflict. The issue of this conflict must b^ whether 28 the High or the Low Church party are to quit the Establish- ment. High Ohurchmen are perfectly willing, if unmolested, to continue the existing armistice, and to trust their cause to fair persuasion. But if they are attacked, they must defend themselves, and will do so to the last. They never can aban- don their opinions, knowing them to be the truth which Christ bequeathed for ever to His Church. They will not leave the Establishment, whose most consistent members they claim to be, without a struggle. Of all the evils of that struggle, of all the heartburnings and family dissensions which come from it, the responsibility, now and for ever, will rest upon those who struck the first blow ; it will rest upon Lord John Eussell and upon the National Club. V. THE BISHOP OF LONDON AND MR. BENNETT.* ' Dec. 16, 1850. By the time this appears in print, the unexpected denoue- ment of the affaire S. Barnabi, as the French would have called it, will have been before the public some days ; and I can, therefore, in what I propose to offer, appeal, not to their first prepossessions, but to their reflection and judgment. A saying of Talleyrand's, upon a memorable occurrence, has passed into a proverb — " It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake." Such, I believe, will be the judgment passed by most candid men, not carried away by party prepossessions, upon the Bishop of London's course in this affair. I have a deep and sincere respect for that prelate. He has for more than twenty years presided over a diocese with a population as large as that of a kingdom ; and during this time his in- dustry in multiplying churches and schools has been indefati- gable, his munificence in promoting these and all other good works unbounded, and very lately he has made a noble stand for an article of the Christian faith. But no man is infallible ; and in the instance which has just transpired, his lordship has shown a disregard of obvious considerations which is perfectly inexplicable. • Thia letter was written solely upon that first one of the Bishop's, which he sent with such haste to the Times newspaper. I have thought it better not to alter it in the reprint. It will be seen at once how little the ca.se, even as put by the Bishop himself, tells in favour of the line which he has unfortunately taken. 29 In this vast diocese of his, the two parties into which the Church of England is unhappily divided have respectively their strongholds, and divide its places of worship between them according to the tenets of each incumbent. His lordship is avowedly on the High Church side, although, from the difficulties of his position, he can show to it little more than preference. Accordingly, as far as outward observance is concerned, he has been compelled to limit his general autho- rity to certain recommendations of rubrical conformity con- tained in those charges which come at the long intervals of four years. These recommendations have always been of a moderate hue; but moderate as they have been, they have met with a sturdy, determined, and entirely suc- cessful opposition from the Low Church phalanx. On the High Church side, they have met as much acquiescence as the relations of the respective incumbents to their churchwardens and their vestries permitted. In many instances these rela- tions even prevented High Churchmen from obeying their diocesan; while, on the other hand, in some localities the clergymen had sufficient influence to succeed in reviving not merely that ritualism prescribed by the Bishop, but further measures of it not enjoined by him, although approved by their consciences as equally in conformity with that letter of the law which they esteemed a safer guide than the shifting precedent of anomalous customs, varying in every parish, and not resting upon any superior authority. Among these clergy- men, one of the most conspicuous was Mr. Bennett. Strongly impressed with the ceremonial character of the English ritual, and having a strong conviction of the binding force of the literal injunctions of the Eubric, he steadily carried his own principles into practice in the Church of St. Paul's, Knights- bridge. His congregation there included some of the richest and noblest in the land, and his method of conducting the service approved itself so highly to at least a considerable portion of them, that, at his invitation, they volunteered sums of money sufficient for him to build another church, schools, and a residence for himself and curates, in a distant and mis- erable portion of his parish, where, but for their munificence, there was no prospect that the teeming poor would have the opportunity of worshipping God, either according to the ritual of High or of Low Church. This was the well-known Church of St. Barnabas. It was built by voluntary ofierings, without any appeal to public society, or any aid from public funds, for the use of a locality too poor to help itself, and with a perfect understanding all along, from the known and published .30 opinions of its founder, of the style of ritual which it would ex- hibit. If ever there was a thing done above ground^ it was the manner in which that church came into existence; and if ever there was an instance of ritual irregularity being excusable, it was in a church so built, particularly as it was not a parish church, and nobody therefore had any legal obligation to attend it. But there is no proof that ritual irregularity took place there. There might have been things in it which the Bishop thought, to use a current phrase, "went too far;" but, as cer- tainly, everything that he says ought to be in every church, and yet is not in so many, may be found at St. Barnabas ; and what the things are to which he specifically objects have only vaguely come to light. November, 1850, came, and with it the recurrence of the Bishop of London's charge. In this document, contrary to the precedent of his two former charges, the diocesan reproved less strongly those who fell below than those whom he held to go beyond the ritual ideal. But while in doing so he used sharp language, he avoided giving, as he had done in former cases, specific instances of what he wished to see corrected. Nothing accordingly was expected to come of it; for it was not to be supposed that any clergymen would volunteer to identify themselves as the unknown defendants, arraigned upon un- known counts. But there was another individual, whom neither Bishop nor clergymen had dreamed would ever play a part in the episcopal superintendence of London — the First Minister of the Crown; who had the audacity, by way of raising a cloud of dust to cover his retreat from a puzzling- political embarrassment, to publish a letter containing what, to every one who knew anything of the Bishop of London's oft-expressed sentiments, was a palpable misrepresentation of his charge. The mob cawght at this, andfor several successive Sundays made the neighbourhood and the very services of St. Barnabas Church a scene of disgraceful outrage, and, but for the interposition of the law, would probably have made it a scene of pillage and bloodshed. At last the disturbance was appeased, greatly owing to Mr. Bennett's quiet courage, and, contemporaneously with its being allayed, appear a pamphlet by him smashing the Premier. All friends of order, all friends of the opinions entertained by Mr. Bennett, and all true friends of toleration, though they might not concur with his theology, were rejoiced at his exposure of what was a disgrace to our civilization. Up to this week matters rested in this shape, when all at once we heard that Mr. Bennett had resigned his living, 31 and that his resignation had been accepted by the Bishop. Curiosity was on tip-toe, as well it might, to fathom this inex- plicable revolution. On Thursday the narrative appeared, in the form of Mr. Bennett's letter tendering, and the Bishop's accepting that resignation. The whole matter turned out to be one respecting the ceremonial of St. Barnabas, which had appeared to the Bishop to be too " Romanising ;" a word which has as magic a force in getting a man hunted down as "Frenchman" had a century back, or as "Socialist" has now. Mr. Bennett professed himself unconvinced of this ten- dency to implied undutifulness to the Church of England — the gist of the imputation — but offered, towards the close of the correspondence, to retrench any ceremonial in his church which it might appear was either not in force in other churches in London with his lordship's privity, or was not in use at St. Barnabas when the Bishop consecrated it, or could not be found to be the practice of some existing Eng- lish cathedral, or was not authorised by the Book of Common Prayer or the Canons of the Church. If these conditions did not satisfy his diocesan, rather than disturb the peace of the Church by compelling legal proceedings, he put the resignation of his parish, which he loved so dearly, and had worked so hard for, into the diocesan's hands at four-and- twenty hours' notice. This all occurred before the Bishop's charge, and before, therefore, the worship at St. Barnabas had been in the slightest degree molested by popular violence. This popular violence soon blazed forth, and Mr. Bennett became identified with the cause of order and decency against Lynch law. And this was the time the Bishop chose to call upon him, for the literal and rigorous fulfilment of a promise which he had given, perfectly voluntary, by a cession of guaranteed and legal rights, almost too self-renunciatory to be justifiable upon the principles of mutual defence which should govern society. This would have been a hard mea- sure, under the circumstances, even had the Bishop been conspicuous for stringently enforcing his ritual decisions on all alike. But, so far was this from being the case, that when, in 1842, he gave some simple directions — such as using all the prayers which the Church ordered to be used every Sunday — and a body of his clergy obstinatelj'' refused to obey him, not only did he shrink from endeavouring to compel them to obedience, but almost at once knocked under. When, in 1846, he advised daily prayers, and a vast number of his clergy simply ignored the recommendation, the Bishop 32 did not say another word to corroborate the expression of his and the Church's known wishes. It is no excuse to say that these gentlemen had never put their resignations into the Bishop's hands. Their not having done this makes Mr. Bennett's claim for forbearance infi- nitely greater. They refused to act up to their Bishop's and the Church's wishes, and dared him to force them to do so by law. Mr. Bennett, having acted up to his Bishop's wishes, did other things which his own conscience told him were right in the eyes of the Church, and he stripped himself of all his legal protection, should his Bishop feel inclined to visit this work of (in his eyes) supererogation with the extreme penalty of dismissal. The Bishop's course has been, I repeat it, a mistake ; and there seems but little prospect of its being rectified by the proceedings of the Archdeacon of London or Middlesex act- ing under his directions, if we are to judge from a letter of the latter dignitary which has crept into the papers, in which he announces that it is the intention of the Bishop " to direct his Archdeacons to visit all the churches and chapels in which the forms and ceremonies referred to in his late charge are persisted in," and trusts that the result of the visitation of St. Barnabas " will be satisfactory to the public." Which public ? The one which was howling round and in St. Barna- bas, converting the house of God into a bear garden, and endeavouring to convert it into a battle-field ; or that public which was in the meanwhile striving to say their prayers quietly in the menaced church ? If the Archdeacon had announced his intention of visiting all churches and chapels within his district, raising some and reducing others to that uniform standard which the Bishop approved — though many persons would have been greatly annoyed at what they would have found themselves compelled to do, or to leave undone, and many would have protested against his competency to make such sweeping reforms — yet all straightforward men would have acknowledged and lauded the Bishop's equity and courage. As it is, all that can accrue from this wretched spectacle of an attempt to crush the momentarily unpopular, and to leave unscathed the triumphing party, is a universal disruption of credit and respect, and everything that com- mands obedience — a pure and simple victory for the cause of anarchy. 33 VI. THE LOJ^DON UNION ON CHURCH MATTERS. Dec. 17, 1850. I LATELY ventured some remarks upon the circular of a voluntary association in London, which has been pleased to occupy itself with the present condition of Church matters, I propose to-day to handle a document which is in the course of distribution by another body in the metropolis — the Lon- don Union on Church Matters — which occupies, on the High Church side, a position somewhat analogous to that which the National Club fills in the opposite quarter, both of them being proofs of the irregular shifts to which an ill- regulated condition of affairs reduces men. You will observe, sir, that in what I said formerly, though most strongly objecting to the entire form, tone, and subject-matter of the National Club's manifesto, and the counsels insinuated in it, I in no way took exception to any body of persons existing in this land of toleration (if land of toleration it can still be called) publishing their mind in a proper, inoffensive, and unseditious manner. Such, as far as I am competent to form an opinion, seems to me to be the tone of the " Suggestions for the future proceedings of the Union and its Members," issued by the London Union on Church Matters, which has come under my notice. You will, in the first place, observe that the document does not address itself to any but the members of the body for whom it is especially intended, although containing observations which its authors would clearly be very glad to see sink deep in the minds of all their fellow-Churchmen. In other words, it is not an agitating document. It states, as I shall show, startling truths; but it leaves those truths to produce their own effect upon independent agents. It singles none out as objects of persecution, it fixes upon no other persons to cajole into engines of that persecution, it hangs out no duke as the sign of the establishment, it sets up no Mr. Bellamy to rule the English Church ; lastly, and most important, so little does it caricature the opinions of the an- tagonistic party, in order to render them objects of obloquy and suspicion, that it does not so much as allude to any but those two marked instances of unsound doctrine which of late have scandalized good Churchmen, and formed the topics of our courts of law. The Church of England, and that alone, as a thing whole and undivided, is the key-note of the whole pro- duction. Thefirstsentenceis so true as to be almostatruism:— • 34 " Churchmen must unite for the defence of the Church, and their united efforts must be guided by the principles of the Church." The committee of the " London Union," after calling upon Churchmen to consider their present position, proceeds to detail the grievances under which it considers the Church to be now labouring : — " It IS useless to rely on the State for the protection of the Church, or to look to temporal rulers for the defence of the faith. " The legislature does not, even in theory, consist of Churchmen, and may soon cease to consist of even professing Christians. " And yet (as the result of a long series of encroachments of the State) the temporal legislature has professed to establish the Queen in Council as the final court of appeal in matters of faith — has claimed and exercised a power which it cannot have of right, to modify or repeal canons of the Church, without reference to Church authorities — and is assuming the control of the education of Churchmen ; while the Prime Minister, who is virtually nominated by the House of Commons, practically appoints to vacant bishoprics, and appoints the great majority of those who now, under temporal authority only, act as the ultimate judges of doctrine." These are strong words, but not more strong than the occasion calls for. As I pointed out in my letter on the Eoyal Supremacy, the relations of Chiirch and State have been entirely altered, and, in my opinion, improved, in a merely political sense, by the gradual admission of the prin- ciple of toleration. I say merely political, because the dis- tribution of this toleration has not been impartial. I am not a citizen only, but also a Churchman ; and so, while, as a citizen, I am most anxious to contribute my share towards raising those of my fellow-citizens whom I know to be in all the practical relations of life good, able, and upright men, although I may think them in error in their theological opin- ions — yet as a Churchman, and as owing a sacred duty to the opinions of the Church, I claim concurrently — not as a favour, not as a reasonable concession, but as the merest scant modicum of common honesty — that, in proportion as the State puts more and more power into the hands of those who conscientiously believe the Church of England to be in error, and who therefore conscientiously fight against her — so the Church should, in equal and concurrent measure, be given the power of defending herself against their assaults by those same spiritual means which they possess and she is deprived of. Why is the Church of England deprived of them ? By virtue of that concordat with the State, the essential principle of which was exclusive toleration of the Church of England, 35 and persecution of all other forms of belief. Whatever dif- ferent persons may think of the abstract justice of such a concordat, they cannot, if they are not wilfully blind, help acknowledging that, when the State has for her part broken it, the Church has the equitable right to demand fresh secu- rities for that sufficient power of satisfying the consciences of her own believers, which is the natural and inalienable pre- rogative of all religions that claim respect on moral grounds. Instead of this, the State has absolutely retrenched the Church's covenanted powers of self-government. This posi- tion of affairs is strongly stated in the paper before me : — " The State, in fact, gives now no preference to the Church. It pro- fesses to protect and encourage all religious bodies ahke. But it is most unjust that, having thus broken the contract on which the union of the Church and State was formed, the State still holds the Church bound by ties to which she submitted only to secure that union and preference — ties, too, which, by a forced interpretation, the State has now rendered more sti'ingent than in former times. " Not to dwell on expressions of persons high in office which might be quoted, the above-mentioned instances, among others, show that we must not rely on the temporal powers of the State to protect the Church. And we cannot but observe, at the same time, that, by the unequal application of the principle of civil and religious liberty, all sects have been set free to attack and injure her, while she is not free to exercise, in her own de- fence, the rights and inherent powers which in common justice ought to have been confirmed to her by that same principle." All other religious bodies in the country have their own legislatures, which are free to meet and to deliberate, and to pass by-laws, so long as those by-laws only affect the spiritual concerns of those who are willing to accept them, and lay down nothing inconsistent with those conditions of citizenship to which all denominations alike are bound to yield deference. The Wesleyans have their Conference, the Kirk of Scotland its General Assembly — graced by the presence of a represen- tative of that Royalty whose interference with spiritual mat- ters it so rigidly repudiates — and the Irish Roman Catholics were not long since startled by the tidings that a Synod was about to sit at Thurles. In theory, the Church of England also has its legislature in the Convocations of the provinces of Canterbury and York — bodies which at every fresh Parlia- ment the Church is called upon to elect — bodies which meet every session, and every session are at once prorogued — bodies of which, at one time, we hear that they are not fit to deliberate upon the affairs of the Church of these days, because they are not reformed ; and at another, that they cannot be reformed, because they have not the means of c 2 36 deliberation. I again refer to the circular of the London Union on Church Matters : — " The Synoda of the Church and the Convocations of the different provinces are the constitutional means authorised and directed by the laws of the Church for such counsel and action ; and the plea often alleged, that Convocation in its present form is unsuited to existing cir- cumstances, ought not to be allowed to weigh against its revival, inasmuch as it has the power of self-reform. " But the ' Act of Submission ' having made the royal licence a necessary preliminary to the enacting of canons in Convocation, and the Crown having now for nearly a century and a half withheld that licence, since the time when Convocation was preparing to censure Bishop Hoadley, the constitutional powers of the Church have been, and are, forcibly kept in abeyance." The writers of the document then go on to prove that the existence of such bodies as Church Unions is the necessary result of such tyrannical silencing of the legitimate means of deliberation, which were given to the Church by the most solemn of national promises, and expressly guaranteed in the royal declaration prefixed to the Thirty-nine Articles. For it must not be forgotten, as a gross aggravation of the wrongs of the Church, that, concurrently with the emancipation of those who dissented from her, her own liberties have been not merely crippled comparatively, by not being enlarged in conformity with the change in the constitution, hut positively and absolutely, in the silencing of her legislature. The " Lon- don Union," in vindicating the moral rightfulness of the organization of those bodies called Church Unions, speaks Very stringently as to the absolute necessity of their conform- ing, not merely to the spirit but to the letter of the law. Glad as one is to see them actuated by such a spirit, yet, as their constitution is not a matter so generally interestino- to your readers, I refrain from making any extracts from°this portion of the document. Those lovers of ease, or followers of Lord John Russell, who may console themselves with the hope that, althouo-h Churchmen may be stirred up out of doors, yet the Hous°es of Parliament are the true retreats of carelessness where the charmed Lotus-eaters are ever privileged to live on in dreamy forgetfulness of the daily increasing dissatisfaction, may be a little undeceived by what follows in these suggestions: "The committee hope that, when so strengthened, the Union niav give important help to members of either House of Parliament who desire to use their power and abilities in the defence of the Church. We need especially a strong body of sound Churchmen of all parties in Parliament, 37 who, while preserving perfect independence of opinion on Bubjects of g-eneral politics, will, notwithstanding, unite firmly to defend the Church, and to obtain for it that freedom of action which is its inherent right at all times, but which, in order to its self-defence, is essentially necessary, now that the State has made all who are separated from the Church free to prosecute their own views to its injury. " The committee further hope that by the efforts of Churchmen thus united, the sad grievances of the Church may be presented to the Crown and the Legislature in their true aspect, by adclresses and petitions, properly framed, and suggesting for consideration well-devised plans for improve- ment. Such plans, it is possible, may not be at first adopted, nor even favourably received ; but we may have good hope that they will ultimately prevail, if wisely arranged upon right principles, and urged with steady perseverance. " For these purposes the committee earnestly desire the co-operation and advice of those members of both Houses of Parliament who feel themselves bound in conscience to use their efforts in the Legislature for the safeguard of the Church, and for the removal of obsolete or improper restrictions upon her freedom. And they would also venture to sug'gest to persons who are not well acquainted with parliamentary proceedings, the necessity of patience, while our friends in the Legislature are thus eserting themselves ; and of confiding to their better information and discretion, while they endeavour to obtain, by means which can be fully appreciated only by those who have studied the forma and habits of our legislative bodies, and the temper and dispositions of parties, that candid hearing and fair treatment to which the truth and justice of our cause are entitled." The paper then continues to give some vFords of charitable and seasonable caution against that terrific outburst of fana- tical violence which seems, for the last two months, to have absolutely bereft many of her Majesty's liege subjects of those wits of which, under ordinary circumstances, they show no lack. They characterise it as — ■ " An excitement which seems to have led people, for the time, to forget all our immediate and far greater perils from the State — the Court of Appeal, the uncanonical appointment of bishops, the suspension of the Church's synodical action, and the denial of an article of the creed. This strange State of the public mind, amounting to panic, is evidently inducing numbers of persons to sink all differences, however important, in the one point of hostility to Rome, and to abandon all Catholic principle for the uncatholic and destructive profession of a ' common Protestantism.' Churchmen must remember that the Papal brief, which doubtless ignores the existence of the Church of England as a part of the Church of Christ, can only effectually be met by adherence to the laws and principles of the Catholic Church, and a consistent course of action in obedience to the same. . " On this point we would most earnestly impress upon all the import- ance of remembering that, while deeply pained at the recent proceedings of the See of Rome, indignant at the 'deductions drawn from them by their defenders, anxious to preserve and hand down unimpaired the integrity and proper rights of our communion, and steadfastly determined 38 not to abandon it in its difficulties, we do not for a moment forget the proper character of our Church ; that while, on the one side, it is not a Protestant sect, on the other, it does not arrogate to itself the character of the whole Catholic Church, but that it is a portion of that Church, separ- ated from other branches of it by schisms and differences, most deeply to be lamented ; and that in defending- our own liberties, we do not permit ourselves to be tempted to any measures inconsistent with the great principle of our catholicity, which we cannot abandon, without treason to the great truths on which the Church of our Lord is built." The "suggestions" conclude with a recapitulation of the principal grievances under which the Church is at present labouring : — " In conclusion, the committee would point to a few of the more prominent subjects which, at the present emergency, press for immediate exertion : — "1. Freedom of the synodical action of the Church. " 2. Properly authorised courts of appeal upon all spiritual matters. " 3. Heal and free confirmation of the bishops elect, according to the Canons, instead of the mere form which is at present enforced, to our great disgrace and injury, by the prevailing construction of certain statutes. " i. Eedress of the grievance caused by the late decision of the Committee of the Privy Council, in respect of the doctrine of Baptism. " 5. Guarantees for the right education of the children of Churchmen. " 6. And, postponing for the present other subjects, we would remind Churchmen to be prepared for the next general election of members of the House of Commons, which cannot be far distant ; and to support such only as may be relied on for sound Church principles, and a steady determination to support such principles by their actions. The clergy, too, must remember that a dissolution of Parliament carries with it a dissolution of Convocation. They ought, therefore, to prepare themselves for procuring the election of such proctors only as will resolutely defend the rights of the Church, and protest against the silencing of her Legislature." You will not fail to observe the very different spirit of this conclusion from that of the " suggestions" of the National Club. It contains no dark insinuations — no appeals to pas- sion — no attempts to set class against class. It lays down certain constitutional grievances, and it calls upon those who have constitutional power, to labour strenuously, but in an orderly way, for their redress. Let not, however, the oppo- site party mistake this calmness and deference to law and order for weakness. It shows a spirit, calm and orderly, but firm and changelessly resolved to maintain its own. The persons who have put this paper forth, are resolved not to break the law, in spirit or in letter ; but all that the law, in spirit and in letter, will allow them, they will have resort to, if assailed. They are as yet numerically weak in Parliament, 39 and therefore their opponents (except Mr. Colqulioun, who unwittingly owned them to be a " large party") form a most fallacious opinion of their real influence, and imagine them to be equally weak everywhere else. Those who presume upon this delusion will discover the case to be far otherwise through- out the country. VII. THE BISHOP OF LONDON AND MR. BENNETT. Dec. 19, 1850. When I last wrote to you upon the aflair of the Bishop of London and Mr. Bennett, the wlaole of the correspondence, of which the public are now in possession, had not appeared ; but, notwithstanding a great additional amount of facts, very little additional matter bearing upon the general and broad features of the case has in consequence transpired, except the circumstances of the extreme haste with which the Bishop published the correspondence, announcing Mr. Bennett's resignation. Still I feel that there are points in connexion with it, which I have hardly sufficiently brought out in the letter of mine which you published yesterday. You will have observed that the question, in its original shape, was one of the interpretation of the rubrics of the Church of England, Later, it took the shape of a specific proposal on the part of Mr. Bennett, laying down certain criteria — the first directed ad hominem to the bishop — of the ceremonies he proposed to retain in St. Barnabas' Church. But this ofior is clearly to be taken as a voluntary cession of a strict principle for the sake of meeting his diocesan half way ; and, accordingly, the public are as much empowered to deal with the discussion in its original shape, as if Mr. Bennett had continued to adhere to the broad statements which he had laid down last summer. In looking at the question dispassionately, we must for the moment abstract ourselves from the special questions of dispute at St. Barnabas — questions in which the taste of the disputant may often colour his judgment — and treat it as one simply of the law of the Church of England as to the inter- pretation of her rubrics. This interpretation Mr. Bennett finds in those usages of the whole Church in her days of primitive purity which the English Eeformers strove to restore, and in that rubric to which I referred you in a former 40 letter— the one fixing the ornaments of our churclies as those id authority in the second year of Edward VI., when the authorised ecclesiastical courts sate in judgment upon any doubtful points. The bishop, relying upon the very proper regulation which makes the ordinary the umpire in disputed questions, concludes that he is absolute and personal judge, Without appeal, upon all rubrical affairs. I cannot, I own, assent to this conclusion. What the Church allots to the ordinary, is clearly the working of a well-understood and uniform system of ceremonial, and the settling of petty dis- putes — not the function of creating off-hand new rubrical law upon points which may have fallen into desuetude, but on which there can be no doubt that there was at one time or another an authoritative interpretation. In fact, the issue raised is, whether the Church of England is to be a body corporate and constitutional, governed in her services as well as in her doctrines, by laws, and courts, and legislatures — or whether she is to be a collection of little des- potisms, each depending for its absolute and irresponsible government upon the will or whim, the learning or the ignorance, of the actual diocesan. The former state of things is the tendency, quite irrespective of the particular ceremonies under dispute, of Mr. Bennett's position; the latter, the shape into which the bishop's views legitimately resolve themselves. Eegarded in this aspect, the question is not one between a single diocesan and a single parish priest, but an affair vitally affecting the constitution of the Church of England, both actual and theoretical. I am satisfied that this aspect of the affair is not yet so generally taken as it will be, and the reason of this slowness of apprehension is not hard to come at. It arises from the respectability of the party who is in this particular instance in the wrong. It is almost too trite a truism for me to repeat, but it is the fact, that more mischief has been done by good men, owing to their good- ness, than is easily conceivable. In the case before us, the Bishop of London is a man of known moderation, a prelate who has devoted himself to the Church for years — one who has individually. In a church which he recently built at his own cost, made an exhibition of ritualism considerably above the average standard of the parish churches of his diocese. Accordingly, people dismiss the matter with the comfortable conviction that Mr. Bennett must be very wrong — must have gone "very great lengths" — to call down such an interfer- ence on the part of his diocesan. And so they contribute their share to build up a theory of episcopal government 41 totally at variance with the ancient and canonical— that is to &a,j, pace Dr. CuiUming, constitutional — notion of that oiHce, as always held by the Christian Church, and by the Church of England as a portion of that universal fold of Christians^ with that theory of episcopacy, in which, for centuries, the idea of a diocesan acting without the advice of his clergy (the germ, of cathedral chapters) was a thing absolutely un- heard of. As long as Bishop Blomfield is spared to us, the evils of such a concession will, of course, be merely in the bud. But let there unhappily be a change ; let a bishop be put in by the noble antagonist of the " mummeries of super- stition"— translated, perhaps, from Hereford — with the old canonical right of opposition at the episcopal confirmation still treated as a farce — and how will the sticklers for eXtra- constitutional powers on the part of our bishops deal with the change ? They will have themselves created the precedent by which they will be scourged. The truth is, that with the utmost desire to show all due deference to the apostolic order of bishops — with the utmost feeling of gratitude to one who has done all the good works for the Christian Church which the present Bishop of London has done — Churchmen must yet, on constitutional grounds, narrowly scrutinize the bearings of all apparently extraordi- nary claims of pastoral interposition on the part of the bench of bishops, appointed as they at present are. The Church's legislature is silenced, and therefore there is no resource to meet an emergency by any provident enactment. The Court of Appeal, established seventeen years ago, was set up with- out the consent of the Church, and need not consist of Church- men ; finally, the spiritual Fathers are in the sole and irres- ponsible appointment of the Prime Minister, who may be Presbyterian, Anabaptist, Socinian, or " Christian unat- tached." Let the Church be given the guarantees which common sense and common justice dictate as needful to secure her the protection of her own doctrine and her own ritual — and the relations between a bishop and his clergy will soon adjust themselves. But so long as all her ancient and solemnly-guaranteed rights are held in suspense in favour of that irresponsible dictatorship of the First Lord of the Treasury— each man, priest or layman, must see to his own rights, so long as he does not (like the National Club) trench on those of his neighbours ; and he must be very care- ful, that in waiving any of them, he does not strengthen the tenure of the dictator. On these grounds, then, as well as on the obvious one of 42 fair play, wMch I treated of in my last letter, I am fully convinced that the Bishop of London— anxious as we know him. to be, from his own words spoken and written this year— for a better adjustment of the relations of the Church with the Government— anxious for a Church legislature, and anxious for a real Church Court of Appeal — has made a very great mistake. He has unconsciously played into the hands of Lord John Eussell, as well as into those of the mob, who regard Mr. Bennett's dismissal as their triumph, and he has simultaneously helped the cause of bureaucratic despotism and of democratic violence. The precedent of Mr. Bennett's case, unless the bishop relent, may prove a fatal one in the hands of any Whig-selected prelate. On these same grounds, I think, as I hinted in my last letter on this subject, that Mr. Bennett's putting his resigna- tion into the bishop's hands, was likewise a great mistake. But one must not be too hard on a mistake which was prompted by a self-denying love of peace, and by respect for the episcopal office. Is there, then, no way out of this wretched complication of embarrassments ? If Mr. Bennett's resignation is not legally completed, cannot some course be adopted which may, without a compromise of self-respect on either side, adjust an affair which is, in all its bearings, a misfortune to the Church ? I hear that his parishioners are in absolute despair at their impending loss, and mean, if they have not done so already, to appeal to the bishop. Cannot such an interposition on the part of those who, after all, are the most vitally concerned in the matter, be regarded on both sides as a sufficient moral reason for cancelling mutually the ultimate issue of the controversy? VIII. CAN CONVOCATION BE REFORMED? Dec. 24, 1850. I HAVE, in former letters, touched upon the injustice of the Church of England being, in practice, deprived of her constitutional right of having her own legislature for her spiritual concerns. I propose now to enter more at length into the difficulties which are supposed to environ the revival of synodical action amongst us, and to show how very easy, if the will w&re not wanting, would be the way to surmount them . 43 I flatter myself I can show that, if there is anything in these alleged difficulties, we ought, for precisely similar reasons, to be deprived of a representative government in our temporal concerns, and to live under the mild and equitable superintendence of a Cabinet responsible only to fluctuating and extra-legal influences from abroad, to clubs, to meetings, to pamphlets, and to the checks imposed upon its efficiency by those difl'erences of opinion among its members, which would, in all probability, seldom lead to a change of govern- ment—frequently, if not always, to a paralysis of its efficiency —and the most so when the danger might be the most pressing. You see I concede, at starting, that Convocation sadly needs reform, and is, in its present shape, unsuited to grapple with the daily increasing troubles attending our ecclesiastical polity; but I call upon those who would make this the excuse for not putting it into working condition in order to let it reform itself, to grant that, in 1799, the Parliamentary con- stitution of Great Britain and Ireland likewise needed reform, and was likewise unsuited to the then circumstances of the empire. Having obtained this admission from them, I will demonstrate that, by an entire parity of conditions, either Parliament ought then to have been silenced, or Convocation ought now to be allowed the means of doing its work effec- tually. The first point of resemblance that strikes us between the two bodies is, that both of them are the gradual growth of events, and not struck out at once upon one definite considera- tion of adaptation to the work of legislation.* It is very well known that, so far from Parliament having been originally thought a constitutional blessing, it was shunned and hated as merely the instrument held by the stern kings of those times to squeeze money from their subjects. Any of your readers who has fallen in with that admirable picture of mediaeval manners, Sir Francis Palgrave's " Merchant and Friar," will recollect the exquisite description of the county election, in which the successful candidate, instead of coming forward to express, unaccustomed as he is to public speaking, that that is the proudest day of his life, sets spurs to his horse, and is, with very great difficulty, literally caught to serve his shire in Parliament. Similarly, Convocation — the * A morning journal of great circulation has, since the above was written, endeavoured to turn this fact to the advantage of its side, by using, it as an argument against the revival of synodical action at all. I appeal to this letter as meeting beforehand its arguments. 44 assembly of the prelates, the dignitaries, and the proctors of the lower clergy — was not at first what is commonly under- stood by the term "synod." There were formerly synods in England, and there Were also Convocations, the latter being called together to do the same for the clergy which Parlia- ment did for the laity^-vote money to the king. In time, however, as Parliaments became legislative bodies, so Con- vocations assumed synodical powers, and both bodies long after showed the marks of their irregular growth. An obstacle to the efficiency of Convocation which at once stares us in the face is, that there is no Convocation for the Church of England, strictly speaking — not to talk of what is, by Act of Parliament (not by any Act of the Church), called " the United Church of England and Ireland." There are the two Convocations of the provinces of Canterbury and York, which, respectively and independently, have enacted all that we possess of Church legislation. However such an arrangement may have suited the difficulty of intercourse and the broad lines of demarcation existing two centuries ago between the South and the North— 'and however it may fulfil the strict letter of old canonical precedent — 'it is perfectly clear that it must be waived if the Church of England is, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to be healed of her paralysis of self-government. But if this inconvenience be now a fatal argument against attempting such a cure, it must have been a fatal argument against Parliamentary Govern- ment in 1799. As now there are the Convocations of Canterbury and of York, so then there were the Parliaments of Great Britain and of Ireland, a fatal impediment to the good government of either kingdom. What was done? Were both the Parliaments silenced? Nothing so preposterous was attempted ; they were united, to the infinite benefit of both islands. All persons except the Repealers must own that, while the existence of a separate Parliament gave to Ireland the semblance of greater legislative power than she now possesses, it was but a semblance, and that all really great and imperial questions were decided at Westminster, just as if there were not a similarly constituted body sitting with all the same pomp in College-green. That pompous body in reality did little else than register the edicts of its haughty and potent sister ; while now the Irish members and the Irish Representative Peers have the same voice and the same vote on every question, however momentous and interna- tional, which any English lord or member possesses. The his- tory of the Convocation of York is a precisely similar detail of 45 a splendid nonentity. The assembly which met in the glorious chapter-house of the northern capital only echoed the enact- ments of the Jerusalem Chamber, except upon one memorable occasion — the final revision of the Prayer Book in 1662 — when deputies from the Convocation of York were invited to assist in the deliberations of that of Canterbury. It is idle to suppose that a body representing the spiritual concerns of the counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmoreland, Cum- berland, Durham, Northumberland, and Cheshire, could either be allowed to drag on in the old silent subordination, or, on the other hand, be permitted a free voice without great risk of its decisions being frequently discrepant from those of the co-ordinate body. The Parliaments of Great Britain and of Ireland passed mutual acts of Union — so might the two Convocations. There is a difference between the constitution of the two, which, although its parallel is not to be found in the Parliaments of Great Britain and of Ireland ; yet, curi- ously enough, existed between the two bodies which were amalgamated a century earlier — the Parliaments of England and of Scotland — and yet formed no bar to that amalgama- tion. The Convocation of Canterbury, like the Parliament of England, consists of two Houses — the bishops forming the Upper one, the inferior clergy the Lower. In the Convoca- tion of York, as in the Parliament of Scotland, the different orders sit in one House. And yet, when the Act of Union with Scotland was passed, the representative peers and the representative commons were drafted off to the two Houses of the English Parliament. But the union of the two Parliaments of Great Britain and of Ireland did not suffice to render the new Imperial Legislature at all a perfect body. The anomalous and unequal representation of the people of the empire which its Lower House exhibited, called for and obtained a Reform Bill. A Eeform Bill for Convocation would he no less imperatively called for, as the second act of that first real Session whose first act could hardly fail to be the Act of Union. I trust that there would not be all the difficulty in procuring the consent of the body to its own reform that there was in the case of the Parliament parallel, but that it would be a joint act of justice, concurred in by all the different sec- tions into which the Convocation might find itself divided. A representation of the Irish Church (whose Convocation never has, as in England, sat regularly) would of course form a portion of their measures. As I am not writing a history of the constitution of the Church Legislature, I will only briefly 46 point out that the chief anomaly to be complained of is the very slight actual representation given to the parochial clergy in that Lower House (for brevity I speak as if exclusively of the Convocation of Canterbury, that of York having similar deficiencies), in which the deans, archdeacons, and cathedral proctors bear a proportion to the proctors of the mass of the clergy suiEcient to cripple entirely the value of the Lower House as the free voice of the great body of the clergy. Passing over what must at first be legalised by the Church — the late redistribution of the English dioceses, to which the constitution of Convocation must be adapted — I will mention but one proof of the imperfect machinery of the actual body. The diocese of Lincoln contains three Archdeaconries : one of them sends proctors to every Convocation, the other two take it by turn ; so that there is always one whole Archdea- conry unrepresented. How Convocation can best reform itself, I neither am competent to lay down, nor do I think it is my function to investigate this point. I have shown that this body must reform itself before it can act, but I have also shown that it has nothing to reform which Parliament had not to struggle through before it obtained its present organization. In the framing of its new constitution, it might very pro- fitably study, partly for example and partly for warning, the system and the history of the general convention of that remarkable and vigorous offshoot of our Church, which has, by its own energy, in spite at first of a strong antipathy in the nation to episcopacy, taken deeper root in the United States of America than any other denomination — a salient and a difiicult fact to those who argue that we are merely an Act of Parliament body — who, like Mr. Miall, follow up the assertion with the conclusion that we must be thrown down, or, like Lord John Kussell, with the demand that we shall be his private farm, by virtue of his leadership in that Par- liament. The American Church Legislature meets triennially (each diocese having its own annual convention on a similar plan) in two Houses, the Upper one of bishops, the Lower one of clerical and lay deputies ; and its rules of proceeding are founded upon those old English traditions of legislation which our transatlantic kinsmen have inherited from the mother country. You will observe that the Lower House contains a fusion of the laity. Such an alteration in the constitution of our Church Legislature would be something sweeping; but, I am convinced, that in some way or other, the laity must 47 have some voice in what is done. Without a doubt, the clergy have distinct privileges in the Christian Church, which it would be most dangerous to root up ; but it is as undoubted, that these privileges are constitutional, and that the whole body of believers have theirs likewise. My proof is very simple, but to my mind irrefragable. In that most formal proceeding of a Church Legislature, recorded in the Book of Acts, that council which decided how far Jewish customs were to be binding upon the converts, the decree ran in the name of — 1, The Apostles; 2, Elders; and 3, Brethren; i. e., the bishops, the priests, and the laity. How the precise relations of the laity to the two other branches of the reformed Legislature are to be adjusted, is not my province to settle ; but, as far as I can judge, the American pre- cedent would not, in this instance, be quite a safe one. The natural tendency of the young republican ideas of that coun- try, on the first drawing up of the constitution of the Con- .vention, put too much power into the hands of the laity. Still, the presence, in our Lower House, of dignitaries and representatives of chapters, would of itself tend to diminish too great a numerical preponderance of the lay element. I need not say that, when I talk of lay representatives, I con- template only absolute Churchmen, regular communicants, being eligible — and not any brawling speech-maker who may don the garb of Churchmanship for the sake of a seat in the Ecclesiastical Parliament. In what I have said, I have treated exclusively of the Lower House of Convocation. I reserve the Upper House for another letter. letiliiin .' Vcintct t; ]9cttet, SufE, ana dCo. (Ccanc-court, JFUel'Street, LETTERS ./ XL. CHURCH MATTERS. D. C. L. REPRINTED PROM THE "MORNING CHRONICLE." No. II. ' The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON: JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY, 1851. CONTENTS. IX. Pkoseucub — Lord Ashley and Mk. Alfoiid . . 3 X. Archdeacon Sihclair and his Visitation ... 8 XI. The Bishop of London's Ubply to the Cler'sy of the Archdbacomby of Middlesex . . . . 15 XII. Mr. Bennett's Resignation 24 XIII. The late Meeting for the Revival of Convocation 27 XIV. The Revision of the Prayer Book . . . .33 XV. Mr. Bennett and the Bishop of London . . .39 XVI. Loud Ashley and the Revision of the Prater Book i3 LETTEBS CHURCH MATTERS. IX. PROSEUCHE— LORD ASHLEY AND MR. ALFORD. Deo. 31, 1850. I PEUCEIVB in your paper of yesterday that my version of proseucM, and very clearly too the inferences which I have drawn from it, are called in question by a volunteer champion of Lord Ashley's the Rev. H. Alford, vicar of Wymeswold* — who, by the way, a very few years back was canvassing England for subscriptions to fill his village church with all those "mummeries of superstition" — high screen, stalls for "surpliced priests," &c. — which deter that noble lord from worshipping in the " Temple of St. Barnabas," as the curious may easily find in a pompously-got-up and grandiloquent description t>f Wymeswold Church, published in quarto by its vicar. With all the deference due to a gentleman of Mr. Alford's classical attainments, and an editor also of the original text " TO THE EDITOB, OF THE MOUUING CBHONICtE. Sib, — I have just seen a criticism extracted from a letter of your cor- respondent " D. C. L.," in which the authorised version of Acts xvi. 13, and Lord Ashley, who founded on it a sentence in his speech at the lay- meeting in Freemasons' Hall, are severely handled, and the word Trpoaevxh, a2 of the New Testament, I must give it as my opinion, that he has by no means made out a case for Lord Ashley — whom he accuses me of handling severely — or for himself. Even if I were to admit all that he brings forward, my argument would be but very slightly invalidated ; and so far am I from making this concession, that I venture to repeat my belief that my version of proseuclie in this passsage is the correct one. I have the disadvantage of writing at a distance from town, with very few books to consult, which Mr. Alford must accept as my excuse for not meeting him with a fuller reply. I might venture to say that Mr. Alford has very mate- rially helped me to establish my point as regards Lord Ashley. As I pointed out in my former letter, the famous sentence about Lydia was an attack (illogical, indeed, and very unfair, but suited for the audience to whom it was there used, is pronounced authoritatively to mean a building for public worship. But I believe it will turn out on examination that in this, as in so many other cases, our translators weighed well the difficulties of the text, and gave what, after al), must be acknowledged to be the best and most scholar-hke rendering. That TTpoaivxn may signify a " house of prayer," is readily conceded. Josephus, in hia Life, § 54, writes, " On the following day all assembled in the Proseuche, a very large building, able to hold a great multitude." So Philo (Lyatim to Caius, p. 1011) speaks of the Proseuchse being levelled with the ground. But that the word in this place cannot signify a building, the verb Ivon'itiTo, which accompanies it, must, in my mind, clearly determine. The literal rendering of the clause is, " Where a Proseuche was in the habit of being." Now, who would say, " Where a chapel was in the habit of being 1" The use of this verb has, therefore, led the most eminent modern cri- tical scholars to the inference that, there being no synagogue at Philippi (for where there was one, Paul, as his manner was, went thither and taught), the Jews assembled for prayer at a certain spot in the open air, " where was accustomed to be a Proseuche," i. e., a haunt, or resort for prayer. So that we are brought at last to the authorised vei'sion for the most idiomatic English rendering, " where prayer was wont to be made." If authority be required for such a practice on the part of the Jews, we find it in Tertullian, Ad Nationes, chap. 13, where he speaks of the " orationes litorales" of the Jews ; and De Jejuniis, chap. 16 :— " Judai- cum certe jejunium ubique celebratur, quum omissis templis per ovine litus quoeunque in apcrto aliquando jam preces ad coelum mittunt." If they were in the habit of doing this occasionally, even where they had " templa," it is not unlikely that the same practice may have pre- vailed in a town where it is implied that they had no synagogue. I am, Sir, yours truly, Hesuy Alford. Wtmeswold Vicaraqe, Dec. 24, 1850. addressed) against ceremonial worship, in the shape of the " Temple of St. Barnabas" — compared with what was meant to be its extreme opposite, in the shape of a camp meeting, in which an Apostle was, by the learned and noble expositor of scriptural lore, supposed by preference to indulge. The cheers with which the announcement was received, and Lord Ashley's complacent encore, stereotyped its meaning. Mr. Alford interposes with certain reasons which lead him to conclude that, in this passage, proseucM does not signify a " house of prayer," but only a spot, " where prayer was wont to be made." He admits, you observe — and not only admits, but confirms by a quotation from Josephus — that the word does signify a house of prayer. In short, he concedes to me my principle, that the worship symbolised by that phrase is not that of the camp meeting, but of the " temple," though he brings arguments, founded on the signification of the Greek verb in the passage, to prove that after all there was a possibility that the Jews of Philippi were, from their poverty or local circumstances, compelled to content them- selves with the site of a yet unbuilt proseicche. Suppose they were then doing so — is this an argument against the principle I advocate, and in favour of that which Lord Ashley adumbrates — that, in its earliest and" purest days, the Christian Church opposed ceremonial worship? It shows that the house was the rule, and the site the makeshift, owing to unavoidable difficulties ; not, indeed, a building, but a site — the greatest instalment of ceremony that is com- patible with circumstance. But, in truth, if Mr. Alford will refer to my letter, he will find that I have, in my definition, actually admitted the possibility o? this proseuch^ not being a building, for I describe it as " a house, or station, of prayer." Let me advise him, then, for the future, when he writes a reply, to ascertain what are really the statements which he undertakes to handle. So far I have allowed, for argument's sake, that Mr. Alford is right in the signification which he assigns to ivoiiiitTo; but this I cannot admit. He renders the passage literally, " where a proseuche was in the habit of being," and builds very plausible inferences upon this version. But in so doing he forgets, what is a consideration upper- most in the mind of any scholar, that what is apparently the most literal version, may very frequently be a far less com- plete and comprehensive one than a translation which seems periphrastic; and this for an obvious reason— that, in the attempt to give word for word, verb for verb, and substantive 6 for substantive, we overlook those delicate shades which distinguish the verb or the substantive in Greek from what is currently allowed to be its English representative, and which the true scholar, the man who/eefo the language he is handling, is perforce obliged to preserve by means of some slight amplification or variation. There is not a language, as far as my knowledge goes, in which this is so emphati- cally the case as Greek. In the instance before us, the word in dispute is voniZoftai, derived from vofiog, law or custom; " I am considered, or in the habit of heing," as the school- boy would tell us. His "construe" would probably satisfy his master, but still it would not be the exact truth. No/ti?o/iai means this, and something more substantive. The feeling which it conveys to a scholar is not " / am considered," or " / am in the habit of being," but, " / am under such and such a law or condition of existence :" ov IvofiiZiTo wpoatvxr) elvai, then, signifies, " in a place whose condition was there being a proseuche there" — a colour- ing of Mr. Alford's literal version which, as you will acknowledge, annihilates his intended reductio ad absur- dum of " where a chapel was in the habit of being." The whole line of his argument, indeed, strikes me as some- what parallel to that of a man who should contend that a Frenchman never could lie down, because his universal greet- ing was, " How do you carry yourself ?" The onljr Greek Lexicon which I have access to, is that by the two very " eminent modern critical scholars," Dr. Liddell and Mr. Scott, published in 1843, and already of high and permanent reputation. These gentlemen give, as the primary signification of vonH^io, the active voice of the verb in question — " to own as a custom or usage, to use customarily." Adapt the latter phrase to our case, and we have, "where a proseuche was used customarily" — a very different thing from " in the habit of being." I will not burden you with a heap of quotations ; but one I must give (as a sample of multitudes of the same sort) for Mr. Alford to digest. It comes from Sophocles's " iBdi- pus Colonoeus " — roS etdv vo/jtlWai ; The authors of the Lexicon elegantly translate it, "To what God is it held sacred?" We attain this meaning through a balder but more grammatical version, "Of which of the gods is it hy custom or laiv considered the property 1" AVill Mr. Alford contradict this signification with a " now, who would say, ' of which of the gods is it in tlie habit of being considered the property ?' " So much for the verb. Now for the Bubst-Sintive proseuchd. I had not until to-day consulted " Liddell and Scott" for their opinion of its meaning in the passage which has given rise to this correspondence. On turning to the word I find that they give "prayer" as the first signification, referring to the Septuagint; as the second, " a place of prayer ; especially, a Jewish oratory ; Josephus, and perhaps in Acts xvi. 13 ;" {pur passage) " confer Juvenal iii, 296." You see that they lean to my version rather than to Mr. Alford's ; and it is easy to understand that two clergymen having, like them, to deal compendiously with so many thousand words, would be rather guarded in pronouncing ofl"-hand, and with- out giving detailed proofs, the authorised version to be in error. I have little doubt that if they were to reconsider this question especially, they would see reasons for dropping their " perhaps." These gentlemen, as you observe, refer to a passage of Juvenal, "in qua te qusero proseuch^?" Weber, in the "Corpus Poetarum Latinorum," the only edition to which I have access, explains this viovA proseucha by "fanum," a fane, a temple (adding, especially, one of the Jews' or proselytes'). Mr. Alford's last is not his strongest argument, but it is certainly the most startling one in his letter. You observe that he gives a quotation from TertuUian, which informs us that at their fast the Jews, "omissis templis" pray, aliqando Jam, " now for some little time," on the shore ; ergo, says Mr. Alford, there was no "fanum" at Philippi ! Is this careless- ness, or is it the desire to establish a case ? Does not every student know how minutely, variously, and rigorously ceremonial the Jewish ritual system was ? — how at one time a rite was obligatory which at another season was absolutely pro- hibited ? TertuUian says the Jews had templa, and he states, as a noticeable circumstance, that at one season — a season of especial peculiaritj'', the annual fast — they were aliguandojam (for a limited period, that is) to desert these " temples" (which must have been concrete things to be desertable). Therefore, chimes in the Vicar of Wymeswold, there was not a Jewish templum at the capital of Macedonia. Pardon, sir, " a town where it is implied that they had no synagogue." The place, as he says before, where St. Paul preferred, when possible, to preach at. In this concluding sentence lurks what I will only term an ambiguity. I grant there very likely was not a synagogue, but why not aproseuchS f Both synagogue and proseuch^ mean a building for prayer, but they do not mean the same class of building ; the distinction is mucli that which exists, mutatis mutandis, between a church and a chapel. Did Mr. Alford comprehend this, or did he not? I leave him to choose between the horns of this dilemma, with one additional fact, which he must have overlooked— that the annal fast of the Jews occurs less than a week before the Feast of Tabernacles, when they were Divinely ordered for the time to desert their houses, and not merely to pray, but to live in booths— a circumstance which I have never seen adduced to prove the likelihood of their being, in the latter days of their existence, accustomed to forego the luxury of a house. Before I conclude, I must state that, since writing the letter which has given rise to this, I have ascertained that the day I visited the Chapel Eoyal was by no means the only one upon which Lord Ashley has by preference chosen it as his proseuche. X. ARCHDEACOiNr SI.XCLAIR AND HIS VISITATION. ■ ■ Jam. 1, 1851. Sevekal papers of Saturday last give a conspicuous place to a letter of Archdeacon Sinclair s,* intended to explain a former letter of his, which has appeared in print, and to which I have called your attention, wherein he expresses his hope that his and Archdeacon Hale's visitation of certain churches will prove " satisfactory to the public." That letter, it seems, was private. I conclude, from the inverted commas and the italics, that the * ST. BARNABAS, PIMLICO.— .\RCHDEACON SINCLAIR. 10 THE EDITOR OF THE MOENIIi'O HERALD. Sin, — About a fortnight ago I received a letter from a gentleman, resident in an adjoining pariah, informing me that " the kiy inhabitants of St. Luke's, Chelsea, intended shortly to hold a public meeting, to me- morialise the bishop against Tractarian proceedings.'' He then referred to a statement, which had been made on my authority, by the incumbent of a neighbouring parish, that " the Bishop had begun to do something to check them," and requested me to give him further particulars. Notwithstanding a great pressure of business, I hastened to inform him, in a "private" note, which has since, to my surprise, appeared in many of the newspapers, that the Bishop intended to direct his Archdea- cons to vi«it certain churches, and that I anticipated a satisfactorj' result. I meant the letter to be "private," not merely because I did not wish Arclideacou means, though he does not explicitly state it, that it had that magic word written upon it ; and he accordingly cha- racterises its publication as an " inadvertency" such as he had never experienced "in the course of a voluminous correspond- ence extending over many years." That the affair does show vast inadvertency, I entirely admit ; but I must confess that the inadvertency seems to have commenced at an earlier period than the publication. His correspondent and interrogator turns out to have been a gentleman resident in an adjoining parish, who prefaced his question as to what steps the Bishop of London intended taking regarding certain churches, with the statement that " the lay inhabitants of St. Luke's, Chelsea, intended shortly to hold a public meeting" (which has since come off, with all the violence of language which was to have been expected) "to memorialise the Bishop against" what he termed " Tractarian proceedings." The Archdeacon gives us no reason to suppose that this gentleman disapproved of the measure ; and so, from his silence, coupled with the wording of the extract, we may conclude that his correspondent (a gentleman of whom, as I shall show, he must have had little, if any, personal knowledge) was one of those individuals who think that they are doing their duty to the Church of Eng- land by setting the laity, as a distinct class, in array against those members of that Church, both clergy and laity, with whom they disagree ; and we also learn that he was prepar- ing to act up to his conviction. Let any of your readers put himself into the position of a dignitary so called to account, and in possession of instructions from his bishop, and say what his reply ought to have been ? I think he would decide. my name to be mentioned, but because I could not then — and, indeed, I cannot now — fully explain in what way I expect the proposed inquiry in different places to prove satisfactory ; whether by the correction of abuses, the refutation of exaggerated statements, the removal of unfounded sus- picions, or possibly the judicial reference of disputed points connected with the interpretation of the Rubric to the decision of the Bishop, or, if the Bishop sees fit, of the Archbishop — a reference which is provided for in the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer, and which, having the au- thority both of Parliament and Convocation, ought to satisfy all parties. In the course of a voluminous correspondence, extending over many years, I have never in any instance experienced on the part of any of my correspondents an inadvertency such as I have now stated. I am, Sir, your faithful servant, John Sinclair. Kensingto:?, Dec. 26, 1850. P.S. — The publication of a list of churches to be visited by the Arch' deacons is entirely unauthorised. 10 without much hesitation, that it ought to have been strongly deprecatory of any such violent and irregular proceeding ; and it ought, addressed as it was by one who was preparing to act g'2Ms« judicially to a person who proved himself a par- tisan, to have been worded with the most extreme care to avoid anything like pre-judgment. How far are these re- quirements attended to in the letter ? It is very short, so I will give it in full : — " Sir, — In anawer to your inquiry, I hasten to inform you tliat the Bishop of London intends to direct hi? Archdeacons to visit all the churches and chapels in which the forms and ceremonies referred to in his late charge are persisted in. It will be my duty to hold a visitation in St. Barnabas, and I trust that the result will be satisfactory to the public. " I have the honour to be, Sir, your faithful servant, " Vicarage, Kbi^sisqion, Dec. 7." " John Sinclair. You will observe that the whole tone of this note — short as it is, and addressed to one who was not on the footing of " dear sir" — is one of unreserved confidence in his corre- spondent, without the admixture of a single word, even of caution, in regard to the proceeding upon which the lay inha- bitants of St. Luke's, Chelsea, intended to embark. Is it, then, very surprising that persons who could be inadvertent enough to think that meetings, such as those with the reports of which your columns have of late been filled, can be useful to true religion, would commit the slight additional inadvert- ency of sending to the papers a letter of the Archdeacon of Middlesex, confided to one with whom he must have been very slightly, if at all, acquainted — which had, at least in appearance, prejudged the case, unheard, in favour of the view of the matter held by their side, dignified in the docu- ment by the term of " the public," whom he expressed his desire to satisfy, and who, they thought, would draw an instalment of that satisfaction from its publication ? The Archdeacon endeavours, and I doubt not with good intentions, to appease both sides by some further explanations in his last letter — intended at once to account for the oracular brevity of his private note, and to appease for the present, without absolutely satisfying it, the curiosity of the public as to the nature of the impending visitation : — " I meant the letter to be 'private,' not merely because I did not wish my name to be mentioned, but because I could not then, and indeed I cannot now, fully explain in what way I expect the proposed inquiry in diiferent places to prove satisfiictoiy, whether by the correction of abuses, 11 the refutation of exag'gerated statements, the removal of unfounded sus- picions, or possibly the j udicial reference of disputed points connected with the interpretation of the Rubric to the decision of the Bishop, or, if the Bishop sees tit, of the Archbishop — a reference which is provided for in the preface to the Book of Common Prayer, and which, having the autho- rity both of Parliament and Convocation, ought to satisfy all parties." You have already called attention to the very great hard- ship of singling out certain churches only, and a certain style of performing service, for visitation, as if the alleged exceed- ing of the letter of the Rubric was more culpable than the omission of what is of necessity complied with in the course of its being exceeded. I shall again have to speak upon this head before I conclude ; but at present— assuming that there is nothing to be said against the Archdeacon visiting churches A, B, C, and leaving the rest of his archdeaconry unvisited — I will briefly examine the points which he raises in the paragraph of his letter I have just quoted. No one can deny that " the correction of abuses " is a very proper employment on the part of any oiEcial, lay or clerical; though at first starting we are brought back to what I have just promised to steer, for some little time, clear of — the question, why the correction of abuses is so very imperative in some quarters, and so little so in many others. " The refutation of exagge- rated statements," and " the removal of unfounded suspi- cions," is likewise a work not of duty merely, but also of charity, though a doubt might be raised whether the whole method of proceeding adopted, and especially the tone of that one specimen of Archdeacon Sinclair's private correspondence which has come to light, be the beginning best adapted to lead to such an ending. But there are further contingencies of a very different class which may result from this visita- tion : — " Possibly the judicial reference of disputed points connected with the interpretation of the Rubric to the decision of the Bishop, or, if the Bishop sees fit, of the Archbishop — a reference which is provided for in the pre- face to the Book of Common Prayer, and which, having the authority both of Parliament and Convocation, ought to satisfy all parties." The Archdeacon grounds this possibility upon a passage in the directions " concerning the service of the Church," prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, to which I alluded in a previous letter, but which I may as well quote at full length : — " And forasmuch as nothing can be so plainly set forth but doubts may arise in the use and practice of the same ; to appease all such diver- 12 sity (if any arise), and for the resolution of all doubts concerning the manner how to understand, do, and execute the things contained in this book; the parties that so doubt, or diversely take anything, shall alway resort to the bishop of the diocese, who by his discretion shall take order for the quieting and appeasing of the same ; so that the same order be not contrary to anything contained in this book. And if the bishop of the diocese be in doubt, then he may send for the resolution thereof to the archbishop." You will notice that this provision only provides for a voluntary appeal, on the part of the conscientious clergyman who " doubts," or of the two or more clergymen who may " diversely take anything," to their diocesan, with a further voluntary appeal conceded to him to the archbishop, if he should find himself embarrassed. Nothing can be clearer than the meaning of this provision ; it considerately creates an arbitration upon points where otherwise an ecclesiastical process would have been needful, with the paraphernalia of Chancellor and Arches Court, proctors, and civilians. But how does it tally with Archdeacon Sinclair's interpretation ofit? There are certain churches, where it is surmised that there are practices which the Bishop has power to put a stop to. Supposing this to be the case, how can the visitation of Archdeacon Sinclair's possibly facilitate this end ? He answers — by bringing about a reference of disputed points to the decision of the Bishop. Doubtless, if he could succeed in compelling the parties who " doubt," or who " diversely take anything," to put their case into their diocesan's hands, with the prospect of a reference to Lambeth, he would at least have held a visitation which would not have been a mere formality. But how is he to do this ? How compel such reference ? The Prayer Book provides an appeal ; but it does not lay down any machinery which can force the man who has no doubts, or who can only take the Rubrics in one way, and not at all diversely, to avail himself of it. Archdeacon Sinclair may argue or he may persuade, but how can he command success ? No one can make me go into the County Court to try to recover money which I do not think any one owes me ; and as little can an archdeacon compel a clergy- man to submit doubts which, in conscience, he does not, and cannot, bring himself to entertain, to the arbitration of his diocesan, whom he is in no way compelled to consider as the lex scripta of the Rubric. I do not at all wish to deny the Bishop's right to inquire into what he may think an infraction of the Rubric. This right he no doubt has ; but the proceeding to which Archdeacon 13 Sinclair's letter is the prelude, is, I fear, the most effective way to bring this right into question, if not disrepute. There is no public ecclesiastical prosecutor-general ; so that, if the mediate result of this visitation is to be, that the Bishop of London will find himself legally in a position to interfere authoritatively about certain practices in a selected number of churches, it must result from his having elicited a certain number of distinct and independent charges. These charges must have been preferred by some person or persons. The Archdeacons may perform the task of collecting them and embodying them in a form to lay before the Bishop, unless, indeed, they may, in this or that case, find themselves in the position of being at once informants and prosecutors. We have now come back to the point at which we always find ourselves, after all — the great unfairness of constituting a one-sided tribunal for the redress of supposed infractions of the Rubrical law only upon the side which has happened to offend Lord John Russell, Mr. Drummond's butler, and Mr. Cuthbert, of " bottomless-pit" notoriety. Let it be known that Archdeacons Sinclair and Hale are collecting their evidence as to infractions of the Rubric in this and that church ; how can they, without blushing, refuse to report to the Bishop — if credible witnesses can be found to substantiate it — that in this church the prayer for the church militant is not read ; in that, baptisms are not performed at the time ordered by the Rubric, or in the place the Canons bid ; in a third, the Athanasian Creed is constantly omitted ; in a fourth. Ascension Day (not to mention other church holidays) is suffered to pass unnoticed ; that in all, the provision for public daily prayers and readings of Holy Scripture, so use- ful and consolatory, especially in a large city, and so expressly ordered in the same page of the Prayer Book which contains the direction for arbitration, which Archdeacon Sinclair mis- understands, is entirely ignored ; or, to take one particular instance, that in a parish of which a dignitary is incumbent, the illegal fee of two shillings and tenpence is exacted for every baptism, the result of which is, that children to a fear- ful number in that extensive parish remain unbaptized. How, I say, can the Archdeacons refuse to report such cases, and how can the Bishop decline to take any cognizance of them ? It may be that, after all, the Archdeacons do not entertain those exaggerated notions of their powers which they appear, from the letter before the world, to have entertained; and that all they contemplate is bringing their powers of persua- sion to bear with such force as to induce certain clergymen 14 to refer their ritualism to the diocesan. If this be, after all, the whole scope of the visitation, I must suggest that very little inducement is held out to the latter to take such a step. Let a disposition be shown in official quarters to reform ini- partially and on all sides, and a feeling of confidence will at once be created. But let it be manifest that the feeling of the day is to press with a peculiar hardness on a body of men who cannot certainly be accused of having hung back from any of the reforms which their diocesan has suggested in his different charges, and these persons are compelled in self- defence to avail themselves of all their rights. There is one more topic in the letter which I cannot pass over without an observation — the contingency of the Bishop of London referring the doubtful points to the final arbitra- tion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which he gravely remarks ought to be satisfactory to "all parties" — that is, both to his favourite " public," and to the congregations of the " certain churches and chapels." As I have shown, not only is the reference to the bishop quite voluntary, but the bishop's reference to the archbishop is equally so. All the incumbents of all the churches in the diocese of London may take the opinion of their diocesan, and yet, if the Bishop has sufficient reliance on his knowledge, the Archbishop of Can- terbury may have no more to say to it than than the Arch- bishop of Paris. "What, then, is the scope of this voluntary introduction of the Archbishop of Canterbury's name on the part of Archdeacon Sinclair ? It is always a delicate matter to introduce into such a letter as this, names of persons in distinguished positions ; and every real member of the Church of England must feel an instinct of reverence towards the see of Canterbury. But their legal obedience has its legal limits, and any compliance which they may render beyond must be the voluntary offering of personal feeling, and a renunciation of strict rights. What legal right has the Archdeacon to call upon an inculpated incumbent to refer these doubts, mediately though it be, to the present Archbishop of Canterbury ? Dr. Sumner is, no doubt, a very amiable gentleman, "and, as Archbishop of Canterbury, he has certain prerogatives. But neither his amiability nor his prerogatives confer upon him the inspiration of theological learning or judgment. There exists, however, one test of his theological learning and judgment — and that a judgment touching a vital doctrine of the faith, in which he practically assisted and to which he gave his formal assent ; and, in this judgment, in the words of the Bishop of London, " errors are passed over in silence/' which are 15 '■' wholly irreconcilable, as it appeared to me, with the plain teaching of the Church of England and of the Ohu,rch uni- versal in all ages." I cannot for an instant suppose that this clause of the Archdeacon's letter can have any countenance from his su- perior, for it is quite impossible to conceive that the Bishop could, under any contingency, call in, to settle his doabts, a theologian of whose joint handiwork he has authoritatively spoken in the words which I have just quoted. But in pro- portion as we acquit the Bishop of London of complicity in this suggestion, we must bitterly regret that he should have entrusted so difficult and so delicate a task as the visitation in question, to an ofEcial who shows such want of taste, to say the least, as to volunteer, upon his own responsibility, the introduction of the name of the present Archbishop of Canterbury as a satisfactory ultimate referee to " all parties," when the party accused all hold, as dear as life itself, the " one baptism for the remission of sins" as a cardinal verity of the Christian faith. XI. THE BISHOP OF LONDON'S REPLY TO THE CLERGY OP THE ARCHDEACONRY OF MIDDLESEX. Jan. 7, 1851. The reply which the Bishop of London has recently de- livered to the address from the clergy of the Archdeaconry of Middlesex, on the occasion of the Papal aggression, pos- sesses an interest superior to its immediate subject-matter, from being manifestly intended as a species of official pro- gramme of the pending visitation. Viewed in this light, it is deserving of a careful examination ; in making which I will not swell this letter with any observations upon the. portion of the reply having reference to the proceedings of the Church of Eome. His lordship, having disposed of this portion of the sub- iect, succinctly sums up the duties of the clergy of the Church of England : — " It will be our duty, as ministers of that Church, to be more than ever active in carrying out the designs of its institution ; in dispensing the 16 pure Word of God, and his holy sacraments ; in niQintaining its apostolical order and godly discipline ; neither falling- short of its wholesome rules, nor going beyond them." Nothing can be more true, or better put, than this is. The next paragraph, though containing a considerable amount of truth, seems more open to question : — " But it is more especially incumbent upon us, at the present^ crisis, carefully to abstain from doing or saying anything, whether in our public or our private ministrations, which may wear the semblance of an intended approach to the distinctive doctrines or discipline of an erring and corrupt Church ; from using language which may appear to sym- bolize with its teaching ; and from reviving practices which were pur- posely rejected and laid aside by our own Church at the time of its reformation." Why should abstinence from symbolizing with what is distinctive of error and corruption be more incumbent at the present crisis, or — the necessary correlative of that statement — less incumbent again when the pressure of the crisis is re- moved ? Error and corruption ought at all times to be treated with an equal distance ; they are absolute, and not compara- tive terms ; and the mode of dealing with them on the part of the Church of England ought similarly to be fixed and absolute. As I pointed out in my letter on the " Circular of the National Club," the Church of England holds distinc- tively the doctrines of the Universal Church ; and she also distinctively holds ceremonies derived from what she has in- herited from her former self, and retained at the time of her reformation. Her plain duty, then, is to maintain these doctrines, and to sustain these ceremonies in the time of crisis as in the more seductive seasons of outward tranquillity, if she have faith in the divinity of her mission, and the truth of her credentials. This sentence of the Bishop's is prepara- tory to paragraphs in which, I am sorry to say, his lordship manifests that tendency towards prejudging, which is the natural result of the position in which circumstances, unfor- tunately dealt with, have placed him. " This duty I have urged upon the clergy in my visitation charges of 1843, 1846, and 1850 ; in every one of which I censured, in the strongest terms, all attempts to fraternise with Romish error or superstition, and all ritual innovations, introduced, as it is said, with the design of making our own Church approach more nearly to what is termed ' the Catholic standard ;' that is, in fact, the standard of the Church of Rome — not that which our Reformers believed to be the standard of Holy Scripture, and of primitive antiquity. 17 " The disapproval of all such attempts which I have expressed in public to the clergy at large of my diocese, I have also signified in my private admonitions and counsels to those individuals among them who have been most inclined to ritual peculiarities sanctioned neither by the Church's order nor by long-established custom." These are, doubtless, weighty charges ; and, had the enunciation of them been accompanied by proof, they would have gone far to put the accused parties out of court. But they are not so accompanied, and I more than doubt whether proof would be forthcoming. Without it, they are merely the somewhat rapidly hazarded sentiments of the speaker ; and the chief regret one feels in reading them is, that a pre- late so high in station and in character should have been impelled to compromise his quasi-iudicial position by giving utterance to words which wear the shape, without containing the substance, of a judgment, and which no disproof or with- drawal can ever make as though they never had been pub- lished. There cannot be a fairer sounding claim than that of " the Catholic standard" — the standard of the Church and of the Faith, which we so loudly claim to belong to and to hold. The Bishop of London cannot wish any other standard to be set up by the Church of England as a whole, or by his own diocese as a part of that whole, than the standard of Catholic — that is, of universal — truth. It is the standard propounded by the last revisers of the Book of Common Prayer, and expressly laid down by them in "the Preface " with which that book commences, where they state that they rejected certain proposed alterations " as secretly striking at some established doctrine or laudable practice of the Church of England, or indeed of the whole Catholick Church of Christ." So what his lordship must intend to imply is, that certain churches in his diocese, aiming at this Catholic standard, have unhappily fallen in with the Roman standard, and mistaken it for the rightful object of their search. The question might be raised, whether his lordship is not forestalling his visitation, and making the verdict antecedent to the evidence ; but I will not here enter upon this branch of the discussion, most sincerely trusting that the result of the inquiry may be, in Archdeacon Sinclair's view of the matter, to remove -unfounded suspicions on the part of his lordship as well as of "the public." I likewise waive the point whether the Bishop has the right to assume any ceremonial to be an innovation before he has in- vestigated it in fact and in law. What is " the standard of the Church of Rome," as dis- B 18 tinct from "that wMch onr Reformers believed to be the standard of Holy Scripture, and of primitive antiquity?" The latter standard I have already shown to be a standard of ceremonial worship, and even of gorgeous ceremonial wor- ship. The mere fact of ceremonialism and of gorgeousness does not bring the Chapel Royal, of which the Bishop of London is Dean, and at which Lord Ashley is sometimes an attendant, within the category of his lordship's rebuke ; no more does every parallelism with Roman worship — that is to say, upon the hypothesis that our Prayer Book represents our Church. Still it is undoubted that there are differences between the ceremonialism of the Church of England and that of the Church of Rome. The principal ones may be thus summed up : — Service in a dead language ; prayers to Saints ; celebrations of Holy Communion without lay communicants ; the elevation of the Host; administration of Holy Communion in one kind ; and the cycle of observances dependent on the reservation of the Host. There are many others, of less moment ; but these may fairly be assumed as the chief. Does the Bishop of London imply that he believes that any of the clergy in his diocese indicate any desire to introduce any of these Roman practices, which our Reformed Church has re- jected? If he does not, he should not make the charge which he has done. Let him charge them with over-attention to ceremonialism, or with mistaken views of the intentions of the Church of England, when she orders that " the chancels shall remain as they have done in times past," and " that such ornaments of the church, and of the ministers thereof, at all time of their ministration, shall be retained and be in use, as were in this Church of England by the authority of Pai'liament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth" — let his lordship, I repeat, make such charges, and he opens questions which can be met with discussion and proof, and do not contain any j»nV?jdyac«e imputations on the character and honesty of individuals. But his way of putting it — that, in fact, these clergymen, in their alleged innova- tions, mean to adopt a Romish standard which was purposely rejected at the Reformation — is a random accusation, founded, I most entirely believe, on misapprehension, and easily to be refuted by historic evidence. As I showed in a former letter, things much more startling might be, but for wise reasons have not been, re-introduced, which come within the standard of those ceremonies which were not purposely rejected, but purposely retained, by our reformers and by the restorers of the Prayer Book, in 16G3. 19 His lordship continues as follows : — " The present crisis, which has brought the Church of England into more direct and immediate conflict with that of Rome, has made it my duty to speak still more openly and strongly, and to endeavour, by all the means in my power, to check the giowth of practices which I firmly believe, in every instance, are likely to smooth the way for a transition to the Roman communion, and in some instances, I fear, are indicative of opinions, on the part of those who use them, which are at variance with the doctrines of our Reformed Church. I cannot but suspect that many of the forms which have been of late introduced into the celebration of the Holy Communion, are the expressions of belief in a doctrine emphatically denied by the Church of England, and are nothing less than acts of adoration done to the supposed corporeal presence of the body and blood of our Saviour Christ." This is a severe charge ; and, coming as it does from one whose every formal word has weight, might, I think, not unseasonably, have been kept back until his lordship had either ascertained that it was unfounded, or could, in place of " I cannot but suspect," substitute " I have proof to show." The accusation is no less than that of the wilful introduction, by clergymen of the Church of England, of the signs of a belief in a doctrine emphatically denied by the Church. Such a charge on the part of one's diocesan makes silence impossi- ble. The belief of which the Bishop of London suspects the expression, is that of the corporeal presence in the Holy Com- munion, which, as the Church of England pronounces, " taketh away the nature of a sacrament" — i. e., transubstantiation. What grounds has the Bishop to make this statement upon a surmise ? While the Church of England denies this assertion of the Church of Rome, she holds that doctrine of the pre- sence of our Lord in the Holy Communion, which, as I have shown in a former letter, is expressed in the statement of our venerated Catechism, that "the body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper." The Lord's table is the site of the cause of this effect — the cause itself, the communion office. Such a site, such a cause, such an effect, are surely all provocative, in a ceremonial worship like that of our Church, of many signs of great outward reverence. ther forms of Christianity .do not hold this doctrine — the Kirk of Scotland, for instance, other Calvinistic bodies abroad, and many dissenting sects at home ; and accordingly their outward forms correspond with their dogmatic opinions. The Scotch, for instance, have no permanent Lord's table at all. When needed, a table is brought into the church — when done with, it is taken awav B 2 20 again. The Ohurch of England, on the other hand, consis- tently retains a permanent Lord's table in the place of honour in her churches — the same place, in a word, where the high altar stands in the churches of the Eoman communion. But while her theory is thus consistently symbolised, the laxity of practice which has crept into her ministrations, makes itself felt in the very disgraceful state of neglect in which, chiefly in country parishes, the Lord's table is too often left. In some places, on the other hand, local advantages have maintained greater conformity between theory and practice, and among these, as might naturally be supposed, the Chapel Eoyal is not the least conspicuous. Here we find not only a Lord's table standing at the east end, carefully railed off from the rest of the chapel, and covered with a velvet cloth, both of which are common practices enough, but also de- corated with massive candlesticks and an alms-dish of pre- cious metal. Were Dr. Gumming to make the same accusation against the Dean of the Chapel Royal, which the latter makes against certain unnamed churches, would the Bishop not find it as difficult to bring persuasion to the mind of his accuser as their incumbents may find it to convince him? And yet the Chapel Royal is but the tradition of an age of greater obser- vance. The inculpated churches are the fresh products of an intentional revival of feelings of reverence for the Lord's table, which the doctrine of our Church is supposed to de- mand — this is conceded on both sides. Common sense, then, would indicate that the latter would, as a matter of course, be more pronounced than the former ; but, whichever church or chapel is foremost or behind in the extent of its fittings, it is impossible to frame such a formula as should (consistently with their respective codes of Christian belief), to a Calvinist and to the Bishop of London alike, exculpate the Chapel Royal from, and inculpate the other churches in, a dangerous approximation to Roman doctrine — however (a quite different question) they may, or may not, be correct exponents of our rubrical law. In making this assertion I have in my eye the points controverted between the Bishop and Mr. Bennett, which it is fair to assume were fresh in the mind of the former, and none of which (independently of their legal sanc- tion) necessarily indicate any doctrine discrepant from that of the Church of England. But I had rather seek my proofs from foreign Protestant countries, and from other days of the Reformed English Church. I do not suppose that Luther will be accused of any over- 21 deference to Roman doctrines or practices, but still he and Calvin held different views on the subjectof the Lord's Supper; and the form in which Luther's views developed themselves was that of an altar with crucifix and lighted candles, and a minister in the olden vestments. We have seen already that the Prussian Evangelic Church continues the crucifix and candles, and places the minister on the west side of the altar. This body is a forced fusion of Lutheranism and Calvinism, amalgamated by an order of the late King of Prussia, and I believe that it has had the success which in general attends government-made religions. But as a fact towards the present argument it is very much to the point; for no one will predicate overweening attachment to Romanism on the part of the Prussian people ! I now come home again, and refer the Bishop to those div.ines whom he is known to hold in honour — the names of the seventeenth century, which are still as household words in our Church. I could flood your columns with quotations from and about them, but I shall content myself with very few. Eminent among eminent men stands, by common consent, the English Chrysostom, Jeremy Taylor. A lost work of his has recently come to light, and been published by a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, with proofs which leave no doubt of its authenticity. The title of this treatise is "Reverence for the Altar." It would, from one end to the other, be a profitable study for those who share in the Bishop of London's apprehension that the ceremonies of certain churches and chapels "indicate disloyalty to the Church of England." One quotation must suffice to show what Jeremy Taylor's judgment on this head was: — " Now, if places became holy at the presence of an Angell, as it did in Josuah's case, to whom the captaine of the Lord's Host appeared, and in Jacob's case at Bethel, and in all the Old Law, for God alwayes appeared by Ang-ells, shall not the Christian altar be most holy where is present the blessed body and bloud of the Sonne of God 1 I but, what when the Sacrament is gone t The relation is there still ; and it is but a relative sanctity we speake of ; it is appointed for his tabernacle, it is consecrate to that end ; and certainly the destination of man, the ])reEence of the Sonne of God, the appointing it to a most holy end, the employment in a most sacred worke, and the presence of Angells (which, as S. Peter saith, desyre to look into these mysteryes), if all this be not enough to make a thing most holy, there is no difference, nor can be any in the world, betweene sacred and prophane." Among the learned prelates who were called in at the time of Charles IL to restore the Book of Common Prayer (than 22 whom a better selection could not have been made), one of the most distinguished was Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, Wren had previously fallen under the castigation of Prynne, in "Canterbury's Doom," for the furniture of his chapel, which is thus described in that scurrilous tract: — " Now what an Arminian and Popish innovator this prelate was in all particulars, the Popish furniture of whose chapel, with basins, candle- sticks, corporals, altar-cloth, a chahce with a cross upon it, and other Popish trinkets, as appears by his own book of account, costing him £159 48. Id., and how great a persecutor, silencer, suppressor of godly- ministers, and people, the world experimentally knows." You observe candlesticks in the above inventory. I should not be surprised if Wren's interpretation of that Bubric which I am ashamed of quoting so often, about the second year of Edward VI., led him to light the candles on them. It is at least certain that John Cosin, Bishop of Durham, another of those bishops who settled the Prayer Book in 1662, and an even more eminent man than Wren, speaks in the following terms, in his " Notes on the Prayer Book": — " Amongst other ornaments of the church then in use, in the second year of Edward VI., there were two lights appointed by the injunctions (which the Parliament had authorised him to make, and whereof other- whiles they make mention, as acknowledging them to be binding) to be set upon the high altar, as a significant ceremony of the light which Christ's Gospel brought into the world ; and this at the same time when all other lights and tapers superstitiously set before images were by the very same injunctions, with many other abused ceremonies and supersti- tions, taken away. These lights were (by virtue of the present Bubrick referring to what was the use in the 2nd of Edward VI.) afterwards con- tinued in all the Queen's chapels during her whole reign, and so they are in all the King's, and in many cathedral churches, besides the chapels of divers noblemen, bishops, and colleges, to this day. It was well known that the Lord Treasurer Burleigh (who was no friend to superstition or Popery) used them constantly in his chapel, with other ornaments of fronts, palls, and books upon the altar. The like did Bishop Andrews, who was a man who knew well what he did, and as free from Popish superstition as any in the kingdom beside." Will the Bishop of London impute to the great men whose words and deeds I have quoted a leaning to Roman doctrines and Eoman practices condemned by the Church of England? This is impossible. But if this be impossible, then it rests with his lordship to justify by proof the grave accusation of unfaithfulness which is being disseminated through the length and breadth of the land as iiis judgment of men untried and uncondemned, and willing to take their place with the 23 Andrewses, and the Taylors, aud the Cosins of other days — ■ men who appeal from the pert insolence of a latitudinarian Premier, the brutal ferocity of a mob, the empty froth of a public meeting, to the framers of our Prayer Book and the divines who restored it, when other ministers, other mobs, and other meetings had combined to pull it down. His lordship concludes ; — " The use of these forms, together with other observances, copied from the practices of the Romish priesthood, induces unlearned people to think that, after all, there is no such great difference between the Reformed Church and that of Rome, and that the passing from one to the other is merely a question of believing or practising a little more, or a little less — not one which nearly concerns their eternal salvation. " It is for this reason that, while I object to any needless departures from the prescribed order of the English Church, in the way of either defect or excess, I think the fault of excess is the more dangerous of the two, where it tends to countenance the superstitions of the Church of Rome ; and less defensible, both on that account, and as not having long- established custom to plead in excuse, as is the case with certain faults of defect, such as the disuse of the Offertory and of the prayer for the Church Militant on Sundays when there is no Communion. No such excuse, however, will serve to defend omissions which involve any point of doctrine, or which the law and custom of the Church alike condemn. " But, though I desire to put a stop to those observances and forms, which are neither authorised by the Church's order nor sanctioned by long-established practice, I must still adhere to the opinion, which I have before expressed, that the Rubric should be scrupulously observed when no insuperable difficulty stands in the way." I would venture to ask the Bishop what is his test of an omission involving doctrine?' He quotes as an instance of the opposite the omission of the prayer for the Church Mili- tant and the Offertory. Is there no such doctrine as the com- munion of saints? and do not these two ceremonies eminently prefigure it? But enough of this discussion. I wonder that the Bishop of London can suppose — if there be any risk of persons deserting the English for the Koman communion on account of their craving for a greater degree of ceremonial worship than they ordinarily find in our churches — that these individuals would be retained through means of his present line of action. Such persons must be amongst those whose temperament requires outward assistance as a help in their devotions. Is it not evident that the gratification of this tem- perament within the limits of the Church of England is, in their case, the most likely expedient to keep alive their alle- giance to that Church ? "it is a fact, of which any person can on any Sunday and any week-day convince himself by visiting the suspected churches, that this class of mind has enough 24 representatives to fill them very amply. To tell these persons that the ceremonial in which they delight, which they feel to elicit the responseof their own inward religious sense — the cere- monial which they know not to accord with any of the leading distinctions of Roman worship which I have given above, and to fuliil the doctrine of the famous English divines of former times — must be abandoned, under the stigma of unfaithfulness for having closed with it — is far more likely to dishearten them, to shake their intellectual convictions of the truth of English doctrine, and to alienate their love and confidence in the English communion — than the continued use of that form of worship is likely to discontent them with their Church, and induce them to seek their food in Roman pastures. But when we behold, in addition, that while such hard measure is meted out to them, the defects excused by long-established custom — the chilling neglect of all observances of piety — the churches closed from Sunday to Sunday — prayers, psalms, and Scripture monotonously gabbled by hireling curate and hireling clerk — Holy Communion celebrated but thrice a-year — the dirty and neglected Lord's table contrasting with the selfish pews under lock and key and softly cushioned, and the poor contemptuously thrust into the worst places — are quoted as less blameworthy than what at worst was zeal outstripping discretion — and all this on account of a panic raised by a change in the organization of another communion, with which they had no more to do than the Bishop himself— could we doubt much, if any unhappily should fall away, whether it were the ceremonies with which they had worshipped, or the manner in which they were stripped of them, which most conduced to that sorrowful ending. XII. MR. BENNETT'S RESIGNATION. Jan. 9, 1851. Among the various complicated and distressing questions which arise out of Mr. Bennett's case, there is one to which I have not yet seen public attention drawn, but which is so important that I conceive it a duty to bring it under your consideration. The state of the case, as it appears to the public eye, is, 25 that Mr. Bennett put his resignation into the hands of his diocesan, to be called for on a certain contingency, and that his diocesan has called for it. But this is not the whole legal import of the transaction. True it is, that he has put his resignation into the Bishop of London's hands, and that the Bishop has called for it. But the Bishop of London is not merely Mr. Bennett's diocesan — he is also patron of the living which Mr. Bennett holds ; so that the latter clergyman put a general resignation into the hands of his patron, and his patron has called upon him to complete the act. Here, then, we have a new aspect of matters — a view of the subject entirely fresh, and, as I need not assure your readers, one which neither the bishop nor Mr. Bennett could have any idea of when they brought the question to the point which necessitates our grappling with it. The danger of trafficking in sacred things has been, in all ages, a subject upon which the Christian Church has manifested a godly jealousy, and the civil courts have assisted her in repressing the abuse. Accordingly, simony, as the offence is termed, after the name of that first great offender, Simon Magus, is cognizable in our courts of law, and has often been treated by them. Among the agreements to which a simoniacal char- acter has been imputed, are general bonds of resignation, put into the hands of the patron by the incumbent on his induction, by which the latter binds himself to resign his cure when called upon by the patron. For a long time these general bonds of resignation were tolerated in our courts. At length there arose a case — the Bishop of London v. Fytche — which came in error into the Court of Queen's Bench from the Com- mon Pleas, the report of which you will find in 1 East, 4:81. Judgment was delivered in Easter Term, 1801, and all the judges affirmed the judgment of the Common Pleas, on the ground that all the current of law was in favour of the legality of such bonds — Lord Kenyon, C. J. (who, by the way, by a very curious misprint of Bast, is quoted as Lord Mansfield), calling attention to the fact that the learned Bishop Stilling- fleet, 1698, wrote a most elaborate discourse against the decisions of the Court of Common Law on this head, but still thinking that authority too strong to allow the question to be raised. Mr. Justice BuUer (who, although popu- larly known by an unenviable sobriquet, is a weighty name in Westminster Hall) is even stronger than his chief, for he commences with saying, " Nothing but the number of positive authorities would induce me to concur in the opinion of the Court. I cannot help thinking that there was a great deal of 26 good sense in the opinion of Mr. Justice Powell, and I tbink with him, that if the judges in ancient times had seen the inconveniences that have since ensued from the use of these bonds, they would not have pronounced upon them as they did." But still he thought the train of decisions too strong and uniform to go against them. But this apparent triumph was the beginning of the end; for a writ of error was brought into Parliament, and after counsel had been fully heard at the bar, the House of Lords, upon a motion of Lord Chancellor Thurlow, reversed the judgment by a division of 19 to 18 — the bishops righteously voting with the Chancellor. Thus a great and true principle was established by that august tribunal. The patrons, so driven out of general bonds of resignation, betook themselves to bonds in favour of a particular person. These met with the same fate in the House of Lords in 1826, during the Chancellorship of Lord Eldon, in the case of Fletcher v. Lord Sondes, reported in 3 Bingham, 623, when these bonds were declared illegal, on the express ground of their being simoniacal. An act of Parliament came the next year to the rescue of these particular bonds, but left the general bonds as it found them. In the course of the hearing, Mr. Justice Gaselee quoted an opinion from Bishop Gibson,, to which I beg to call your particular attention. The oath referred to is that taken upon institution : — " Bishop Gibson contends that this oath, whether interpreted by the plain tenor of it or according to the language of former oaths in the notions of the Catholic Church concerning simony, is against all promises whatsoever." You are now, sir, in possession of my case. There has existed, since the commencement of this century, a righteous prohibition against general bonds of resignation given to the patron; and interpreting this law according to the spirit, and not according to the letter, a very grave question seems to arise, whether Mr. Bennett's general promise given to the patron may not be of the nature of such a bond. I do not for an instant say that it is such a bond, but that it is of the nature of such a bond, and therefore, to say the least, a very undesirable thing for any clergyman to give or for any patron to receive, and still more so when that patron is also the diocesan. What, then, is to be done in this dilemma? Mr. Bennett is under a promise to resign his living, to which his bishop 27 keeps him, arid from which, as a man of honour, he has not the least idea of shrinking. But, in fulfilling his duty as a man of honour, Mr. Bennett is running a great risk of violating an important law both of Church and State, on a most delicate question; and in accepting this resignation, the Bishop on his side is running a risk of being a participator in that violation. One solution, and one alone, presents itself as possible. This is, that the Bishop should freely waive Mr. Bennett's resignation. In so doing he would perform a generous and magnanimous deed; he would enlist on his side the sympathies of candid men; and he would in no way damage his legitimate episcopal rights in matters ritual or doctrinal. XIII. THE LATE MEETING FOR THE REVIVAL OF CONVOCATIOiX. Jan. 18, 1851. I OBSERVR in your columns of this morning the report of a meeting held under the auspices of the Metropolitan Church Union, in Freemasons' Hall, in favour of a measure which I have already advocated in your paper — the revival of the Synodical Government of the Church of England. Your reporter states that the meeting was not very nume- rously attended. This fact, to which its appearance in your paper will give such extensive currency, renders it incumbent on one who takes a lively interest in the great cause of the resto- ration of the self-government of the Church of England to ex- plain the causesof what might appear, but for the reasons which I shall give, a rather damaging circumstance. Those who know anything about the condition of the " large party" — as High Churchmen will, I doubt not, for the future, be called for shortness— will be well aware that, though as a party very strong and very united, it contains, as the neces- sary condition of its largeness (without which one would hardly credit its being so), a certain proportion of grumblers —of men who think their merits unappreciated, and their importance underrated by their more fortunate, but not more deserving, coadjutors. This necessary class in all parties is, in the one before us, represented by certain individuals who have by various means accumulated a body bearing the mag- nificent appellation of the Metropolitan Church Union ; a 28 body having little weight in the movements of the "large party," not to be accepted as its representative, and mainly, indeed, kept up by the kindness and fidelity of some of the general members of that Union, who will not desert actual leaders whom, were they to choose again, they never would select. Consequently, a meeting got up solely under its auspices, was not likely to be a very numerous one. It may, in fact, be esteemed as so much clear gain to the Church cause that it met with the success which it has obtained, and as such I am willing to accept it, although, of course, not unreservedly. Many others, I doubt not, will gladly view it in the same light. It is, in short, an independent testimony to the need of self-government on the part of the Church of England, and to the grievous evils which have arisen from the paralysis of her synodical action. There was another reason which led to the meeting being thin. Last summer a meeting for the same object, the revival of Convocation, was held in London, not under the auspices of the Metropolitan Church Union alone, but under the guid- ance of that society, in combination with the more weighty London Union on Church Matters, which sufficed to fill not merely Freemasons' Hall, but, in addition, to crowd to sufib- cation the far larger St. Martin's Hall. For politic reasons, the petition to her Majesty, voted and signed at this meeting, has not yet been presented. Many persons, therefore, who would have gladly attended such a gathering, even at the call of the Metropolitan Church Union, felt that it was ridiculous to take part in a new meeting while the action of the former one was not yet completed. There was a third obstacle to the numerical value of yes- terday's demonstration, which I shall enlarge upon more at length ; the means adopted by its originators to give piquancy to their end. This end was one in which all sound Church- men sympathise, the revival of synodical action in the Church of England. The means chosen were the ventilation of an idea that the late proceedings of the Pope had rendered a session of Convocation more imperative than before, so as expressly to meet it. I cannot, I own, see the cogency of this view. The Church of England is crippled by the State in everything she can do towards mending her own organiza- tion, or saving the souls committed to her keeping. But she is still the Church of England. Her existence, as such, is a continued protest against the claims of modern Eome to uni- versal supremacy. So long as her bishops claim to rule as the successors of her ancient hierarchy, so long as she dis- 29 penses the bread of life throughout her parish churches as our Lord and His apostles commanded that it should be dis- pensed ; so long does she protest silently, but with a force and an eloquence more telling than all words, against Cardi- nal Wiseman and his new hierarchy. If a special protest were needed, and I think a special protest was desirable, as a refresher of her claim to Catholicity upon this overt denial of it by the present Bishop of Rome, her bishops were quite competent to make it without a meeting of Convocation. It is really child's play to be told, that, with the fearful and daily increasing need of the means of self-assistance which the State, dog-in-the-manger like, denies her, our Church is to hold her first real synod for 130 years, merely to fulminate a protest (which they will ignore) at those against whom she has never whispered a word as vicars apostolic (that is, vi termini, bishops) of the divisions of a Roman Catholic Eng- land, simply because they have changed Uranopolis into Clifton, and Samosata into Hexham, in their signatures. If the originators of the meeting merely meant that the Pope could only be undeceived as to the Catholic character of our Church by her being permitted free scope to display it, and that we ought, for his sake and for that of Englishmen and Englishwomen, to take those steps which would lead to such a desirable consummation, I quite agree with them. But their words do not imply this, and still the good sense of the meeting persisted in so understanding them. Large as were the letters in which " Papal Aggression" figured at the head of the advertisement, yet, when it came to the business itself, reality could not fail to assert its sway, and the pressing practical evils of the Church formed, as they ought to do, the principal plea adduced in support of the demand for synodical liberty. Mr. Sweet's speech is especially deserving of careful peru- sal on this account. Had we 15,000 clergy all as zealous as he seems, the public would be better satisfied than they are with Archdeacon Sinclair's letters. On the whole, then, I think it is clear that the meeting will do good ; but, in saying this, I must strongly protest against one or two expressions used in the course of the discussion. The most striking of these is the vehement disclaimer which Mr. Hoare (the chair- man) made against the supposition that the movement in favour of Convocation was at all " Tractarian" in its origin. What was the need of this ? Why evoke all the feelings connected with that word of mysterious and unfathomed danger, Tractarianism, at a moment when no one was think- 30 ing of it ? Mr. Hoare might truly liave said that the paralysis of synodical action was a grievance felt and acknowledged by candid men of all parties in the Church, and he might have " quoted his authorities accordingly. But why drag in, Avith so perverse an ingenuity, that scarecrow of Tractarianism, a term which, I will answer for it, that gentlemen would find it difficult so to define as not to dissatisfy either himself or his interrogator, probably both. The truth seems to be, that Mr. Hoare is a gentleman of that peculiar turn of mind which never can be satisfied, when fighting a great and a real battle, without augmenting the forces of the enemy by a supple- mentary corps of bugbears, created and recruited into their ranks by his own imagination. But as he has used the word Tractarian— a word I have never hitherto employed in any letter, and which I trust to have very seldom, if ever, occa- sion to bring forward again — he must pardon my putting a few questions to him as to what he means by it. Ask an ordinary and unlearned believer in alarmist prints, what the word means, and he will tell you, " Tractarian ! why, of course, a Papist in disguise, a Jesuit, a man who eats the bread of the Church after he has betrayed her," &c. But Mr. Hoare is not of this stamp, and he has, I will very plainly tell him, no right to use the word in the sense he has done. The " Tracts for the Times," or, as they are usually called, the " Oxford Tracts," are, as he must be aware, a collection of ninety difl'erent publications, varying in size and importance from the handbill to the bound volume, and published between 1833 and 1841. They are the work of many authors, some of them being reprints of writings by divines of eminent and acknowledged importance, and the difi'erence of tone between the different Tracts is very marked. They are the independent productions of independent minds, freely allowed to energise each in its own way ; and they are only combined by the fact of their intention being to revive, at a period when the attempt was more difficult and more daring than it is now (thanks to them, in a great measure, for the change), those genuine doctrines of the Church of England, contained in her formularies, and held by her great writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, which, we have Mr. Colquhoun's testimony for asserting, are now those of a " large party." One, and one only, I believe (having in various ways heard the names of most of them), of all these writers, has lapsed from the Church of England— the famous Mr. J. H. Newman, the only really important trophy, out of all the Church and State Gazette's catalogue, which the 31 Church of Rome has vron since the commencement of the Church revival among us. The last Tract, the well known No. 90, is Mr. Newman's writing, and expresses only his ideas ; but still it is an Oxford Tract, and hence "Tractarian- ism" is a telling word in the eyes of some persons who would be very sorry to have the writings of every or any one indi- vidual of their own section quoted as symbolical of their pro- fession. But the charge is most unfair. Mr. Newman, very shortly after his secession, and again in some recent lectures, confessed that his position in the Church of England, all along, was merely an experimental one. Conseciuently his sayings and writings are absolutely no criterion of those of the "large party" whose faith in her is fixed and not tenta- tive. "While saying this, I do not mean to disparage the services which he rendered to that Church while his position in her was wearing, in his own eyes as much as in those of others, an appearance of fixity so great as to be absolutely an intellectual phenomenon. At all events, however, " Trac- tarianism," so called, has now not a more hitter foe than Mr. Newman ; yet it fiourishes in spite of him ; and, to conclude this digression, without exacting or thinking of any pledge of agreement with the Oxford Tracts. Tractarianism is, of all nicknames, the most absurd, destitute of truth, and destitute of wit. But Mr. Hoare does not confine himself to rebutting any supposed " Traetarian " savour in the strong feeling which has arisen for synodical action. He asserts that the " Tracts" are silent on this head, and that the first man who revive4the cry was a gentleman of difierent religious views, in 1835. How stands the case? The Tracts in question were started at a period of alarm and danger, when the ques- tion was not, shall the Church have synodical action, but, — shall there be a Church at all, shall episcopacy be swept away, and the Prayer Book remodelled ? And yet, in the second of these Tracts, published September 9, 1833, on the same day as No. 1, I read, relative to the suppression of the ten Irish bishoprics :— " 5ow, what am I calling on you to do ? You cannot help what has been done in Ireland, but you may protest against it. You may, as a duty, protest against it in public and private ; you may keep a jealous watch on the proceedings of the nation, lest a second act of the same kind be attempted. You may keep it before you as a desirable object that the Irish Church should, at some future day, meet in synod, and protest herself against what has been done, and then proceed to establish or rescind the State injunction as may be thought expedient." In No. 5, published on the 18th of October in the same 32 year, talking of that same monstrous cry wliicli some persons had got up, then as now, for a revision of the Prayer Book, I observe :— " When corruptions, prevalent among the professedly Christian world, render it necessary for her to state the substance of her faith in articles (as was done in A.D. 1563), or when circumstances appear to require any change or variation, either in the forms of her liturgy, or in her general internal government, the King has the constitutional power of summoning the houses of Convocation, a sort of ecclesiastical parlia- ment, composed of bishops or clergy, from which alone such changes can fitly or legally emanate." But I have really said too much about Mr. Hoare ; for his assertion was absolutely annihilated by the very gentle- man whom he called upon to move the first resolution, Mr. Hughes, a person unknown to the world, but who, from the tone and tenor of his speech, must be one of those real and earnest men to whom, in the time of trial, the Church will not in vain look as her defender. Mr. Hughes truly and beautifully said, regarding the aspersed originators of the Oxford Tracts, that they were the men to whom we owed the commencement of this wonderful revival of genuine Church- manship, which men wonder at and cannot understand, and which is still going on, in spite of their wonder and their astonishment, and of the enmity of many. The other point against which I would very strongly pro- test, is the obtrusive manner ia which a certain self-important person with a foreign name. Dr. Biber, endeavoured to make the meeting the vehicle for his own peculiar views, by a singularly abrupt and trenchant assertion, dropped with the easy assurance of a man who knows he is stating a wrong thing and would fain brazen it out, of a doctrine which the Church of England no way commands us to hold, that the Church of Eome is Anti-Christ. How the reverend gentleman should be so wanting in tact as, in a meeting, the professed object of which was to deplore the want of a synodical voice in the Church of England, to prove that, in Ms case at least, the void did not exist (I will not say of a national synod, but) of a general council of the universal Church, I cannot very easily decipher. Still less do I wish to enter into the ques- tion whether the Church of Eome be Anti-Christ ; one, be it remembered, wholly distinct from the question whether the Church of England be not entirely justified in her protest against the many errors and corruptions unhappily to be found within that portion of the Christian Church. I will dismiss it with a remark and a quesre. My remark is, that 33 it is a simple truism to say that everything which militates against the law of Christ, every sin, every crime, every dis- honesty to be found anywhere, is of the nature of Anti-Christ; but that being of the nature of Anti-Christ, does not make these transgressions, individually or collectively, the one fearful portent of the future, the An ti- Christ of prophecy. My qucere is. Supposing it to be the doctrine of the Church of England, that the Church of Rome, a Church whose orders and whose sacraments she recognises as valid, be Anti-Christ, what name does, or can, the Church of England devise for that fearful development of evil which all thinking men see gaining head all around us, the denial of all faith, of all reve- lation, of all substantive supernatural religion? Happily, however, the meeting did not take its colour from Mr. Hoare's ungenerous disavowal of supposed Trac- tarianism, or from Dr. Biber's theological dogmatism, any more than from Mr. Cox's and Mr. Oummias' eccentric interruptions. Injudicious as I cannot but think it in one of its principal premises, yet, as your readers will see, it mostly forgot those premises when it came to action. It remains a valuable testimony to our extreme need of real Church government ; and several of its speakers drew pictures, strik- ing and sad, of the wretched state of disorganization engen- dered amongst us by that lamentable deficiency. XIV. THE REVISION OP THE PRAYER BOOK. ' Jan. 20, 1851. I HAVE no wish to be an alarmist ; but I am equally little desirous of withholding a necessary warning, from any fear of the imputation of spreading needless terrors. Information has reached me, from quarters which have the means of being very well informed, of movements on the part of the secret enemies of our English Church, which it were well that Churchmen should take timely note of, so as effectually to stifle them. Lord Ashley's meeting in Freemasons' Hall, viewed by itself, was a failure. It was not a particularly large one, and it has left little behind, on the score of oratory, beyond the Lydian sentence, Sir E. Parry's nautical eloquence, and Mr. 34 Bevan's bold assertions that the clergy have always been in the wrong, and the laity always in the right. But the pro- moters of this movement, though perhaps not great as theo- logians, nor brilliant as orators, are sufficiently able as tacticians ; and they have sufficient confidence in their cause not to be over scrupulous in the means they adopt to promote it. A " Loyal Address to her Majesty, as what, by the constitution, she is not — " the earthly Head of our Church" — praying her, somewhat vaguely, to exercise " the wholesome power of interposition," was, as you will recollect, one of the principal results of that assembly ; and, six days after it was held, we saw an advertisement in the Times proclaiming the organization of a " London Committee for the defence of the Protestant faith," composed of leading members, lay and clerical, of that party which charitably assumes to itself the exclusive appellation of " Evangelical," underthe chairmanship of Lord Ashley. This committee was once, and, I believe, only once, advertised in that paper ; certainly I have not noticed any further advertisement of it ; and the unwary might, therefore, not unnaturally be led to conclude that it was a coup manqui. Not so, however. The tactic is, it seems, first to pro- cure quietly — by such means of course as the managers of the schenie consider jusifiable— signatures to that address ; then to have it presented ; then, I conclude, a Parliamentary debate ; then (her Majesty's ministers stepping in, like the good fairies of a child's tale) to have a commission issued to the two metropolitans and certain judiciously selected bishops to revise the Prayer Book ; and finally, by Act of Parliament, to endeavour to establish the result of their learning and impartiality in lieu of that Book of Common Prayer which the English Church possesses by the joint act of Church and State, of Parliament and Convocation. Such, sir, is the report which has come to me from quar- ters which do not speak without authority ; and if it be any corroboration, I may observe that this was the policy which, ever since I first heard of the meeting that laid the train, seemed to me must be the one which was in preparation. But there are not wanting corroborative proofs of its extreme probability. My first evidence is the person to whom English Churchmen should always yield the first place, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It mus"t be fresh in the memory of all your readers, that, in one of his Grace's recently published replies to addresses, he deprecated the recent agitation, as rendering a revision of the Prayer Book " further removed than ever. ' Further removed than ever] 35 I leave it to any unlettered man of common sense to say ■what is the feeling implied in these words. It must never be forgotten that a special protege and friend of his Grace's, appointed by him to an honorary stall at Chester, is Dr. M'Neile — the open advocate, years ago, in print, of a "bracketed Prayer Book," The Globe, too, the professed organ of the cabinet, contains an article in its number for Thursday last, which is so important, as indicative of the tendencies and wishes of those in power, that you must excuse a somewhat long extract : — " It is impossible to affix any intelligible character to her (the Church's) profession or practice, unless we bear steadily in mind that she is essen- tially a machine for embodying the spiritual element in the changing public opinion of the day, and not a contrivance for transmitting sacra- ments or defining creeds. On any other theory, such a Church as we have in England is either a contradiction or a living outrage on every pretence of religious independence. Her government by the Prime Min- ister, her passive immobility, her obstinate silence, the absolute nullity of her censures, the thousands of her professing adherents who laugh outright whenever her ministers outstep the modest sphere of oflBce-bearers in a national establishment — these are all incidents and marks of bondage which would be too intolerable for the meanest sect of Jumpers to submit to, which the Roman Church derides and scoffs at from her pride of place, the recognition of which would be degrading beyond belief to a purely spiritual establishment, but which become, we do not say merely intelligi- ble, but suitable and decent, in our Department of Public Worship. These facts cannot be got over, and however they may jar with the superb tone which the Elizabethan Eeformers sometimes assumed, in an unwise deference to the prejudices of their day, it is foolish to ignore them, and dishonest to speculate on the faith that the uninstructed rich or poor may do so. It is a great misfortune that the true position of the Church of England was not brought out more clearly — we may say, more offensively — in the sixteenth century. A real Nag's Head consecration would have saved us from a world of our present difficulties. Dr. Arnold used to assert that there was nothing more useful than for a nation to have a revolution scattered here and there in the course of centuries, to attest the emptiness of all Divine right, and keep alive the principles of popular sovereignty. In like manner, we deeply regret that there exists even the small superficial evidence which can be cited in support of the exclusive spiritual pretensions of the Church of England. If her Erastian side had been thrust more prominently forward, she might have had more trouble in conciliating waverers ; but we should not at this day be molested by the perverse pretensions of the Tractarian clergy, nor reduced to the alternative of shocking sincere prejudices or complimenting away the rights of the English Crown and people." The Times, also, has not obscurely hinted that, if need be, the laity must be brought down upon the observances of our Church ; and the Morning Herald does not find it inconsistent with its unflinching conservatism to advocate, as it has done c 2 36 in the most open language, in more than one article, that there must be a revision of the Prayer Book. On the nature and effects of such a revision, conducted by the hands that will conduct it, I need not address a word to those whom the preface of the Prayer Book describes as "sober, peaceable, and truly conscientious sons of the Church of England." My present purpose is rather to open the eyes of those who are either weak and vacillating members of that body, or else dissenters from her, to what will be the inevit- able result, viewing it as a civil question, of such an attempt —although, in so handling the matter, I may seem to be taking up the ground of expediency rather than of principle. I postpone the obvious consideration, that such an attempt is a palpable confession, on the part of the promoters of the movement, of having been hitherto in the wrong ; for did they not feel that the Prayer Book was unmistakeably against them, and for us, they would never for one instant have con- templated so violent a measure as the struggle which must and will ensue on a Parliamentary attempt to alter it. The agitators probably hope that the changes which they may insinuate will be so short and few — ^if we are to count the number of words they may propose to vary and those they will leave — that they will find but little difiiculty in persuading the national mind, save a few " bigots," that such inconsequential alterations are a cheap exchange for charity and comprehension, and for the development of the idea of a State Church — of a Church of which rumour tells that a right reverend prelate, the diocesan of not the smallest provincial city or the oldest see in England, first said that it ought not to have any doctrines, and then corrected himself by admit- ting that it might hold the divinity of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But men are not to be so easily deceived. They know very well that the smallest word may often be the point of the sentence — the shortest clause the gist of the whole docu- ment — the omission of a monosyllable the parent of ten or fifty years' litigation in the Court of Chancery. So the commis- sion may quietly substitute in the creed, as the Prussians have done, " Christian" for " Catholic ;" retrench one or two words in the baptismal service, which dare to say that " this infant is regenerate ;" one or two words in the Communion Office, which speak of the body and blood of Christ as " pre- sent ;" one or two words in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, which convey to the dying man the gracious tidings from him who is accredited to bear them, of the forgiveness 37 of his repented sins ; one or two words in the form of Order- ing Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, which send forth men empowered to do these great things ; and then they may smilingly turn round and say, " Here is your Prayer Book — a little improved, to be sure — one or two obsolete and undesir- able expressions retrenched — but the whole pretty much as we found it. See, we have not presumed to quarrel with what David said in the Psalms, and we have left the State Prayers, not to mention that for the High Court of Parlia- ment, quite untouched." But, sir, there is the "large party." What will the "large party" do ? The agitators, I most entirely believe, have the most erroneous idea of the principles and rule of conduct of this "large party." Their own idea of any outward form of religion is so purely political, so entirely derived from the notions of a political party, that they cannot conceive any higher or more unearthly principles of conformity. Some folks, they fancy, are, on secondary grounds, the supporters of the Establishment — answering to Ministerialists ; others, dissenters — answering to the Opposition ; and they dream of times of peace and compromise, and of times of struggle for the good things of the State, existing between these two parties, just like the vicissitudes of Parliamentary warfare. But any men really holding in the English Church a view of Christianity in which Establishment and Nonconformity are accidents, and not essentials, is an idea as much beyond them as the electric telegTaph is beyond the scope of the Polynesian. They think — " Let us only put down the compromises with Popery unhappily adhering to the Prayer Book, and we have put down the evil. Some few benighted creatures wUl fly to the Cardinal ; the remainder will soon quietly accept what they cannot help, and learn to bless oiir interference." Victims of judicial blindness are those who think this ; and miserably will the worshippers of expediency, the disciples of laissez aller, smart for it, if they give credence to the song of such false sirens ! The "large party" clings to the Established Church of England — not because it is established, but because it is a Church — not because her Majesty (happily for her own spiritual welfare, and we bless God therefore for it) is a member of it, but because Christ founded upon a rock his Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church — of which One Church the English Church is part and parcel. They are deeply thankful that the abundant mercy of Providence should in this land have made Church and Establishment one and the same thing, 38 and they are very anxious that this alliance may not be broken. But once make it a question between the two, once make the formularies of the English Establishment no genuine voice of the Catholic Church— and you make her ministers by the thousand, themselves and their families, hearthless and houseless, and you drive the laity by troops into dissent — the dissent of the disestablished Book of Common Prayer — a dissent which cannot fail, much as they may struggle against it, to be embittered by the feeling of the deep wrong to their souls which has been inflicted on them. You will be bold men if you dare this, albeit Ministers of the Grown, or bishops, sent by them to rule the flock of God. Tou are never tired of declaiming about what you term the cruelty which, on the restoration of Eoyalty in this land, compelled so many intruded ministers to restore our churches to their rightful holders — how will you qualify an act which should gratuitously drive the rightful holders out of their churches and their parishes ? You must not consider that the process of expusion will be either a short or a silent one. It will not be la Heine le veut to the act of change, and then exit the " large party." Every clergyman of England has sworn at his ordination " always so to minister the doctrine and sacraments, and the discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded, and this Church and r.ealm hath received the same, according to the commandments ot God." Consequently, until Church and Realm combine to vary anything, each clergyman is bound, as he values his solemn oath, day after day to go to his church, and to use unchanged the Book of Common Prayer, in spite of twenty acts of Parliament unsanctioned by the Church to the contrary; and I have no doubt that all the clergy of the "large party" will continue so to do. Are you then prepared to bring the police to every church in the luugdom where the new-fangled ritual is not adopted, and to carry ofl' its minister to the county goal ? Till you have done this you will not have expelled the "large party," or its opinions, from the Estab- lishment. When you have effected all this, do you think that you will enter upon a very quiet or enviable epoch? Will you not be haunted by sights and sounds of the distress of body and of soul which you will have caused ? — the desolation of the congregations deprived of their pastors, the wails of the wives and of the children driven from comfort to beggary, and the stern submission of God's priests, going forth into the wilder- ness so that they may serve Him ncceptably ? 39 I am not declaiming — I am not scene-painting. Such will, without fail, be the result of any attempt to obliterate by- act of Parliament the Catholic character of the English Prayer Book, Will the Ministers, will Lord Ashley and his party, be bold enough to run such risks ? I cannot think so, if once they are taught that such are the risks which they will have to run to win success. High Churchmen differ very widely from Lord Ashley and his followers. It is absolutely a mystery to them how honest men with ordinary faculties can read the Prayer Book as the latter do. But as these accept the Prayer Book, the "large party" has never attempted to assail them ; and as they find no difficulty in living under the actual Prayer Book, they cannot say that they are hardly used. High Churchmen trust their cause to truth, to that truth which they know to be enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer, and they go on amid many difficulties to do the work of the Church of England with quiet confidence. But on the other side we hear the voice of hatred, and the broil of angry passion — " Out with them, out with them." Well, let the Ministry and their new allies turn us out ; I have warned them what they will bring about by that act of desperate madness ! XV. MR. BENNETT AND THE BISHOP OF LONDON. Jan. 21, 1851. YouE paper of Saturday contains, so far as the principals are mutually concerned, the ultimatum of the Bennett affair. It is true that Mr. Bennett is still incumbent of St. Paul's, but, with the self-denying determination which marks his character to a fault (for it was a fault, though one of a generous nature, to abdicate his constitutional position by conferring upon the bishop and patron of the living'a summary power of dismis- sal), he has refused even to think of any course but the literal fulfilment — irrespective of the conditions under which he tendered it, or of the legal dilemma which may be involved in it — of his promise to the Bishop. The Bishop, on the other hand, has refused to teU the parishioners the grounds upon which he holds Mr. Bennett unfaithful to the Church of England ; for upon these grounds only Mr. Bennett put it 40 ill his power to displace him ; and, as the result of this re- fusal, the parishioners are foiled in their intentions — strictly legal, peaceable, and respectful — of subjecting, through means of an amicable suit, the Bishop's impressions to that judicial scrutiny to which they are as liable as those of the humblest curate, and which they hold to be, in the pass to which matters have come, the only way of arriving at the right. So we are driven to form our own conjectures upon the data before the public ; and I have no hesitation in saying that the conduct of the Bishop is to me perfectly inexplicable. His lordship is a kind-hearted man — one who, I am sure, means to act justly ; and the constitutional character of the Church of England must be very familiar to him, from the prominent part he invariably takes in every measure intended to facilitate the exercise of constitutional powers on its part ; and yet we see this prelate performing an act of pure and simple despotism, to the detriment of one whose great zeal and usefulness he owns while doing so, and whose voluntary deference for the episcopal office alone it is that has em- powered his bishop to be a despot over Mr. Bennett, while he is a constitutional bishop over every other incumbent in London. And what is the offence that has called down this magis- terial severity? Mr. Bennett, by untiring exertions, com- pleted the building of a church for the poor, with a residence for the clergy, and schools adjacent, the church embodying that idea of the English ritual which Mr. Bennett held. The Bishop, aware of the general intention of Mr. Bennett's ritualism, consecrated the church, and then was present at a dinner given by Mr. Bennett on the occasion, uniting the rich and the poor — at which he acknowledged his health, when given by the incumbent, in a speech from which I make two extracts :— "The Bishop of Londou returned thank.s. Before he proceeded to the pleasing duty assigned him by his friend Mr. Bennett, he was anxious to assure them, and he did so with the greatest sincerity, that he had expe- rienced the highest gratification in coming among them on this occasion ; and after the solemnities of the morning, by which a new house of prayer had been dedicated to the honour of God, he thought it was most fitting to preside at such an entertainment as this, where rich and poor were met together. His lordship then paid a high compliment to Mr. Bennett, for his success- ful efforts to furnish so complete a provision for the spiritual wants of the neighbourhood, and expressed his earnest hope and confidence that the church and schools so munificently provided would be the source of inestimable blessings to all around." 41 Very shortly after, his lordship wrote to Mr. Bennett, complaining of certain practices in the new church, of which he commanded the discontinuance. Of these, some were alternatiye interpretations of the Rubric, and therefore beyond the scope of his injunction, unless Toluntarily submitted to him — others of them were things not ordered, and not very judicious to introduce, but difficult to prove illegal ; one being a form of administering the cup, as fully realising all requirements as the common one ; another, a motion of the hand; and the third, the use of words, most innocent in them- selves, and forming a portion of the sermon — a parf of the service left to the preacher himself to frame. Two only of the counts were clearly against the Rubric. Of these Mr. Bennett at once proved one to be a simple fabrication ; and the other was a concession in a matter of form, only made in six exceptional cases, with the intention, in two of them, of retaining conforming Roman Catholics in the Church of Eng- land, and in July last, at the Bishop's first admonition, absolutely discontinued. Curiously enough, it so happens that two of the revisers of the Prayer Book in 1662 (Wren and Oosin), who introduced the Eubric prefixed to the Prayer of Consecration (in which mention is made of the priest standing before the table) — upon which Mr. Bennett founded the position which he took during that most solemn part of the service, and which the bishop impugned — happened to think with him, and against the Bishop of London, on the questions of the lighted candles, and of the place of the priest at the consecration — if, that is to say, their words and their actions are any criterion of their thoughts. So, whether Mr. Bennett were right or wrong in this particular, he was right or wrong with the revisers of 1662; and any unfaithfulness exhibited by him in this particular was unfaithfulness on their parts. The controversy between him and the Bishop continued, with the interval of a journey to the Continent by the latter, and the interlude of the Russell riots- — -eliciting, on Mr. Bennett's part, that most unhappy oiFer (just thrown out in July, and shaped in October) of resignation, and a proposal for an understanding on certain data which the Bishop declined to accede to, and which he met by the urgent demand to Mr. Bennett to resign, at a time when Mr. Bennett was fighting his gallant battle against popular frenzy. Then came the publication of the correspondence, and the interposition of the churchwardens, of which an immediate result was, that, in the service of St. Barnabas' Church, alli^xe points objected 42 to by the Bishop (except one) have been waived — with a clear understanding that Mr. Bennett approved of their proceedings ■ — even that of the lighted candles, of which, in strictness, the Bishop was not competent, on his ipse dixit, to order the dis- continuance, nor the clergyman to accept such mandate, if he believed it contrary to the Rubric. The single exception was the position of the priest at the Prayer of Consecration — an exception, as I have shown, not taken without very high authority. Here stands the matter, so far as Mr. Bennett is concerned. The Bishop's position is, that he continues to exact the performance of a promise given upon the supposi- tion of his considering Mr. Bennett "guilty of unfaithfulness to the Church of England" — while he neither will say cate- gorically that he does so think him, or, if he so thinks, upon what grounds he does so. The result is, that a parish priest, eminent for zeal and self-devotion, and greatly beloved by his flock, is ejected from his cure untried — for his ejector will not lay, nor suffer to be laid, the indictment — and uncon- demned, for there is no charge against him but that compen- dious one alone — " Sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas." On the other side, we see that clergymen convicted of the most barefaced profligacy (I have one in my eye whose brutal licentiousness came before the public a few years back) are only punished by a temporary suspension. And when we see such things going on about us, those wretched secessions to the Church of Rome, which are so greedily caught at as the excuse for anything and everything, are laid to the score of the ceremonies of St. Barnabas. In the interim, Lord John Russell has had his triumph over the bishop who stood up against him in the Hampden and the Gorham cases — the mob is satiated— and Mr. Broderip and the butler are justi- fied. Can the fear of these have been in any degree a ruling- motive in the late proceedings ? There is a view of the case, personal to the Bishop, which I could much wish were brought before him. As I pointed out in my last letter, the integrity of the Prayer Book is in peril from a Parliamentary revision. Once let it come to this, the Bishop of London must — he cannot help — placing himself at the head of those who are resolved to fight for it. Nay, he has as much as pledged himself to do so, in a letter of his to Mr. A. J. B. Hope, which was published in tlie papers last year, in which he ignores any but a synodical 43 revision of our formularies. " I hold that until the Church's Articles and Formularies are altered by the authority of Con- vocation, or of some Synod equal to Convocation, her charac- ter as a teacher of truth remains unchanged." The clear deduction to be drawn from this remarkable passage is, that his lordship can see but one body competent to change the teaching of the English Church — Convocation, or some Synod equal to Convocation. If, then, as there is too much reason to fear, our apprehensions prove true, who Avill be his lordship's stanchest troops in the campaign against the Ministerial reformation ? Those men who will have felt most keenly the hardship of punishing Mr. Bennett, as he has been punished — even on the Bishop's hypothesis of his holding the ritualism of that Prayer Book, and something more, on all the charges — while all the clergy who have revised the Prayer Book for themselves, issued their own commission, and retrenched whatever seemed good in their own eyes, are allowed to go scot free — being only guilty, we hear, of the more pardonable fault of defect. His lordship, I doubt not, will then sound the alarm. But will he find his troops as much disposed to trust themselves to Ms generalship as they might have been three months ago ? I very much fear that they will expect, in addition, a council of war elected by themselves, and I cannot but apprehend that he will find that some of his recent sayings will be, to his astonishment, perverted into weapons of the adversary. XVI. LOED ASHLEY AND THE REVISION OF THE PRAYER BOOK. Jan. 24, 1851. In your paper of yesterday I find a letter from Lord Ashley, in reply to an advertisement put out by the London Union on Church Matters, which contains the same intelli- gence, respecting the proposed scheme for an attempted revision of the Prayer Book, which I communicated to you in my letter which appeared on Monday. The careless reader of this oracular manifesto might be led to conclude, that it proved the baselessness of the apprehensions which prompted that letter, and upon which the resolutions of the London Union were founded. A more careful examination of its 44 singularly guarded phraseology, viewed in connexion with corroborative circumstances, will infallibly lead us to a directly contrary conclusion, and almost justify us in saying hahemus confitentem reum. Lord Ashley is an old member of Parliament, a practised speaker, and a practical writer of letters — one long compelled to keep in good humour and patience as turbulent and head- strong a troop of followers as, I should think, ever ranged tliemselves under the banners of any leader. His lordship, when on his legs, may sometimes let his ideas carry him rather further than prudence might dictate ; but, pen in hand, he is as reserved as the most phlegmatic could desire. What, then, does Lord Ashley's denial say; what does it leave unsaid? It says : — " I may perhaps be allowed to assure you and the gentlemen who have advertised the statement, that it is not in contemplation by myself, nor, I firmly believe, by any of those who took part in the meeting of the 5th December, when I had the honour to be chairman, to proeiire a Royal Commission, or any other authority, for a revision of the Prayer Book, either latitudinarian or otherwise." Observe the wording — "is not in contemplation." Is this an unconditional denial ? Is it any denial at all of such a Commission having been in contemplation ? Is it not an acknowledgment of the fact? It is an almost physical impossibility that Lord Ashley, if he could have said so, would not have said, " No such idea has ever been entertained." He has not said this — he has said, "it is not in contem- plation ; " and the inevitable conclusion is, that the contem- plation was entertained, and that some prudential consideration or other has led to its present postponement. I have been informed that a "hitch" occurred. From which side, spiritual or temporal, the hitch may have come, I do not venture to speculate. We know — this is all we do know from Lord Ashley's letter — that the attempt to alter the words of the Prayer Book is " further removed" (to borrow the expression of the Archbishop of Canterbury) than it was some days back. But we also know that when Lord Ashley and his meeting got up the address to her Majesty to exercise her "wholesome power of interposition," they could not have intended merely to play a First of April prank on the gohemouches of London ; and your paper of Saturday, which I had not seen when I wrote the letter, contains a pattern card of noblemen and M.P.'s whose signatures have already been procured to that document. That address, too, has just been adopted at a public meeting at Southampton, reported witli a flourish of 45 trumpets in a morning contemporary. Happily, however, there is no room for conjecture, for an announcement of hiS lordship's intention has appeared in another morning con- temporary of yesterday. This communication professes to be official, and is honoured with the position and the type which are reserved for paragraphs coming from authority. It commences with a tolerably accurate recapitulation, cast in the phraseology which the quarter from which it emanates would naturally give it, of the report, adding (a fact new to me) that a private version fixed upon the Duke of Bedford as the peer who was to bring the scheme forward in the House of Lords at the -^ry commencement of the session. It then continues [the italics are mine], " We are enabled to state that there is no truth whatever in the report. We can say this most positively on behalf of the noble lord who presided at the meeting, and we believe we are equally justified in saying it for the other noblemen, members of Parliament, and private gentlemen, imder whose auspices the meeting took place. But we have much pleasure in adding that the noblemen and gentlemen alluded to have determined on using every means in their power to obtain, immediately on the re-assembling of the legislature, a Eoyal injunction to restrain the Puseyites from inculcating prin- ciples and practising ceremonies which are wholly unsanctioned by anything within the boards of the Prayer Book. The effect of this will be to turn out of the Anglican Church, by one fell swoop, the whole brood of the Tractarian clergy." Can anything be clearer ? "Who has enabled your con- temporary to make such statements? How can it speak " most positively ?" Who has given it " the pleasure of add- ing 1" These are not questions thrown out at random. Lord Ashley has chosen to enter personally into the controversy by contradicting a report identical with one to which I gave currency in your columns. He is bound, therefore, to state whether this paragraph has appeared with his privity ; and he is, moreover, bound — a perfectly different question, and one which he cannot escape from by merely giving a nega- tive answer to the former one — to state whether its subject- matter be true or false. If he neglects to do so, its truth and accuracy stand confessed. What is it that these "noblemen and gentlemen" are using every means — with whom? — to obtain? "A Eoyal injunction to restrain" certain religious practices. Can I believe my eyes ? A Eoyal injunction to restrain ! Is the year upon which we are entering to be the great epoch of 46 the " world's fair," the symbol of toleration and brotherly kindliness between all nations and all religions ? Is it, after all, only the fear of possible unpopularity which restrains Sir Charles Wood from attempting to give iclat to the new budget by a few Benevolences and a little Ship-money ? Supposing, for argument sake, that the practices com- plained of were of the offensive nature which the agitating party make them out to be, is it conceivable — were it not true — that members of both Houses, persons of all parties, would have combined so entirely to stultify themselves^- would have so recklessly leagued together to bring to nought all those principles of a fre^constitution which we used to be told the struggles of the two last centuries have established for this empire, as we see they have done, and have ostentatiously proclaimed in the sympathetic columns of their new organ? The state of the case, according to their own showing, ■which we cannot therefore conceive is over-coloured, is that these legislators, hereditary and elected, are "using every means" to "turn out of the Anglican Church," hy a simple exercise of autocratic and irresponsible tyranny (the disloyalty of the notion is theirs, not mine), and " by one fell swoop, the whole brood of the Tractarian clergy" — all the clergy of the " large party." After all, sir, my letter of Monday is correct in its picture of the results of the movement in its present, as it was of it in its original form- — the police, and the minister dragged off to the county gaol, and the troubles that will then follow — the whole machinery, in short, of what I then termed, and still term, an act of desperate madness. Observe the jovial swashbuckler way in which the organ of the Freemasons' Hall meeting discourses of that pleasurable scene ; the gusto with which it hacks again the hacknied " one fell swoop," like a " fast man" contemplating the suc- cess of a night's foray among the knockers, or a rat-catcher the trophies of the depopulated stack. I will not trespass upon your valuable space by proving the illusory nature of the pretexts put forward for this mon- strous scheme of our new reformers. I appeal to my former letters to prove that the practices which they mean to put down, and dare to terra " wholly unsanctioned," comprise, actually or by implication, every form significative of that code of doctrine and discipline which the Church of England has inherited from the pure days of primitive Christianity, everything that was above the dreary level of Genevan doc- trine and Genevan discipline. If there be any one innocent enough to believe that such an injunction can be effectually 47 carried out with the Prayer Book unchanged, if there be any who look upon this announcement as anything but a blind, they will very soon find themselves undeceived. The party which Lord Ashley represents know that the Prayer Book is against them. That sovereign act of diplomacy which they meant to be the master-stroke of their policy, the seal of their doctrine — the Gorham judg- ment—brought this out unmistakeably ; and it is clear that they feel it. For years and years they never tired of declaiming against that " soul-destroying heresy," baptismal regeneration ; they never ceased wondering how men could be so wilfully blind as to pretend to see it in the Prayer Book. At length the important day came, and the expected judgment was delivered. This document is compelled, in every portion of its tortuous argument, to own that the scouted doctrine stands confessed through all our formularies, while so audaciously arguing that the rejection of it is com- patible with the honest acceptance of them and of the emolu- ments thereon possibly depending. Any one who wishes corroborative evidence of this fact will find it in a series of able papers, by one who himself thoroughly disbelieves the doctrine, entitled the " Great Gorham Case," attributed to the pen of Mr. Binuey. A striking article, also, in the current number of the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, " The Battle of the Churches," while pleading for a scheme of Church Eeform for which even Lord Ashley, I think, would be unprepared, acknowledges that, as the Church of England now stands, the " large party" are its most con- sistent members. The upshot of the whole affair is very simple. Lord Ashley and his party are tired of the status in quo in the Church of England. They see that the development of that Church, so long as her essential character remains unchanged, must tend to the diffusion of her true principles. They have, in their hour of fancied triumph, learned at what a cost of principle that dear-bought victory has been gained. They have, therefore, taken the desperate resolve of endeavouring to change that character, and force new principles upon that Church. A fixed scheme like this may well aflbrd to shift its views of policy. A few days ago the most approved course may have been to attack the Prayer Book openly ; now we have the best authority for knowing that it is decided, at first, at least, to endeavour to undermine it. But the charac- ter of the attempt remains unaltered, and the real danger unabated. Most earnestly, then, do I trust that no Church- 48 man will allow himself to be lulled into a false security by the vague and temporary denial of one single count of the indictment contained in Lord Ashley's letter. The object of the party he represents is to throw sound Churchmen off their guard ; and admirably does his lordship attempt to do so. If we relax one iota of our vigilance on account of that letter, we help on the consummation of our own undoing — a catastrophe which, if we will, we can avoid. No. III. will be published in a few days. PETTER, DUFF AND CO. PniNTEHS, CRANE COURT, FLEET STREET. LETTERS CHURCH MATTEE8. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE " MORNINQ CHRONICLE/ No. III. ' The world Is nat'rally averse To all the truth It sees or hears; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON : JAMBS RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1851. CONTENTS. PAGE XVII. Mk. Bensett's Resignation 3 XVin. The Bishop of Manchester 5 XIX. The Theory op Episcopacy. — 1 12 XX. The Bishop op Manchester's Eejoindee . . .19 XXI. The Late Meetins of Convocation . . . .28 XXII. Lord John Kussell and the Bishops . . .31 XXIII. Lord Ashley in the House of Commons . . .34 XXIV. The Theory of Episcopacy. — II. .... 39 XXV. Marriage with a Deceased "Wife's Sister . . 45 XXVI. Papal Aggression and the Scotch Bishops . . 49 XXVII. Parliamentary Reform and the Mummeries of Superstition 52 XXVm. Lord Stanley and Mr. Gladstone . . . .56 XXIX. Lord John Russell, Low Churchmen, and the Bishops 58 tETTEES CHURCH MATTEfiS. XVII. MR. BENNETT'S EESIGNATION. Ja1(. S5, 1851. I LEARN from a quarter whicli cannot be misinformed upon the point, tliat in speaking, in my last letter, upon the subject of Mr. Bennett and the Bishop of London, of a prac- tice of which the latter complained — that of administering the cup at the Holy Communion without entrusting it into the hands of the communicant — as if it were an habitual practice of Mr. Bennett's — I have wronged him. It seems that Mr. Bennett's general practice was the usual one of the Church of England ; but that in some few cases (not above ten or twelve, I hear) he administered it in the manner for which his diocesan blamed him ; not on account of the incul- cation or expression of any desire on his part, but in com- pliance with the request of these communicants themselves. Here, then, sir, is a diminution of the possible grounds of complaint brought against Mr. Bennett by the Bishop — a further reduction of that infinitesimal body of evidence which exists to prove that a clergyman who has pre-eminently de- voted his titne, and health, and private income to the Church of England, and consummated all by a signal homage to her episcopate, is unfaithful to her. The longer one thinks of the A 2 matter, the more is one tempted to ask, whether the Bishop of London has ever really weighed what is the meaning — the plain grammatical meaning— of Mr. Bennett's various letters to him, which conjointly compose that honourable engage- ment to resign, which— rashly, as I think, given— has been so nobly redeemed. The confidence which Mr. Bennett has placed in his ordinary, exacted on the part of the latter a judicial caution in weighing words and scanning actions, far more onerous than any which he could be expected to exercise had he, happily for all concerned, never had to deal with Mr. Bennett's case, except under the powers which he pos- sessed by the laws of the Church. I assume you wiU observe, that the Bishop does conclude, though he will not state it, that he considers Mr. Bennett un- faithful to the Church of England. Any other hypothesis of his lordship's conduct is too perplexing to be for one instant admissible. But we have not yet attained the Bishop's idea of what " unfaithful" implies. The same word may have a popular conversational import, very light, implying little blame, thrown out almost at random, and easily forgotten by the person inculpated under it. A friend is engaged to dinner at a particular hour ; he wilfully comes too late, and the repast is spoiled. He is taxed by his host with being unfaithful to his engagement ; and he bears with eqxianimity what, in the vernacular use of the word, is a very mild rebuke for an undeniably selfish proceeding. But let the judge in the Ecclesiastical Court pronounce husband or wife un- faithful to the other, and he has judicially enunciated the gravest censure. This, precisely this, is the censure which Mr. Bennett enabled, by his own sole act, the Bishop of London to pro- nounce, not in his court, acting by commissary, after the forms of trial, but autocratically in his study, through the medium of the penny post. The notion of the parish priest being married to his church, is not a metaphor, but a reality, in ecclesiastical law. The idea is ingrained in the system ; it forms, so to speak, a first principle of its action. The very word endowment implies it in its derivation ; and in Latin dos means both that and a marriage dowry. "What Mr. Bennett, then, said to the Bishop of London was — " I have such defer- ence for your office — such faith in your individual exercise of it — that 1 waive, in my own case and in your favour, all my constitutional rights — those rights that I am co-trustee for with my brother parish priests, on their behalf as much as on my own ; and that I permit you, in the solitude of your own room, upon examination carried on in your own way, upon rules of evidence of your own devising, to pronounce me un- faithful to my spouse, my parish, and to decree a divorce." Accordingly the divorce is decreed, the evidence refused, and Mr. Bennett has accepted the sentence ; the only charges brought against him being a few ritual observances — some of them imprudent, some, at worst, irregular ; others, I believe, though unusual, more legally regular than their more ordi- nary substitutes. The case is distressing enough as far as it regards Mr. Bennett alone. But Mr. Bennett is not the only clergyman in the diocese of London. What clergyman in the diocese can hold himself to be for one instant safe, if, in the Bishop's eyes, the charge of unfaithfulness is one to act upon, but not of necessity to substantiate, against the inculpated party. I refrain from dilating upon such a picture, so little re- sembling what the condition of a pattern diocese ought to be — so little like the primitive idea of the bishop, the father and confidant of his clergy, habitually sitting amidst them in his cathedral church — habitually taking counsel with them about the common welfare. XVIII. THE BISHOP OF MANCHESTER. ' Jan. 30, 1851. I HAVE, in previous communications, called your attention to the unfortunate necessity imposed upon us, in these times so out of joint, to keep in check that inclination to exceed rather than fall below the letter of deference to our spiritual rulers, which must be a first instinct to a well-regulated mind — although, like other good instincts, it is one requiring to be kept under by reason and reflection. Churchmen truly are placed in a fearful dilemma. Believing, as they do, in the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession, as a constitutional prin- ciple of the Christian Church, and feeling, as they do, a reve- rence for the person of a bishop in consequence of his oflice, they are often caUed upon to do what is of a perfectly different nature — to submit to the bishop as if he were superior to the Church itself, and to obey his edicts against the laws of that Church ; or, if they will not at once acknowledge these pre- tensions, to be taxed with being untrue to their normal prin- ciples. But, hard as this accusation is, they must bear it with patience, knowing full well that, as English Churchmen, their first and dearest allegiance is due to her laws, to her convocation, and to her Prayer Book — all standing facts, which no individual bishop,, no knot of bishops, can any more contravene than the Lydian meeting could annul them. It is unhappily the case that, although our bishops, when con- secrated, are truly bishops — and although, if the choice has providentially been a good one, they may make themselves in deed and feeling, as well as in oiBce, the fathers of their flock — yet the mere fact of Dr. So-and-so being elected Bishop of So-and-so — while it may afford a pretty sutficient gauge of the dispositions towards the Church of the Prime Minister, in whose patronage, along with places at the Customs, the " office of a bishop in the Church of God" is now vested — no more guarantees, I will not say the perscmal orthodoxy, but even fairness towards the orthodox faith on the part of the, new prelate, than commanderships-in-chief in the Indian army would be a test of military capacity, supposing their nomination to devolve upon the Archbishop of Canterbury, . and the rule that guided his Grace to be notoriously concur- rence with his theological opinions. The bravest and wisest officers would soon find it a necessity, in defence of the inte- gTity of the army, not to allow such generals any more than, their legitimate authority ; and Churchmen, I am sorry to say, must, in defence of the Church and the Prayer Book of Eng- land, not allow the bishops to exceed their canonical powers. Facts enough have transpired of late, even in London, to justify me in the conclusions to which I have, with no plea- sure nor willingness, arrived. But the full effects of ascribing autocratic powers to the Episcopate are not to be sought in London. The evils of unlimited discretion being given to an individual bishop must be sought in some case, should such unhappily be anywhere found, of temper- overcomiag- the ordinary rules of reverence and common respect for the Christian dead, even in a church, and a church completed and served by the deceased — of violence rendering the aggressor blind to ridicule as. much as to decortim' — of an acute and learned man discovering false doctrine in a letter o^ the alphabet, that letter being the only one which could com- mence a given date, or any date for anything ever done since the year 999 — of a clergyman mistajiing churching gifts for offerings for the dead — of all this occurring in" a chuvcli where, till Lord John Russell's letter to the Bishop of Durham liad appeared, that diocesan had held a pew, and had himself officiated at holy communion and at a confirmation without hazarding" a word of rehuke, or a single criticism beyond the advice of one who admired a work, and, wishing well to it, was sedulous for its improvement. Such a spectacle as this has, I am shocked to say, been seen in a parish church of Manchester during the late season of misrule, and has attracted sufficient notice to have been the topic of comment in local papers, although, somewhat strangely, no London periodical which I have seen has yet taken it up. The chief actor in the scene which I shall have to describe is the Eight Reverend Dr. J. P. Lee, Lord Bishop (as every one knows) of Manchester. Not very long after the creation of the see, the newly-made ecclesiastical division found itself unexpectedly convulsed by the refusal which the Bishop took iipon himself to make, to countersigning the ap- plication from two churches for that aid towards maintaiuing curates which the "Society for the Employment of Additional Curates in Populous Places" renders. He adopted this course avowedly on account of his disapproval of the observances and discipline of those churches — the first principle of the Society (whose executive by its constitution comprises all the English bishops) being that it eschewed party, and that the whole soul of its proceedings — application, coUnter-signa- ture, grant — everything, in short, was purely statistical; that is, in any place its munificence only required that the existing staff of clergy should approve themselves as doing all that they reasonably could, and having done so, should be mani- festly not numerous or strong enough for the work. But the Bishop of Manchester does not view things as other men do. There were two curates in his diocese, whose licences he was bound, if he could prove them untrue to the Church of Eng- land, to revoke — and whose applications for assistance' from the " Additional Curates' Society," if he could not prove that, he was bound to countersign. He would do neither. He continued their licences, and he strove to starve them out by not backing their applications. This magnanimous policy was proclaimed at a public meeting, in a speech such as few but the Bishop of Manchester can make ; and, as was not at all curious, it set the Additional Curates' Society in a fer- ment. Exciting meetings of its. governing committee (the only public meetings which its constitution allows) were held, and at last a resolution was framed, laying down in the most explicit terms that the countersignature of a diocesan was simply to the truth of the statistics therein contained. Every- body thought the matter settled. But what was, to use a common phrase, as clear as the sun at noonday to everybody else, was a mystery to the Bishop of Manchester ; he could see nothing in this resolution which compelled him to coun- tersign the applications, the refusal of which gave rise to that extraordinary step of the society — and so the curates continued starving, and the Bishop had a short triumph. But things could not last so— the society found itself breaking up ; and its quietest members were convinced that something must be done. All at once the wind veered, and it transpired that, if the society would, in place of what it had ahready said, use certain other words absolutely tantamount to its former reso- lution, the Bishop of Manchester's understanding would be opened, the society would be saved, and the curates would receive their allowance. The committee of the society very wisely, all things considered, took their part in this — tragedy it was not, for it ended well — farce I will not call it, out of respect to the perfonners — but mummery I may term it ; and the breeze blew over. A short lull it was, when the exploit which is the more immediate subject of this letter occurred. To the north of Manchester lies a suburb called Broughton, beyond which is Sedgeley Hall, the temporary residence of the Bishop. In Broughton a church was built some few years back, to which Mr. Bayne, late incumbent, added, at his own risk, a chancel of handsome architecture, and richly fitted. This gentleman died not long since at an early age. For some time the Bishop, imable to procure a pew in his parish church, rented* one at Broughton, where he regularly attended on Sunday afternoons. More than this, he has celebrated Holy Com- munion in the church, and he has confirmed there. No ob- jection was heard from the diocesan, and no complaint was lodged with him. At last Lord John Russell's Letter to the Bishop of Durham was published, and the public justice of the diocese of Manchester required a victim. What victim so convenient could be found as Broughton chancel — for the Bishop was necessarily tolerably familiar with its fittings, and its founder was dead. Accordingly, one afternoon, a visit was unexpectedly paid to the clmrch, and its results were paraded to the world in a reply to an address from the clergy of Blackburne upon the " Papal Aggression," in which the , Bishop of Manchester adroitly runs into a self-laudation of * The filet of his lordship's reiiting a pew is, as will be seen further orij disproveti. 9 an aggression at Broughton, at least as insolent, and at least' as insidious, as that of tlie Bishop of Eome. I will cut up the passage into clauses, illustrating it as I go on, partly by remarks of my own, and partly by extracts from a reply issued by Messrs. Atkinson and Dodgshon, the gentlemen who were Mr. Bayne's churchwardens, and from an article ia the Manchester Guardian* the leading liberal organ of that city. " Nor was the prospect less hopeful to her emissaries," i.e., those of Rome, " if, going, as 1 myself did a short time since, into a district church built in this diocese, a few years ago, they found, as I did" (no one will say that these words are precisely those most conducive to make it apparent that the church in question was one in which the Bishop rented a pew, and where he had himself officiated), " the three sedilia on the south side of the church, for priest, deacon, and subdeacon, whereas our I^ubric places the minister on the north." It is almost needless to remark : I. That our Rubric nowhere says anything of where the minister is to sit when not at the Lord's table. 2. That these sedilia so placed are a portion of our chancels " as in times past." 3. That we read in Queen Elizabeth's time of celebrant, epistoler, and gospeler — the functionaries who, in the reformed Church of England, occupy the sedilia ; and 4. That when there is a plurality of " Mi- nisters," the excess m\ist be placed somewhere during the sermon delivered by one of their body ; and therefore, there being no Rubric to justify the old-fashioned altar-chairs flanking the altar, the unfortunate minister or ministers in question must, according to the Bishop of Manchester, stand at the north end of the table during the entire course of any sermon, however long ; and I may add, 5. That such sedilia are found in a church lately built at the entire cost of the Bishop of London. We are then told of " the piscina, to wash the minister's hands while saying the ' lavabo' of the Romish service." The churchwardens very summarUy dealt with this accusation, by the statement that the said piscina was only introduced as an architectural ornament, which " never has been, nor was it ever intended to be, used for the purpose mentioned by the Bishop." The Manchester Guardian acutely asks : — "Did he wash his hands, and did he say the lavabo of the Eomish service? If not, the spirit of truth, and we think the spirit of 'Protestant Christianity' also, would have required the bishop to say so." Again, he speaks of "One shelf for the cruets of wine * Really, as it seemed, the Manchester Spectator. 10 and water for the priest alone in tlie Eucharist" — a gratuitous assumption of Dr. Lee's ! — and " The altar tomb, ready as a sepulchre for the crucifix at Easter." I reply in the words of the Manchester Guardian : — " Mark the word ready." " Was the crucifix ever placed there at Easter, or at any time; and was it ever used in the church? Did not the hishop know that the tomb was built to receive the remains of the late Mr. Clowes, and did he not know that those remains were, and are, in that tomb 1 Did he ever hear — had he ever reason to believe — did he, in fact, ever believe that the tomb was for any other purpose V The churchwardens further explain — " This is a canopied tomb on the north side of the chancel, in which is interred the late Rev. John Clowes, who was a principal benefactor to the chancel as well as the church. This tomb was erected by the present Colonel Clowes, of Broug'bton Hall (the brother of the deceased), from the designs of Mr. Wright, an architect at Nottingham. On a very con- spicuous part of the tomb is a brass, with the following inscription : — " (I omit this for brevity.) " We may remark, that when the architect was made acquainted with the view which the bishop took of this tomb, he wrote to express bis amazement that any one could fall into so extraordi- nary a mistake." With respect to the next feature discovered by the Bishop's playful imagination, " The almorie for such as come to pray for the souls of the departed," I give the churchwardens' interpretation, without any comment of my own :— " This is nothing but a small neat oak alms-box fixed near the vestry door, for the purpose of receiving the accustomed ofierings made at the churching of women. We need scarcely observe that this was the only purpose for w hich it was put up." We read further: " The Virgin Mary, crowned, in the. stained glass above, the date of the erection of the church ingeniously disposed, in a large M. (for its first period 1,000), the Virgin s sacred emblem, with A. and 0. and I.H.S., amid the emblems of Christ's passion (the cross, nails, scourge, dice, coat), all copied duly from Eomish artists, on the pave- ment beneath." The Bishop does not record a fact which I have heard upon very good authority, that he expressed a reverend wish that the boys might throw stones through the figure in ques- tion. But the gem of the whole accusation is the M. Is the thing credible ? Bishop Lee, a man of no mean intellectual calibre, a University scholar of Cambridge, a fellow of Trinity College, a distinguished schoolmaster at Rugby and at Bir- ming'ham, when visiting Broughton Church and reading this inscription— neither of them for the first time— seems at once 11 to lose all his learning, all his acuteness, all sense of the ridiculous, at the sight of the first letter of the only collection of letters which can possibly be used to designate 1846 — or, as 1 said, any year that ever has occurred, or ever can occur to the end of time, since a.d. 999. Risum teneatis amici ? And, to consummate the absurdity of the whole affair, he concludes that the, builders of Broughton chancel — those daring individuals who built a piscina to say the lavabo at, and an almorie to receive the offerings for the souls of the departed — betook themselves to the expedient of concealing the first letter of the word Maria (a word which it is, I trust, not blasphemous to, use) as the designation of one whose name was Maria, in the form of a date let into the pavement, and more often trod upon, than read ! As for the charge intended in the words, "with A. and 0. and I. H. S.," I have hitherto striven, sir, to despise it rather than to be angry, but I own. it is almost too much for me. The canon of Holy Scripture ends with that marvellous proclamation in the Book of Revelations, " I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." The Bishop of Manchester sneers at this, the voice of God himself, and he sneers at the recognised initials of the name of the Son of God ! But I refrain from dilating upon what I cannot talk of in the strain which I desire to preserve in these com- munications. I cannot conclude without a somewhat lengthened extract from the defence of the churchwardens, especially bearing upon this part q^ the Bishop's accusation : — " We must, however, remark that this (alonof with the other things objected to by the Bishop) has remained exactly in its present state ever since his lordship came into the diocese, and that on several occasions he has officiated in the chancel. On Christmas day last he coniirmed a number of young persons, and afterwards administered the Holy Com- munion. He has also officiated at other times, and on these occasions his lordship has been seated in a chair on the north side of the chancel (almost close to Mr. Clowes's tomb), while the other clergy present have invaria- bly made use of the sedilia. Until recently the bishop has never made any complaint, except on one occasion last year, when he objected to the tile mentioned above ; but this was from a motive which we cannot but admire and respect, His lordship thought the sacred symbols, from the position of the tile, were in danger of being trampled on, but appeared to be satisfied with the explanation which was then given. Not the least allusion or objection was made to the letter M. " When we contrast the fact? of the case with the statement of the bishop, we are lost in amazement. That his lordship should still persist in his views increases (if possible) our amazement, when we know that the above facts have been laid before him some time since. As he has officiated in the church: several times within the last two years, without 12 making any complaint (with the ahght exception mentioned), we are at a loss to understand how that should be considered Popery in the latter part of 18.30 which was not so in the earlier part, or in 1849. Kor are we bound to assig-n any reason for auch apparent inconsistency ; we cannot, however, refrain from remarliing- that his lordship's objections (if he had any) never assumed a public form until after the publication of Lord John Russell's celebrated letter to the Bishop of Durham." All this is very sad ; but the details of the Bishop's visit to the church are such as to throw his own description of it into the shade. I have heard various reports of this visit — of violence of words and violence of action — ^which, rather than run the risk of misstatement and misrepresentation, I omit ; but I am satisfied that I can record as a fact, that his lordship, in the church, spoke of the clergyman who had carried through the good work as " St. Bayne ;" and that at first he ordered the altar-screen reared to Mr. Bayne's memory to be torn down, and the tile containing the M. to be pulled up. Happily for the cause of religion, he afterwards spared himself this exposure ; but the sedilia and the piscina, I hear, were doomed — for the chancel, being unfortunately unconse- crated, is at the mercy of the Bishop, as a consecrated one would not be. Such, sir, are a few facts from the history of the first Bishop of the great city of Manchester — the nominee of Lord John Russell ; the result of that magnificent gift of one bishop, and that promise — never, I fancy, meant to be ful- filled — of three more, which happened to precede the general election of 1847. If sound Churchmen have, unhappily, to choose between their diocesan, in the shape of Dr. Lee, and the Book of Common Prayer, on which side is the truth more likely to be found ? XIX. THE THEORY OF EPISCOPACY.— I. Feb. 4, 1851. Whatevbr may be the turn of matters in the approach- ing session of Parliament, it requires no prophet to predict that episcopacy, both in its English and in its Eoman aspect, will occupy no little of the attention of that body which ever manifests so strange an inclination to assume the attitude of an ecclesiastical synod. It may not, therefore, be unseason- able to string together a few facts relative to the theory of 13 episcopacy as held in the entire Christian Church, to serve as landmarks in the discussions which must ensue on a topic dur- ing which it is clear that the ordinary supply of tart invectives on purple liveries, sumptuous palaces, and lordly domineer- ing prelates, on the one hand — and the invariable rotund flow of responsive platitudes about amiability, and respectability, and responsibility, and so forth, on the other— can no longer suffice to stave off the real question of the constitutional posi- tion of Bishops in the Universal Church. Hitherto the con- troversy has been all on one side — that of the Anglican episcopate ; and a species of stereotyped form of attack and defence has, of course, resulted. In this session, on the con- trary, everything which the superficial Liberal of the Eussell school may advance against the " Papal Aggression" wiU be a vindication of the Anglican status in quo ; and every gibe he points against the latter will strengthen the position of the former. Hitherto we have heard the episcopate blamed for its inordinate wealth — the intrusive body is notorious for its ex- treme poverty. Hitherto we have been threatened with the expulsion of Bishops from the House of Lords — the intrusive body will not so much as dare show itself at a levee. Hitherto episcopacy has been taunted with being only a machinery to heap patronage upon the Minister, and to afford an easy pro- vision for tutors and younger sons — the intrusive body is the spectacle of a hierarchy so little pleasing to the Minister as to have had, to dispassionate bystanders, the appearance of depriving him of all his statesmanship. And yet both bodies, under very different external mani- festations, comprise the essential conditions of the episcopacy as held by the Universal Church — -while, in almost every detail, they wander, though in different directions, so far away from it. And yet, far apart as these directions them- selves seem to be, they deviate from each other owing to a common cause. This common origin is the assumption, on the part of the mediaeval episcopate, of baronial and secular dignity, as distinguished from any claim to authority which they might make or decline on the score of the divinely inherited prerogatives of the Apostolate of the Christian Church — prerogatives existing sometimes under the favour, sometimes under the persecution, but always, when true to its essential idea, beyond the power, of secular domination. Being by conviction a member of the Church of England, I shall assume that her view of the constitution of the Chris- tian community is the correct one; and I shall take for granted that, in concluding the Apostolic Succession to be a 14 primary law of the Universal Church, she is acting in accord- ance with the Christianity of the earliest times, which, with- out exception, held that the College of Apostles received the Divine Commission to transmit its ordinary powers to a succession of men who should, for their part, transmit the same, and so on ifor ever — ^which body of men are known by the designation of Bishops. The outward aspect of this episcopacy at a time when the Christian Church had consolidated its outward organization, was at once majestic and practical. The dioceses were very many and very small. The heart that sent the life-blood through all the arteries of every diocese was to be found at a building in the centre of the town of this diocese, in the Cathedral Church — that is, the church where the Bishop had his Cathedra or Throne. Here he dwelt, and here he cele- brated the majestic rites of the Christian faith, with his body of inferior elergy round him — both morally, in their joint administration of the diocese, and actually, in their stated seats in the sacred edifice. When the throne fell vacant, they elected, subject to the concurrence of the entire faithful of the district. Their nominee had to pass the scrutiny of con- firmation by that Bishop to whom a wise provision of the Catholic Church had allotted the dignity of Metropolitan, and, if approved, he received the consecration which really gave him his dignity. Once consecrated, he found himself the chosen chief and president of a body of clergy whose choice and ruler he was, as they were his fellow-counsellors. From these bishops, by a lineal pedigree of which every link can be proved, descend both Archbishop Sumner and Archbishop Wiseman, Bishop Lonsdale and Bishop Ullathorne ; and yet the respective ways in which the two hierarchies have been appointed cannot be more different than each difi'ers from the primitive type. The first disturbing cause, speaking generally, which influenced this state of things, was one which was in itself a sign and a means of development — the organization of the parochial system, which established subordinate centres in each diocese, more or less independent of the primary centre of operations afi'orded by the Cathedral Church, with its bishop and its stafl:' of clergy. This development of necessity called for some re-adjust- nient of the forms of episcopal election, which might, while ]naintaining the position of the Cathedral Chapter (to borrow a more modern phrase), at the same time secure its repre- senting the newer class of parochial clergy. 15- Biit this re-adjustment never arose ; for events brought into prominence circumstances -which tended to widen that inevitable separation which on all accounts ought rather to have been bridged over. It is clear that the primary idea, on the one hand, of the Cathedral, and, on the other, of the parochial system, required, when brought into concurrent action, that the former should be — at all events when fulfilling its most important function of ele*tingthe bishop — the representation, the standing synod, so to speak, of all the parishes of the diocese, and of all the clergy in it. But certain of these bodies became too powerful for this due subordination to be properly maintained. In Northern Europe, to which I confine my remarks, the energy of the missionary exertions of the Benedictiae order, to which common justice compels us to own that it owed, for the most part, its evangelization, had the eifect of completely altering the nature of Chapters, of Bishops, and of Cathedrals. The monks were the missionaries — the parishes a glow after- growth. The result was, that monks became bishops, monas- tic churches were constituted Cathedrals, and their religious corporations grew into Chapters. I am not intending to blame any one for the change, unfortunate as its results may have been; events stronger than theory produced it. The result was, that the episcopate became, in theory, not the representative of the universal clergy, but of certain monastic bodies, or of chapters of canons, with the complete monastic stamp upon them. These bodies acquired, little by little, territorial wealth and importance ; so did the Bishops ; thence came Prince Bishops, and thence mitred Abbots. A some- what similar course of events developed the western Patriar- chate into the complex idea of temporal and spiritual sove- reignty comprised in the term Papacy. And here we find ourselves in the midst of the Middle Age. The close Chapters, as succeeding to the diocesan clergy, still claimed the election of the Bishops. But these Chapters ' were, if truth be spoken, exclusive corporations, without sufficient prestige to maintain them. For instance, in London the Chapter of St. Paul's elected their Bishop, and the equally important Chapter of Westminster had no more voice in the choice than the watermen on the Thames — while the parochial clergy were absolutely unthought of. In making this state- ment I do not forget the shade of a representation of the diocese, comprised in the prebends. I merely allude to them to show that I have not forgotten them, feeling that they do not really tell against my argument. The natural result followed. 16 Strong as these Chapters were, they wanted the plenitude of moral weight ; and stronger powers stepped in to supersede them in their right of choosing men who were to be at once the depositaries of the highest spiritual prerogatives, and the possessors of the amplest worldly power — chief pastors of souls, and wholesale lords of manors. These powers were the King and the Pope — the feudal suzerain, and the western patriarch whom events had so aggrandised. Thenceforward the ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages present a melan- choly record of kings, popes, and chapters contending for the nomination of that bishop whom the last-named competitor had always to go through the form of electing. Sometimes one prevailed, sometimes another ; the great mass of the parochial clergy, in the meanwhile, looking on in uninterested apathy. This evil developed further ones ; thus the bishop no longer even represented the chapter, but, assuming baro- nial state, he often fixed his residence in some castle or manor- house far away from his cathedral church, which thence- forward differed in nothing but name from any other abbej'. This corruption, odd to say, has been consolidated and aggra- vated by some of our recent so-called ecclesiastical reforms in England. At length came the reign of the " Head of the Church," Henry VIII., who made good his assumption of that title by stifling at one blow Pope and Chapter, and constituting the Crown effectual nominator of Bishops. I do not pretend to trace the course of events on the Continent ; it is sufficient to say that for the most part the old contest between Pope and King has ever since continued there. But still various circumstances tended to preserve for the Church of England some free voice. In the first place must be named the Convocation. This, however, was silenced at the begin- ning of the last century, because it had the audacity to think of calling to account Bishop Hoadley, a man of confessedly unsound, if not Socinian, opinions. In the secoiid was the process of confirmation by the Metropolitan, which had, some time after the Hoadley affair, sufficient terror to induce the Minister of the day to give to Dr. Kundell, a heterodox favo- rite of the then influential party, a bishopric in Ireland (where all form of canonical election has perished) in lieu of Glouces- ter, for which he had been designed. This process has, within the last three years, in the " Hampden case," been practically rendered a nullity, owing to the want of moral courage of that upright man, but unlearned theologian, the late Lord Chief Justice, on the confessed ground of that most fallacious notion of keeping peace by means of the compromise of strict principle. 17 Concurrently with ttese changes, the episcopal nomina- tions have become, more and more, merely Ministerial appointments, in the absolute gift of the Premier, instead of being, as up to a somewhat late date they were, beyond the autocratic nomination of the elected of the majority of the House of Commons — that House of Commons being now constituted, religiously speaking, as I leave Mr. Cobden to describe in more forcible language than I can command. Former letters of mine have pointed out the inevitable ■consequences of this selfish system — one of the most palpable of which is the distance which cannot but exist, under any but extraordinary circumstances, between the clergy and him to whom they ought to look as their father. I do not for one instant suppose that the primitive system could be abso- lutely restored. Such a notion is purely chimerical. The forms of modern civilization, the system of modern govern- ments, the growth of the parochial system, all render it impossible. But there are still elements of truth in that system which might be incorporated into our actual one without dislocating it — elements which cannot be brought into shape until the Church of England recovers her powers of synodical action ; but which, when shaped, will, I feel con- vinced, combine in a system far more conducive to the true dignity of the Crown, the true liberty of the subject. Dissen- ter as well as Churchman, and the true well-being of the Church, than the present complication of cumbrous and barren privilege, concurring with an actual paralysis of power for real and effective action in the one especial vocation of the Christian Church — the salvation of souls. After the evil of the nomination of bishops without any reference to their flocks had thus prevailed for ages, those disestablished offshoots of the Church of England which are to be found in Scotland and in the United States of America, were driven by the necessities of their case into the opposite extreme ; and they adopted — the one, the principle of election by the entire clergy of the diocese, to the fullest extent — and the other, the election by all the clergy, together with repre- sentatives of the laity. But, as was natural, one extreme being avoided, the other was embraced, and, by an unhappy compensation of evils, these bishops found themselves desti- tute of any chapter or any cathedral ; they were bishops in ofiice, but in position parochial clergy — each the incumbent of a parish, and in that position as much himself subject to all petty parochial persecutions as any of his dependent clergy 18 who might seek his advice under similar difficulties. Lament- able instances of this abnormal state of things have, within these few years, given great scandal. I have, as you see, sir, been stating facts, not proposing remedies. It is very clear that neither the English, Scotch, nor American hierarchy — to confine the question to these — is nominated as it should be. Mere Ministerial nomination is palpably a failure. Diocesan election of decentralised pre- lates, with hardly any Conservative check, is liable to great misuse. Still the Christian Church cannot go on without bishops ; and when once a bishop is consecrated to his see, while the form of his election becomes, and ought to become, a matter of importance in all matters of extra-canonical exer- cise of powers — ^it cannot be brought in question in those which are strictly canonical. I do not for one instant con- template any sweeping change in the system as its exists amongst us ; but I do want to point out how that system is only the accidental and extra-statutable growth of many con- flicting causes, and subject, like all other matters of human accident, to revision and reform — providing the revision and the reform are undertaken by bodies legitimately competent to the work. All other professions have been reformed. For- merly a Lord Chancellor might be appointed, like Sir Chris- topher Hatton, because he danced well — ^now the notion is almost too ludicrous to be believed. Formerly the scions of royalty were, as a matter of course, sent in command of armies — now the notion would be scouted, unless the indivi- dual prince showed capacity equal to the undertaking. At the present day, the opinion of lawyers creates the eligibility to the Chancellorship — the opinion of the army points out the rising officer. In the Church alone, the question of capacity is solved by an external — it may be an ignorant — it may be an unfriendly arbiter. Is there common sense in this ? Does the connexion of Church and State depend upon the mainte- nance of this principle of selection in all its overgrown pro- portions ? But the question is so ample, that I must defer the appli- cation to present circumstances of what I have said, to another letter. 19 XX. THE BISHOP OF MANCHESTER'S REJOINDER. Feb. 6, 1851. The Manchester Guardian of Saturday last contains a leading article keaded "The Bishop of Manchester and Broughton Church," in which that paper shows itself not a little excited by my having attributed to it a,n article which, it seems, really appeared in a journal of similar politics — the Manchester Spectator. The article itself, which professes to demolish " a few of the more important" of my " misrepre- sentations and mistatements," is, it appears, not to be con- founded with the usual run of such productions ; for, says the writer, " We shall not do so merely upon our own know- ledge, but wish it to be distinctly understood that for every statement we make in reply to the assertions of ' D. C. L.,' we have the authority of the right reverend prelate himself." I own to being a little staggered by this fearful prelude. How to deal with a bishop I know. The idea I wish to cherish of a bishop is that of his being, more than most men, a Christian, a gentleman, and a scholar. Opposition to a bishop, even when necessary, has a tone and a manner in it called forth by the quality of one's opponent, and is not a thing to be hastily taken up. On the other hand, controversy with a newspaper has its characteristics. It need not, for instance, be quite so deferential in its language as when one's contro- versy is with a ri^t reverend lord. But the novel spectacle of a fusion of the bishop and the leading article, with which this passage presents me, is somewhat perplexing. It is so hard to ascertain whether the editor is donning the mitre to weight his sarcasm, or whether the father of the flock chooses to offer words of exhortation to the faithful through the columns of a leader. My best course will be, it seems to me, to conclude that the Bishop is the animating spirit of the whole tirade. Before I go further, I must observe that my misnomer of the paper arose from the very simple circum- stance of my having a slip of the article before me, without the name of the paper on it, and having accordingly con- founded that name. I cheerfully make the Bishop a present of all the advantage he may gain from this confession. His lordship, or the paper, states that the initials D. C. L. " are said to conceal a certain Puseyite or pervert lawyer." It is not very clear whether the or is meant to be partitive or not ; but, in any case, the charge of my being a " pervert " is a B 2 20 simple invention. I shall not pause to point out the self- " evident fact that this charge is one of deliberate and manifold falsehood against a writer whose key-note is the OhTirch of England ; or to moralise on the tone of the last sentence of the article as to where "truth is most certainly not to be found." The Episcopal leading article characterises the success with which I attempt to make out a case against the right reverend lord about the Additional Curates' Society as "small." Since, however, it is satisfied with its own asser- tion, I am contented to leave my facts to themselves — being, however, perfectly ready, if it wiU be the slightest pleasure to his lordship, "to give the fullest narrative of the whole affair, drawn from the pamphlet which he printed at the end of 1849, containing the entire correspondence. With a generous forbearance, however, his lordship, or the editor, promises only to expose and contradict at present a few of the " more important misrepresentations and mis- statements" of my letter. I shall have, in the course of this letter, to point out what facts of mine are not exposed and contradicted, which must, therefore, either be true, or be, in the eyes of a Christian Bishop, unimportant. The first exposure which I have incurred, is that of the libellous statement, that the Bishop rented a pew in Brough- ton Church, not being able to procure one in his parish church. Here I find I am grossly in error ; for, by " the authority of the right reverend prelate himself," the Man- chester Guardian tells us, " that the Bishop never rented a pew in Broughton Church, but has always had one in Prest- wich Church, more than two miles distant." I acknowledge my mistake ; and I beg to assure his lord- ship that I will not any more conclude that he had the excuse which I have hitherto made for him, for having gone on so long as he had done, winking at what he now considers so " hopeful for Eome," in a church where he has worshipped, and where he has officiated by preference. My supposition was, that finding that he could not so conveniently get a seat anywhere else, he took up with Broughton, and, charitably, also with what he found there. The fact turns out to be, that his selection of that church was as gratuitous as is Lord Ashley's joe«c/mMi for worshipping in the Chapel Eoyal. My next delinquency is thus summed up by ' 'authority": — " We are authorised to state that so far from Lord John Russell's letter having anything to do with the Bishop of Manchester's notice of the arrangements in the chancel of Broughton Church, the Bishop did not notice them, or visit the chancel, until specially requested to do so by the 21 minister, the churchwardens, and the trustees of the church, for the pur- pose of arranging the seats within the chancel. He then went, not' ' unexpectedly,' as D. 0. L. asserts, but at a time agreed upon with these parties, who met his lordship there by appointment." His lordship, it seems, was called on to settle the seats in the chancel, and then, for the first time, he noticed the arrangements there — Mr. Clowes's tomb, I conclude, and the M., and the sedilia, the " almorie," and the piscina. No doubt his lordship's devotion is so great that, often as he may have officiated there, he never did notice them. But how does the Bishop dispose of the following statement of Messrs. Atkinson and Dodgshon, which I must repeat : — " He has also officiated at other times, and on these occasions his lord- ship has been seated in a chair on the north side of the chancel (almost close to Mr. Clowes's tomb), while the other clergy present have invaria- bly made use of the sedilia. Until recently the Bishop has never made any complaint, except on one occasion last year, when he objected to the tile mentioned above ; but this was from a motive which we cannot but admire and respect. His lordship thought the sacred sj'mbols, from the position of the tile, were in danger of being trampled on, but appeared to be satisfied with the explanation which was then given. Not the least allusion or objection was made to the letter M. " When we contrast the facts of the case with the statement of the Bishop, we are lost in amazement. That his lordship should still persist in his views increases (if possible) our amazement, when we linow that the above facts have been laid before him some time since." Solmtur amlulando, as they say in the schools. He simply ignores it ; so does his mouthpiece ; for on this part of the question we enjoy the great advantage of reading the case both in the words of Bishop Lee himself and of the chosen depositary of his opinions. His lordship, in the first person,* thus answers the letter of the churchwardens which I have quoted : — * The result of these letters of mine has been to compel the publication, in total of this letter, which Messrs. Atkinson and Dodgshon had hitherto, "out of respect," as they word it, for his lordship's "high and holy office," kept private, although his lordship had for his part given a copy of it to the Archdeacon to show to the clergy. Prepared as one might be for much from the extracts— the entire composition, taken as a whole, is astonishing. I will not attempt — for no words of mine can give the faintest idea of the whole letter— to depict the tone of sneer running through the address of a chief pastor to the members of his flock. One portion I must, however, quote. In the second paragraph the Bishop observes that— "The chivalrous self- devotion with which you rush to the defence of your late incumbent, who was not even by implication alluded to in my reply to the Blackburn clergy, is admirable; it is only to be surpassed by the modesty, tempered no doubt with prudence, which led you, 'of yourselves,' to 'say nothing.'" " With respect to the decorations of the chancel of St. John's, Brough- ton, it might be sufficient to state they are exactly described in Pugin's ' Ecclesiastical Architecture,' now before me, in his directions for building Eoman Catholic Churches, and many of them, among the rest the M. for the Virgin's emblem, almost exactly figured in his ' Glossary.' The altar tomb is expressly described, as mentioned by me, as is also the almorie. I have verified every statement made by me. You state I have several times officiated in the chancel, and even administered the Sacrament there. This is true ; and, as I came to worship, not to act as spy, you ' cannot refrain from remarking, that my objections, if I had any, never assumed a public form until after the publication of Lord John Russell's letter to the Bishop of Durham.' 1 thank you for the insinuation attempted to be conveyed. You know, however, that I did not examine into, or notice these things, until requested officially to inspect the chancel by your incumbent and churchwardens, with a view to allotting the seats within it." In the third person, the Bishop of Manchester repKes with the following statement : — " This writer artfully glosses over the fact of the crowned figure of the Virgin in the stained glass window. We may add, on this point, that the Roman Cathohc artist, Mr. Hardman, of Birmingham, who was em- ployed to put up the window, on being applied to lately to remove the crown from the head of the Virgin Mary, declined to be employed, on the ground of his religious scruples. The altar-tomb, with the hollow in it for the crucifix, from Good Friday to Easter, is expressly described by Pugin in his ' Ecclesiastical Architecture ;' and with his directions for building Roman Catholic Churches the whole of the chancel of Broughton Church exactly corresponds. That hollow in the altar-tomb was used till very lately as the credence table for holding the elements prior to conse- cration. With respect to the decorated tiles, the ' M.' complained of is almost exactly copied from one in Pugin's ' Glossary.' We may add, that when the Bishop visited the church to officiate, a chair was always provided for his lordship, and from the position in which he sat, one portion of the objectionable tiles was out of sight, and a portion was covered by matting. We are authorised to state that the piscina and shelf have already been removed, other alterations undertaken, and that designs for new tiles have been submitted to the Bishop for approval. We may add that, since the visit referred to, the Bishop has discovered that the communion table in Broughton Church is of stone, concealed by a crimson covering, and with wooden feet, so as to give the impression of the whole being of wood, and that that stone was put up the very year Messrs. Atkinson and Dodgshon, in their explanatory statement inserted in the Manchester Courier, observe—" We therefore proceed with the second paragraph, in which the Bishop states that our 'late incumbent was not even by implication alluded to ' in his reply to the Blackburn clergy. The Bishop's visitation to the Broughton Chancel occurred on the 13th of Nov., and his reply to the address of the Blackburn clergy was dated Dec. 5th. After what has transpired we leave others to judge whether we had not reason for concluding that the Bishop referred to the late Mr. Baj'ne on the above occasion." 23 after the judgment of Sir Herbert Jenner Fust was given in the case Faulkner v. Lichfield, in which stone altars were expressly condemned." It is needless to tell you tliat the qtiestion is not whether Pugin's " Ecclesiastical Architecture ' exactly describes this or that fitting in Broughton Church, but whether this or that fitting is consistent with the worship of the Church of England. The Bishop of Manchester's criterion would banish pulpits and fonts, steeples and bells. But his lordship comes to particulars, and communicates the startling fact that, among the decora- tions of the chancel at Broughton, "exactly described" in Pugin's " Ecclesiastial Architecture" (published some years before it was built), is " the M for the Virgin's emblem, almost exactly figured in his Glossary." These are, doubtless, grave accusations and suspicious circumstances : — an emblem — and that emblem, too, found in a "Glossary" — and an exact description of Broughton chancel by that Papist whose help our gracious Queen has allowed in decorating that House of Lords in which the Bishop of Manchester says he sits, not to defend the Church, but to advise her Majesty — and, to wind up all, " the M." I can conceive his lordship addressing Messrs. Atkinson and Dodgshon in the words of an eminent' reformer of other days — " It wiU be proved to thy face, that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ever can endure to hear." For the benefit of those who may never have dived into the dangerous depths of the Glossary, I may observe that it contains designs for every conceivable way of writing letters in Gothic character— among them (his lordship is welcome to this admission) of M, as the first letter of Maria. But M, when it stands for Maria, is simply M, neither more nor less so than when it stands for Manchester. It so happened that the M in question, at Broughton, signified neither Maria nor Manchester, but mille, the Latin for 1,000. The date of the chancel had to be given, and good taste dictated that it should be included in one tile. Accordingly, by that commonest bf devices, a monogram, the M — a letter, in its Gothic shape, eminently adapted to fill a square — was made to include the other letters which made up the date 1846 ; and, to give a second quotation from the same prototype of the " authority" of the Manchester Guardian, his lordship exclaimed, " Away with him, away with him ; he speaks Latin." It is a simple matter of course, that if his lordship should ever happen to wish to commemorate his iuitials in Gothic characters, any 24 approximation to any M ever figured by Pugin will be strictly prohibited. I refrain from giving his lordship un- easiness by the remark, that whenever he prints his name, he uses that form of M which stands for Maria in every church which has been built in Italy for the last three centuries ; a,nd whenever he sig-ns his name, he uses that M with which Cardinal Wiseman would have inscribed the first letter of Maria. I leave the Manchester Guardian and the church- wardens to settle the trifling discrepancy of the tiles being hidden, and of his lordship having looked at them and pro- nounced an opinion about them.* I come now to the " altar-tomb" and the " almorie." The altar-tomb is, it seems, "exactly described" by Pugin, "as mentioned" by the Bishop. First, I must congratulate the prelate on his felicitous choice of the word "mentioned." Had he described the tomb in question, and not mentioned it, he must have described a tomb not intended to hold the crucifix at Easter, but the remains of Mr. Clowes at all times and seasons. I will help his lordship to make out his case. I conclude that what he intended, but failed, to express was, that the tomb of Mr. Clowes was similar to that tomb " exactly described " by Pugin as intended to hold the crucifix at Easter. Pugin's works happen to be accessible to others besides the " authority " of the Manchester Guardian, and I have referred to those exact descriptions which the right reverend journalist has so diligently "verified." Will it be readily credited, that Pugin neither " exactly " nor vaguely describes any tomb with a hollow in it for the crucifix from Good Friday to Easter — and for a very good reason, that there never was any such tomb to describe. He describes exactly enough a tomb which was used in the awte-Eeforma- tional Church to deposit the consecrated host in from Good Friday to Easter ; but it is not for a moment to be conceived that the newspaper which has been so severe upon me for mistaking the Manchester Spectator for the Manchester Guar- dian will fail to direct its just invective upon a Bishop who, having referred to Roman Catholic writings to build upon them a charge of disloyalty against a deceased clergyman, turns out, after all, to have looked with such carelessness at those passages about which he so confidently blusters as to * Messrs. Minton and Co., the manufacturers of this tile, have written to say that they were not aware that this pattern of M occurred in Pugin's Glossary. It seems they took it straight from an old example in our ancient ecclesiastical structures — and so must Mr. Puffin have done. 25 make so great an error. The truth is, that the Bishop of Manchester mast, if he has ever really looked into books of ecclesiastical antiquities, know that it was an ancient custom to bury the founder or chief benefactor of any church in the side wall of the chancel, as a mark of respect to his memory. Such a benefactor was Mr. Clowes ; and accordingly this most innocent custom was resorted to in his honour, as a preferable plan to blocking up some window of the church with a marble hoarding, bearing an urn, a naked cupid, a half-naked genius, bulls' heads, wreaths, and other emblems of the mummeries of superstition of the Pagan (not Papal — this is a palliative) Romans, I repeat it, the Bishop must have known this ; but it did not suit his purpose to own it, and the fact was accordingly suppressed. If he does not believe me, I advise him to go to Canterbury Cathedral, where he will see a monument (a cenotaph, too) lately put up to the venerated Archbishop Howley, in a similar position. I cannot quit this topic without an observation in passing on the logic of the Guardian (whether logic, as well as facts, come from " authority," I leave to those skilled in parallelism of style to investigate). That tomb, the paper informs us, was till lately used as the credence table for holding the ele- ments previous to consecration. I suppose these must be put somewhere till the time when the Rubric orders them to be put upon the Lord's table ; and it is not absurd to conclude that any raised space would be more convenient than the floor of the church. But to let this pass — the tomb was used till lately as the credence table, and therefore the paper, and its authority, would leave us to conclude it was employed to hold the crucifix from Good Friday till Easter. We have now arrived at the mysterious " almorie" — " for such as come to pray for the souls of the departed," as the Bishop told the clergy of Blackburn — "exactly de- scribed," as he now informs the churchwardens, " in Pugin's Ecclesiastical Architecture." Can I venture, in the face of the Bishop, to give Pugin's real exact description? — "Ad- joining the chancel, a sacristy, or revestry, for keeping the vestments and ornaments ; or, in any small churches, an almery may he provided for this purpose on the gospel side of the chancel, within the chancel." The truth, then, is, that this almery (not almorie, as the Bishop writes it) has nothing to do with the souls of the departed, but is simply a cupboard or press for the dresses of the living, and for the vessels needed for service. It is in fact, that very same word which, in its 26 French form of armoire* is so innocently used for a very common, and not, I believe, unorthodox article of furniture in everybody's dressing-room. The truth must be (incredi- ble as such a truth is when fathered upon an eminent scholar, such as one used to hear Dr. Lee called), that his lordship, finding that the first three letters of almery were A L M, jumped to the conclusion that it must have something to do with alms (which any boy in the lower form at Birmingham might teach him was derived from eleemosyna) ; and seeing an alms-box, with a slit to let money through in its lid, in the chancel of Broughton, he decided on the nonce that this was an almorie — perhaps, too, he had some misty notion of the Almowry at Westminster in his head — and, having settled that it was an almorie, in some day-dream conjured up a dissolving view of the souls of the departed, and read, with eyes denied to any other man, an " exact description" of this almorie, for such as come to pray for the souls of the departed, in Pugin's Ecclesiastical Architecture. The Guardian, or its authority, accuses me of artfully glossing over the fact of the crowned figure of the Virgin in the stained glass window. What his theory of glossing over may be, I may have my suspicions about ; but as to the pre- sent alleged instance of it on my part, I simply refer to year columns, where I expressly draw attention to " the figure in question," with the additional fact that the Bishop expressed his wish that boys might throw stones through it. How comes it that the right reverend " authority" glosses over this statement of mine ? I am much obliged to him for the fact respecting Mr. Hardman, proving, as it does, that, so far from the authorities of the Church being responsible for the crown in question, they had themselves endeavoured to persuade its artist (the same artist, by the way, who has provided the House of Lords with its gorgeous gates) to remove it. This he refused, with, I doubt not, the same notion that he was acting conscientiously, as the Bishop felt, when he desired that "some well-directed pebble" might make short work of it. One more topic alone remains to be considered — the assertion — no doubt, from "authority" — that the Lord's table, being of stone with wooden legs, is illegal by Sir H. J. Fust's judgment in the case Faulkner v. Lichfield. Is it not a little surprising that the Bishop of Manchester labours * Armory, I have since heard, is the common term for the cupboard in the cottages of Scotland. 27 under a positive inability to be accurate on any point of ecclesiastical lore which he ventures to handle? By this judgment, neither stone tables with wooden legs, nor wooden tables with stone legs, are, as such, pronounced illegal. What the judgment does touch are immovable Lord's tables — stone, as a material, being demurred to from the immobility of that substance. I give the exact words of the judgment : — " No one would suppose the term ' table' to mean an article formed of slabs of stone, lixed or imbedded in mortar or concrete. My opinion, therefore, is, that, according' to the true construction of the Rubric, this is not a communion table within the intent and meaning of the Rubric, which meant a wooden table, capable of being removed, and not an immovable stone table." The Bishop, as you see, " artfully glosses" over the question of whether this wooden iahle, within the scope of the judgment (for it would be no easy task to prove it not to be such, whatever its top slab be made of), is or is not im- movable. I have now, sir, exhausted the catalogue of what the Bishop is pleased to consider a few of my "more important misrepresentations and misstatements." Among them, as you will observe, there is not the slightest allusion to the points I detail, or refrain from detailing, in the last para- graph but one of my letter — not a syllable about " the violence of words and violence of action, ' which, as I say, I omit, rather than run the risk of " misstatment and misre- presentation." I trust, sir, you observe the source from which the episcopal leading article has drawn its phraseology — a proof, it might be thought, that the silence with which this paragraph is treated is not from its having been overlooked by the right reverend " authority" of the journal. There is not tie most passing allusion to the charge 1 make, of the Bishop having spoken contemptuously of the deceased clergyman as St. Bayne, and in the first instance ordered the altar screen, which had been put up as his monument, to be thrown down. If these things were misstatements and misrepresentations — if they were not facts — it is not to be conceived that an Eng- lishman and a Bishop, when supplying a paper with facts to demolish me in a leading article, woiJ.d not have offered the most indignant denial of the assertions. He has offered no denial, indignant or faint; he has absolutely slurred over this entire portion of my letter, and yet dares to conclude with remarks on what he calls my " case." I am, therefore, driven to the irresistible conclusion, that. 28 on these points, I was quite correctly informed. I will not, therefore, add anything to what I said in my former commu- nication upon this head. Most sincerely do I trust, that, when his lordship read this portion of my letter his feelings were — " Pudet hsec opprobria nobis Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli." XXI. THE LATE MEETING OF CONVOCATION. Tee. 7, 1851. A PORTION of one of the many columns of your paper of this morning registers another epoch in the history of the Church of England — the commencement, the course, and the conclusion of a session of the Ecclesiastical Legislature, at a conjuncture not inferior in interest to any through which she has ever passed since the consummation of the Eeformation. On Wednesday, at noon, a few gentlemen dropped into the Jerusalem Chamber, chatted a little (so I hear), read two or three documents, and then walked out again to the many occupations which they might have chalked out for themselves as the work of that day. And this was a Session of the Con- vocation of the Province of Canterbury ! This was the crowning "meeting" of the professed religious meetings of the last six months — the practical way in which the Arch- bishop of Canterbury, in Westminster, meets the "Archbishop of Westminster " and his threatened synod — not, indeed, that I would have had it meet for that, and leave untouched the practical evils of the Church of England. It is difficult not to take the matter in its purely ludicrous aspect. But ludi- crous as it may be to one who can afford to be a philosophical bystander, it is a fact that betokens the presence of deep inward disorganization — it is a ceremony which never could have taken place, with similar concurrences, were there not a fearful accumulation of unsoundness to prop it up. It reminds one of nothing so much as of the Senate, the Consuls, and all those old traditionary forms which had produced a Fabius and a Scipio, still dragging on through the degenerate days of the Roman Empire. But in one respect the parallel is not a complete one. 29 The present attitude of Convocation has — which the Eoman Senate had not — its bright side. The latter was allowed to linger on, in order to confer the semblance of a constitutional title upon the successors of Augustus, who durst not, till Diocletian (so, long did republican prejudice simmer on), assume the literal crown. It is a different thing when the imperial power permits the shadow of the legislature of an imperium in imperio to haunt the scene of its former labours. This indicates some life — some power — in it. It is also true, paradoxical as the assertion may at first sight seem, that the uselessness of the actual Convocation, as compared with the Senate, is likewise, in its way, hopeful. The Senate, still aping the attitude of its bygone power, was ridiculous enough — but it had in some sort an employment, and a practical one, too. These cumbrous externals enshrouded a munici- pality, which still, as a fact, attended to the police of Rome, its paving, lighting, and so forth, and made, I doubt not, a very respectable common council. Convocation has not the merest routine work of the Church to perform. Then why does it still meet at all? Because its abolition would be too daring an invasion of the integrity of our Church for any minister willingly to attempt it. A dexterous and unscrupu- lous man found an opportunity to prorogue it surreptitiously, upon a pretext which had shaped itself; concurrent circum- stances, and increasing apathy on the part of those Church- men of the last century who seemed to think that orthodoxy was an apology for the want of any other Christian grace, combined to give permanence to this prorogation. But once endeavour to sweep it formally away by Act of Parliament — and all the grievances of the Church, all the unsatisfactori- ness of her position, all the encroachments of the civil power upon the reformational "concordat" are dragged to light; and the measure could only be carried, if carried at all (which I will not admit), after a contest more damaging to the victors than to the vanquished party. The very particulars which have transpired in your columns, and those which I have been enabled to gather from one who was present at the meeting, are facts indicative of the beginning of the end of this mere illusory assemblage of our Church legislature, the very existence of which was till lately a matter of erudition to those who knew it at all. Melancholy as is the record which you give of the session, it is at least a gain that the daily papers record it at all. More- over, the Archbishop appeared in his " Convocation Eobes " of scarlet (the only dress in which a Bishop can properly 30 attend); at the preceding meeting he walked there in his coat, umbrella in hand. Grievous as is the fact that its pro- ceedings were confined to receiving one single petition, yet that one petition was a petition to a constitutional body, and that constitutional body formally received it. It needs no prophet to say that, at the next meeting, it will not be a soli- tary petition which will disturb the calm dignity of the Lord Primate, and tax his constitutional lore. However this may be, it is certain that the experience of the Queen's Advocate, " Full of wise saws and modern instances," was absolutely staggered at so daring an innovation on the present occasion. But it was not the matured erudition of the Queen's Advocate that carried the day, and the petition was receiyed. In the interim the Lower House found them- selyes turned into another room, as, after the Queen's Speech, the House of Commons finds itself dismissed. In this room, unlike the one in which the Commons meet, there was a fire, and there were only two chairs for the whole house to sit upon. Accordingly, that dignified House of Legislature thought it better to stand around the fire than to scramble for the chairs ; and so, in that degagi position, various questions were raised, none of which were solved. The Prolocutor (the co-relative in the Church of that awful reality, " Mr. Speaker," in the State, and, like the Speaker, existing from dissolution to dissolution), did not know whether the Lower House was constituted or not. He did not know whether he could receive the petition (which was presented to both Houses), and he would not carry a message to the Upper House soliciting information on the points which they were themselves incompetent to decide. In the midst of the con- fusion the Lower House is summoned to the Upper one. To their astonishment, they find that, while they have been talk- ing, the Upper House have been doing some business. They procure, by an act of desperate resolve, license to act, and they receive the petition, the Prolocutor formally taking pos- session of one of the two chairs. The petition is barely re- ceived, when another summons is sent, and Convocation is prorogued till the 28th of August. Thus, a session of Par- liament commencing, which will, not improbably, lae con- cerned with questions deeply important to the Church of England, the Primate of that Church postpones her legisla- ture (the legislature, that is, of the ruling province), till a day selected of disposition prepense, to come after the termi- 31 nation of the Parliamentary Session ! How long can such an insult to common sense continue ? Formerly, too, Convo- cation was advertised in the London Gazette, Now it is no longer so. Nay, incredible to say, the Kegistrar-General of the province of Canterbury — the dignitary occupying in Con- vocation a similar place to the clerk of Parliaments — did not know the hour at which it was to meet, and an intimation had «rept out that the members of the body were not expected to attend. All this trifling is the result of the violence consequent upon the Ministerial encouragement of Hoadley. But the attention paid to it is the result of the awakened spirit of the Church in our days. With a cry for emancipation on all sides, it is impossible that the emancipation of the Church of England will be a solitary exception. Lord John Russell will, of course, never see that the Church of England needs such emancipation ; but happily Lord John Eussell is not the typical Englishman nor the ideal statesman of our times, A little longer we are bound to tolerate a pageant Convoca- tion — a little longer, a Russell Administration ; but there are things older and stronger than such Administrations and such pageants. The English people is a practical one, and so we may see the end of one thing — it is an honest people, and so we may see the end of another thing. XXII. LORD JOHN RUSSELL AND THE BISHOPS. '■ Peb. 10, 1851, I HAVE heard it said of a somewhat eminent person, that his notion of mediation consisted in knocking both parties down. It seems to me that this, if any, must also have been the guiding principle of Lord John Russell's policy towards the rival episcopates of England and of Rome with reference to the recent aggression of the latter. I do not mean to follow the noble lord through the intricacies of his speech of Friday last. This speech had at least a major, a minor, and a conclusion. Th« major premise laid down that the Pope — a foreign and independent prince — and Cardinal Wiseman had committed high treason against the Qu«en of England, (the only intel- ligible inference to be drawn from the parallel of his supposed 32 Jacobite Lord-Lieutenant of Middlesex) ; and not only com- mitted high treason against the Queen, but, as far at least as the Pope went, the equally unpardonable offence of rude- ness to Lord John himself, by speaking out Urbi et Orbi, before he had whispered to his lordship, and by not pressing upon the bashful Lord Minto the perusal of that document, or even offering a translation of it — drawn, as it was, in crabbed Latin — which, after the diplomatist knew that it con- cerned England, he so coyly declined to look at. The minor premise was, that her Majesty's Attorney-General, when con- sulted upon the point, decided that, treasonable as was the deed, it could not be proved contrary to the actual laws ; that, in short, Cardinal Wiseman, the parallel of a Jacobite office- holder, was all along a loyal subject of Queen Victoria. The conclusion was drawn that by an ex post facto enactment, this legal treason, this rebellious deference to the existing constitution, is to be made a misdemeanour. I might have my own opinions about the moral effect upon men and society of this atrocious trifling, this tossing too and fro, according to the momentary caprice, of the first principles of constitu- tional policy ; but still the enunciation of them would not strictly come within the scope of these letters, were it not for certain statements made in the Premier's speech having direct reference to our bench of English Bishops. The very first time I addressed yoa was with reference to the same parties — to Lord John and to the episcopate. I warned the latter that, in resting their cause, as against the Papal invasion, upon the temporal accidents, the state trap- pings of their office, and not upon their spiritual preroga- tives, they were acting a part at once impolitic and unworthy; they were refusing to take up their only strong position — the only one which would stand them in present stead, and not fail them hereafter, when the aggression upon them was on the part of the Government, not of Rome, but of England — and they were not fulfilling their obligations to those sons of the Church of England who looked to their chief pastors to prove by their fruits that the Bishop of Eome's ignoring us as a Church was a fallacy and an arrogance. But the tempta- tion was too strong, and with one or two, at the most three or four, exceptions, the bench of English Bishops have shown themselves very sensitive to the Eoyal prerogative, and not a little callous to their own spiritual means of op- posing the aggression, and to the duties and the charities which it imposed upon them — and they have had their reward from Lord John Russell, 33 I did not, I confess, imagine that this reward would have been so speedy or so complete. Nothing was wanting to give it perfection except that the body of our prelates shonld have been seated on the bench opposite the self-appointed Vice-" Head" of the Established Church ("Eldon redivivus," as I have heard him named), to have learned from him at first hand the result of their policy during the last twelve- month. First, with a delicate irony, the noble lord quotes two leading members of the bench to prove that what he proposes is just what is needed for the security and dignity of the English Church. " The present bill, therefore, in the first place, aims at preventing: the assumption of any titles, taken not only from any dioceses now existing-, but from any territory or any place within any part of the United King- dom. That provision is in conformity with a proposal which I saw was made in the answer of the Bishop of London to one of the addresses that was presented to him. He said he thought that not only ought we to prohibit the assumption of titles derived from existing sees, but that we ought to prohibit the assumption of titles derived from the United King- dom. What I propose, therefore, agrees with that suggestion of his. And perhaps I may mention, that the Archbishop of Canterbury said, with respect to instituting a prosecution, ' I did not expect that the Government would institute a prosecution ; but what I do expect is, that some legislation should take place on this subject.' I think therefore, in this respect, we prevent what I consider an insult to the Crown of this country — an interference with the rights of the Established Church and the independence of this nation." Can anything be more satisfactory — can anything indicate a more conciliatory, a more generous disposition towards the Church of England ? To be sure. Lord John forgot to add, that, when the Bishop of London made that suggestion, he accompanied it with a perfectly just observation that such restriction would, in all probability, be quite inoperative. But I can pardon the omission for the animus of the passage. But pause a little — read a few lines further on. It will be remembered that, after the judgment of the Judicial Commit- tee of the Privy Council on the Gorham case, it was expected that our bishops would fortify the hearts of Churchmen by some explicit declaration on the doctrine of baptism. This expectation was frustrated; but, as some protest against the judgment — as some step towards Church reform, the Bishop of London, representing his brethren, brought in a bill for establishing a new court of appeal in ecclesiastical matters of a most harmless character. This measure was stifled in its birth by the agency of the government. It would not require a very sanguine optimist to conclude of any other c 34 minister that the change in our ecclesiastical relations created by the aggression might have led the chief adviser of the Crown to reconsider the opinion he then came to, and to endeavour, if he really meant to oppose the Roman Catholic Episcopate, to give the English Hierarchy the not exorbitant support of showing that he trusted in their possession of common honesty and common sense— particularly as his chief wish is, and has ever been, to keep their nomination under his own thumb. But, with regard to Lord John Russell, such an anticipation is very sanguine, not to say Quixotic, optimism. Not many minutes after he had brought in the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London as the make-weights of that " trifle light as air," his bill, the noble lord, with the bland and playful superiority to all things celestial and terrestrial for which he is distinguished, informed the House of Commons — " I am for the fullest enjoyment of religious liberty. But I am entirely opposed to any interference on the part of ecclesiastics with the temporal supremacy of the realm. For, whenever I h;ive seen in ray own Church a disposition to assume powers which 1 thou^-ht were incon- sistent with that temporal supremacj' which belonged to the State, I have not been slow in urging myself, and in inducing others to urge, strong and prevailing objections to that attempt. I may, perha]is, say, that in the course of the very last year, when a proposal was made, plausible in itself, to give to the Bishops of the English Church a power which I thought would give them a control over the temporal existence and well- being and property of the clergymen of the Church, that that proposal, because I saw in it this dangerous principle, was successfully resisted by my colleagues in the place where it was proposed." The Bishops have got their reward ! They are brought in as prime advisers of that juggle, so unworthy to the Min- ister, and they are told that they are not competent to sit as a court of appeal in ecclesiastical matters, lest the permission should emperil " the temporal existence, the well-being, and the property" of the clergy. XXIIL LORD ASHLEY IN THE HOUSE OP C0MM0?*'3. Feb. 13, 1851. It has been my duty — not a pleasurable one, I can assure you, though a necessary one — to call your attention more 85 tlian once to the proceedings of a noble lord whose energies and talents have unfortunately been enlisted in a cause de- structive, as I have endeavoured to show, to the true cause of the Church of England. I refer to Lord Ashley. In a speech which he delivered last night upon the Papal Aggres- sion, he took advantage of the opportunity to bring in, as, the concluding and telling portion of his speech, that topic which is as much capital to those who trade in the aggression as the aggression itself is capital to the general politician — the proceedings, I mean, of the "large party." Everything which falls from Lord Ashley on this subject has a peculiar value at present, considered as explanatory of those inten- tions, which were significantly, but not expressly, put forth at the meeting of the 5th of December, and which were not unclearly stated in that paragraph of one of your morning contemporaries, which I called upon his lordship in a former letter to disown, but which he has never disowned. The strategy of the allusion in Lord Ashley's speech of last night was not a little remarkable. After he had discussed, with a praiseworthy adherence to the question, the subject-matter of the night's debate — with all that dignity of manner, that measured gesticulation, and that array of papers upon the red box, which he so well knows how to manage — the sonorous voice was lowered ; another view of the aggression was announced ; and the attention of the house was rivetted. In one minute, upon the flimsy pretext of the encouragement said to have been given by " unworthy sons of the Church of England" (I must, in explanation, say that Lord Ashley did not use these words) to the proceedings of the Pope, the House found, itself deep in a lecture upon " Tractarianism." Three principal topics distinguished this discourse. The first was the slow and significant I'eading of an extract from a high authority, as Lord Ashley made him out to be, describing in glowing language the Romeward tendencies of the " large party." The pauses were judiciously made; and if the House was not electrified by the awful disclosures, it was no fault of the reader; but, the document having been gone through, it was necessary to state its author. This author turned out to be that very impartially situated looker-on. Dr. Wiseman, and the date ten years ago — 1841. Pray observe the writer, and note the date. The writer was Dr. Wiseman — and not Dr. Wiseman, " Cardinal Arch- bishop of Westminster" — but Dr. Wiseman, not long after he had settled in England, when yet concerned in establishing his position in the island, and when everything was concur- c 2 36 ring to lead him to make out a case in favour of his own side of the question. This case was made out by a judicious use of words — especially the words " Catholic union " — which mean, literally, grammatically, and truly, the universal harmony of all true Christians in a pure, and, therefore, undivided. Church — but which Dr. Wiseman of course desired should be taken as denoting absolute submission to the banner of the Papal supremacy. The answer is brief and positive — that the views to which Dr. Wiseman then alluded as likely to lead to the latter result, have not, except in some individual instances, had that result, and that they have had the effect of developing a large and always increasing party in and of the Church of England, who are zealously deter- mined, through good report and through evil report, with singleness of heart, calmness of temper, and unswerving determination of purpose, to uphold the faith and the practice of the Book of Common Prayer. By what I must believe to be a strong self-delusion. Lord Ashley quotes the words referred to as those of a " great authority " — the first time, I should conclude, that a Roman Catholic has ever been, in his eyes, a great authority for any- thing connected with the Church of England. Nay, not only so — they are not only in themselves the testimony of a great authority — but they are also such because " these are not the words of some low Churchman attached to Genevan princi- ples, and writing in the spirit of bitterness." I thank his lordship for this admission. A low Churchman, attached to Genevan principles, and writing in the spirit of bitterness, is, on the testimony of Lord Ashley, no trustworthy evidence as to the views and tendencies of the " large party." But I have been loitering too long upon the first of the three points into which, as I have said, this attack divided itself. We were told next that "it would be remembered that last year there was published a declaration, signed by 1,800 clergymen, against the Royal supremacy. He did not doubt that those who signed that document were conscientious in the opinions which they professed. Nevertheless, the lead- ing effect of it was this, that the Royal supremacy, which had been recognised for 300 years, was first called in question and disputed. This must have been matter of congratulation and of hope to Rome." I fully believe Lord Ashley's utter incapability of delibe- rately making a mis-statement. To one who believes this, the passage which I have just quoted is a most remarkable 37 evidence of the power whicli party bias possesses of distort- ing the sight of those who may fancy themselves seeing most straightly and most clearly. So little does the document in question deny, either in effect or in intention, the Eoyal supremacy, or any other thing which has been held for 300 or for thrice 300 years, that its absolute intention and effect are to give that rational and sufficient explanation of the Royal supremacy on which alone it is possible that, in these days of reason and argument, it can be accepted. This declaration lays down that the Royal supremacy extends over temporal matters, and over " the temporal accidents of spi^- ritual things." What more can be needed? What is the function of sovereignty but the maintenance of temporal rule ? Most fully and to the utmost does the declaration recognise this definition, for it not only completely accepts the Sove- reign's prerogative in things temporal, but it likewise searches out the temporal accidents which may be found attaching to matters spiritual, in order to place them also under the superintendence of the Crown. But I need hardly dilate upon this topic, having devoted the whole of a former letter to its consideration. Does Lord Ashley himself attri- bute more to the Crown ? I cannot imagine it. He may fancy he does ; but if he does not only fancy it, but actually believe it, then he gives to her Majesty the prerogative of altering the creed of the Christian Church, and of forcing him to accept the alteration. Let him, then, acknowledge that he does believe that the Queen has this power, or let him retract his assertion that the declaration " must have been matter of hope and congratulation to Rome." The third topic is the most serious ; for the two former ones have been merely opinions of Lord Ashley's. The third, though clothed in the garb of a fear, wears very much the impression of a menace. After a highly-coloured descrip- tion of what he conceives to be certain practices of the party whom he is labouring to discredit, his lordship continues, as if borrowing his key-note from the circular of the National Club — " When they considered all this, could they say that there was not within them something which invited the aggression of the Roman Pontiff? And if these things were allowed to continue, there would arise, and at no distant time, a collision between the ecclesiastics and the laity, the issue of which could not be doubtful to any reflecting mind." I pray you to observe the cool assumption, common to the section represented by Lord Ashley and to the Voltaire school, that ecclesiastics and laity are naturally antagonistic 33 classes, and must always be plotting each other's downfall. This maj serve to point a sentence, but, for the sake of social order, not to mention other considerations, it will, I trust, never be assumed to be a rule of practical action. Lord Ashley may ea-gily — more easily than his cold temperament may calculate — hurry on a collision, but it will not be a collision in which all the laity will be on his side. For proof of this, I need go no further back than your paper of the day before yesterday, to the address of the working-classes of St. Paul's, Knights bridge, to the Bishop of London. Eumour says that her Majesty's Ministers, participating in Lord Ashley's delusion, have it in contemplation to arm such of the laity as may be ill-advised enough to swallow the lure, against the order and discipline of the Church of England. I only give this as a report ; but it is a report that has enough of probability to make it a matter not to be lightly overlooked. If they do so, they will simply succeed in producing a& much pure mischief as any set of men, not absolutely escaped from Hanwell, could ever, by one act, have effected ; and they will, after all, not attain their object- — for they will not make the world believe them heroes, and they will not drive the men of whom they are afraid into the Church of Rome. To Lord Ashley the "large party" replies, in the con- cluding words of his speech, that they would " maintain " the Church of England "in purity, and not in corruption. To obtain this end they would under God's blessing incur every hazard, try every alternative, and shrink from no consequences whatever, in- their endeavours to bring back the Church that they love, still nearer and nearer to the standard of the glorious Eeformation." This standard, however, they are determined, under every hazard, to seek in the literally interpreted words of the Prayer Book, and not in the frothy declamations — at Exeter Hall, or Freemasons' Hall, or in the House of Com- mons — of any of the leaders of that party which has noto- riously mutilated the services, despised the discipline, and strained the language of that precious volume, and which is prepared, if hard-pressed, rather than accept it as it is, and not as they will it to be, to league together to procure its alteration by Ministerial interference. XXIV. THE THEORY OF EPISCOPACY.— 11. Feb. 17, 1851. " Nicholas, by the Divine Mercy, of the Holy Eoman Church Cardinal, by the title of St. Pudentiana, Archbishop of Westminster, and Administrator Apostolic of the diocese of Southwark " — such is the style and title assumed by Dr. Wiseman. Monstrous and intolerable presumption ! exclaims Lord John Russell — to call himself by such a string of names, when there is " Victoria, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith." Monstrous and intolerable presumption'! echo a multitude of voices — and none of them more loud than that of " John Bird, by Divine Permission Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England, and Metropolitan." In the meanwhile some sceptical people, standing quietlj'^ by, and not looking to Lord John for their faith or their prac- tice, may compare the two styles, and say that, after all, as far as they go, the latter title seems to give the go-by to the Queen of England as completely as the former. " John Bird," they wiU observe, claims to be Primate of All England, not by the permission of Her Most Gracious Majesty, nor by the infinite condescension of that Minister to whom in fact he owes his place, but by Divine Permission, and by that alone. "Yes," as I shall be answered, "but it is by the Queen's per- mission, and by the permission of Lord John Kussell too," that the Archbishop of Canterbury is where he is. But I look to the mode of his election, and I find that the chapter of Canter- bury has professed to elect him; and I find also — I am really sorry to have to draw this fact into my statement — that they have professed to do so unds'i: special guidance of the Holy Spirit. We all know what a cong6 d'elire is supposed, popu- larly, to mean; and the more accurate comprehend that the sting is not contained in the congi, but in the accompanying Letter Missive, in which her Majesty sayS' — "For certain considerations us at this present moving, we of our princely disposition and zeal being desirous to prefer unto the same see a person meet thereunto, and considering the virtue, learning, wijdom, gravity, and other good gifts wherewith our trusty aild well-beloved" ("Renn Dickson Hampden" is the name occurring in the book from which I copy this) "is endued, we have been pleased to name and recommend him Unto you, by these presents, to be elected and chosen into the 40 said bishoprick." Accordingly the bishop is elected, and he then governs his see by " Divine Providence." The Arch- bishop of Canterbury, as I have shown, is by Divine Per- mission. Such, sir, is the attitude of the Archbishop of Canterbury ; and such is the attitude of all those Bishops, successors of the apostles, whose congi d'elire was Divine, whose letter- missive was the mission to them to go and teach all nations. Either they have been appointed to their sees by a form as cumbrous as it is ridiculous, if not indecent, and any assump- tion of spiritual power on their part, any claim to govern any district is an aggression both insolent and insidious — or else they have their own appropriate functions which Lord John Eussell has not given, which Lord John Eussell cannot take away, and which will continue to exist after Lord John Russell is forgotten, till the end of the world. I do not call upon a Churchman of the complexion of Lord John Russell, who considers habitual attendance upon Dr. Gumming consistent with his allegiance to the Church of England, to believe this. But I do call upon the bishops to be true to themselves. Whatever they may be by natural predisposition, they are, by consecration. Bishops in the Church of God, and as such we honour and obey them in all things lawful, whoever it may be who has prompted the letter-missive which has led to their election. They may feel all the indignation possible at the recent aggression — they may repudiate it with the utmost warmth — they may burn to demonstrate that neither the See of Canterbury nor that which any one of them may fill is extinct; but they must have a care, lest, in opposing a Roman Catholic and an intrusive episcopate, they altogether sacrifice episcopacy, in its Catholic, and in its national character. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London may justly exclaim against Cardinal Wiseman's presuming to govern Middlesex in the double capacity of metropolitan and of diocesan ; but let them accept without reserve the terms in which Lord John Russell denounced that power of the Cardinal of Santa Pudenziana, as inconsistent with his allegiance to Queen Victoria, and they will stultify at once and for ever, as far as they are personally concerned, those titles and those claims upon which they fill the thrones of Canterbury and St. Paul's Cathedrals. One line of defence only they could adopt to justify such a policy, but I will not for one instant suppose they would deign to adopt it. They may say that the retention of all 41 those forms of election and of confirmation is only a mummery ; they may say that they are only State ofBcials ; they may openly proclaim that they do not consider that the existing machinery by which a priest is converted into a bishop is a compromise whereby, while the Sovereign exercises the prac- tical nomination, the old rights of the Christian Church, and the old genuine credentials of her bishops, are in form, and as a protest, retained. They may glory in being called to their post by the same authority which nominates Assistant Poor Law Commissioners. They may, I say, do this ; and they mtest do this, if they agree with Lord John Russell. But they cannot do so ; they cannot deny the primary constitu- tion of the Universal Church. Therefore they must take their own, their independent line of opposition, to the new hierarchy ; a line of opposition which shall not drive them into suicide as the only method of extinguishing their rivals. As I have said before, a protest, such as that which one bishop made — a protest of Fathers in God, and not of Peers of Parliament — is a portion of this opposition ; but it is not all, nor the most important feature of it. It is self-evident that the strength of the one body will very mainly consist in the weakness of the other. I have already made it clear that various modifications will be requisite before the Anglican Episcopate of the present day can rightly claim to be to the ninteenth century what that of primitive times was to its era. In the early Church, as I showed, the bishoprics were very small, and the bishop was the immediate pastor of his whole flock. He lived in the midst of them ; he was always officiating in his cathedral — preaching, visiting, confirming, living with his clergy and taking counsel vrith them — he fully realised the meaning of his title ; in deed as well as in name, he was the superinten- dent. And while superintendent he had a more endearing title : he was a father, too ; not governing by edicts and reprimands alone, but by exhortation, by persuasion, by personal labours of rectification. I have shown how the growth of the parochial system introduced a new and most important element into the Christian polity, which might have been combined with that older one which re- garded each diocese as a single parish ; and I have pointed out how, unhappily, worldly position and temporal advan- tages were suffered to mar the goodly constitution of older times. Unhappily, the English episcopate of the present day has not emancipated itself from these pernicious influ- ences. One instance which I cursorily alluded to I must 42 dilate upon — the divorce of the bishop from his cathedral church. These divorces, where they existed, were consolidated by our ecclesiastical reformers of 1835; and in one or tvs'o instances, where they did not yet exist, they were pro- nounced. I cannot, sir, find words strong enough to express how fatal to the true idea of episcopacy I conceive this innovation to be. A bishop living away from his cathedral, even with the best intentions, the highest abilities, and the utmost activity, never can fully shadow forth the true cha- racter of his office. Fancy a sovereign never holding his court. Such is the bishop who does not frequent his own especial church. Such a bishop runs daily risk of falling into two extremes — either of sinking into the easy-going- squire or red-tape precisionist, or of becoming the autocrat, irresponsible of public opinion, and neglectful of constitutional forms, dealing out self-made law from a comfortable fire-side. The size of our dioceses is another evil of pressing im- portance, but this I reserve for fuller discussion in a further communication. The moral condition of our cathedral churches, even when the bishop is not a non-resident, is very far removed indeed from what the study of primitive times would lead us to wish that they were. Magnificent as they are in architec- tural form and decoration, it is, we all must feel, too often a magnificence of sense alone. Often must we, in sorrow of heart, think that we would gladly exchange even these glorious forms for the smaller, ruder structures of an earlier day, if we would ensure the men and the system which gave those structures life. In which of our cities has the cathedral laid hold of the hearts of the people ? Where do we find its corporation de- voting themselves to the evangelization of that cluster of houses which seems to cling to the huge Minster for support and direction ? Where do we behold in it the centre of edu- cational enterprise, and the retreat of theological study ? In which city do we find the entire structure, Sunday after Sun- day, crowded by multitudes eager to hear their Bishop lead- ing them along the narrow way ? In which city do wc find it lighted up for the evening lecture upon the week-day ? The cathedral stands in awful beauty, the daily service is sung mostly with decent precision, and some congregation is never wanting. But still the building, and all about it, is alien to everything else — a show, and something to talk about at spare times, and something that brings a few strangers to the city ; and here its influence ends. 43 I have spoken naked truths, for it is no time to be mealy- mouthed. We must be real just now. Either we must sub- mit to the Cardinal, or we must oppose him on his own chosen battle-fields — the slums of our cities. Either he is strong there, or the terrors of the aggression are a mere panic after all. Our Bishops have shown a zeal which is very- remarkable in guarding their flocks against it — so I am sure they will gladly have it pointed out to them at what points they must make the bulwarks of our reformed faith stronger. And yet one is almost ashamed of bringing forward secondary motives as inducements to them to labour to reform abuses so patent as those which I have been recording; still, if secondary considerations will avail at all to effect such de- sirable ameliorations, I gladly welcome them. What care our operative classes about the " Seal Of the Fisherman," or the Flaminian Gate ? If the Roman Catholic Hierarchy is ever to be acclimated to our Birmingham or our Nottingham, it must be from some other causes. These causes will be — and here is my great apprehension of the aggression — that, concurrently with the creation of the titles, the apparatus of working episcopacy has been provided, or rather has been made ready beforehand. It is a notorious fact that several of the new Prelates will find themselves masters of ready-made cathedrals — not churches like the gigantic miracles of Durham or Lincoln, but spacious and handsome buildings, with majesty enough about them not to render their claim ridicnlous, even to the architectural critic —planted in the slums of large towns, with their chapters of working clergy already in harness. Accordingly the people of Birmingham and Nottingham will see "the cathedral;" they will hear of "the cathedral;" they will hear at "the cathedral;" they will see the new Bishop too, and hear him if they like— a man in grave apparel, living in the heart of their city, always in the church, preaching very often, using his own feet to move about, the daily companion of his asso- ciate clergy. They will inquire where is our Bishop ? — where is the real pastor of that large town which the Eomanist has so impudently invaded? And they are directed to Castle this, or House that, some twenty or thirty miles ofi", with, perhaps, a distant hope that, at visitation or confirmation, sis months hence, the Episcopal chariot will be seen to roll through t-heir streets from the station to the church, and from the church to the parsonage, and an elegant dijeune. These are facts which speak for themselves. No one wishes so heartily as I do, that our Bishops may govern, and 44 may " continue to govern," our counties and our towns ; but paper government goes for very little in any denomination I I know nothing of the interior of the Eoman Hierarchy. It may, after all, from its internal unsoundness, be an utter failure. A failure it must be, if the new Hierarchy is not on familiar terms with its inferior clergy. We have heard it rumoured that there were hitches with the Vicars Apostolic ; and of course the mere change of name would not heal them. But there also seems a probability — and I have now come to what is, in my mind, the chief danger to the Church of Eng- land from the aggression — that the change is to include a restoration of diocesan episcopacy in deed as well as in name ; that is, that the clergy are to have a voice in the appointment of their chief pastor, instead of receiving one always from Rome. It is this that our Bishops and our Chapters will have to guard against. How, is a question I leave to them to settle ; observing only, that throwing themselves into the power of the Minister, or courting Parliament, is not the way. It is not either politic, generous, or Christian to strive to deprive the members of another denomination, by external interference, of spiritual privileges, simply because one can- not acquire them for oneself; and we may also be pretty well certain that, in the present complexion of the times, every scourge which may be provided against the Roman Catholics will be balanced by a scorpion to chastise the Church of England with. It is not really the " mummeries of superstition" which Lord John resists in the Roman Church — but he dreads its combined energy and power. A similar dread of the Church of England has awakened in him similar feelings so strongly that he is unable to exercise the ordinary caution of not expressing them, even to his own detriment. Stifling the aggressive organization, then, is not the Churchman's way of meeting it. He must fairly over- come it by offering something better in lieu of it. But where should he go for the means of so doing ? Parliament — we have the testimony of Mr. Cobden for it — ^is not a good arena for theological discussion. A Synod we have not yet got ; but still there are things which require neither Parliament nor Synod to bring about. To infuse life into our cathedral institutions, to bring their services and the teaching of those mother churches to bear upon the masses of the people, is not penal by act of Parliament or canon of Convocation. 45 XXV. MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. I'eb. 20, 1851. The question of marriage with the sister of a deceased wife is again, for the third successive session, before Parliament, but in a way so unusual, in a form so grotesquely mutilated, that it is difficult to think upon it seriously, or to talk of it without disrespect to those who conduct its management. I need only very briefly recapitulate the rise, progress, and downfall of this notable measure in the House of Commons. Some years past, certain individuals — some of whom had broken the existing marriage law, and some of whom were anxious to do so — availing themselves of the services of a very able London solicitor, applied (very late in the last session of the Parliament of 1841) for an address for a Royal Commission to consider the question of marriages within the prohibited de- grees. The thing was ventilated at the fag end of that wonderful Parliament which preserved its physical existence for a year after its moral extinction ; it came on early in the afternoon in a very thin house, and accordingly no one had the presence of mind to divide upon the commission — the knot of members who had gathered to oppose it looking to Sir Robert Inglis, and Sir Robert looking at vacuity when the question was put. The commission accordingly met, and in due time laid on the table of the House its blue book, at the close of the session of 1848; and its prime mover, the Right Honourable the present Recorder of London, accordingly brought in, in the session of 1849, a bill founded upon that blue book. This bill was to legalize marriages with the sister or niece of a deceased wife throughout the United Kingdom; the degrees of brother's widow and brother's wife's daughter, standing as they did in perfect parity of relationship, being omitted — an anomaly for which reasons were given, logical enough I do not pretend to doubt, but which the uninitiated profanely interpreted as cul- minating in " each for himself." This bill produced a long skirmishing debate, which was protracted through the session. In the course of this discussion the blue book was handled in a way which in no little degree surprised the law-breakers in esse or in voluisse, who could not conceive how such profane liberties could possibly be taken with so august a document as the report of a Roj^al Commission; but which, I fancy, in no way at all surprised Mr. Wortley. In particular, Mr. Goul- burn, tackling its statistics, demonstrated that, according to 46 its statements, one widower out of every four who had remar- ried during the preceding year must have married his wife's sister. So the session ended with the bill still in the House of Commons, and the report, morally, nowhere. The session of 1850 saw a bill, purporting to be a revival of the one of the previous session, and introduced under the same patronage, but (besides some utterly ineffective attempts to save the posi- tion of the clergy, by limitations the effect of which would have been continual traps to their conscience) comprising one very surprising omission' — that of the wife's niece; thus leaving the bill one which was to legalise the nearer degree, the quasi sister by the wife's side — while it prohibited the further one, the quasi niece by the same side ; and while the parallel degrees of quasi sister, and quasi niece, through the brother, were as before excluded. Such a concession as this was, of course, to any dispassionate person, a confession of special intention. Arguments in plenty I know were used to palliate it, but common sense somehow met them with the observation — " If it is not right to marry your wife's sister's daughter, then how can you prove it is right to marry the mother ?" This extraordinary fragment of legislation was, however, with infinite difficulty, fought through the Commons; the huge majority with which, on its first ventilation the year before, the House had received it, dwindling on the third reading to ten, and on the question of whether Scotland should be included, to seven. In the Lords it was soon becalmed. This year the bill re-appears, but not in the Commons, and comprising a substitution of prohibition, geography being made to take the place of affinity as an element of compromise. By the actual measure before Parliament, the prohibition against marrying the wife's niece is re-inserted, while Scotland is excluded from the operation of the measure, which has ex- clusive reference to England and Ireland. So now tlie two bills of ISoU and 1851, being compared together, give the following results : — 1. In 1850 a man may not marry his niece-in-law any- where. In 1851 a man 7nay marry his niece-in-law, by the wife's side, everywhere : he may not marry his niece-in-law, by the brother's side, anywhere. 2. In 1850 a man may not marry his sister-in-law, by the brother's side, anywhere ; so in 1851. .J. In 1850 a man may marry his sister-in-law by his wife's side in Scotland; in 1851 he muy not do so. 4. In 1850 a man may marry his sister-in-law, by the wife's side, in England and Ireland. So also in 1851. This is the so-called reform in our legislation which is to 47 take up a niglit of the time of the House of Lords on Tuesday^ next. One is really quite ashamed of having to combat such an absurdity ; but this absurdity, unhappily, including grave moral detriment to the community, has to be dealt with seriously. The exclusion of Scotland renders all the allega- tions upon which it has been sought to prop up the bill simply nugatory. If disconsolate widowers need the connubial affections of their wives' sisters to render these the natural guardians of their children in England, so do they in Scotland likewise. If the wife's sister, becoming the mother of a second family, is sure not to be the injusta noverca to her sister's progeny in England, no more is she in Scotland. If the prohibition creates immorality in England, so must it in Scotland. If a minority are sufficient to enforce a repeal of the law in England, then the majority have no right to have their way in Scotland. The exclusion of the brother's widow may be traced to different grounds — and those very little honourable, I fear, to human nature. I do not mean to impute them as consciously felt by the promoters of the bill ; but upon their existence at the bottom of the affair I should almost venture to stake my knowledge of human motives, such as it may be. It is true that the surface view is that the wife's-sister party, being the stronger and more numerous one, has thrown the other overboard, as a sacrifice, more willing than disinterested, to public opinion. But why is the wife's-sister party (a party professing to fight the cause of the poor, but, per blue book, exclusively composed of the higher and middle orders) the more numerous ? My answer is, brothers' widows are, as a rule, not so young a class as wives' sisters — brothers' widows also are widows. The difficulties, legal, testamentary, and genealogical, which would infallibly arise from a different table of pro- hibited degrees existing in different portions of Great Britain, I leave to be done justice to by the law lords. A specious plea has been raised in favour of the alteration of the law, on the ground of civil and religious liberty, with about as much success as that which has attended Lord John Eussell's attempt to prove his Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill a development of the same principle. It is very obvious that the question either has nothing at all to do with this consideration, or that the brother's widow and the niece-in- law bj'' his side in the United Kingdom, and the wife's sister also and the niece-in-Iaw by the wife's side in Scotland, ought to be allowed the benefit of the Act. But, in truth, how does the prohibition impede liberty 1 That there is some degree 48 at whicli liberty of marriage must stop is clear to every well- ordered mind, while it is unfortunately a truth that there is no degree which unbridled excess has not at some time over- leaped. It is also clear that the wants of the body politic require that the political line should be drawn uniformly, if merely for the preservation of the succession of property. It is also clear that the political line should have a due regard to unquestionable morality, but should at the same time not impose burdensome restrictions. These premises being granted, I appeal to any one to say whether the English law, which freely allows the marriage of first cousins, is too restricted. As for the difference which it is sought to establish between consanguinity and aflSnity, I leave this, not to reve- lation, but to nature and to properly-regulated affection, to answer. So much for the prohibition being a restraint to civil liberty. How is it one to religious liberty? Religious liberty means the liberty of freely exercising one's religion ; freely worshipping God as one's religion orders ; possessing that spiritual organization and government which a man con- ceives necessary for the maintenance of the discipline and the faith which he holds ; being conscious that the members of this organization can freely meet according to constituted forms to deliberate upon and settle the concerns of that denomination which chooses to submit to them. How, then, can the liberty of marrying one's wife's sister come under any of these heads any more than . the liberty of marrying one's own sister? Civilized and intellectual nations, the Athenians, for instance, have permitted the latter. But surely it must be a strange definition of religion which should make such an alliance a duty to one's Creator ; and it must be a discontented spirit which should endeavour to make out that the limit which the law of the Church and State in this kingdom alike prescribe is not one which gives to all men that utmost latitude of virtuous, and all but unrestricted, choice — a choice only limited by relationship, and no way by pedigree — which any well-ordered man ought to desire, whether to initiate him into domestic felicity or to cheer his widowed solitude ; or which any woman (for it is not, as the promoters of the scheme would fain make it, a man's question only) should wish to be presented to the impulses of her confiding disposition. 49 XXVI. PAPAL AGGRESSION AND THE SCOTCH BISHOPS. Feb. 22, 1851. The results of the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill are beginning to show themselves in ways little anticipated by many, who omitted to realise their own position before they " went a colonelling " against that common enemy, the Pope. The shape in which the attack upon us presented itself was that of a phalanx of Bishops landed somehow in England, but not authenticated in the London Gazette. Here was clearly something to make a stand about — here was a cry ready to hand ; theological — no matter ! constitutional — no matter ! It was at least a cry requiring only lungs to make it, and ears to suck it in. The cry was, that the Queen had been insulted. Impulsive but unreasoning good feeling was not slow to catch this up, and in an incredibly small space of time the whole controversy was, both to friends and foes, inextricably confused. The real broad question was that of toleration ; not, I mean, whether toleration should exist or not, but whether, as a fact, toleration did exist in this kingdom. This was overlooked, and issue was joined on the secondary matter of the titles of the intruding bishops ; just as if, supposing tole- ration to be the existing axiom of the British constitution, there could be any question as to any denomination, not excluded owing to its anti-social nature (such as the Agape- monites), being debarred from that most complete form of organization which it might require for its own weal. In most politicians this was simply a blunder; in unwary Churchmen, it was an almost culpable blindness; in some politicians, it was neither blunder nor blindness. As, in the eyes of the earnest Roman Catholics, the new English Hierarchy was a great opportunity of proclaiming the axiom of Papal supremacy — so, in the eyes of certain politicians at home, , it was an equally good opportunity of clenching that denial of any spiritual authority inherently attached to the Church, in its proper aspect, which it is their earnest desire to make good. Churchmen, both of the clergy and of the laity, were caught by the view so dexterously put before them, and our papers teemed on all sides with addresses, of which the whole pith and marrow was the insult to the Queen. D 50 In vain a few individuals endeavoured to show how suicidal to all indigenous claims of episcopal authority was this ascription of spiritual power to the Grown as the original source of jurisdiction. These protestations were mostly either disregarded or depreciated. But there was a quarter in which they were subjected neither to disregard nor depre- ciation — that quarter which, as I had occasion in the very first of these letters to show, professed, not so very long since, that there was nothing parallel between the cases of the new Eoman Hierarchy and the Episcopacy of our Church in Scotland. This was very well in November. In February letters had to give place to bills, and declamation had to be succeeded by legislation. That versatile mind which, in its lack of statesmanship, finds so much place for manoeuvre, had in the interim calculated its advantage ; and the clerical denouncers find themselves gratified by an enactment, realising to the full the pretensions which they have been labouring to set up of Royal jurisdiction over the Episcopate of the Universal Church. These worthy individuals had, however, found it conve- nient to forget that, although in England and in Ireland the Reformed Church enjoyed the dignity of being established, in Scotland its position was that of a Dissenting sect, and its bishops were the free appointment of those over whom they had to rule. Here was a clear assertion of the principle of Episcopacy as an ecclesiastical fact. Hitherto, Scotch Epis- copacy had been regarded by politicians as a harmless freak — a thing so weak in itself as to be best met by being disre- garded. But, weak as it is in numbers, as a corroborative proof of a theory, it has a value totally independent of num- bers ; and this theory suddenly acquired a political value. The result of this unforeseen combination is the bill before the House of Commons for the prevention of the assumption of ecclesiastical titles not granted by the Crown — a bill which, while professing to be aimed at the Papal Aggression, and popularly interpreted to have as its ultimate object the anni- hilation of Cardinal Wiseman and Drs. Ullathorne, Briggs, &o., has in truth a deeper and a more dangerous intent, which it well behoves every earnest and sincere believer in Episco- pacy as a Divine institution — that is, every genuine English Churchman — to ponder, and to say whether it is after all wise to crush the Eoman Hierarchy at such a cost. This intent, barely concealed in the words of the enact- ment — and not denied by any advocate of the measure — is 51 the assertion that the status of Bishop, both the name and the thing, is a religious position which the Sovereign, and the Sovereign alone, can confer. In one word — I am going to say a startling thing, but I mean it to startle, for it is the truth — the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill is a formal and overt repudiation of the Universal Church of God, in its divinely ordered constitution, as held hy English Churchmen. It is the enunciation of the principle that Bishops must be either State functionaries or rebellious impostors, according as they are appointed or not by the civil government. This claim, to push which the Pope, with so unhappy an ingenuity, afforded to the man who above all others was anxious to make it, an opportunity above all others felicitously adapted for the object, appears patent in the provisions of the Bill — cleverly worded so as to apply to the United Kingdom — by which the episcopacy of the Scotch portion of our com- munion is rendered penal ; and this Bill was drawn, I repeat, under the orders of that Prime Minister who, so far from being oblivious of Scotch Episcopacy, played it off when it suited his object to do so, in his letter to the Bishop of Dur- ham. Mr. John Stuart, with praiseworthy vigilance, asked Lord John Eussell this evening, according to the notice he had given, whether any law-officer of the Crown had decided that it was necessary or expedient that penalties and dis- abilities should be enacted against Scotch Bishops, as a protection against the Papal Aggression. The answer was just what one would expect — an evasion of the question upon a technicality. Mr. Stuart will, I trust, not allow this reply to silence his questions. In the interim it will go forth more expressive in reality than many a professed answer would be. This is, then, the external position of the case. The joint result of Papal daring, of Lord John's diplomacy, of a popular panic indefatigably worked up, and of the incredible short- sightedness of Churchmen, is that, in order to give some show of statesmanship to the measure of repression directed against the Papal aggression, our own brethren of our own communion in Scotland are to be turned back to those dark disgraceful days when the maintenance of that form of dis- cipline, the denial of which was then penal in England, was in Scotland a grave and punishable offence. The internal meaning of the portent is, I believe, still more dangerous and intolerable — no other, I must again repeat it, than to effect what we know Lord John Russell Jias ever longed to D 2 52 effect, and what he knew he was helping to effect when he sent Dr. Hampden to Hereford, and Dr. Lee to Manchester, and conferred the deanery of Bristol on his connection. Dr. Elliott— the annihilation of the idea of Apostolic authority in the Established Church. In one sense the wrong of Scotland is our gain, for it has drawn to light this inward meaning. In opposing the Bill upon the ground of its injury to Scotland, the most timorous Churchman may feel confident that he is not giving Cardinal "Wiseman an undue advantage, while he is most assuredly acting towards the Church of England like a loyal and a courageous son. I have no doubt that, now the plot has burst, Churchmen will deal with the measure as it deserves. XXVII. PARLIAMENTARY REFORM AND THE MUMMERIES OF SUPERSTITION. ' Feb. 25, 1851. Finis coronal opus. Friday next may proclaim that Lord John Kussellhas succeeded in glossing over incompatibilities, or it may announce that he has failed ; but, one way or the other, we have at last reached the sere and yellow leaf of that chief Minister, who has, above all ministers, shown himself little in the greatest times, crooked when honesty would have been most triumphant, spiteful when he had nothing to complain about, vacillating when the danger was of his own creation. This Minister has foundered on the open seas, as no one but himself could have foundered — bankrupt at last in his own especial speculations, when he had exhausted his credit in every other branch of political business. The two last parliamentary nights of the Kussell Government of 1846 — two short nights, upon the first of which the House of Commons was up at nine o'clock, and on the second at six — were a conclusion so exactly appropriate to the political life of Lord John Kussell, that had Defoe been living to forecast his last days, he never could have matched the actual event. It was a farewell to power, grotesquely grand at once and pitifully ridiculous. As little could the most Pantagruelian annalist have dared last week to build up, even in burlesque, an explanation of a Russell resigna- 53 tion as for the next Monday, which could have come within half a continent's breadth of the reality of this evening's achievement — an explanation containing no reference, direct or indirect, to the Papal Aggression and its consequences, and no opinion on any Budget, past, present, or future. Brief as was the speech, in its pretended frankness, its real sup- pressions, its thorough callousness to moral rectitude, it betrayed its author with a fidelity of which, at such a time, one would have hardly supposed even him to be capable. I am not bold enough to say that we may not still have to endure, for a few weeks or perhaps for some months, the spectacle of Lord John Russell in the leading place on the Ministerial bench, as one of the shows, along with Gore House and the Great Globe, ancillary to the Exhibition ; but, morally, his reign is over : and whether he meant his resig- nation of Friday to be bond fide or only a ruse, the people of England will be obstinate to afiix their, and not his, sense to that always dangerous step in Ministers, as well as servants, giving warning. Twenty years ago, a clever young lord — the historian of Europe after the peace of Utrecht, the novellist of the Nun of Arrouca — lately risen to be Paymaster of the Forces, found himself, not yet a Cabinet Minister, the mouthpiece of an epocal ministry (thanks to its having a leader in the Com- mons who could never be very eloquent), on a measure of transcendent moment — the reconstitution of that very body which had to discuss it — the certain political extinction of numbers of those who were handling it. The measure passed, and Lord John Russell and Parliamentary Reform became identified in English history. To be sure, it was not always the same reform, nnless finality and progress are identical; but the spots in the sun ought not to be illnaturedly looked for through smoky glasses. Still, creditors were not to be ever put ofi" with promises ; and on Thursday last, just twenty years after the Reform Bill, the Minister, now Premier, who had introduced it, was pressed, on the motion of a private member, to promise definitely the new Reform Bill, and to give the date of its introduction, so as to get rid of the inconvenient motion. A few minutes more — the house is cleared, and the parent of the Reform Bill is left with fifty-one members to endorse his promise of its development, and about twice that number to record their mistrust of his assurance. This was trying enough ; but it was of course set down for the evening as a surprise, and as such it would have soon sunk into a joke and an anecdote among par- 54 liamentary quidnuncs. The events of the following day stamped it with a moral. I will not tire you with what I have so often had occasion to refer to — the letter to the Bishop of Durham, with itsi panorama of the precipice and the unworthy sons, and the responsive spectacle of "the banks of the river side" — I will not re-open other painful topics on which I have had occasion already to dilate. It is sufficient to state that liabilities, recklessly contracted in haste, had to be compounded for by a pnritan reforaiation in the Church of England, undertaken by Lord John with a mixture of craft and of sincerity — crafti as far as it helped to evade the persecutions with the promise of which he had striven to delude country meetings— sincerity 80 far as he longed from his heart to set his foot more com- pletely than he had dene through the trick of the Manchester Bishopric, the realities of his distribution of high patronage, the "unostentatious " policy of the Committee of Council on Education, and the bold immodest violence of the Gorham judgment and rejection of the Bishop of London's Bill, upon any remaining liberty of doctrine or discipline which the English Church might, yet possess — and driven on by his novel allies with all the vehemence of intolerant and self- satisfied fanaticism. The lumbering impertinences of the National Club, and the selection of St. Barnabas' Church by the thieves of London as the scene of their exploits for seve- ral successive Sundays, swelled the panic and encouraged the Eeformers. The purifier of the House of Commons was looked upon to repeat his former triumphs in "a sweeping alteration of the Church. A Parliamentary campaign was announced against High Churchmen, as an event of the sud- denly " glorious, pious, and immortal " Russell Administra- tion, and the announcement was made good in its extremest days. Bat what a fulfilment ! The attack comprised no de- mand for a Eoyal Commission — no recapitulation by my Lord Ashley of well-digested imputations, and of influential names, affixed without much forethought to a specious docu- ment. It turned out to be a stray shot, inopportunely fired ofi" by a metropolitan member, in the interest of a few con- stituents, against a quiet, unoffending clergyman, of so flimsy a nature that two or three facts, briefly stated by a friend of the inculpated man, disposed of it completely. This shot was yet the explosion of the mine. It brought up upon his legs that noble lord whom the House of (Jommons fancied, -\Thile it listened to him, was the chief adviser of the Crown. It wrung from him the statements that nothing could be done 55 in Parliament, and that the Primate of All England did not think of going to Parliament except in the acknowledged con- tingency of requiring to crush the Rubric, and not being able otherwise to do so. It elicited from the universal good sense of the house the unmistakeable expression of feeling that it ought not to, and that it would not, meddle with such matters. Sir Robert Inglis,; amid loud cheers, gave this sentiment sub- stance and expression, Mr. Hume, coming to the assistance of the Lydian party, could only arrive at a charge as frivo- lous as the former, against another clergyman who was brother to a Cabinet Minister ; and with the interval of a hearty laugh at Lord Dudley Stuart, the members, who had been sitting on pins during the whole discussion waiting for that Budget which was never to arrive, found themselves hurrying out of the house, their heads full of anything but the weal or woe of the Church. And so, amid horrible grinning mockeries of his early and his later glories, after a division on Parlia,m,entary Reform, and a discussion on Church amendment — 'Such a division and such a discussion! — Lord John Russell determined his die- tatorshiip — " In this Jerusalem must Harry die." He may now — or if his evil star prevail, after a brief post mortem tenure of power, impotent for harm, so long as he wields it in his own interest — retire to his ease with the per- fect consciousness that he has not only made a more trifling use of magnificent opportunities than any other man could have had the distorted cleverness to do ; but that he has directed his enormous power towards more petty teazing and tormenting of unoffending individuals than any other ruler of our millions has thought it creditable in modern times to condescend to. Churchmen, once they shall be fairly rid of Lord John Russell, will undoubtedly be free from one great and imme- diate evil ; but if they imagine that the ship will be, therefore, in calm waters, they must be terribly deluded. What may yet be in store from any quarter I dare not vaticinate ; but they will do well to take a lesson, not to be forgotten, from the conduct of Lord John Russell towards them, and from the way in which many of them were at first inclined to meet the recent panic, to have a little more forethought, a little more organization, and rather wider views in store against another similar emergency. 56 XXVIII. LORD STANLEY AND MR. GLADSTONE. Fee. 26, 1851. The anticipations which clouded my letter of yesterday, lest for a short time longer, to his own dishonour and the con- tinued alarm of all thinking people. Lord John Russell should still continue to encumber that place of power which he could no longer maintain with honour, administer with efficiency, or — when the last stroke of the clock had sounded — quit with respectability, have happily come to an end.* In name, as in deed, Lord John Eussell is a tradition of the old days. The feeling with which, as a Churchman, one tries to compass this astounding fact, is as yet a dull amazement — a relief too start- ling and too sudden to be a joy — the first startling into the consciousness of real life from a feverish dream of horrors, more fearful because we could not shape them to our wander- ing imagination. The dreary anticipation of attacks, now insidious, now menacing and audacious, upon the faith — the slow sapping which we knew was going on around us — the steady, scientific discouragement of everything great and true — all this is gone in a moment with that man who seemed, so little time since, omnipotent for mischief — afflavit Deus, et dissipantur. What may be the precise posture of Church matters under any administration which may ultimately shape itself, it is impossible to conjecture. Certain it is that the Church must be a gainer; certain it is that neither Lord Stanley, nor any other chief Minister, could ever, or would ever, throw himself into that attitude of wanton pugnacity against feelings and facts, which it pleased the late Premier to assume. Report — more, I believe, from its universality, than a mere rumour — says that this day's chief delay has arisen from Lord Stanley's waiting to confer with a stateman, bene meritus, more than any other politician, of the English Church. This report carries with it the assurance of good to the cause of Church freedom in two ways — not merely as it regards the prospects of our seeing Mr. Gladstone again in office, but as * So every one thought, when this letter was written. I have not, therefore, altered a word of it ; for it would be uncharitable to Lord John Russell not to show that at that time he was judged according to common rules. 57 an earnest of what the intentions and the actions of Lord Stanley must be should he gain the assistance of such a coad- jutor. Considering Mr. Gladstone's antecedents — considering the frankness and the accompanying self-sacrifice with which he made his public acknowledgment that the theories of his book were not possible under the actual state of society — it would be an insult to him to conclude that he would take oiSce with Lord Stanley, or any other chief Minister, except upon an understanding which would enable him to fulfil at once, and by the same means, his duty as a Minister to the State, and as a man to the Church, by advocating that only true, consistent, and rational religious liberty which allows to all denominations liberty of self-development within the bounds of order and morality — to Dissenters and not only to Dissenters, but to the Church of England — a liberty neither abated, in the one instance, from a hypocritical regard to " the interests of the Establishment," nor arrogantly refused in the other on the ground of freedom and the status of an Esta- blishment not being compatible. Such, I say, must be Mr. Gladstone's only position in any Cabinet. Such I am desirous of believing is what Lord Stan- ley imagines are also his own views. The question remains, has he realised the necessary points with a suificient clearness to make it sure that he could satisfactorily co-operate with one so well informed and accurate on Church matters as Mr. Gladstone ? The last and the most complete ezposi of Lord Stanley's views upon the question of Church organisation is to be found in that speech which he made on the 4th of this month, on the first day of the session, when the contingency of his being in the act of making a Cabinet within three weeks was not, I conclude, very seriously anticipated. The portion of this speech having reference to the unfortunate Papal aggression is very long. One extract, however, will be sufficient for my present purpose : — " If you disallow the title of Bishop of Nottingham, but enable the Bishop of Nottingham and other bishops to complete their synodical organisation, and through that means to exercise boundless control over the consciences of their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects, I tell you you have done nothing towards meeting the emergency." You observe the trenchant character of the proposition laid down in this sentence — that nothing could meet the Papal aggression but the paralysis of synodical action among 58 Roman Catlaolica. I do not suppose Lord Stanley im- plied, when he said this, that he was the foe of synodical action in the Church of England; and he certainly could have no intention of ever attempting to put down the Wes- leyan Conference, or the General Assembly of the Established or the Free Kirk in Scotland. The three latter bodies, to be sure, possess their synodical action in working order. The Church of England, as we are too well aware, does not. But the question is not now, what is ? but what can, and what shall be ? Lord Stanley is, I am sure, a statesmen of too enlightened a mind — too much a man of his century — either to hope or to expect that he can any longer really benefit the Church of England through temporal advantages heaped upon her by Parliamentary favour. He is, we must hope and trust, from his anxiety to co-operate with Mr. Gladstone, truly anxious to see the Church of England righted. But how will he be able adequately to carry out his intention to that extent which Churchmen are longing for all around, if he adhere to the words of his denunciation of synodical action on the part of a tolerated denomination ; and how, on the other hand, can Mr. Gladstone accept this doctrine ? The solution is on all sides full of perplexity, and — to Churchmen — of apprehension. But of the two persons on whose mutual understanding such weighty interests depend. Lord Stanley is the one who can more easily, and with more honour, open the way to an accommodation. So, if Lord Stanley and Mr. Gladstone are combined in the same Cabinet, it must be the earnest wish and hope — I ought rather to say, the fervent prayer — of every Churchman, that this union may be the pledge of Lord Stanley's free acceptance of the truly tolerant, yet truly Church-like views of his colleague, rather than of Mr. Gladstone's closing with the sentences, more elo- quent and fervid than elaborately thought out, of his lordship. XXIX. LORD JOHN RUSSELL, LOW CHURCHMEN, AND THE BISHOPS. Pbb. 27, 1851. Lord John Russell really out, one can review with more of calmness than heretofore the relative positions into 59 which he, with the party which has so recently and so suddenly made him their hero, and likewise the bishops, have found themselves driven, under the various antagonistic pressures which they have alternately courted and impinged upon. The denouement, as you will see, finds them all assuming false and untenable attitudes. The Durham manifesto purchased the ex-Premier a cham- pion where he had never expected to find a word of comfort — that bi-weekly paper which is the organ of the more un- compromising members of the Low Church party. This journal, which had long maintained a traditionary conser- vatism, has for some little time past extended a forgiveness, if not generous, yet very comprehensive, to Lord John Eussell, and has constituted itself mourner at his exequies. What has made it do all this ? Lord John's zeal for what he calls Protestantism. If Lord John Russell's apprehension of this phrase, and that of the journal in question, were identi- cal, there would be nothing wonderful in this, and nothing discreditable to any party. But the truth must out, and the sooner and the more plainly it is told the better. In their new-born zeal for Lord John Russell, in their professed admi- ration for his Durham letter, the Evangelical party must very well know that they have been bridging over differences the most enormous \nth a most assured confidence. That Durham Letter, renowned as it is, was not his first specimen of epistolary theology — it was not the first outburst of his Protestantism. Events have been crowding so fast, that it is almost now forgotten that several brilliant specimens of his authorship found themselves in print a little more than three years ago, at the time of the nomination of Dr. Hampden to the see of Hereford. One of these I venture to reproduce, not for its suavity — nor yet for the dignity which runs throughout it— not for the logical connection of its argument, or the wide spirit of charity which dictates its inferences — but as a proof of the real nature and value of that zeal for pure religion on the part of the ex-dictator which has of late won him so much applause from the organs and the speakers of a certain party : — "Chesham-place, Dec. 10, 1847. " My Lords and Gentlemen, — ^I have had the honour to receive your representation on the subject of my recommendation of Dr. Hampden to the Queen for the see of Hereford. " I am aware that there exists a strong feeling on the part of some laymen and clergymen against Dr. Hampden ; but that the appointment should excite feelings of bitterness is, I hope, an error, as it would show a sad want of Christian charity on the part of those who would indulge such feelings. " The consequences with which I am threatened I am prepared to en- counter, as I believe the appointinent will tend to strengthen the Protes- tant character of our Church, so seriously threatened of late by many defections to the Church of Rome. " Among the chief of these defections are to be found the leading pro- moters of the movement against Dr. Hampden, eleven years ago, in the University of Oxford. " I had hoped the conduct of Dr. Hampden, as Regius Professor of Divinity and head of a theological board at Oxford, had effaced the memory of that unworthy proceeding. "I have the honour to be, my lords and gentlemen, "Your obedient servant, " J. Russell. " To certain lay members of the Church of England." The words whicli I have italicised are very important. Lord John excused his thrusting Dr. Hampden on an unwilling Church, against the reclamations of respectable men of all parties in it, on a plea that this act of his would tend to strengthen its Protestant character. What he implied by this phrase he did not then explain, nor has he ever since explained. It is therefore fair to conclude, that when he used the word "Protestant" in that latter, and when he used it in his later one, he meant to express the same thing. Wide as are my differences from Lord Ashley and his party, and inadequate as I believe are their ideas of the doctrine either of the Church of England or the Universal Christian Church, or of the means necessary to keep doctrine alive in the world, yet I am ready cheerfully to own that they are at least anxious for a fixed and definite faith, such as they fancy their Protestantism to be. How far did the appointment of Dr. Hampden conduce to strengthen this " Protestant character of our Church?" Dr. Hampden's Protestantism is of a widely different class — a class referring not to Baxter or to Calvin, but to his inti- mate friend and adviser, the inspiring element of his lectures — to Blanco White, and all that dreary shoreless sea of scep- ticism on which that unhappy man had turned his bark adrift. So palpable was this fact that, both on the former occasion of his appointment to the Divinity chair at Oxford, and on his elevation to the see of Hereford, many of the most respectable members of the Evangelical party, as it is termed, were among the most earnest of his opponents. Need I enter into further explanation — need I dilate more at length upon the unprincipled nature of the alliance which, commencing from the Hampden epoch, acquired strength and 61 solidity last , autumn, between the Latitudinarian party, the coterie of Blanco White, of Dr. Hampden, and of Lord John Russell, and the Evangelicals, as they are termed — the party whose Parliamentary leader Lord Ashley is — a coalition be- tween the negation of all dogmas, and a dogma, incomplete to others, but meant by its professors to meet the requirements of definite revelation ? Supposing the immediate result of this combination jus- tified, and the " large party " expelled, would there have been peace, and harmony, and concord in the Church of England ? If so, it would have been a peace of pure selfishness, a har- mony of corruption, and a concord of no belief whatever ! But this was not the only false position petrified into an historical blunder by that downfall of Lord John Eussell. The palpable result of that combination was an attack not upon doctrine, in the first instance, but upon ritual. Do not be afraid of my wearying you with a recapitulation of all the Bennett afiair. I will not even repeat how Sir Benjamin Hall and Lord John Eussell brought another clergyman, Mr. Murray, before the House of Commons, for the ofi'ence of carrying out the Eubric according to his conscience, as the culminating exploit of a deceasing Cabinet. In the speech then made by Lord John, which history will record as his last official announcement, his lordship took occasion to state that the bishops had been consulting upon the rubrical question. Eeport says that a result of this con- sultation may be expected in the shape of some joint publi- cation of the Bench. In the interim your columns of this morning contain an opinion — and that an opinion of eminent and learned men, Dr. Addams and Mr. Badeley — that, in nearly all the points on which Mr. Bennett was brought in question, and all those charged against Mr. Murray, the incumbent did nothing more than obey the laws of that Church which he could not disobey without committing a grave offence. Pray note the strange predicament. Mr. Bennett divested of his living — Mr. Murray rebuked; and both, by no ordinary and contemptible authority, pronounced in the right ! What paper may be issued by the Episcopal conclave, I know not — it may, of course, take the same view as this opinion, although I confess I do not much expect that it will do so. If it does not, are its authors — many of them bishops of Eussell nomination — sanguine enough to anticipate that in the present temper of matters, those Churchmen whom 62 tkey most desire to affect will accept their eSlra-legal dicta in the face of such an opinion ? I trust we have heard the last of so unfortunate a con- trivance as this publication would infallibly turn out, to kindle strife where harmony may now exist, to subject honest men to the torment of a divided conscience, and to compel them to make questions, now in solution, matters of principle, and to fight for them as such, without the hope of an accom- modation. The fear of the Ministry driving on the Bench to acts of intolerance being now removed^ such considerations as those I have just stated must prevail. Our bishops must desire to return to that status in quo which last autumn disturbed, and to escape, with all possible and decorous haste, from their pre- sent attitude of preparation for a fierce intestine war in which they would be the assailants. Thus, sir — to return to the point from which I started — the Russell revel ended, all parties but the " large party " of High Churchmen find themselves in their wrong place, with wrong allies, and aiming after impossible results. The "large party" itself was at first adopting some erroneous policy, but it corrected itself just at the right time. Churchmen will have enough to make them fearful for the future ; but one form of the perpetual danger which they are ever incurring has been averted — one part of the history of the English Church has been played out : the first scene at the Flaminian Gate ; the second in the Bishop of Durham's study ; the rest — no matter where ; at last the epilogue, when the chief performer, who began roaring and bouncing and mawling like a lion, confessed his real name and vocation : — " When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar, Then know that I, one Snug the joiner am, No lion fell, nor else no lion's dam." END OP FIRST SERIES. PBTTEU, DUPP AHU CO. PRINTERS, CnAKB COURT, PJ.EET OTRKKT. LETTERS CHURCH MATTERS. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE "MORNING OHRONICLE." VOL. I. " The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON: JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1851. CONTENTS. LETTEIt I. Lord Jolm Russell and Scotch Episcopacy. n. High Churchmen and the Royal Supremacy. ni. Lord Ashley and his Meeting. rV. National Club. V. The Bishop of London and Mr. Bennett. VI. The London Union on Church Matters. Vn. The Bishop of London and Mr. Bennett. VrH. Can ConTocation be Reformed. IX. Proseuch^ — Lord Ashley and Mr. Alford. X. Archdeacon Sinclair and his Visitation. XI. The Bishop of London's Reply to the Clergy of the Archdea- conry of Middlesex. Xn. Mr. Bennett's Resignation. XIII. The late Meeting for the Reviyal of Convocation. XIV. The Reyision of the Prayer Book. XV. Mr. Bennett and the Bishop of London. XVI. Lord Ashley and the Revision of the Prayer Book. XVII. Mr. Bennett's Resignation. XVin. The Bishop of Manchester. XIX. The Theory of Episcopacy .—I. XX. The Bishop of Manchester's Rejoinder. XXI. The Late Meeting of Convocation. XXn. Lord John Russell and the Bishops. XXIII. Lord Ashley in the House of Commons. XXIV. TheTheory of Episcopacy.— II. XXV. Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister. XXVI. Papal Aggression and]]the Scotchjiishops. XXVn. Parliamentary Reform and the Mummeries of Superstition. XXVril. Lord Stanley and Mr, Gladstone. XXIX. Lord John Russell, Low Churchmen, and the Bishops. LETTERS CHURCH MATTEES. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE "MORNING CHRONICLE." No, IV. ■' The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON: JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1851. CONTENTS. PAOB XXX. SlATESMEir AND TOLERATION 155 XXXI. LoBD John in again, and the Scotch Bishops. 160 XXII. The Principle or the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill 163 XXXIII. The Solicitoii-Gbneral's Speech . . . 170 XXXIV. The Dangers of the Church op England . 172 XXXV. Our Bishops and our Church .... 176 XXXVI. The Bishop op Oxford, his Colleagues, and the Public 178 XXXVII. The Pending Episcopal Declaration . . 182 XXXVIII. Lord Ashlet's League and the Prayer Book . 186 XXXIX. The Actual Episcopal Paper. — I. . . . 190 XL. The Actual Episcopal Paper. — II. . . . 196 XLI. Sir George Grey, Lord Ashley, and the Bishops 202 SETTEES CHUKCH MATTERS. XXX. STATESMEN AND TOLERATION. March 3, 1851. The explanation given in the two Houses of our Legisla- ture of Friday night, though barren in immediate results, were most fruitful and instructive as an opportunity of promulgating general views of policy on the parts of the leaders of various parties. The Papal Aggression, viewed in its references to the question of toleration and ecclesiastical self-government, occupied a prominent position in their state- ments. I propose, therefore, briefly reviewing those portions of the leading speeches which bear upon this topic, as far as it relates to the condition of our own Church. I shall begin with the speeches of Lord Aberdeen and of Sir James Graham — speeches which agree in the statement that their authors came, without concert or correspondence, to the conclusion that the Aggression, however annoying, was not a fit subject for legislative interference. The value of this concurrence of opinion on the part of those two able and acknowledged statesmen, may not improbably be under- rated by many — most likely by the majority of casual observers — upon the general plea that it is not very strange that Lord Aberdeen and Sir James Graham should come to K 2 156 the same conclusion by an independent process, belonging as they did to the same political party — " Peelites " both. It is certain that they were both members of Sir Robert Peel's Cabinet, and that both voted for those commercial alterations which created the distinctive term " Peelism" — an appella- tion useful enough, but having the same philosophical value as "Lydian" applied to a certain party in the Church. Viewed, however, by their antecedents, and not by their joint vote of 1846, these two ex-ministers show as much diversity of school and training as can be readily conceived ; and their concurrence on this question assumes the form, not of a paral- lelism, but of something more important — of a convergence — and a convergence, moreover, from very distant starting points. Lord Aberdeen — in taste, the literary man of the beginning of the century ; in politics, the ripe, wise, moderate diplo- matist of Vienna-days ; in religion, the aristocratic but stern Presbyterian, yet not averse to the Establishment of England on account of its prelatic element — is the most able and the most irreproachable specimen of a school which has now comparatively few living examples. This school is the old one of British statesmen such as they were in the days of the great Continental war; trained in Downing Street, when news mysteriously reached Downing Street by breathless messen- gers, and no telegraph existed to render it the instantaneous property of millions ; and inured to parliamentary warfare, when Parliament, stiU unreformed, could act without that perpetual reference to the universal people which has now become a sovereign element in its tactics. These men, as a class, acquired a scientific precision and a quiet readiness of ministerial tact, which, in iaferior minds, deteriorated into " red-tapism," but which, in such as Lord Aberdeen, rose to statesmanship ; and, when coupled, as in his case, with clear- ness of sight suflicient to make it prefer to sail with and guide the bark that hurries down the inevitable stream, rather than fruitlessly strive to anchor in the rapids, this quality of mind has a value and an influence all its own — quiet, but powerful — the influence of enlightened precedent. Sir James Graham, on the contraiy, is a man exclusively of this time and century ; at his starting in life, an ardent financial reformer, ^vhile Lord Aberdeen was the diplomatist of the Holy Alliance ; then a Cabinet Minister of that Government which passed the Eeform Bill, the refusal of whose correlative had broken up the Cabinet to which his lordship had belonged ; at last a Conservative from love of 157 order, and not at all from any traditionary sympathy with tlie old days of omnipotent Toryism. The problem of that great heterogeneous party of Order which has kept the fabric of French society from utter chaos, has frequently been seen in other countries on a small scale. The moderate Conservative organization of England is one example of such a political breakwater — precedent contri- buting one element, the old Tory ingredient ; order, the other — the " Liberal" aggregation. Of those two elements. Lord Aberdeen and Sir James Graham are perhaps the most unadulterated examples among the leaders of that party. Precedent, accordingly, the old constitutional idealization — and order, the desire for peace and social economy — have both, by the mouths of eminent representatives, combined to pronounce that no legislation ought to have been thought of to meet the Papal Aggression; that is, that the said aggres- sion did not exceed the acknowledged theory of toleration, the now admitted element in the British polity. The language in which the two statesmen respectively gave expression to this courageous view is strikingly parallel. Lord Aberdeen says — mitis sapientia LcbU — " I felt undoubtedly an invincible repugnance to adopt the measure of penal legislation towards our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects which is proposed to be carried into effect by the prohibition of the assumption of ecclesiastical titles. And, indeed, I objected to any legislation of this kind on this subject. " I felt, then, that this legislation must prove utterly ineffectual. It is difficult enough at all times, by foi'ce of law, to give a criminal cha- racter to acts in themselves indiffei-ent, so as to ensure the willing obedience of mankind ; but when such acts are performed from a sense of duty and religious obligation, your acts become dead. Conscience and opinion are beyond the scope of your legislation. No doubt you may persecute, but your persecution will be ineffectual. We have for 200 years tormented, verj' successfully and effectually tormented, our Eoman Catholic fellow- subjects ; but you find nevertheless that their numbers, instead of dimin- ishing, have increased. I think I see in this measure a retrograde step towards a system of law which I had hoped was utterly abolished. 1 believe that in the late proceedings which have taken place no law has been broken, unless indeed, which may be doubtful, there has been an infraction of some of those barbarous laws, the text of which still con- tinues to disgrace the statute-book, though they have long been obsolete, and which very recently have been stigmatised by the legislature itself. But though I felt persuaded that no violation of the law had taken place, I was not the less sensible of the arrogant tone assumed by the Eoman Pontiff and by his Cardinal, in the bull of the one and the pastoral letter of the other ; and I felt that this might properly obtain the attention of her Majesty's Government, and even of Parhament; but I saw no suffi- cient grounds for interference with the rehgious liberty of our Roman 158 Catholic fellow-subjects, or for impeding the development and organiza- tion of their Episcopal Church." In the Commons, we are told by Sir James Graham : — " When I supported emancipation, I knew that the Roman Catholics acknowledged Papal supremacy, and would be guided in all spiritual matters by bulls from Home. I knew, also, that their religion is epis- copal ; and when I fought on their side for perfect equality of civil rights, I was aware that the Pope might nominate in England, as in Ireland, archbishops and bishops. Above all, 1 was the organ of the same Government in bringing before the house the Charitable Bequests Act, an act which recognised the dignity of Roman Catholic archbishops, bishops, and the parochial clergy. It uses a kind of paraphrase, and it says that bishops officiating in districts, and clergymen having pastoral care, shall be entitled to the benefits of the act. Well now, what is a district but a diocese ; and what is having pastoral care, but the j urisdiction which a parish priest exercises ? The act carefully gave them the benefit of all charitable bequests, subject to the expressed limitations. 1 am offended, indeed, by the arrogance and folly of the language which the Pope and his Cardinal have thought fit to employ in announcing an ecclesiastical arrangement which I believe to be lawful, and which I do not consider dangerous." I have trespassed on you with very lengthy extracts, but I could not be briefer, when, after so many months' buffeting with that heavy, turbid, frothy, foaming stream of nonsense which has deluged the land, at length I came across these words of sense and moderation, of true statesmanship and toleration, uttered by no strutting hero of the hour of platform glory, but by ripened rulers of the empire^men who have sat in great cabinet councils, and who are famous throughout the civilized world. Such views may widen the breach, as he tells us they do, with Mr. Newdegate ; they may aggra- vate Exeter Hall, and puzzle the family compact ; but sooner or later they must prevail, for they are the only sentiments which the present temper of the civilized world will brook. I do not dwell upon the especial recog-nition contained in both speeches, of episcopacy being the rule of the Roman Church— involving as it does the admission that diocesan and synodical action are necessary to give it full efficiency. I would rather simply call attention to the breadth with which each statesmen has grasped the full notion of liberty of internal development forming a portion of true toleration. It is, of course, undeniable that, to any politician of their school, the connexion with the State, involved in the condition of establishment attaching to the Church of England, \Yill render the frank acceptance of this principle as it affects that 159 body more difficult ; but I will not conceive that men of such views, who have begun so w^ell, can fail at last to grasp the entire compass of the true principle. I turn to very different language — to the stale decoction of platform violence, tempered with the lees of the feeblest official chicane — with which the late Prime Minister ap- proached the topic, in that speech which some believe to be his funeral oration self-spoken — others, the inangural address of the minister of the future — and which seems to me pre- pared to fulfil either character; an harangue in which, in imitation of the Pope giving his blessing Urbi et Orbi, he apostrophised the clique of Holland House and the universal Anglo-Saxon race, and announced, from his evanescent throne of more than Papal infallibility, that to Holland House the future happiness of all that mighty progeny throughout the world was tied for every age. The orator said, " Sir, 1 still entertain the opinion I expressed on the introduction of the bill ;" and having a little amplified this bold assertion, he told the House what, coming even from him, fairly amazed them. His lordship stated that, having ascertained that the second and third clauses — to prove the stringency of which, while still unprinted, the Attorney- General was judiciously put upon his legs at the beginning of the second evening of the debate on the introduction of the bill — were not, as he (Lord John) had intended them to be, a sham, he should withdraw them. This was ludicrous enough —but if Lord John had stopped here, one would only have said, "just like him;" but his evil star prompted him on for once to sincerity, and he acknowledged that the change had been operated by a Roman Catholic Archbishop— Dr. Murray, of Dublin. This, from the author of the Durham letter, was too much. One's only regret was, that, to complete the burlesque, the honour of victory should not have been due, not to Archbishop Murray, but to Archbishop Wiseman. One more speech remains 'to be considered-^that of Lord Stanley. His lordship, entering upon the subject of the Aggression, announced his full adherence to the principle of religious liberty, and his ignorance as to whether the Pope and his accessories had violated the law or not. He then detailed his method of dealing witk that proceeding^a strong resolution of Parliament, and an inquiry into the status of the Eoman Catholic body in England, with reference, among other matters, to the binding effect of the by-laws passed in Synod by that body upon those who might choose to accept them. He stated that the efficiency of the legislation which IGO would result from such a course of proceeding would amply repay the delay of a year or two. It is clear from this precis of Lord Stanley's speech that his views of the force of the principle of toleration are not so pronounced as those of Lord Aberdeen and Sir James Graham on the one side, or of Lord John RusseU on the other. Churchmen may learn much from an attentive and dis- passionate consideration of the debates of Friday night. XXXL LORD JOHN IN AGAIN, AND THE SCOTCH BISHOPS. Maech 8, 1851. OuB reanimated Premier would fain say — " I am Sir Oracle, And when I ope my mouth let no dog bark." But the dogs will bark in spite of the Humane Society ! The Oracle this night, dreading to be too common, delegated the management of the second reading of his own especial biU to a member of the Cabiaet, whom I was really sorry to see dragged in to meet the event of a dilemma for which he was not responsible, — viz. the Home Secretary— a Miaister who, while his colleagues have been mismanaging the world, has, all things considered, been creditably conducting the Interior. But Louis le Grand never would show at his levee (then an etymological reality) till his wig had been poked through the bed-curtains ; and so Lord John would not appear to conduct the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill to-night. It does not come within my province to treat of those alterations in the ill-starred measure, which complete the cycle of ministerial incapacity, commencing with the Durham letter. I am not minister, happily, nor leader of the Opposi- tion, so all I can do is, as a citizen, gaze on the course of a bill which in my heart I believ^ can only conduce to degrade the legislation of the Imperial Parliament of Great Britain to the level of that of a body which, three years back, was heard of as the Parliament of Frankfort. But in one point the bill touched me directly, as it did all other members of the English Church. I say directly, 161 because I think I could, in no long letter, show the dangerous indirect effect upon that body of any legislation regarding the moot hierarchy. To-night I have learned that the special injury has, with a cruel kindness, been exacerbated — sheathed in honied words, while it has been dipped in deadlier venom. The measure in its rudimental form implicated — as inde- pendent lawyers discovered, and lawyers not independent could not deny — the bishops of our own Church in Scotland, in the prohibitions and persecutions-made-easy of the bill, •including the visionary penalty of £100. The words of the bill were all along silent respecting them. Had there been no Scotch bishops at all, the affair would run — as the ex- pression is — on all-fours, just as it did; but there being Scotch bishops, the drag-net of the Russell enactment swept them in. I have already addressed you on the ecclesiastical bear- ings of this gratuitous maliciousness. The gravamen of the case was so great as to excite indignation both amongst those who approved and those who disapproved of legislation against the Eoman Catholic hierarchy. It was, in short, a duty, however unpleasant, incumbent upon the reanimated Cabinet (an ugly word was on my pen's tip to describe the unnatural life re-infused into a corpse) to do something for the Scotch episcopate. That something was elaborately enunciated by Sir George Grey this evening. By the original bill of the Russell Cabinet, the Scotch episcopate was inferentially snubbed, and inferentially sub- jected to the theoretical penalty of £100. By the paulo- post-fuiurum recension of the resuscitated administration, that fine, which none but a lunatic Attorney-General would ever sue for in their case, is to be annulled. This by itself would be worth its value ; but this important concession is to be accompanied by a special mention of the Scotch episco- pate. This mention is to be the statutable repudiation of the territorial titles by which the bishops of that body desig- nate themselves. Anxious as I am to be brief, I find it very puzzling to include the manifold absurdities, and the trenchant denial of toleration and of justice included in this announcement, made by the too easy follower of Lord John Russell. The ab- surdities are patent. We, and the Scotch peojple together, have established in Scotland a form of Christianity which repudiates the outward form of prelacy. But, not being masters of the souls of men, we have not been able to prevent 162 there beitig a per centage of the Scotch people who believe in those things which the rest of the empire is taught are true ; that ■ is, if the establishing a religion does imply any belief in its truth on the part of its establishers. After persecuting this per centage, we at length took to recognising it, and at last actually came to designate its bishops, in act of Parlia- ment, as " exercising episcopal functions within some district or place in Scotland." " It was a kind of paraphrase " (I am quoting the words of Sir James Graham, uttered by him one week since respecting another enactment), " and it says that' bishops officiating in districts, and clergymen having pastoral care, shall be entitled to the benefits of the act. Well, now, what is a district but a diocese, and what is having pastoral care but the jurisdiction which a parish priest exercises ?" So does not Sir James Graham's successor say ! As a bonus to Scotch Episcopacy, he seriously tells us to-night that the penalty which no man anticipated, no man dreaded, shall be repealed ; while the principle involved in that theo- retic penalty which gave it its sting shall be openly an- nounced, and not, as in the first draft of the bill, left to be implied by inference. Was 1 not right in saying what I qualified as " a startling thing" in a former letter, that the bill was " a formal and overt repudiation of the Universal Cliurch of God in its divinely ordered constitution, as held hy ^English Churchmen ?" The Home Secretary's words were : — " And in introducing clauses exempting them frota any penalty, I shall certainly feel it my duty that the provisions exempting them shall not be held to give them any right to assume a style to which they are not already by law entitled." Insult had yet to be added to injury. Sir George Grey went out of his way to explain how, in the hypothesis of any petition to her Majesty from the individuals exercising episcopal authority over districts in Scotland, in which they designated by their signatures those districts — districts over which, by the act of Union, no state-appointed official could, under that designation, exercise such powers, and in which, therefore, the appointment of an Episcopate could hardly, by the extreniest stretch of casu- istry, be looked upon as a trespass on Eoyal or Ministerial preserves-^he would return the petition to the subscribers. Nay, deserting hypothesis for fact, he told the House how, lately — under the alarming event of four out of 3,000 sub- scribers to a certain document being of that body, and so subscribing themselves — he had taken the trouble to write ah official letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has 163 as much jurisdiction over the Scotch bishops as the Arch- bishop of Dublin, repudiating any contingent recognition of their titles, involved in his laying the document before her Majesty ! And this was ia the same speech of which the earlier part was in great measure an elaborate vindication of the assumption of their penal at-J^lOO-per-time territorial titles by the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland. Such, Sir, are a few facts of the first parliamentary night of the resuscitated Government. Happy nation of England — but thrice happy English Church— to have received again her own lost Russell ! " Tu pudice, tu probe, Perambulabis astra sidus aureuml" XXXIL THE PRINCIPLE OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES ASSUMPTION BILL. March 17, 185L The debate of last night has brought within a nutshell the principle of the unfortunate bill now before Parliament ; its principle, I say, not its injury, past, present, and future. This principle is the assertion that the civil power, as such, is judge of the organization necessary to give each individual of the nation the means of saving his own soul to all eternity ; and not those individuals themselves, either as Protestants by right of private judgment, or as members of a hierar- chical corporation in deference to that corporation. I do not for one instant imply, that all those excellent individuals who came down to the Hotise determined to sup- port ninepence in the pound of what they had anticipated, were conscious of the dogma which they were helping to establish ; far otherwise. Many of them, having in the retreats of their autumn holidays taken up the idea that the Pope intended to insult the Queen and nation of Great Bri- tain, have pertinaciously adhered to this impression, imper- vious to argument and untouched by fact ; others, again, most honestly and entirely believe, as a primary article of religion, that though it is a duty to love Christianity, it is a superior duty to hate the Pope. Mr. Page Wood, on the other hand-^ 1C4 a class by himself— attempted to justify his entire derelic- tion of all his own position by arguments which, if they were worth anything, go to the extent of proving every Roman Catholic a ca2mt lupinum. That, however, there was con- sciousness somewhere, I am thoroughly convinced, although I have but little hope of obtaining an acknowledgment. However desirable, in a social aspect, may be the mutila- tions which the Government has inflicted upon its own bill — for, upon a balance of questions of great intricacy, men will, I believe, at last come to the conviction that the maintenance of order and security is a gain, although purchased, when no longer to be procured any other way, by selling out so much of the moral capital of the Imperial Parliament of Britain — yet, if we regard them in their bearings upon ecclesiastical matters, we shall come to the conviction that they leave the dangerous principle which has been at work in the measure from the beginning, more undisguised and more unsound than before, and not the less because it now stands in the bill as a principle, and that almost alone. In the measure in its original condition, it was laid down, in the first clause, that " any person other than a person thereunto authorised by law in respect of an archbishopric, bishopric, or deanery of the United Kingdom of England and Ireland," assuming the title of archbishop, bishop, or dean of any place in that United Kingdom, should be judged guilty of an offence punishable by lex talionis, at the rate of £100 a time. The three following clauses were corrobora- tive of the principle of this enactment. These restrictions, as we very well know, brought the Episcopal Church of Scotland under the ban of the act. Loud outcries were made at this restriction ; and in its amended form, as proposed by the Ministry, the Scotch Episcopate are to save their pockets under the following terms : — " This act shall not extend or apply to the asaumption or use by any bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Scotland exercising episcopal functions within some district or place in Scotland of any name, style, or title in respect of such district or place ; but nothing herein contained shall be taken to give any right to any such bishop to assume or use any name, style, or title which he is not now by law entitled to assume or use." I never remember to have seen words which, under a milder appearance, concealed so stringent a signification as this proposed clause. Taken by itself, it seems a platitude and a triiism^ — a claim so self-justificatory as to bo really below the dignity of the legislature to make — that men shall us not avail themselves of a release from an inequitable penalty to transgress the law. But viewed with its context, it signi- fies a very different thing; "not now by law entitled to assume or use." What law ? The bill answers this question in its preamble. The gravamen of the Roman hierarchy is there set out to be — recurring to the Roman Catholic Eman- cipation Act — that it is an infringement of the Act of Union between England and Scotland, by which Act of Union epis- copacy was established, as " permanently and inviolably" as an Act of Parliament can make anything pennanent and inviolable, in England and Ireland, and Presbyterianism in Scotland. This is the law, the offending against which is at the bottom of the penalty proposed to be inflicted upon the new Roman hierarchy; and therefore, by similarity of reason, this is the law which does not authorise the Scotch Bishops to assume titles, which titles, they are cautiously warned, not to suppose they have any right to. While Mr. Roundell Palmer, in his admirable and ex- haustive speech, was laying down, with a truthfulness too pungent to be pleasant, the manifold absurdity of this restric- tion upon the Scotch Episcopate, he was interrupted by an exclamation from the Treasury Bench, " Call them by name!" — an exclamation no sooner thrown out than annihilated by the speaker whom it was meant to discompose. This excla- mation came from Mr. Fox Maule, a minister whose antece- dents are that a few years since he was the Parliamentary champion of a vast religious secession from establishmenta- rianism in that very Scotland, of men differing from the body which they left neither in doctrine nor in general discipline, but only on the point of patronage — a body in full communion, I believe, with the one from which it has broken off, against the churches of which, in almost every parish, it has set up its rival edifice. Mr. Fox Maule, the representative in Scotland of princi- ple preferred to State connexion, was not ashamed to volun- teer his help to crush the assertion of the same preference in that same land of that same principle by another dissenting body, which has had to make sacrifices for its belief in the truth of God which, and I am sincerely happy it should be so, the Free Kirk has not yet been called upon to render. And yet Mr. Fox Maule generally bears himself as a just and a fair man; How can we then account for what, how- ever unconscious on his part, is great and flagrant inconsis- tency and injustice towards a portion of the inhabitants of his own northern fatherland ? The solution of the enigma 166 must be, that Mr. Fox Maiile is so radically Presbyterian and Ministerial at once (as Ministers now are), as to be absolutely unable to grasp the deprivation of the freedom of territorial episcopacy being a wrong to the souls of any men. His view of episcopacy is, clearly, that in England, for instance, where an Episcopal Church is established, it is the organization which the State thinks best to maintain the peace of the established form of worship ; and that in a dis- established body, like the Episcopal Church of Scotland, it is a traditionary prejudice, or a piece of foolish mimicry of the wealthy and gentlemanly prelatic Law Church in England. I attribute ignorance to Mr. Fox Maule ; for his pre- vious career, so far as I have traced it, makes me respect him. Ignorance I cannot predicate in extenuation of other heads which have been at work trading on the Papal Aggression. The bill before Parliament clearly does not recognise the legal discouragement of territorial episcopacy among our brethren of our own body in Scotland as a grievance to their conscience. Herein is the vice of its principle — herein is contained the evidence for the somewhat bold assertion with which I commence this letter. To the Episcopalian Christian territorial Episcopacy is almost a necessity — Episcopacy pure, quite so. The enjoy- ment of what is quite necessary is of course a vast compensa- tion for the loss of what is almost so ; but this is no excuse for the spirit which puts the peaceful and loyal citizen upon the need of applying such a palliative to his injured feelings. The true Episcopalian Christian does not receive episcopacy as he does the new County Courts, as a boon given to him by the State for his convenience : nor, on the other hand, does he practise idolatry of individual bishops, acting beyond or in defiance of the law of the Church, which is sometimes attempted to be exacted from him as the supposed result of his principles ; but he treasures episcopacy in its true value, as a " fact " (to borrow the slang of the day) in the Christian Church, as something quite essential — so essential as to be essential in spite at once of the civil power and of the personal qualifications, the ignorance or the knowledge, the legal or illegal conduct of any individual bishop, and to be maintained in absolute independence of all siich considerations. The Episcopalian Christian throughout the world holds Episcopacy from the unhesitating belief that the Saviour instituted a suc- cession of ministers, whose primary duty was threefold — the care of their flocks within a certain limit — the " laying on of hands " on their own so-created order of men, and likewise 167 on two inferior orders of clergy, for the promoting them to their dignities — and lastly, in common with the higher of these two inferior orders, the celebrating of that rite which their Divine Founder ordered should be celebrated till He came. Bishops — for such this class of men are termed — are thus a constitutional body, who may, like other men, act well or ill, but who are of necessity towards the continuance of the Christian Church. As I have said, one of the duties of such bishops is to overlook (the etymological meaning of the word episcopos, corrupted into bishop,) a certain flock — a certain fragment of the faithful ; not, of course, units fantastically selected, one man in this town, another in that, but the terri- torial aggregation of them in the place or district which has been assigned to circumscribe his governance of the Christian Church. Common sense has for the most part called him by the name of that district over which he presides — Bishop of A, if overseer of Christians in A ; Bishop of B, if overseer of Christians in B. Circumstances do at times make overseers of bodies of Christians — in England, for iQstance — take their name from places like Melipotamus or Uranopolis (wherever these towns may be), or Cambysopolis — I conclude in the Lybian Desert. But the revolting grotesqueness of these appellations, it seems, annoyed those subjected to their holders more than it did any one else. Somewhat similar difficulties at one time led to the temporary expedient of what was called the College of Bishops in Scotland ; but such things are rocks to be avoided, not precedents to be quoted. This, the Episcopalian Christian's idea of his needs, is denied by the bill before us, and more nakedly in the clause which pretends to benefit Scotland than in any other part, asserting as that does that the law does not allow those whose conscience tells them they ought to have territorial bishops, to have them on their own account in a country where the State is tied Up from providing them. This is the common-sense way of putting the difference between England and Scotland, between a country where episcopacy is estab- lished, and where it§ establishment is forbidden. The fact of the extensive existence of Established Episcopal Churches throughout Europe is a proof, not a refutation, of my posi- tion; for how came this phenomenon about? People often talk as if a bishop's were a State-created office — a title of dignity — like, to borrow Lord John Eussell's notable simile, a lord-lieutenant. This is a comfortable theory ; but it over- looks a wonderful array of awkward facts. How comes it that every country has its own system of titles and offices, 168 while everywhere, where the apostolic succession is held, the one order of bishops is to be found ? Because the former is the creation of the State, the latter a self-efficient body. Words can no longei* be minced. A truly Episcopal (the meaning of this reservation will come out afterwards) Churchy when established, is only a body which has, for mutual advantage, entered into certain engagements — a concordat, in short — with the State, by which it gives up more or less of liberty (not, of course, of vital principle) for more or less of temporal advantage. For the proof of my assertion I appeal to the three first centuries of Christianity. None but Epis- copal Churches existed till three centuries ago, and therefore, of course, old rules do not apply to the creation of the inter- mediate epoch — non-Episcopal establishments. But this creation developed a result — the existence, when not crushed by arbitrary tyranny, of a residuum of immortal souls in those coutitxies who still clung to the creed of Episcopacy. In their case the concordat was broken, and they of necessity returned to a condition similar to that of ante-Constantinian Christianity. In England such a concordat exists, and we are accord- ingly provided with a State-recognised territorial Episcopacy. Scotland stands otherwise. But what premium is this for selfishness on our part? How can we be more sure that our present position will be more secure than was that of Episco- palians in Scotland, when they in their day were as we now are — the State establishment ? In a former letter of mine, which appeared in your paper on the 20th January, I quoted a passage from that evening contemporary which rejoices in being the organ of the Russell Cabinet. The sanguine "we" of this valuable revelation grieves that we had not a "real Nag's-head consecration " — a pedantic reference to a foolish story, the gist of which is that our bishops are not true bishops. Such are the words of a contemporary, that contemporary the echo of the Cabinet. A "real Nag's-head consecration" would preserve the shadow of Episcopacy — the temporal title and position, just as in Denmark, where there are certain State officers called bishops who supervise the religious matters of the establishment, while openly repudiating even a claim to apostolic succession ; or just as the Duke of York was Bishop of Osuaburgh. Is this supposition a chimera so monstrous that it ought not to form an element of our present consider- ation ? The Whig journal, as we see, ventilates its desira- bility ; and he would be a bold man who would venture to aftirm that Lord .John Bussell, if he saw his opportunity. 169 would shrink from pushing it, and so get rid of such a " mum- mery of superstition," such an "aggression" as an Episco- pate claiming authority as descended from the Holy Twelve. If the Nag's-head consecration were carried, and the new- minted " Oantuar" sat in Lambeth, and " London" by Act of Parliament drove down to Fulham, the true Episcopalians would have but one resource, to range themselves under true Bishops — old ones, who threw up the temporalities of their sees rather than abet in such a profanation, or newly elected prelates consecrated by these, and by free bishops elsewhere. These bishops could not, if they wished it, help having the duty imposed upon them of being territorial. And if they acted up to that duty they would find themselves in the clutches of an Act of Parliament (supposing it to pass) fastened upon the English people by an unscrupulous Minis- ter, under cover of the panic of the Papal agression ; they wouH find themselves subject, under the insolent and insidi- ous terms of this Act, to a severe penalty, at the mercy of the Attorney-General, for fulfilling their imperative duty, for not falling short of their sworn allegiance to the Universal Church of God. Such, sir, is the bill now before Parliament. Is not my definition of its principle fully borne out? Should not all who hold the divinity of conscience dear to their souls unite to oppose it ? And, more than any other, should not every man to whom episcopacy is a belief, and not an expedient, refuse to be any longer juggled out of his privileges as an Englishman and a Christian by the panic fears of that Papal aggression which has afibrded to the opponents of all religious freedom opportunities which they have drawn upon to the last farthing, and under which he has been led to the very verge of fooling away the substance of his share in the divine corporation of the Universal Fold for the shadow of a paltry revenge ? Every day strengthens the view of the crisis which I have all along consistently held. Every day, I trust, brings others to it. 170 XXXIII. THE SOLICITOR-GENERAL'S SPEECH. Makch 18, 1851. The Ministerial speech of this evening on the Ecclesias- tical Titles Assumption Bill was that of Sir Alexander Cock- burn, her Majesty's Solicitor-General. The self-possession of its assertions will, I doubt not, make it tell in some quarters, where law and logic may not unnaturally be looked for as dropping from lips so venerable as those of the second legal adviser of the Crown. May I, then, accompany your issue of it with a few remarks, for the purpose of systema- tising attention upon its principal heads ? I shall not touch upon the fallacy which runs throughout the argument — the strong assertion of the illegality of the Pope's act brought forward to justify an act of Parliament to render it illegal — an acknowledgment, in short, of the falsity of the assumption, that it was, as things stood last year, illegal. This fallacy is so universal in all speeches on that side of the question, that noticing it would be time lost, even when it is found in the mouth of a Solicitor-General, to back up an irritating manifesto by arguments which would support an impeachment. Moreover, it does not come directly within the scope of these letters. But it does come within my com- pass to test how far the learned gentleman has grasped just, or rather any, notions of religious organization. As a first specimen of intelligent comprehension, the House found itself enlightened with a distinction drawn between "spiritual" and "ecclesiastical;" the obvious in- ference from which would be that Sir A. Cockburn had not realised that, in certain forms of religion, ecclesiastical organization is held a necessary channel of spiritual grace, and therefore as necessary to the idea of toleration in respect of such forms as the recognition of its most abstruse or theoretical doctrines. But there was an object in this dis- tinction. A passag'e from the Pope's brief was quoted, and, with all the ingenuity of a counsel seeking for a verdict, the allotting in it, on the Pope's part, of all the ecclesiastical powers which he was competent to do to the new bishops, was represented as conferring on them the status which estab- lished Roman Catholic bishops enjoy in countries where Eomanism is the establishment. This view, you will own, showed clearness of compre- 171 hension. It was followed by an instance of singular good taste. Mr. Roundell Palmer had, in his speech, talkedof the irregiilarities which had grown up of necessity under an irre- gular and an abnormal system like that of the vicars-apostolic. The Solicitor-General was pleased to interpret this as signi- fying moral irregularities, and to step forward with a gracious defence of the purity and goodness of that body of clergy whom he saw in the visionary dock before him ! All this was strong, but it was eclipsed by what followed — by the assertion that it was not discipline which it was sought to establish through means of the new hierarchy, but the Canon law ! It was no maiden speaker — no eldest son fresh from an ancestral county — no local hero deep-pledged to his anti-aggression meeting to say something, and labo- riously elaborating that something into an illusory antithesis, that made and propagated this assertion, but the Solicitor- General. As he has said it, will the Solicitor-General kindly explain what the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church is, except the canon law — ^what the canon law is, except the code of the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church ? Imagine, sir, the Procureur-General of France stating officially that such and such a measure — the bill before the house, for instance — was not intended to maintain the law in England, but the statutes, and you exactly grasp that mon- strous fallacy which the Solicitor-General had the courage and the modesty to palm off upon the House of Commons this night. Of course it did not suit the learned gentleman to say, that everything which might be most arbitrary, and vexatious, and dangerous in the canon law had full swing in England under the provisionary government of vicars-apostolic, and that the only effect of the new hierarchy would be to check the tyranny of fragmentary applications of that code by the constitutional balance of its entire system of reciprocal rights. This is a thing not to be overlooked, and not to be refuted, that, for all harm which may be in it, the canon law is actually, and always has been, in force among English Roman Catholics in its most arbitrary and offensive form, that of abnormal makeshift. Prepared as I was for a great deal, the next argument of the versatile jurist astonished me. His course led him on to the Synod of Thurles, and its audacious assertion of indivi- dual opinion about three voluntary colleges, and in particular to Archbishop CuUen. Archbishop Cullen, as might be sup- posed, fell severely under the lash. Will you believe' me L 2 172 when I tell you what was Archbishop CuUen's chief offence in the eyes of Sir A. Cockburn? It was that he had been appointed to his see " against old established usages" — not freely elected by his clergy, but placed by the Pope over the heads of the three selected candidates " against old established usages." So deeply does the Solicitor-General feel this wrong that later in his speech he recurred to it, speaking with praise of a bishop elected to govern the archiepiscopal see. Free election of a bishop, then, is a good thing, and the author of this assertion is the Solicitor-General. Free election implies. a meeting of clergy to elect, and yet the Solicitor-General is against synods, and contrived in the course of the speech to give a side hit at our own Convocation. Still the admission about free election is so startling, that I am prepared not to be very hard upon a little confusion of logic, a little neglect of common sense, a little oblivion of consistency, even in a Solicitor-General, so long as he is not prosecuting me or mine. Such, sir, was the speech of a Solicitor-General, not at the Central Criminal Court, but in the House of Commons, on a matter which the Government which he serves has made of European interest to Christians and to politicians. XXXIV. THE DANGERS OP THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND. Makch 20, 1851. Two morning contemporaries respectively contain docu- ments of very different characters, having no strictly definable connexion with each other, but both bearing, in their several ways, upon the condition of that body which exists in this country under the legal appellation of the Church of England, as it has existed for twelve centuries and a half, since first the Anglo-Saxons heard the word of truth — once unreformed, now reformed— still, under her various conditions of greater and of less purity, a branch of the one Catholic Church. The first of these is a letter of Lord Robert Grosvenor to the Bishop of London, upon the question of Church obser- vances, and the Bishop's answer. The letter is a call upon his lordsliip, in as peremptory language as courteousness will 173 permit, to carry out the repression of "mummeries" for " the satisfaction of the public." The Bishop, in his reply, after some observations upon personal cases, which one would have hardly expected to see thus elicited, continues — " With respect to the observances complained of, a distinction is to be made between the introduction of ceremonies which have not the sanction either of written law or of long-estabhshed usag-e, and those which have not been customarily observed in our parish churches, but which are thought to be authorized by the rubric. "The former class of innovations I think that a clergyman is bound by his oath of canonical obedience to abstain from when required to do so by his ordinary. With respect to the latter, he will not feel himself bound to desist when he thinks that he has the law on hip side. Nor can the bishop authoritatively require him to do so unless he is satisfied that the clergyman is mistaken.' To this last description may be referred some of the ritual practices which are at the present moment most objected to; and it is by no means easy to determine in what cases coercive measures can be safely resorted to where moral suasion has been ineffectual. " Some of the practices complained of I have reason to think could not be stopped by process of law, and I freely admit that I have been extremely unwilling to have recourse to that method of restraining the mistaken zeal of men who were acting under an erroneous notion of what their duty to the Church required or permitted them to do." The principle laid down by his lordship in this extract is very valuable, quite apart from his application of it. The application is of course the accuracy of his view of the rubric — the principle being that the rubric is paramount to episcopal mandate, and to be maintained as such by the second order of clergy. It is only to be regretted that this principle was not resorted to in a late painful and notorious case. The other document which I shall refer to is a paragraph, conspicuously inserted in that papef which was on a former occasion the official organ of Lord Ashley's party. The para- graph is so important, that I make no excuse for giving it in full :— "Great Anti-Papal League. — Yesterday the foundation was laid of a religious League, which promises to become the greatest of the kind Tvhieh modern times have witnessed. A number of noblemen, gentlemen, clergymen of the Church of England, and Disseilting ministers of various denominations, met in Osborne's Hotel, Adelphl, for the purpose of con- sulting together as to what ought to be done l}y evangelical Protestant denominations, with a view to resist the aggressions of Popery. Among the noblemen and gentlemen present were the Earl of Ducie, Lord Ashley, Sir Culling Eardley Smith, the Hon. and Rev. Montague Villiers, the Rev. W. W. Champneys, the Rev. Edward Auriol, the ReV. T. R. Birks, the Rev. Dr. Morison, the Rev. Dr. Campbell, the Rev. Dr. Bunting, the Rev. Dr. Beecham, the Rev. Dr. Steane, with a great number of eminent laymen. The meeting lasted three hours and was characterised through- 174 out iy the greatest unanimity and cordiality. It was resolved that duly ortranised and most energetic measures shall be forthwith adopted in order to enter the arena with the hosts of Popery." It will be asked, What connexion has this quotation with the former one ? My reply is, that it may serve as a proof of what "the public," which Archdeacon Sinclair, and others also, I fear, are so willing to " satisfy," must gain before that satisfaction is attained. Hitherto, as any one who has studied the records of the self-dubbed Evangelical party well knows, there has been a species of half-establishmentarian, half-fine- gentleman feeling of distance between at least a certain section of that party and the Dissenters. The "greatest league of modern times," it seems, will annihilate this feeling, under the pretended colour of opposition to Papal Aggression. Per- haps it is for the personal credit of both parties that it should do so ; and certainly, while it renders the danger attaching to orthodoxy in the English Church more imminent, it affords those who are prepared to defend her as she is, and as our fathers have bequeathed her to us, no excuse for shutting their eyes to that danger. That party, whose existence within the pale of the English Church no one attempted to molest so long as they refrained from attempting persecution against those who avowed them- selves, and were unwillingly acknowledged by their opponents, as holding the literal doctrines of the Prayer Book — has now fairly proclaimed its true intent; on the one hand, by Lydian meetings and addresses (one to the Archbishop of Canterbury, I hear, signed by about 240,000 names, and presented this day by Lord Ashley and a deputation), intended to recall to life Tudor powers of interference, and to drive out of the Church of England those who hold and teach the literal language of the Church Catechism, the literal language of the services for Baptism and the Lord's Snpper, the literal language of the form of Visiting the Sick, and the literal language of the Ordination Services— on the other, by proposals to join in the greatest league which modern times have witnessed with all " Evangelical Protestant denominations." This double proce- dure (in both phases of which we see Lord Ashley took a pro- minent part within a day), if successful, would simply amount to revolutionizing the Church of England— to depriving her of her position among the branches of the one Catholic Church. True Episcopalians, as I said in my letter on Monday, would then be compelled to form their own Free Church, and for that Free Church penalties are made ready in the recesses of the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill, whieli, in spite of 175 its inadequacy, so far as regards their hoasted demands against Rome, the Evangelical party are so eager to abet. Such, sir, is the toleration proposed for us — such the paternal treatment of us — renunciation of the Faith, or the Attorney- General. Such, sir, is the generous "public" which is to be " satisfied." But there is another class to whom I must say a few words before I conclude — the lovers of peace " where there is no peace." Such persons, whoever they may be, whether clergy or laity, in high or lowly station, are very blind — very careless — very ignorant of the feelings of the High Churchmen — if they imagine they can thus quell them. High Churchmen belong to the Church of England because she is a portion of the Catholic Church — and to maintain her in this position is their most sacred duty, and one which they are prepared to carry out at any cost. If there is one principle more indisputable by fact and reason than another, it is, that tee present Chukch op England is the old Catholic Church of England, speci- fically reformed IN errors specifically stated, holding AND bound to teach EVERYTHING SHE HELD OR TAUGHT NOT specifically forbidden in such STATEMENTS. This principle saves our position, as a branch of the Catholic Church, against Kome — and it saves our position against those bodies which, while attempting to reform, would commit extirpation. It, and it alone, connects us with the universal Christianity of all times. With the recognition of this principle, the " large party " is satisfied — it is not satisfied with anything else less. It has hitherto desiderated a clear specific enunciation from our spiritual fathers of this great truth, which they can hardly fail, if ever acting in concert, to recognise. I say they can, I trust, hardly fail, although I perceive that the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his reply to the deputation headed by Lord Ashley, on the very day after he assisted at "the greatest league of modern times," claims his "colleagues on the Episcopal bench" — i.e. the Bishops of English sees, I conclude — as " generally agreed " upon the subject of opposing what is called " Tractarianism." Is it, then, a truth that our Bishops can be generally agreed to back up the Durham letter (this is the plain English of it), when last year they could not be " generally agreed " to put forth a statement of their belief in the " one baptism for the remission of sins ?" Let our Bishops speak for themselves, and make such a de- 176 claration as that wbich they must make, if they mean to speak the language of the Church over which they are set ; they will be assailed by much ig-norant clamour, but they will have a phalanx of true hearts to back them up, and a con- science sans peur et sans reproche^ to cheer them on their way. Let them vacillate or fall back from the assertion, and the result must be fearful,— confusion, breaking of hearts, disruption, extinction of moral feeling— despair in some, despondency in others — and, on the part of those whom they strive to satisfy, a sullen refusal to be satisfied till all Catholic character is blotted out of the Establishment. XXXV. OUR BISHOPS AND OUR CHURCH. "~ '~ Mabch 21, 1851. T'he difference between strength and weakness, breadth and narrowness of mind, courage and cowardice, wisdom and its converse, in the practical management of affairs, consists, in no little degree, in not mistaking effect for cause. A truism, you will say — and so it is ; but it is a useful one now-a-days. The Church of England is just emerging from a state of awful spiritual torpor. The shock of the awakening displays itself in many eccentric gestures ; and the weakness, it may be, of the patient is still most painfully visible. Wise physicians would, under such circumstances, strive to foster the reviving senses, and to administer strengthening support. The rash and the ill-educated alone could mistake the tokens of life for the symptoms of disease, and strive again to bury the object of their blind care in a deathlike stupor of disease. Such, sir, are the reflections which announcements like those of your correspondent " F. H. D." awaken in my mind. The anticipation of a joint Episcopal document, at wliich I hinted yesterday, is, then, not an hypothesis, but a rumour, and one which cannot fail to rest upon some tangible foun- dation. Like " F. H. D.," I cannot venture to conjecture what the nature of such a publication may be. I yesterday stated that, if such a paper should appear, and if it should uncompro- misingly proclaim that " the present Church of England is 177 the old Catholic Church of England, specifically reforfned in errors specifically stated^ holding and hound to teach every thing she held or taught not specifically foriidden in such statements"^— ^en, although there might even be a hurricane of confusion and unpopularity for the time, yet, in the end, honesty, and truth, and zeal for " the faith once delivered to the saints"— to the Christian Church, eighteen hundred years ago— must triumph. Should, however, the document afSrm any contrary prin- ciple-^pardon me for assuming, even for argument's sake, the possibility of such an overt betrayal of that faith on the part of any considerable number of the collective Episcopate — then all the evil consequences of bowing down and cringing to popular favour, rather than manfully facing persecution, if need be, for the immutable truths of Christ, for the Catholic verities which Christian Bishops are bound to guard as dearer than life itself, would most assuredly ensue. The report is pregnant with anxious thoughts. Our Episcopate has not, within the last twelve months, been so courageous as to make the prospect devoid of great appre- hension. But can we apprehend a deliberate denial of the charter of our existence as a true Church — a denial, of course, destitute of the least shade of legal authority, hut awfully compromising those who make it ? Time will show — but in these strange days it is well to be prepared for the worst. Cowardice often prompts the most desperate rashness ; to borrow a simile employed by Archbishop Laud upon the scaffold, a very awful deed was once perpetrated lest the Romans should come, and the Romans came in consequence. If secessions to Eome are to be checked, it is not by per- secuting faithful and loving children of the English Church — it is not by enforcing any stringent measures against churches where they know that they enjoy spiritual consola- tion, which the selfishness of the clergy of other places denies to them. Our bishops, there is too mUch reason to believe, judging from some unhappy secessions, fancy that there is a Home- ward movement, which ought to be, and which may be, repressed by strong measures against such men and such churches ; but I can assure them that, if anything would swell the Roman ranks, it would be such a policy ! The re- vival of the reverence for Christian antiquity, and for the faith of the primitive Church, has been vast and far-spreading. On all sides are persons — having no sympathy with modern Eomanism, shrinking with horror from the teaching of the 178 " Oratory," agliast at its doctrine of development— whoselieart and all whose affections are in those days and that discipline which they know must be the truth— if truth ever has been on earth— the days and the discipline of the Undivided Church. Believing, as they do, that the English Church joins them to those days and that discipline, they cling with deeper affection to her. But let that attachment be shaken— let them be told that their tradition is from the Germany of three centuries back, seen in the mirror of modern Germany — that their faith is not Catholic and ancient, but simply what the actual Bishops choose, with a more than Papal infallibility, to make it, and nothing but a fearful crash can follow. These have slight sympathy with actual Eome — their true affections are with the Church of primitive times ; her reverence, her communion, her discipline, they follow, persuaded that their English mother bids them do so. But let them be told, or let them judge by what they endure, that the English Church has no place for them, and what must follow ? We need not be surprised if, in various cases, bewildering unbelief should possess their minds ; we ought not to judge very harshly if, in desperation, they take np with one convulsive grasp doctrines and prac- tices from which, while grasping them, they shrink away, and plunge into Eoman Communion. We must expect that many will strive to perpetuate English orders and the English Communion, apart from the State body. This, if the State body apostatise from the faith, would become not an alterna- tive, but a necessity. Perhaps there may, as the result, be no State body at all. Any how the Bishops are playing a desperate game. XXXVI. THE BISHOP OF OXFORD, HIS COLLEAGUES, AND THE PUBLIC. March 24, 1S51. Since I last addressed you, so short time ago, the various perils which are at this instant menacing the Church of Eng- land seem to have gathered more consistent shape. In the first place, it is whispered about, that, should some happy interposition not occur to prevent or to modify it, the episcopal circular will contain something very like, if not amounting to, a denial of that great first principle of the continuity of 179 the Englisli Church, which, in my letter of Thursday, I was rash enough to assume that our prelates could not possibly venture to speak against. Then it appears that, in his reply to the Lydian monster address, the Primate of all England had — shall I call it the ignorance or the audacity, the courage or the weakness — to abandon his sacred position as a chief ruler in the Church of God, and to declaim about "principles which have been loudly maintained and zealously propagated under the equlYOcal title of Church principles ?" Thirdly, the Christian Times of this day, the clever and energetic organ of that really consistent party of united Low Churchmen and Dissenters who feel their substantive agree- ment and who labour for greater sympathy, lets us into the secret history of that "greatest league of modem times," of which I had occasion to speak the other day, in a leading article headed " The New Protestant Movement." This meeting, it seems, took place on Tuesday last, at the invitation of the "Protestant Defence Committee" (the emanation of the Lydian meeting), and was presided over by Lord Ashley — ^its object being "to consider the desirableness of uniting, in some common action, the different bodies of Protestants in opposition to the present aggression of the Church of Rome." The mine, then, has exploded. Our Bishops, jointly or singly, sometimes by expelling the hardest working clergy- man of the diocese, sometimes by handing over another to be bullied by the House of Commons, sometimes by ventilating joint words of compromise called " peace," are striving to " satisfy the public." The " public " knows what it is after. " Good, kind gentlemen," say its satisfiers, " the candles shan't be lighted ;" and the gentlemen bow, and retire to organize combined meetings with those very Dissenters who are the dread and the aversion of the bench. " Mop out the Atlantic," the bench cries ; but the Atlantic will come in foaming and roaring, and breaking down before it the feeble barriers of Establishmentarianism. The Christian Times is explicit enough as to what the league is called upon to do : — " It rejoices us to see that the noble chairman was so well supported, that the two great sections of the Church of Christ, the Evangelical Con- formists and Nonconformists, were so fairly represented, and trust that the committee appointed to prepare a plan of action will recommend no timid or partial movement, nor countenance any half measure. "The Goverment of England is no longer Protestant. "The Parliament is doubtful. 180 " The parochial clei'gy of the Established Church is doubtful, if not worse. " Oxford is almost utterly Romanized. " Cambridge quails. " Jf onconformists are untaught and disunited." "And as for the Nonconformists— it is now the fittest time for them to prove themselves worthy of their illustrious predecessors— the Puritans —and show that they have largeness of heart enough to join, even with the Evangelically sound members of a State Church, for the sake of repelling Popery in all its forms, first by promoting the utter abolition of Papal jurisdiction, and an honest and outright expulsion of Romanism from the Universities, and then by watching with undying vigilance over the common interests of Gospel truth, Protestant liberty, and in regard to Rome, of national independence also." "The Protestant Defence Committee have now an alternative before them. They may prepare to recommend a temperate, cool, moderate, inoffensive something, that shall be blameless and harmless — something that even Parliament would not be afraid of; or they may lead on a bold, unflinching assault on the aggressor. ' Defence ' is not enough. We have been too long quietly sitting down within our trenches, leaving the whole country to be occupied by the enemy. The time for a softie is fully come. The whole body of Christian men throughout the land should at once be summoned to unite their forces. Popular enthusiasm may be done with- out on hght occasions, but we want it now, and nothing short of a great and worthy effort will arouse it." is, this a movettLent which such an Episcopal paper as that with which we are threatened can check ? "Will any Episcopal brief satisfy the daUy paper which tells us :- — " This comes of fostering, and encouraging, and paltering with such monstrous figments and fables as apostolical succession. Church authority, the sacramental system, a sacrificial and mediatorial priesthood V One thitig there is which the Episcopal proclamation can do ; that is, to sap the foundations of that Catholic faith and that apostolic system upon which alone aprelatic estahlishinent — an establishment containing bishops and deans, canons and archdeacons and so forth — can- raise any claims not to be swept away by a utilitarian generation and a Parliament of mixed religionism. Such a document can dishearten and alienate that body of men who alone belieA^e in the Episcopacy as a Divine principle, and, therefore, the only men who will feel it a religious duty to support Episcopacy when it may have brought itself into an emergency. This, I say, it can do ; but stronger food than that — more explicit offers of individual sacrifice — must be tendered before Lord Ashley and the "public" of the Christian Tmes will put their trust in the present body of the Episcopate ; and then where will be the things which they are blindly striving to maintain by sacrificing the principles which give them life ? 181 Still, we have a drop of consolation, if the rumours I hear about the manifesto be in any way correct. It is consoling to reflect that it can hardly be possible that all the bench can have assented to it, or can have affixed their signatures to it. Take, for example, one of its most distinguished mem-, hers — a prelate conspicuous for his own talents, and the inheritor of an honoured name — the Bishop of Oxford. The Guardian of this night shows clearly what must be his lord- ship's line upon a question like the present. It contains a letter from the bishop to one of his clergy, who had been delated to him for "Tractarianism." With all the details of this reply I not agree ; but the concluding paragraph is so striking that I must extract it in full : — " There is need just now of great forbearance between clergy and people. Some of us, alas ! have forsaken the truth, and gone over to the corruptions of Rome; and this, of course, makes all who seem in any- thing to agree with those who have gone suspected. But these suspicions are unjust. Our people should lay them aside, and we should he patient. Among the test and greatest men in the Church of England, many have heen what are now called High Churchmen. Such were the martyr Bishop Kidley, Bishop Andrewes, Richard Hooker, whom all times since have called 'the judicious.' But for the labours and sufferings of such men, and God's blessing on their labours, we should not now have the Church of England ; for Puritanism would, as it did for a time, have subverted it, and with it the crown of our monarchs, our civil liberties, and, above all, our hereditary faith. And if now all those who believe, and labour, and pray, as Hooher did, are to be cast out of the Church, the Church of England will not long survive their expulsion, and then must come— first the war of all sects, and tJien the end of all religion. May God, then, of His mercy for Christ's sake, give us a spirit of love and peace, one to the other, of mutual forbearance and kindness, that through his great grace we may maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." Can language be more strong or more explicit? Were it not dated two months back, one could almostsuppose it written to meet the joint danger of the greatest league of modern times, together with Archbishop Sumner's — what we should, in a less exalted personage, call — flippant repudiation of Church principles, and, I fear I may have to add, if many- tongued fame do not speak falsely, the positions of the epis- copal paper. Lord Ashley at least now stands confessed in his true colours. The opposition against the "large party" comes from his set ; his set have joined certain of the Dissenters — their joint object being the expulsion of High Churchmen from the Establishment; and to "satisfy" them the ej^scopal paper has been drawn up — as a tub thrown to a whale which 182 continues to lasli the sea in fury, and which will continue so long as it hopes to sink the bark. They openly demand that High Churchmen shall be expelled from the Establishment. Ask them what they mean by High Churchmen, and they will tell you that they are men who believe in the "monstrous figment" of the continuity of the Catholic and Apostolic Church in England— that is, of the Church which is the same as the ante-reformational one, minus certain specific errors specifically reformed. This principle the episcopal paper does, in fact, I fear (for it is easy to talk of not severing con- tinuity while one is cutting it with a hatchet), protest against — it does, in short, protest against the principle of those men of whom the Bishop of Oxford has said, that, " but for their labours and sufferings, and God's blessing on their labours, we should not now have the Church of England " — "and then must come, first, the war of all sects, and then the end of all religion." Who can doubt what line the Bishop of Oxford will take? XXXVII. THE PENDING EPISCOPAL DECLARATION. Makch 27, 1851. Youn correspondent, " A Canonist," must excuse me for intruding upon the subject which he has made his own in those most able letters which you have lately given from his pen. It is a topic upon which I have already addressed you upon more than one occasion, but which is yet very far indeed from being exhausted. I refer to that joint declara- tion which, as I learn, our collective Episcopate, or at least an overwelming majority, proposes to put out. That such a declaration is to appear, seems a fact most undoubted ; that the document, not many days ago, contained matter of the most dangerous description, is, I believe, whether doubted or undoubted, yet as much a fact as the former statement. It is also, I fancy, a fact, that the present week has not been a holiday to the authors of the manifesto. The result of all this is, I must conclude, that the decla- ration will appear — but that it will not, in its ultimate form, containtprecisely the words which rumour has allotted to its paragraphs. This, I strongly believe, is the only possible 183 interpretation of the silent delay of so many days. The delay and the silence, combined, point to our bishops having once been occupied upon " a really stringent measure," in their sense — and, moreover, I believe, to this measure having undergone, as your correspondent remarks, a fate not dis- similar to that of the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill, or, to speak more correctly, a fate similar to that which that bill would undergo were the £100 penalty to be struck out of the sole remaining clause. This, then, is our position — the bishops proposing, so I assume, to put out something for something's sake ; the public prepared to read it ; the newspapers prepared to dis- sect it ; the Lydians prepared to criticise it ; and the " large party" prepared to compare it with the law of the Church of England, and with the custoins of the Universal Church. At this first prospect, 1 confess a reminiscence of half Jiisop rose before me But to be serious, and not to allude to parturient mountains, Durham letters, and other similar stock phrases, in history and romance, ancient and modern, what does the silence portend ? Is the paper to be exacer- bated, or is it to be toned down to that neutral tint which is no colour at all ? If the former be the solution of the mystery, the prospect is indeed a gloomy one ; if the latter be the interpretation, there may not be so much gloom indeed, but there is still a great deal to distress those who reverence Episcopacy as the Divine ordinance, and who feel that the present compulsion calls — somewhat sharply, it may be, very freely-spoken without doubt — its occupants to a feeling of their true position, as a necessity of unhappy times — a neces- sity to be manfully faced, indeed, for the sake of a greater good, but not to be hugged as an occasion of a party triumph or a brilliant opportunity for caustic and successful onslaught. Such, sir, is the feeling which has compelled me to write many of my letters to you; and such, sir, I am convinced, are the feelings both of yourself and of those correspondents of yours whose observations you may think fit to publish to the world. Let us, then, which is the more probable hypothesis, assume that, as far as the coming paper is concerned, delay foreshadows decay — decay of life before the fruit has burst the sheath. What will be the result? Why should such a paper appear at all ? Where is the warrant — where the pro- mise — where the obligation ? There has been a very general expectation (I am now talking formally) of it — no more. A leading article of the Evglish Churchman was framed upon 184 tlie belief— so have some of my letters, and those of " A Canonist" and " F. H. D. ;" but I have yet to be apprised that the English Churchman, and " A Canonist," " F. H. D.," and " D. C. L." are the accredited and official mouthpieces of the actual Episcopate. _ Simply, then, and in a word, the bishops are just as free''to throw the paper into the fire as to send it to you for publication ; and if it should turn out to be, after all, a paper for paper's sake, they would compromise themselves much less by the former than by the latter course. I am very willing to allow to cabinets, and to railway committees, and to the managers of theatres, and other cor- porate bodies, a very wide margin of playing a recognised game by the recognised machinery of dotting so many words over so many pieces of paper, in fulfilment of certain pre- understood laws of courtesy existing betwixt them and their public, general or special. All these corporations are mun- dane and politic, and may therefore be expected to use mun- dane and politic devices. But it would be with great sorrow, and, 1 will add, with great shame, that I should find the collective Episcopate of any — and still more of my own — • branch of the Holy Catholic Church, condescending to avail itself of a similar privilege ; it would be with great shame that I should feel myself compelled to regard an aggregation of the successors of the Apostles in the light of a Cabinet Council, or a board of railway directors, or the management of a theatre. If our bishops knew their true interest, they would feel that what they ought to strive, at any cost almost of tempo- ral pomp, to gain at the present moment, is respect. Let me, then, calmly put it to them — Is an illusory document, solemnly fulminated at this momentous crisis, likely to create that respect? No one can be respected unless he has people who respect him. The passive voice is everywhere the cor- relative of the active one. Who, then, would respect such a document? Lord John Russell? or Dr. Gumming, or Lord Ashley and his joint " Protestant Defence Committee," and his greatest " league of modern times ?" or Mr. Drummond's butler ? or the dense mass of prelate-hating Dissenters, strong in vehement convictions boldly carried out? or (to come to a more numerous, unhappily less cared-for class) the millions and millions of our alleys, and our mines, and our colleries, of our ships and our gTowing railways, living and dying without the voice of religion to meet them at any turn of their toilsome life, or at their blank and terrible dissolu- 185 tion ? Will such a paper be a pastoral to such as these ? I wish there were more care taken to " satisfy" this " public." The Archdeacon of Middlesex has yet to learn that this " public" is to be told by hundreds of thousands within his range ; and, if he wishes to " satisfy" it, I should refer him, as his most practical counsellor, to the late incumbent of St. Barnabas, Pimlico. But I am wandering from my point. If ever manliness was needed in any at any time, it is now needed in the Epis- copate of the English Church. Let them learn before it is too late that their friends are new, and their foes are new — their foes, the growing mass of infidelity, of red democracy, of Pantheism — the Ledru Rollins, the Gavazzis, the Harriet Martineaus — their friends, the daily increasing phalanx of believers in the Church of England, not as the State Es- tablishment, but as an offshoot of the one true Church, with which One Friend abides " always, even unto the end of the world." They fancy they see friends, and they fancy they confront foes, where there is not firmness to befriend them, nor organi- zation to oppose them. Smiling deputations in the morning — " my lording" and " your gracing," and tediously strum- ming upon hack phrases, "decent order," "mummeries" and " pure faith," " fallible men," and our own infallible selves ; in the evening, leaguers, without pith or marrow competent to make a league which ever can abide — omni- potent to confuse and to uproot — not friends of the Church, nor founders of any possibly permanent religious body — most ready, while most unwilling, pioneers of Communism, of Pantheism, and then of utter unbelief. The world is hurrying on to a final conflict. Old masks, and shams, and secondary objects are crumbling away. Establishmentarian checks, governmental persecutions, reli- gions minted by the State are vanishing ; with now and then a convulsive recoil, a memorable spectacle of judicial blind- ness afflicting great and intellectual nations, to teach them the emptiness of their greatness and the folly of their intellect — to make good men pause and adversaries rejoice — a spectacle like that upon which the cold dawn of this morning opened in the Commons' House of the Imperial Parliament. But, in the face of all this, the inevitable movement goes on. Conscience and private judgment will have their own ; they are rapidly marshalling the two great armies — ^the Catholic Church — purified, we hope, and undivided — and the forces which will gather against it from every quarter. M 186 At sucli a time, with, such a struggle, will the bishops of England continue to palter and to compromise between light and darkness — to accommodate truth and its negative — to battle at Ecclesiastical Commission Boards, and to top Lydian meetings with Delphic manifestoes? Why not at last, for once — once only, in these days — be men? "Nee cauponantes bellum sed belligerantes !" For once be Bishops of the Universal Church, not Lords of Parliament, or Assistant Public Worship Commissioners ! If ever there was a great and glorious opening for heroic men, it is the opening now patent to the Bishops of the English Church — Bishops of the Reformed Catholic Church of the world-encompassing Anglo-Saxon race — dispensers of truth, who can, if they will, earn a resplendent name as benefactors to the entire human race. Such is one side of the picture. The other is, a contemptuous rejection of Pro- vidential opportimities, a feeble inability to comprehend a great and noble position — meddling with trifles, legislating about straws, dogmatising about cobwebs, in a gigantic era. Our bishops may yet make their election. Let them not delay : the " yet " may, ere long, become a " might have." XXXVIIL LORD ASHLEY'S LEAGUE AND THE PRAYER BOOK. MakchSO, 185:. " I DECLAEB, as a correspondent of Lord Ashley's, that his and my object is to alter the Prayer Book, and to put down High Churchmen, through means of a Eoyal Commis- sion addressed to the bishops. To carry this, we shall not hold meetings ; we shall work in another way. The world will know nothing about it — our organization is very per- fect." Such is the resume of the confessions of an Ashleyite, authenticated to you by the signature of a well-known Liver- pool incumbent. Two months ago Lord Ashley himself made the following statements in your columns, in answer to an advertisement of the London Union on Church Matters— as also, it may be, to one of my letters :— " I may, perhaps, be allowed to assure you and the gentlemen who have advertised the statement, that it is not in contemplation by myself, nor, I firmly believe, by any of those who took part in the meet- 187 ing of the 5tli of December, when I had the honour to be chairman, to procure a Eoyal Commission, or any other authority, for a revision of the Prayer Book, either latitudi- narian or otherwise." These two statements could not, by the acutest lawyer, be proved to be accordant. At the same time, I fully believe that each was, when it was penned or uttered, perfectly true. As I showed in that letter. Lord Ashley only commits himself to " is not in contemplation," and not to '^ never has been" — still less to "never will be;'' and in the same letter I brought forward the statements of that morning contemporary from which you derive the infor- mation illustrative of Mr. Wray's communication, which tem- pered the then denial with a jubilant announcement of " a Eoyal injunction to restrain the Puseyites," &c., adding, " The effect of this will be to turn out of the Anglican Church, by one fell swoop, the whole brood of the Tractarian clergy." You observe, sir, the parallelism between this day's and January's news. In either case, the tidings were very well authenticated — as I could prove were I at liberty to divulge my authority — that the integrity of the Prayer Book was menaced ; and in either case, I had to deal with a triumphant announcement of the great things which the party represented by a certain journal were about to do. The fact is, that the details of their campaign must have been very different then from what they now are. I said in that letter, referring to the then temporary abandonment of the direct attack upon the integrity of the Prayer Book, " A fixed scheme like this may well afford to shift its views of policy!' These words, written a little more than two months ago, were eminently prophetical — more so than I could have anticipated at the time. The scheme is very fixed, and it has greatly shifted its views of policy. A short retrospect will give the clue to the change. At that time the Parliamentary session had not com- menced. Lord John Russell was in the first blush of the glories of his Durham letter — he was the patriot Minister, who had chalked " No Popery," and not yet run away ; and Lord Ashley was still revelling in the uproar of the Lydian cheers. The touters were out all over the country, sweeping in signatures, under all manner of pretences, to the monster addresses. The law of Royal injunctions had not been much looked into, the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill had not been venti- lated, and Sir Benjamin Hall's escapade about St. Andrew's church had not yet taught the sanguine lord that Mr. Lefevre was not Lenthall, and could not very easily be converted into m2 188 Lentliall. What secret hopes " authority" may liave cherished — what promises of reciprocal support may have beeu -whis- pered — is not for me to speculate upon. It may be lawful to surmise that, in more than one quarter, the easy and speedy annihilation of all inconvenient claims of purity of doctrine, and of independence of authority in the Church, would be entertained ; and it is not very extravagant to con- jecture, moreover, that, in the most private of private feel- ings, the Pope and the Cardinal were thanked for hurrying on this consummation. Perhaps, to conclude, distant rounds of some joint Episcopal action were faintly heard. So much for January. — Now look at March. The pros- pects of management had failed; the great Achilles of trickery had been mortally wounded ; his flatterer-in-chief had dubbed him the destined hero of a hundred defeats — his helmet of bigotry was, after all, Mambrino's head-gear — his spear of persecution a splinter that ran into his own hands. On the other side, that party which had been estimated as feeble and disunited, and ready to fall almost before the first blow was struck, put forth more signs of life, and vigour, and organization, than ever it had done before. All expectation of wearing it out by threats, or of abashing it into compliance, soon became hopeless ; and the truth stood confessed that the Lydians must either be content to live, as before, under an armistice with the " large party," or meet them hand to hand. Such was the prospect of the present month, " all for all" — or a quiet retreat. The " all for all" has been chosen, and the greatest league of modern times has been inaugurated as the signal of Lord John Russell's downfall. I do not blame Lord Ashley for his present course — it is, I will say openly, a far more straightforward one than that of January ; and it brings a struggle which he has rendered inevitable, to a more general issue. It brings it to the same issue to which it was brought two centuries ago, when the same dislike of the Sacramental system of the Universal Church, maintained in our English formularies, drew on them temporary perse- cution — but with the advantage to us that politics are not now, as then, mixed up with the conflict. He has pronounced against the Prayer Book, and he has " leagued" with sectaries who left the Church on account of her sacramental system, to procure its overthrow. Such, sir, is the all for all. Lord Ashley comprehends it — and let the large party only comprehend it too, and then, at least, our souls are safe ; the doctrines, and the sacra- 189 ments, and the apostolic order which our fathers have be- queathed us, are safe — where they are, if Lord Ashley does not drive us out — if he does so, where Scottish Episcopalians treasure them, viz., in a free Reformed Church ! It was with no ordinary curiosity that I took up this evening's Christian Times, and my curiosity was rewarded. " Preparatory movements of the Great Protestant League," conspicuously headed one of the leading articles. From this I learned that at the previous meeting a committee had been appointed to draw up a series of resolutions, and that the meeting of Thursday, at which two hundred individuals — lords, clergymen, Dissenting ministers, &c. — were present, adjourned till that day week for its final adoption of them. This is startling enough, but there is something still more strange peeping out from an unexpected corner of the paper — • the Reviewing department. The notice of some controver- sial work by a Low Churchman contains a very curious passage : — "The author is one of those Churchmen who desiderate a reform in the Liturgfy, but his views are by no means so comprehensive and fearless on this point as those Of Lord Ashley and the evangelical laity, and as we beUeve the necessities of the times require. We do not lilse to hear an evang'ehcal clei-oryman speaking' with such approbation of the 'compre- hensive spirit' of the Bnghsh Church, when it is to this that the dang-ers of the Protestantism of the Church are mainly owing. A comprehension that embraces Evangelicals and Traclarians, and achnomledges (as the Privy Council has decided) that both are equally true sons of the Estab- lishment, cannot be scriptural. It attempts to join tog'ether those whom God hag put asunder. It unites the living and the dead. It is the grand obstacle to closer union among true Protestants ; and no sound thinker can believe that it either is, or ought to be, the ideal of a Church of Christ." Why attach so much weight— it will be asked — to the dicta of a mere review in a newspaper ?-^My reply is, because it lets the cat out of the bag. It speaks by name of Lord Ashley in a way in which no reviewer would venture to speak, if he had not somehow obtained an extent of knowledge about his lordship's feelings which he was not conscious to himself of revealing when he penned that notice. I believe he must have been one of the two hundred at the meeting ; but whether he was or not, he has that intimate knowledge of Lord Ashley's way of thinking that he innocently lets it leak out at the wrong moment. I thank him, as I thank the clei*gyman at Liverpool whose revelations Mr. Wray records, for his candour. The question has now come to a determinate issue — The ]90 old Englisli Ohurcli, maintaining the Catholic faith, or a new- English Church, latitudinarian to all except the truth. We are prepared for this contest. Will our bishops aid us ? _ I trust so. But anyhow, with bishops helping us, or in spite of bishops, we mean to wage a life-long fight to save the Catholic faith of the English Prayer Book. XXXIX. THE ACTUAL EPISCOPAL PAPER.— I. Apkil 3, 1851. At last the Episcopal Paper is a matter of history — past, and not prospective. It cannot, like a geological section, or the sawn bole of some aged tree, chronicle the history of its own progressive epochs. To the public at large it is the sur- face stratum, or the outward bark of a trunk, which may be heart of oak, or which may be hollowness within. It is not my wish to disturb the placid satisfaction of those who look upon what they have read to-day as what they were called upon to expect a fortnight since. It is sufficient to me that the published paper had a narrow escape from containing what would, on the part of its signers, have been a virtual denial of all that makes the Church of England a genuine branch of the Catholic Church ; but since the escape has been made — how made, or by what aid, is not for me to guess. The dan- ger was imminent, and it was avoided, and for this I am thankful ; for this, when I read the actual paper, I am in- clined to — " Be to its virtues very kind, Be to its faults a little blind." Still, however, as the twenty- four issuers of the " address" commend it to the " serious consideration" of the clergy of their respective dioceses, they will not be oiTended, I am sure, if their words are taken in a wide and liberal sense by an humble member of the " public" who would find his " satis- faction" in giving to it his " serious consideration." The paper commences with a statement of the " troubles, suspicions, and discontents which have of late in some par- ishes accompanied the introduction of ritual observances exceeding those in com?no7i use amongst us." 191 The first feeling of every Churclimau, on reading these words, will no doubt be one of gratitude, when he reads, in the words of six-sevenths of the Episcopate, not of the English communion — not of the British Empire — not of the " United (by act of Parliament) Church of England and Ireland," but of England and Wales — the expression of what, changed from negative to positive language, would imply a desire to act up to the common use of the provinces of Canterbury and York ; for common and use are words which have a meaning, and a very precise one, whether satisfactory to the public or not. " Common" occurs in the very title of the Prayer Book — " the Book of Cordmon Prayer, &c. ;" " use " (which occurs in the same title-page) is found defined: in the prefatory matter " concerning the service of the Church :" — " and whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and sing- ing in churches within this realm; some following Salisbury use, &c. Now henceforth all the whole realm shall have but one tise." So, then, our bishops are going to enforce the " one use " of the " Book of Common Prayer ;" its orders for daily prayers ; its reference to the first and second years of Edward VI., &c., — I think I hear the stranger to non-natui'al inter- pretations exclaim. For the present I will assume as much. The paragraph following this one is what lawyers would term surplusage — rather involved in its references to antece- dents which seem to have slipped out, but not calling for any particular criticism. The next begins with the ominous words, " The principal point in dispute ;" which is laid down to be whether the clergy (it is all along treated as a clergy ques- tion — a convenient expedient, very parallel to those of Mr. Oolquhoim's National Club petard) " are either in conscience required, or absolutely at liberty to act each upon his own view of the letter of the precept rather than by the rule of COMMON PRACTICE." Common practice predicated of the actual ritualism of the Church of England, by twenty-four bishops ! I commend this assertion to your " serious consi- deration." But to revert to earlier words. Is it quite deco- rous in bishops — that is, judges — to insinuate a doubt as to the absolute liberty of men to act up to the letter of a pre- cept as they read it? We have seen enough said in the papers of late of sacerdotal constraint, but this does seem to me to go one step, at least, further than the ultimate point which has ever yet been attained. The bishops assert that men— men solemnly sworn, at that most solemn rite, an ordination, to obey the laws of the Church — are not at liberty to read the statutes with their own eyes, and obey them by 192 the guiding of their own senses; but are, by command, termed suggestion, to follow the rule of common practice— i.e., the varying, and shifting, and everywhere diverse pitch of corruption into which each parish has fallen under its late pluralist, or fox-hunting, or non-resident incumbent. I will only, sir, remark, that I am glad that six-sevenths of the police magistrates of London do not provide for the " troubles, discontents, and suspicions" which some of them may anti- cif)ate from the Great Exhibition, by a similar exposition of the stringency of the " letter of the precept" of the law of petty larceny, in opposition to " the rule of common practice" of Field Lane, St. Giles's, the Mint, and other populous localities. But this is only verbal criticism. No one more thoroughly and cordially agrees with the paper than I do, in its advice not to revive the law itself, when it has fallen into disuse, without " the greatest caution ;" and to adopt no change which renders it difficult for the congregation at large to join the service. I simply am surprised at seeing so self- evident a truism propounded with a twenty-four-bishop power, and must conclude that the words are meant to mean more than they bear upon their face. But when I come to the^ con- cluding portion of this paragraph, which indicates who is to arbitrate about this " common practice," coupled with the assertions of the following one, I am, I own, almost stag- gered. The supposed evil against which the subscribing bishops conclude themselves bound to protest is, that each clergyman is either in conscience required, or absolutelj' at liberty to act upon his own view of the letter of the precept— ^i. e., that he should feel that when he does not doubt in the least, nor in the least take a point diversely, he is "absolutely at liberty" to act up to his certainty. This liberty of common sense-^of reading " A B G " as "ABO" under the ordinary limitations which are imposed upon the fatuity or knavery of asserting that " D E F " are " A B "—the bishops would fain restrain by a non-natural (to borrow a word from the Eomanist Mr. Ward) interpretation of the Eubric, which orders that parties who do so doubt, or diversely take anything, shall always resort to the bishop of the diocese for their solution. Thus, to repeat my simile, the provision which orders that, ■when a man is in doubt whether half-obliterated (in his eyes) letters are ABC, or D E F, the bishop, acting judicially, shall be his referee — this is brought forward to compel him, when he has no doubt that A B are A B 0, to go and ask the Bishop whether they may not possibly be D E F. Such 193 an edict, emanating from Westminster-Lall, might not be thought quite within the limits of judicial reserve. The subscribing bishops, however, give in the ensuing- paragraph the reasons wliich have prompted them to this advice : these are, that "most of the difficulties which have arisen " would probably be " solved '* by " recourse in all such cases to the advice of her (the Church of England's) chief pastors." When I read these words, they seem at first like delicate irony, and when 1 read them again, the irony appears still more exquisite. There is — no matter for my argument whence it has arisen^fearful excitement at present within the Church of England ; hence the elaboration of the present paper. This paper is particularly fulminated against one " party " in that Church — and that party, by the confession of its antagonists, a " large " one ; and by its own avowal, as well as by that confession, at the present moment under great distress and perturbation of mind, arising in a very great degree from the tyrannical oppression of the Govern- ment, which has step by step consolidated a right to thrust upon that Church " chief pastors " utterly irrespectively of their fitness for their post, and without the inferior clergy being permitted their constitutional privilege of representa- tive government. Hence mainly " troubles, suspicions, and discontents" throughout the entire land : and now these so- introduced " chief pastors" have — I will term it the innocence — 'to call upon the clergy of the " large party" to forego their consciences, and their view of the letter of the precept to which they are sworn, and to render to these chief pastors an obedience beyond, if not beside the precept, by way of "solving most of the difficulties which have arisen." I have treated the conclusion of this paragraph in con- nexion with the preceding one, bat I should not do justice to the paper Were I not to go back to the assertions contained in the body of it. It calls upon those who have by " excess or defect" " broken in upon the uniformity, and contributed to relax the authority of our ritual observances, to consider the importance of unity and order." Taken by themselves these words are most true-— but their truth is destructive -to all that precedes and all that follows. What uniformity can there be but strict compliance with the Rubric ; what authority of our ritual observances but strict obedience to that Rubric ? The bishops cannot deny this. Then what becomes of the com- plaint with which they start, of the introduction of " ritual observances exceeding those in common use" — words which, I fear, one cannot, after all, conclude to have been meant to 194 bear the strict interpretation of " common" and of " use." Do the twenty-four bishops mean to pledge themselves to carry- out "the Rubric, the whole Rubric, and nothing but the Rubric," whether it satisfies the public or not ? If they do, there is pith and marrow in the document — it is a really courageous proclamation. But if they do not mean to do so — if they mean to reserve to themselves, each in his own diocese, a power of chopping and changing and paring, according to his own notion of expediency — then the words which I have quoted, and those which follow, " and, hy common consent, to avoid what might tend to violate them " (unity and order) — then all this specious advice is simply an exhortation to the entire clergy of the two provinces to join in a league — a " united" and " orderly" conspiracy — to defraud themselves, each other, and all the flocks committed to their charge, of a portion of the entire spiritual privileges which the Church has provided for them, for the sake of " unity and order," " by common consent." I really cannot trust myself to speak of such advice — of advice, deliberately, I fear, tendered to the clergy, to deprive those craving for full spiritual consolation of what is their legal and their moral right, for the sake of unity and consent with some neighbouring careless, worldly, or feeble clergyman. The bishops feel that some apology is due for such counsel, while in apologizing they aifis the less favour- able construction upon their words— a construction which, it is clear from these words, the interlocutory " defect" does not vitiate ; for in the next sentence I find that they " do not shut their eyes to the evil of even the appearance of any dis- crepancy existing between the written law and the practice of the Church." This is at least candid. But in its candour I observe a tone of feeling which is, to my mind, almost more distressing than even the legal inconsistencies contained in the varied positions of the paper — a dry, technical way of talking of "law" and "practice," and so forth, as if these were all matters of police and enactment, for enactment's sake, like the household arrangements of a priggish martinet. Will not our spiritual fathers learn how Churchmen yearn for the full Rubric, not for the sake of precision or legal exactitude only, but because they know that it, and it alone, guarantees full spiritual privileges, daily prayer, frequent communion, congregational worship, which are their appointed portion 1 Would that our bishops might learn that those who treat Church services as matters of drill are the true formalists. My eyes happened to light upon the first three names 195 appended to the paper— J. B. Cantuar., T. Ebor., C. J. Lon- don; and I could not but think of a certain affair in which, little more than twelve months back, these three prelates were engaged — a certain judgment 4n which they were con- cerned, to which the two first assented, and from which the third dissented, believing it to be contrary to the plain teach- ing of ours and of the Universal Church, on the subject of the Sacraments. When I saw these three names heading this paper, I could not but say to myself, is it possible that the Bishop of London can expect, or can desire any clergy- man, or any layman, to go out of his way to seek the advice — or, if it be thrust upon him, to care for the advice — of two " chief pastors," who have, under the pressure of a most solemn responsibility, contradicted — as he has formally asserted — the teaching of the Universal Church touching Sacramental grace? On the other hand, can these two chief pastors for an instant conclude that the followers of Mr. Gorham will think of submitting their difficulties to one whom they must look upon as, in their peculiar phraseology, so " carnal" and so " legal" as the Bishop of London? If the bishops think that the Gorham judgment is forgotten, they are mistaken ; never will it be forgotten till it is atoned for. But I have not got through more than half the "address." I must postpone the remarks which arise from some very curious positions assumed in the later portion of it, as well as some general observations which arise upon the whole spirit of the paper, and also the expression of my surprise at the readiness of certain bishops to put out a paper without one word of consolation for, and much which will be taken as rebuke to, that portion of the Church of England who are still in grief of heart at that judgment, which, in the eyes of those very prelates, struck at a fundamental verity of the Christian faith. I cannot, however, conclude without loudly and vehemently protesting against the assumption — borrowed it would seem from the National Club and my Lord Ashley — that the ritual development is exclusively or preponderat- ingly a clergy movement. On the contrary, I am sure that if the history of theparishes of England for the last ten years could be spread out on a single page, it would be seen that it could tell as many tales of earnest. God-fearing laymen animating clergymen more timid or slow to move than them- selves, as of vehement clergymen driving an unwilling flock to startling changes. Now, sir, I must conclude for this day. The address will at least serve as a consolation to those who might otherwise 196 be disheartened at the procrastination of the bill which was offered last year as a modicum of satisfaction for the Gorham judgment, and which was to have been brought before Parliament again this session, to constitute the actual Episcopate the court of Ecclesiastical Appeal. XL. THE ACTUAL EPISCOPAL PAPER.— IL Apkil 4, 1851. In my letter of yesterday I examined carefully, and, I trust, in a candid spirit, the first four paragraphs of the Episcopal paper. Four still remain for consideration. The fifth commences with the statement of what it terms " a distinct and serious evil," and enters against it a " clear and unhesitating protest." The alleged protest against it is as follows : — " That as the Chorch of England id the ancient Catholic Church settled in this land before the Reformation, and was then reformed only by the casting away of certain strictly defined corruptions ; therefore, whatever form or usage existed in the Church before its reformation may now be freely introduced and observed, unless there can be alleged against it the distinct letter of some foi'mal prohibition." While protesting, the bi-shops, in the next paragraph, own "the undoubted identity of the Church before and after the Reformation," and state, as their view of the case, that— " We beheve that at the Reformation the English Church not only rejected certain corruptions, but also, without in any degree severing her connexion with the ancient Catholic Church, intended to establish one uniform ritual, according to which her public services should be con- ducted." While saying this, they reflect rather severely upon the principle which they protest against. I will at once acknow- ledge that I think that the bishops put their view very clearly and well, and that I entirely agree with it. But at the same time, I am bound to say that, while they put the view against which thejf protest far less clearly and well, yet, in what they say, they state a principle which I can trace under their phraseology, and that I entirely agree with that likewise. In one word, to my comprehension the principle ]97 against which they protest, and the principle which they bring forward in opposition, are simply different aspects of the same fact — the composition of our present Prayer Book — aspects perfectly compatible with each other, if not rather identical. The Tiew approved by the bishops lays down that the English Church at her Reformation " intended to establish one uniform ritual ;" the disapproved one asserts that every ante-reformational form and usage is practically lawful in the post-reformational Church, "unless there can be alleged against it the distinct letter of some formal prohibition." There is nothing a priori inconsistent in these two assertions. The one uniform ritual of the post-reformational Church may sweep in, or it may not, all ante-reformational usages which are not distinctly and formally prohibited. The twenty-four bishops accept the latter alternative without professing to prove it. I venture to assume the former one ; and I beg to tender what I think proof of it — involving what I conceive to be a fair and reasonable explanation of what constitutes the distinct letter of a formal prohibition. The bishops admit that the Prayer Book produced at the Eeformation was not a simply new one, but a compilation from old ones. This matter is conceded on both sides. I further concede that the ritual then intended to be arranged was a uniform one. Thus the question stands — were the old books brought to the new standard by an eliminating or by a constructive process ? I appeal, as I have done on former occasions, to the Prayer Book itself, in its introductory matter. Passing over the " Preface," which was added in 1662, and which does not contain any matter on the point bearing upon the present question, I come to the section "Concerning the Service of the Church." This commences with a well-grounded com- plaint of the imperfect way in which, in the then Church of England, the annual perusal of the Bible was carried out. Therefore — what is the result and the remedy ? — a complete new body of Rubrical law, a new system of uniform ritual ? Wo ; but a new calendar, re-arranging simpliciter , without any direction but the blunt announcement of the fact, the order of Lessons, and continuing — " For this cause we cut off anthems, responds, invitatories, and such like things as did break the continual course of the reading of the Scripture," i.e., such as did so — viz. those anthems, responds, and invitatories, which split up the appointed portions of 'Scrip- ture into lections, all which, in fact, are omitted in our 198 present Prayer Book, " by the distinct letter of tliis formal prohibition."' But anthems, responds, and invitatories, are either by name (in the case of anthems) or in fact (in the other two cases), set forth in our present booli, in places where they do not intrude into the continuity of Scripture lessons. Then comes a paragraph contrasting the fewness and easiness of the new rules with the contrary character of the old ones. The next paragraph is the one which I quoted in brief yesterday, ordering, as the bishops truly say, "one uniform ritual" — or, as it terms it, " use" — instead of the diverse Salisbury, Hereford, York, &c. " uses" which had heretofore existed. Next we find the direction which I had yesterday, as on a former occasion, to explain, defining the limited reference to the diocesan. A break- then occurs, below which we find some regulations of detail allowing the use of some other language (Latin must be primarily meant) than English in the private use of the service, and ordering daily public prayers, and their announcement by toll of bell. In this important section it is clear that the old ritual is, by the reformers, brought to the new one by elimination rather than by construction. The next is headed, " Of ceremonies — why some be abolished and some retained." " Abolished and retained," not " why some he re-enacted" — the words which the twenty-four bishops would probably have selected had they been logical, and had they framed this heading upon their hypothesis of the Reformation making a tabula rasa. This essay — commencing with language certainly not mild, about the peculiar burdensomeness to which ceremonialism had grown in the Church — continues, " some wq put away ." "Some put away:" mark this phraseology' — mark the partitive noun of number " some " — and then tell me whe- ther this does not (to state it gently) show that those indi- viduals who look for " the distinct letter of some formal prohibition" for what they are not to do, hardly deserve an imreasoning rebuke from four-and-twenty bishops ? "Some are put away," continues the Prayer Book — speaking in the most general terms — from their excess and multitude, or from their being so abused that the abatement of the abuse could only be efi'ected by their abolition. Then comes an apology, on equally general grounds, "for some of the old ceremonies" which " are retained still." Then come special directions for reading the Psalter and "the rest of Holy Scripture;" and next the necessary tables and calendars ; and then the two pregnant Eubrics. " The morning and evening prayer shall be used in the 199 accustomed " [accustomed by what, sare traditionary usage derived from unreformed days ?] "place of the church, chapel, or chancel ; except it be otherwise determined by the ordinary of the place. And the chancels shall remain as they have done in times past." • " And here it is to be noted that such ornaments of the church, and of the ministers thereof, at all times of their ministration, shall be retained and be in use as were in the Church of England, by the authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth " [vest- ments, &c.]. Surely — I speak under correction — it might be said that when chancels, &c., were intended to remain, as they have done in times past, it might be allowable to fit them with anj^thing they were then fitted with, against which the distinct letter of some formal prohibition could not be quoted. But to resume. These prefatory directions concluded, we find ourselves fairly launched on the services themselves, without one further word of guidance. The Rubrics scattered up and down the services themselves are merely explanatory, in very brief terms, of the occurring details. Our only resource is to compare the new book with the old one for our- selves. When we do so we find the dififirence. We find the nocturns ^nd the seven day-services of the old rituals reduced to " matins " and " even-song " — we find anthems, responses, invitatories, &c., cut down with an unsparing hand. We find the services and parts of services having reference to those Eoman doctrines which the Church of England repudiated, omitted. We find the processional suppressed. We find the Latin language changed throughout into English ; and to con- clude, we find, after all this has been done, a residuum — being in the main a portion of the old rituals — left to be worked by no general positive rule, except the rules of the identity of chancel arrangements with those of older times, and of the status in quo of the first and second years of Edward VI. Here, then, we have reached a definable position. We have before us the uniform ritual, or "common use," of the post-reformational English Church, compiled from the non- uniform "uses" of the ante-reformational one, which has to be worked ; and we have " the distinct letter of the formal prohibition," involved in the absence (as seen in the light of the introductory matter) of those services and parts of services which have been omitted in the process. How, according to actual Rubrics, is the residuum to he worked so as to produce uniformity ? I defy the twenty-four bishops to answer this 200 question so as to make a rule which shall be uniform and orderly, and at the same time practical, except by the enun- ciation of that principle which they call " a distinct and seri- ous evil," and against which they " feel bound to enter their clear and unhesitating protest." To sum up in one word— the reformation of the Prayer Book aifected matter, not manner. Matter which the Reformers thought had been, or might be, abused, they banished, and with this matter went of course the manner of performing it — on the other hand, the old manner, applying to the innocuous residuum of matter, became propria vigore innocuous also, and was known to have become so. The two concluding paragraphs are what in sermons is called the " application," and in apologues the "moral," of the preceding definitions. They imply that these definitions would ensiire "uniformity," " authority," and the restoration of " the peace of the Church" — and they allude to " the true spiritual freedom of the Church." I have now gone thrpugh the paper. I have, I trust, shown that its real drift, establishing the autocracy of each individual bishop, would be — not merely dangerous, but — fatal to us, in our present distressed position — " Every Bishop his own Church," as a morning contemporary tersely puts it. I have also striven to show that every other position over- turns, or ia overturned by, that which precedes or which follows it. It now only remains to conclude with some remarks upon the document as a whole. The question presses very mournfully upon one — Why have the bishops drawn up such a paper? Why have they signed it, and why do they circulate it ? The obvious answer is — " to satisfy the public," to comply with' the Durham letter, and to condemn a deprived parish clergyman ; and for this end twenty-four out of twenty-eight bishops have been induced to set their hands to such a document ! Last year the faith was in peril. The bishops met, and the bishops dispersed, and no joint document would they put out; not twenty-four — not four — not two combined together to utter a united voice. The judgment referred to pressed sorely upon a party in the Church who — deny it as the bishops may — are the party to which they have for some time past looked whenever they needed any practical work done, any ecclesiastical movement at home, any missionary enterprise abroad, anything, in short, which involves self-denial and energy. I omit the claims — most truly made, I verily believe, by that party — to be the true and orthodox members of the English Church. I only look, or strive to look, at 201 matters with the practical eye of a collective episcopate. That party — their chief practical support, as they must know — was sorely wounded. It had a slender offer of compensa- sation in a bill last year, which did not meet the evil and only afforded a possible means of a possible future remedy ; this offer, such as it is, is to be renewed — but what is it now, when our evils are so much greater, and while political management has brought our party into incidental unpopularity ? Forthwith the bishops— High Church, Low Church, and " Liberal" — combine to ventilate a document which defines nothing, orders nothing, and can effect nothing ; which merely asserts claims that are untenable and unsupported ; and the practical effect of which is meant to be, to bring that party into greater unpopularity. The times are most critical ; and this is the way in which the bishops meet them — to sacrifice the weak in favour of those whom they suppose to be the strong. Assume this policy to win, as far as mere policy can win. Assume all generous and independent action on one side, cramped by the " uniformity " and " order " of that " rule of common practice " which our " chief pastors " so much desi- derate — what then ? Would there be peace ? And would there be bishops as there are now ? Who care for bishops ? — Those, and those alone, who believe in the Catholic and Apostolic Church, and who act up to that belief — the party, in one word, now denounced, traduced, per- secuted — first wounded, by the Gorham judgment, and then abandoned by those who should have been the first to strive to redress that corroding wrong. Expel that party — or, without expelling them, enervate them by discouragement and petty interference — and who will be left to be your friends? The mob does not care for you; it hardly knows you — or else it thinks of you as your worst enemies depict you. The " practical man " asks for how little your work can be as efficiently done. The Presbyterian and Inde- pendent hold hatred of prelacy to be a branch of Christianity. The philosophic politician reasons you down. The Erastian talks of the Established Church of Scotland. To those who do not believe in the Apostolic mission, your office is not more sacrosanct, more free from revision than that of any other state official; and the highest, the most dignified of these have gone. Where is there a Lord High Treasurer, or a Lord High Constable now? Two dignities of illustrious prestige — the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland and the Lord High Chancellor of England — are at this instant trembling for exis- 202 tence. Ten bishoprics in Ireland have gone. The Palatine of Durham is a memory of the past. What pi'omise, then, of surety adheres to bishops of the Establishment upon the "established" basis? As bishops of the Church of God — members of the Apostolic order — they have one, and one single, human stay — the support of those who believe, with a practical belief, in what the world has called the " mons- tious figment " of Apostolic Succession. These friends they may keep, or they may alienate. Their personal matters are their own concern ; but the continuity of an Apostolic Church is the concern of all men's souls who look to it for spiritual sustenance. The present bishops of England may be privileged to hand down the inheritance — or they may waste away — dropping off one after another, while America and Australia are allowed to return her gift of the Christian priesthood to the mother land. When the trial comes, Parliament will fail — the populace will not stir a finger — wealthy and noble companions will prove wanting — all will fail but those Churchmen who hold the continuity of the Universal Church through good report and evil report, for better and for worse. XLI. SIR GEORGE GREY, LORD ASHLEY, AND THE BISHOPS. Apkil 8, 1851. Last Friday again witnessed one of Sir Benjamin Hall's attempts to give synodical action to the House of Commons, under his own volunteered primatial presidency. Again the House of Commons showed its unwillingness to meddle with such discussions, and for once Lord John Eussell took a moderate and a cautious line in backing up the feeling of strong repugnance which the lively baronet had excited. In his statement, one fact was noticeable — that the Lydian address to her Majesty had been replied to in a letter addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury by Sir George Grey, contain- ing the expression of her Majesty's wish that no innovation contrary to law and established usage should be introduced into our Church services. This letter— by a selection which is curious, and not likely, I should think, to prove concilia- tory—has by its recipient been allowed to be first made 203 public in the Record of this evening. The document is, of course, not what is known as a Eoyal Letter. It is one by an official adviser of the Crown, employing, as it is the con- stitutional custom to do. with extreme" moderation, and the Whig custom to do without any moderation at all, the Royal name. Still, we must conclude that Sir George Grey would not publish it without the confidence that what he said in it was a tolerably truthful transcript of the feel- ing of his Eoyal mistress. Viewed in this light, it is most gratifying to observe how clearly her Majesty comprehends the true basis of her ecclesiastical supremacy — the vindi- cation, for law's own sake, of that law of which the Executive Government in Church and State is the exponent. This is as it should be — the law and established usage of the strictly rubrical fulfilment of the " one use " of the " Book of Com- mon Prayer," ofi'er, as I have often urged, the only escape from a mesh of difficulties which any attempt to " satisfy the ' public" by playing fast and loose with positive enactment must produce. This is clearly enunciated in the letter before me. Her Majesty desires to see purity of doctrine main- tained, and innovations in the mode of conducting the service of the Church not sanctioned by law or general usage, and therefore calculated to create dissatisfaction and alarm among a numerous body of its members, restrained. This is precisely what that numerous body, the "large party" of High Churchmen, are striving to accomplish. For their desire to maintain purity of doctrine, to enforce the law of the Rubric, and its " one use," and to check innovations, it is that they are suffering misrepresentation, injustice, and per- secution. I wish that, when he penned his Durham letter, Lord John Russell had thought a little more of his responsi- bilities as the sworn and responsible servant of his Royal Mistress. He may now learn a wholesome lesson from his colleague at the Home-office. Friday, as well as Thursday, saw also the meeting of another synod — the Ashley League — at which, as the Chris- tian Times kindly informs " our learned friend of The Morn- ing Chronicle' — by which designation I conclude I am (little worthy as I am of the honour) implied — an agreement " upon the draft of a constitution, such as would enable all the various denominations of evangelical Christians to unite in co-opera- tion against the common enemy," " has already been accom- plished, with the expenditure of infinitely less time and trouble than was ever employed in harmonising the discordant and pugnacious elements that compose the heterogeneous body 204 which assumes the designation of ' The Catholic Church.' " " The meeting on Thursday was numerously attended, and the draft of the committee was examined with that scrupulous carfe which was due to a document that may serve as a mani- festo and a symbol to the millions of Protestants throughout the British empire." The daily organ of the League tells us, further, that its operations are to be inaugurated by a great public meeting. Without meaning to assume that these sanguine anticipa- tions must necessarily bear a mathematical value, it is clear that they must imply something ; and it is also clear that that something is a revolution in the condition of the Church of England, which shall render co-operation with Nonconformists more easy than heretofore — a revolution which must comprise in it the abandonment of something on the part of Church- men — that something, of course, the something most distaste- ful to their new allies — i. e., the Catholicity of our Church. With such a confession on the part of the organ of the League, we do not need the testimony even of Mr. Wray's friend's informant, tmequivocal as it is, to teach us that our Prayer Book is menaced ; and, by the way, neither the Christian Times, nor the daily journal which shares in the honour of recording the movements of the LeagTie, says anything of Mr. Wray's letter — a silence as significant as speech. So we now see confessed a tangible danger to the Church of England — the assault of the League. Our assailants are the same persons who have for years, each in his own way, done what he could to thwart the growth of orthodox views in the land. Now it is no longer " each in his own way," but all in one way ; and to this one way, one, way of defence must be opposed — the bold, uncompromising, unvacillating, undiplomatic enunciation of the ancient truth. I know that many very excellent men may not at first be prepared for such action — many may think that, as we have continued to drift on so long somehow, we have now no danger of imping- ing upon the rocks. She, say they — the old Established Church of England — has stood many hard knocks in ours' and our fathers' days, and yet she has kept on, without' throwing overboard her trusteeship of the truth — therefore she never can do so. Such persons may think me harsh — nay, possibly imkind — in the remarks which I have made upon the episcopal paper, in that attenuated form to which happily the first most objectionable draft has been reduced ; and they may do so the more from the expression in the paper, which commits all its signers for life to the avowal of 205 their belief in the identity of the present and the old unre- formed Catholic Church of England, whether or not — a thing I much doubt from the tone of the remainder — they all realised, when they put their hands to it, all that this admission em- braced. But I cannot think so ; I am even sure that I am the true friend of our bishops, though a very plain-spoken one. I would, in answer to them, urge that, over and above the fatal (for so I will ever persist in calling it) principle of individual and unconstitutional episcopal infallibility which it involves, it contains, in its every line and letter, the germs of a danger not less fatal to our Church than the Ashley League itself — a danger into which, without clearness of sight, and boldness of purpose, we shall be almost compelled to fall in avoiding the other. No matter whence it arose — it is certain that there has always been in the Church of England a party, more or less influential at different times, which has had very little sym- pathy with the distinctive doctrines of the Prayer Book. It has sometimes suited the circumstances of those in authority to favour this party — sometimes it has suited them not to do so; accordingly they have sometimes found the "bench" open to them — at other times not at all so. In every epoch, however, the actual constitution of the episcopate has been the summary of the ecclesiastical policy of the preceding thirty years ; and the prospects of its giving an orthodox or an unorthodox opinion on any given subject, would have very much depended upon the prevailing tone of the Church politics of the Governments to which its members respectively owed their appointments. By a species of tacit understanding — graceful in those days, and justifiable — orthodox Church- men have hitherto been much in the habit of ignoring this palpable fact, and of assuming the necessary soundness of the faith of those whom they found placed over them as their chief pastors. On the other hand, the balance of conflicting parties in the Church, and, I fear I must add, a wide-spread apathy, if it prevented the episcopate from fulfilling this bright ideal, also stood generally in the way of their doing anything markedly inconsistent with it. But within the last three years and a half this state of things has been radically changed. Three events, at rapid yet distinct intervals, have occurred in that interim — events all different in their characters, but each filling up something which was wanting to its predecessor, and each an assault from the anti-orthodox side — to shiver the compromise which our bishops Jiave hitherto had a mutual interest in maintain- 206 ing, and to render any act of theirs, performed upon the hypothesis of its continuance, in reality almost more mis- chievous in its attempt at a negative good, than what might be intended from some other quarter to be at once active and mischievous. The first of these events was the bold assumption of Lord John Russell to intrude upon the Church, as one of her bishops, a man notoriously unsound in the faith, without affording to her the means of inquiry into the glaring proofs of his unfitness — under the specious plea of such an inquiry being an infringement of the royal supremacy. Twelve bishops protested against the choice — the Court of Queen's Bench was divided, the Chief Justice confessedly taking a simply political line — and so the Minister carried his point. At the critical moment the venerable Primate died, and as a matter of course his successor consecrated the Bishop of Hereford. All orthodox men felt that this event had grievously injured the discipline of our Church. Her doc- trine was not affected by it. Two years later a similar blow was dealt under the auspices of the same First Minister, in a judgnaent of a new-fangled Court of Appeal, which reversed that of the highest Ecclesiastical Court, to the disparagement of an article of the Creed. The two Primates aided in this, and a joint episcopal protest in vindication of the truth was not attainable. I do not comment on this — I only give it as a fact, but one which is very pregnant with reference to the events of the last month. It remained, as the complement of the Hampden and Gorham cases, to see discipline and doctrine involved in a com- mon attack ; and this we now behold, as the culmination of the excitement of the last six months, fostered by the Minister — still the same man — unwittingly encouraged by the attempt to " satisfy the public " — hectoringly proclaimed by the Bishop of Manchester — brought into shape by Lord Ashley and his League. At this moment appears the Episcopal Paper, advising, under the names of Ministerially appointed bishops, compro- mise, under the designation of " order" and " uniformity." Of course there is no intrinsic objection to twenty-four bishops meeting together— or, without their all meeting, publishing a paper, provided there is nothing objectionable in its contents. In the old days, before tlie Hampden contest, this would have been natural enough, and the paper would have stood or fallen on its own merits — a compromise, of course, but only a compromise as much as anything else. But by the proved 207 impossibility of a joint episcopal paper on the doctrine of Holy Baptism — that fundamental article of the faith — our prelates have put themselves out of court, for at least a very long time — and so I trusted they would have felt — so far as regards the exercise of any joint voluntary action on a minor matter. They had put themselves into a position which called upon the more sound of them for great caution, as being now the only means of retrieving a position — over and above the bolder and truer way of magnanimous daring. That sad affair of last year dragged before the public eye the world- wide differences of the various members of the Bench. The possibility of their agreement on such a paper as this,' the practical drift of which is the exaltation of their own power, coupled with the impossibility of unanimity on an article of the Creed, is a fact which has a significance which it is very strange that some at least of the twenty-four should not have perceived. After what we have gone through, even the Bill for the new Court of Appeal will not, I fear, unless it contains some further-reaching provisions than it did last year, find as much support as it then received from High Churchmen. Bad as differences may be between Prelates, and open warfare, in charges and so forth, yet this is surely better than such a unanimity as that before us ; a unanimity which will be interpreted as saying — " We could not agree as to the meaning of ' one baptism 'for the remission of sins,' but we do agree to call upon you, for the sake of ' order' and ' uni- formity,' to hold us all equally infallible." When one of two parties has thrown compromise over- board, then for the leaders of the other to strive to maintain it, is simply to play into the hands of the adversary. This is precisely the position of High Churchmen at present, as far as repects those High Church bishops who have signed the paper. The Ashley party has openly proclaimed itself in its true aspect. It has openly announced its intention to follow up the Gorham advantage by alterations in the Prayer Book which shall retrieve the consistency then forfeited by them for a political gain. What boots it, that this bishop or that, who does not vehemently disagree with them in doctrine, thinks at present that he would rather not see the Prayer Book altered — that the time for that step " is further removed than ever." Such playing with conviction will finally do nothing but strengthen the hands of the League, and as a guarantee to orthodoxy, it is perfectly impotent. Clearly, then, the High Church section of the bishops ought to have placed themselves at the head of those who do 208 believe in Apostolic descent and sacramental grace — their only friends, as I have often said, to whom, when the dark days come, they will ever think of looking. They ought to have proclaimed that, thanks to their opponents, the close of compromise has come, and that a further weak endeavour to maintain it would be, in fact, betrayal of the truth. Two have done so — praise to them; and the daily organ of the League says that it thinks that their character stands higher than that of those who have signed. But except in these two cases, disappointment has sup- planted just expectation, and we are compelled to fight for ourselves — each man with a stout heart and a firm belief in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Be it so. In any case the episcopal paper can do nothing but harm. Either (the far more probable contingency) it will be disregarded — and it is not a light thing to see the joint act of twenty-four bishops meet with nothing but disregard — or else it will be regarded ; and then, worked as it will be by the incompatibilities of its signers, it can only result in again plunging our rising English Church into a spiritual torpor — a timidity, a formalism, a pla\isibility, an insensibility to any high and independent action — ^which (although I fully acquit its subscribers of intending this) will assuredly extend, far beyond the ritualism with which, in its present form, it seems alone to deal, into the regions of doctrine and Christian living, where it will produce consequences not less dangerous to the truth than even the open triumph of Lord Ashley and his League. LETTERS /'^■"' CHURCH MATTERS. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE "MORNING CHRONICLE.' No. V. " The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swaBows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON : JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1851. CONTENTS. ZLII. Sbcessiows to the Chuhch op Rome . . . 209 XLIII. The AssA-UM os thi. Prayer Book; . . . 215 XLIV. The Bishop op Manchester and Westhoughton . 218 XLV. The Synod op the English Presbyterian Church 222 XLVI. Church Extension 224 XLVII. Catholicity op the English Church . . . 229 XLVIII. Lord John Russell and the Sy-nod op Exeter . 234 XLIX. The Church at Home and in the Colonies . 237 L. Sir Benjamin Hall and Lord John Russell . 241 LI. Bishops and People 244 LII. The Troubles of the Church, and their Remedy 249 rETTEB, UUFP, AND CO. flilMMliS, C'UA^'E (.'ornT, FLEET STREET. LETTERS CHURCH MATTERS, XLII. SECESSIONS TO THE CHURCH OF HOME. Apkii, 11, 1851. I PROPOSE addressing a few words to you upon one very painful topic connected with the religious history of our Church for the last seven or eight years, which, as the neces- sity for it presented itself, I have not been afraid of handling incidentally, but which I have not previously considered in a systematic way. I refer to the various secessions to Eome, of persons whom our Church once regarded as her own, and whose loss, so generally accompanied by some individual incident of a painful nature — as if intended as a special warn- ing to others not to do likewise — never fails to be used as -a handle by our watchful and ingenious adversaries against the truth of our views ; as if the fact of Mr. So and-so being, or not being, in the Church of England could cast a diiferenf hue over the pages of the Prayer Book. I need not expatiate upon the deep feelings of grief with which those whose hearts are in the welfare of the English Church regard the lamentable want of faith which leads so many — forgetful how light even the present suffering is, com- pared with the days when the Eoman Proconsul, and the- altar of the false God, or the rack, awaited the believer in 2 210 the Oliristian Church— to desert her fold, renounce her orders, and abjure her sacraments, and often, far too often, to place themselves in the conspicuous fore-front of those who heap her with every injurious and bitter-mouthed reproach — men who, while with us, seemed all gentleness and forbearance. This is very grievous, and very grievous is the manner in which the treacherous world deals with it— employing it as an occasion to infiame animosity against those who- are feeling a real desolation, which it does not feel, at the event ; accusing those who remain with us of corrupt motives, and at the same time predicating corrupt motives of those who have so often left their worldly all to follow out their unhappy error. With these facts before us, I think it my duty calmly to view the matter as it stands — to point out why the fact of these secessions having taken place is no argument against the truth of High Church views, or against the fact of these views being the risumi of the Prayer Book's teaching — and to give some reasons why the revival of zeal in our Church should have been characterised by such events. Those who argue in the Tenterden-steeple way do not want any further reasons than they may find in any Church and State Gazette to show that the secessions which have occurred demonstrate the falsity of High Churchmen's claims, and justify all the severity and all the injustice with which they have been treated. The more rational observer will feel that common justice requires that, if he were to concede this, he should also demand the acknowledgement that the many lapses, for many years past, of both clergy and laity to Dissent, (of which toe do not keep a register,) are as valid against the opposite party. But I do not intend to try the issue upon a secondary point. The present position of the Eoman and of the Anglican Churches towards each other, and towards the Universal Church, when she was visibly one, is really as follows : — The " Church of Rome" is composed of many National Churches, and portions of National Churches, which are in communion with the Bishop of Eome, by reason of their acknowledging communion with him as essential to Catholic unity — in virtue of his possessing an episcopate derived from a something in the one apostolate of St. Peter which the apostle held over and above, and differing in kind from, that lesser apostolate which he had in common with his brethren, and which has descended to all other bishops. I am making my statement, for brevity's sake, very general — although 211 fully aware that the Gallican Church, for example, recognised of old an apostolate of the collective episcopate of the world, to which the Pope himself must bow ; but these opinions, for practical every-day consideration, do not now come into question. The result of this limitation of the Catholic Church to its own body and of its negation of the possibility of out- ward separation co-existing with intrinsic unity, makes, and has made the Roman Church at all times a working body. It has never failed in fulfilling, in its own way, what it asserts to be the functions of the Universal Church; while, in so doing, it has, in Eastern and in Anglican eyes, built up a vast super-structure as Catholic which is not really so. Still it had the claim of being "The Whole Church" — the form of energizing life. The " Church of England"-^a single National Church, which has, however, by the marvellous multiplication of the Anglo-Saxon race, planted herself in every quarter of the world — at her Reformation rejected those claims of the Roman Church which could not be proved by primitive warrant, and in so doing, she placed herself at once in a primitive and likewise in a confessedly imperfect attitude. In rejecting the seeming completeness of Catholicity comprised in the Roman demands in which she had previously acquiesced, she could only appeal to a completeness of the future — a day still distant in the hands of Omnipotence, when the weak should be strong again, and the withered leaves turn fresh again, and the children of the one Church embrace around their common altars. The Reformed English Church was a Reformed^and, through her reform, an isolated— National Church. The unreformed English Church had been an actual member of what termed itself the whole visible Church. This change, of course, in itself, necessitated an appearance of weakness in her action by the side of the great Cfhurch of the Continent and of those Englishmen who had not embraced the Reformation. She, by the law of her existence, could not act with plenary power — while their body, by the anta- gonistic law of its existence, made, and strove to enforce, that awe-striking claim. Moreover, contemporaneously with our Reformation, came that of other countries, which, in their precipitancy, surrendered what we had preserved — the credentials of identity with the Universal Church. Still, we and they were, politically speaking, on the same side ; and many of our soundest and highest divines still cherished the charitable hope that German Protestants would one day crave from us the gift of that which we preserved, and which 212 tliey had lost — and consequently tliey involved us in too much moral participation in that denial of revelation wMcli has, unhappily, marked the downward — not upward, as they had hoped— course of those unsatisfactory bodies. The dynastic history of England tended to draw closer the bonds of this alliance. The word Protestant — used in the land of its invention as the designation of Lutherans exclusively, in distinction to the Eeformed or Oalvinists— became in England a collective term for any professing Christian of Western Europe who did not belong to the Eoman Church — whether he were Anglican, Anabaptist, or Socinian. Again, the term " Catholic," by their constant use of it, and by our careless- ness, had become the vernacular for "Roman Catholic;" and so " Catholic" and " Protestant" are, in too many Eng- lishmen's minds, the two fixed antagonisms within the Christian pale. The German and Swiss influences which bore upon England during the Reformation, laid the egg from which broke out that party to which I liave so often alluded — which has ever since existed in our Church without accepting the literal teaching of the Prayer Book, and which is now so very rampant. The result of all these causes has been that the normal form of corruption in the Reformed English Church has ever been negation of her Catholicity, whether by religious or irreligious persons. The normal form of corruption in the Eoman Church, on the other hand, is the allegation of what is un-Catholic as Catholic by the religious, and the cloaking of absolute unbelief under the same designation by the irreligious. Under these circumstances commenced that great revival of religious truth and earnestness in our Church, of which the first strongly visible signs were shown in 1833. The moving principle of this (by the confession of foe as well as friend) wonderful movement was the Catholicity of the Eng- lish Church, as shown in her constitution and in the teaching of her Prayer Book. The practical result towards which those who participated in it strove was this — the development through the land, among rich and poor, of those duties of Christian living which the Catholic standard required. The movement went forward, in its own mysterious way — here, possessing the souls of a knot or even of a crowd — there touching the heart of some solitary in a moral wilderness, ]')ut all who embraced it with earnestness, and with the resolve to act up to its requirements, found themselves engaged in a life which was always one of labour, often of S13 great trouble and anxiety. The love of Churcli consolations, and the felt need of the Christian Sacraments, are not things which, when they have once been allowed to lapse into neglect, can be so readily revived. Then came coldness, suspicion-— and often rebuke from those to whom natural instinct had taught them to look as fathers. Many of these men were persons of susceptible and tender feelings — many were young men, ignorant of the ways of the world, and of the social laws of impossibilities ; and it was no great wonder that they often felt their hearts sink, when they found them- selves exposed to reprimand, if not to persecution, for striving to do the work of God in their own Church, as their own Church commanded them. So great a revival, so suddenly spreading over a body so wide as the English Church, left many men necessarily to the influence of private feelings — feelings fed upon in solitude after hard days of ill-requited and harassing labour — or else it congregated similar minds in small knots, only large enough to intensify mutual sorrows. All the while these men knew that "the head and front of their olFending " in the world's eye was their maintenance of the Catholicity of the English Church; and they did not sufficiently consider that a revival must, without a direct miracle, encounter many crosses. This made them often falter in their faith, and exclaim, " Can a church which seems to be fighting against Catholicity really be Catholic ?" Present to them, while they indulged in this delusive strain of thought, was always standing that vast corporation which beckoned theni on to her — the only Catholic Church, as she assumed herself to be. And, as we know, some have fallen — some^ not many, if we coimt how great the phalanx is of those who still are with us. These falls, most distressing as they are, are clearly, as I have shown, no marks against the' Catholicity of our Church. It was, humanly speaking, impossible that such a revival could take place, and yet that all should be right and smooth within it ; and as the most pressing trials of churchmen have been from the anti-Catholic side, it was clear that, if unhappily they dreamed the English Church no longer a safe resting-place, they could only rush into the arms of Eome (for Greece was not a tangible reality to any but a travelled few), or else sink into total doubt of all things. But this cannot affect the truths of the eternal Church. If they are written in our Prayer Book, this cannot blot them out — if they are the words of life this cannot change their import. The Church of Eng- 214 land is not less or more a branch of the Catholic Church than she was before these secessions. The method of dealing with divine truth must be, to all real men, as changeless as the truth itself, though fallible instruments may shift and falter. The cause of our losses has been the imperfect exhibition, in our practice, of our Catholic credentials and our Catholic privileges. It would, therefore, have been the part of wise rulers to have laboured all the more earnestly to show that, in spite of the reclamations of Rome, our church contained the Saving truth^to have laboured to strengthen her where she was weak, to have fostered everywhere the ripening seed, to have multiplied her indications of Christian love, and charity, and zeal, to have shown a generous and tender confidence to the gentler spirits whom present troubles weighed down, to have urged the rougher and sturdier natures to great deeds of faith. Instead of this, like the old surgeons, they have too often dressed the open wounds with boiling oil. We have seen, for instance, a charge denouncing all and everything about a body of Christians wlio are told by the hundred of millions, as hopelessly bad and wicked^a sneer dropped during the visi- tation diniler — -some quiet good man who had been spending his life's blood without a doubt of the English Church, treated with marked coldness— some approval of some good scheme withdrawn or modified. Such are the practical methods too often taken to meet a secession ; and then persons are sur- prised that the remedy is so little efficacious. But still the old truth remains enshrined, as it did before, in the Prayer Book. Still, as before, we protest, as against new German notions, that the Apostolate is needed for the preservation of the truth. Still, as against Rome, we assert that, in the universal Episcopate, and not in the sole chair of St. Peter, the plentitude of this Apostolate is vested. One more topic must be handled— ^the assertion that an indulged love of ceremony in our church drives persons over to the Church of Rome. I have seen enough of the state of matters amongst us to be certain that this assertion cannot be substantiated. A craving after more ceremonial; created by over-indulgence amongst us, is I believe, the least of all reasons for secession. My proof is one derived from fact. The chief of the early converts have organised a commiinity in England of the Oratorians — and to the Oratorians most recent converts bend their steps. These Oratorians are dis^ tinguished by the vehemence with which they resist that species of ceremonialism derived from our older days, and embodied in our Prayer Book, as un- Roman, un-modern, un- 215 suited to the actual Ohui-cli, " Protestant," and so forth. And yet we are called upon to believe that indulgence in that which creates a craving for more has driven so many over to a system which is noted by its denunciation of that which is supposed to have furnished it with its converts, and that the form of the over-gratification is a rejection even of the former more moderate portion. In confirmation of this, I observe that one of the articles of the leading Eoman Catholic Magazine for the present month is a favourite topic of that clever periodical — the denunciation of a defence of chancel screens, contained in a High Church review. And yet these chancel screens are held by Lydians to be so fearfully Popish a thing — Quam parv& sapientift mundus regitur ! The last remarks are by way of parenthesis. The facts at which I have hinted in them are deserving of a more careful consideration and a wider notoriety than has been given to them. I must conclude. I have spoken out ; and if any one for the future should accuse me of disloyalty to the Church of England, or accuse that system which I advocate, of not being the voice of her trusty sons, and the genuine exponent of her doctrines— first, by anticipation, I deny his charge; and, secondly, I tax him with affinity to the system, not of Eng- land, but of Geneva. XLllL THE ASSAULT ON THE PRAYEll BOOK. Apeil 17, 1851, The Christidn Times and your correspondent, Mr. Power, in their respective ways sing lo Peean over me for what they assert to be the falsity of the alarm which I have raised about the danger of the Prayer-book from the machinations of Lord Ashley and his party. A very brief analysis of their exulting assumptions wiU show whether, in point of fact> I have been so unreasonable in what 1 have said. The Christian Times heads an article, " Protestant Organi- zation and Tractarian Misrepresentation ;" and, after making a bitter attack upon the bishops, and asserting that as long as the " Sacramental system" is taught, " it is no better than a delusion or mockery to talk, or even to dream, about a 216 purification of the Church," it tells us, a little lower down, that all that it is " anxious' about" is to correct "certain misrepresentations of the most glaring kind," which it accuses me of haying made, " perhaps inadvertently." These for- midable "misrepresentations" concern that which the Christian Times accuses itself of having saddled with the name of "League" — under thecaution, however, that "the namehadnot yet been settled by the Conference ;" but which, as it happens I found recorded under that title of " League," with no such caution, in a daily paper, and about which, accordingly, I wrote under that designation — nay, as, in the very words of that paper, " the greatest League of modern times" — before a syllable about it had appeared in the weeklj'- journal. But to come to the charge under which I am so crushed— it turns out " that, however desirable may be a further reformation of the Church of England, that subject was never mentioned at any meeting of the Conference, nor is it alluded to in any of their, resolu- tions." Still, " Church reform" — which " must come shortly, and that with a vengeance," from the hands of politicians, "if not speedily undertaken by those who care anything about existing institutions" — " that great, that patriotic and religious work — the consummation of the labours, the vindi- cation of the rectitude, and the crown of glory of so many martyrs to the cause of Nonconformity in former ages — will find its own appropriate machinery, and' its own special ad- vocates. Among these we hope to see Lord Ashley and a goodly company, who," &c.; " but that organization will not be the Protestant Conference, nor are its members, as such, in any degree responsible for what is said on the subject of Church reform." I bow to the Christian Times. " As such" — as members of that which is to publish such wonderful resolutions, the Pro- testant Conference — Lord Ashley and the " goodly company" are not in any degree responsible for what the CJiristian Times has said on the subject of Church reform^ — on the ex- tirpation, for instance, of the Sacramental system. " As such." These are two very short words, and therefore easy to be remembered ; and remembered they will be. The danger to the Church was imminent from that party- — and the mysterious " League" was being hatched. Not being a spy or a prophet, I could not tell precisely what was passing there. I sounded the alarm — and I learn that it is not as such that Lord Ashley and his company are meditating the muti- lation of the Prayer Book. I tlianlv the Christian Times, and give it leave to make what use it may of such a triumph. 217 Now, sir, I come to Mr. Power — the gentleman to whom, as it appears, Mr. Wray's. informant was indebted for his facts. You cannot have forgotten how, in the memorandum which his collocutor handed to Mr. Wray, he claimed very broadly the honour of frequent communication with the party of the noble lord. In his letter to you he states, " I know- nothing whatever of the designs of Lord Ashley's Association by any private or secret communications. What I did state had reference to my own opinions, and perhaps wishes." Was it not only the " private opinion, and perhaps the wish," of Mr. Power, that " the world would know nothing about it — that their organization was very perfect ?" I leave it to any candid reader of yours or any other paper, to say whether such is the sort of explanation of a conversation so remarkable in its statement, and so minutely reported, which can for one instant bear impartial scrutiny. I can only remark that Saturday's leader in the Christian Times may explain Mr. Power's otherwise puzzling letter. That article tells us that, though Lord Ashley and his " company " may be plotting to eradicate the " Sacramental system " from the Prayer-book, it is not "as sueh" that they are doing so — not as that precise " League " whose ostensible function is, it seems, to be in another quarter of the same movement. Mr Power s denial of complicity, contained in his letter, has reference only to this particular league, or "association," as he terms it, "As such " he knows nothing of its designs — so he tells you ; as something else, " Lord Ashley and his goodly company " have a " very perfect " and clandestine " organization " — so he tells Mr. Wray's friend. It is glad to see so easy and so probable a method of saving the consistency of one in Mr. Power's sacred position ! Let no one, then, he put off his guard, If the article in the Christian Times and the letter of Mr. Power are sufficient to appease the alarms of any one, to that man I have written in vain, and nothing but the consummation of the danger will ever arouse him. 218 XLIV. THE BISHOP OF MANCHESTER AND WESTHOUGHTON. ■ April 21, 1851. Your paper of yesterday recalls to your readers the actions of one, who, often as he comes before the public, never has, as far as I remember, done so without making all those who reverence the order to which he belongs, regret his notoriety —I refer to the bishop of Manchester. His lordship's proceedings with reference to Mr. Alsop, of Westhoughton, and his curate, even in the isolated shape which the narrative assiimes in your columns, seems strange enough, and little to the credit of the right reverend prelate — neither very courteous, nor even, it might be whispered, very straightforward, What persons will think of his lordship, I leave to them to settle for themselves when they learn the entire array of facts connected with that curacy of Westhoughton, You may recollect that, in a former letter of mine respecting the same Bishop, to which you gave insertion on the 30th of January, I was compelled to say : — " Not very Ions' after tlie creation of the see, the newly-made ecclesias- tical division found itself unexpectedly convulsed by the refusal which the bishop took upon himself to make, to countersign the appUcation from two chui-ches for that aid towards maintaining curates which the ' Society for the Employment of Additional Curates in Populous Places' renders. He adopted this course avowedly on account of his disapproval of the obser- vances and discipUne of those churches — the first principle of the society (whose executive by its constitution comprises all the Enghsh bishops) being that it eschewed party, and that the whole soul of its proceedings — appHcation, counter-signature, grant — eVeiything, in short, was purely statistical ; that is, in any place its munificence only required that the existing staff of clergy should approve themselves as doing all that they reasonably could, and having done so, should be manifestly not numerous or strong enough for the work, But the Bishop of Manchester does not view things as other men do. There were two curates in his diocese, whose Hcenses he was bound, if he could prove them untrue to the Church of England, to revoke— and whose applications for assistance from the Additional Curates' Society, if he could not prove that, he was bound to countersign. He would do neither. He continued their licenses, and he strove to staive them out by not backing their applications. This mag- nanimous policy was proclaimed at a pubhc meetmg, in a speech such as few but the liishop of Manchester can make; and, as was not at all curious, it set the Additional Curates' Society ia a ferment. Exciting meetings of its govenung committee (the only pubhc meetings which its constitution allows) were hold, and at last a resolution was framed, laying flown, in -the most explicit terms, that the couuttrsignature of a 219 diocesan was simply to the truth of the statistics therein contained. Every hody thought the matter settled. But what was, to use a common phrase, as clear as the sun at noonday to everybody else, was a mystery to the Bishop of Manchester ; he could see nothing in this resolution which compelled him to countersign the applications, the refusal of which g'ave rise to that extraordinary step of the society, and so the curates continued starving, and the Bishop had a short triumph. But things could not last so. The society found itself bi-eaking up ; and its quietest members were convinced that something must be done. All at once the wind veered, and it transpired that if the society would, in place of what it had already said, use certain other words absolutely tantamount to its former resolu- tion, the Bishop of Manchester's understanding would be opened, the society would be saved, and the curates would receive their allowance. The committee of the society very wisely, aU things considered, took their part in this — tragedy it was not, for it ended well— farce I wiU not call it, out of respect to the performers— but mummeiy I may term it ; and the breeze blew over." Will not you be astonished that one of these two historical cases is that of Westhoughton? The whole truth, in short, has transpired. It is now published to the world, that after Bishop Lee had violated the understanding of the Society in order to crush the incumbent of Westhoughton and the incumbent of Leigh, in whose parish stood the chapel of Westleigh — after he had compelled the Society to frame a special law to meet his own special transgression of all its precedents and all the spirit of its fundamental constitution — after he had contumaciously stood out against this law — and after he had sent an unequivocal message last summer {as I have the best authority for stating) to the Society, that if it should, in place of the words it had previously adopted, adopt other words, he would no longer hold out — and after the Society had, on this representation, abandoned its own dignity in favour of Dr. Lee's wild caprices — after all this, I say — unmindful of its proffered word, unmindful not only of con- sistency, but of reputation — he has involved himself in that miserable network of intertwined chicane and insolence detailed in your paper of yesterday, in order to outwit the Society and crush Mr. Alsop, the chosen object of his perse- cution. And what is the cause of this strange acerbity ? — Very simple, very obvious. Bishop Lee, while a Christian most liberal in his creed, most tolerant of differences — tolerant, as rumour has it, even to qualifying with a " perhaps " the belief in the divinity of our blessed Saviour as needful towards belonging to the National Church — Bishop Lee, I say, makes one exception to his liberality, one abatement in his toleration : bitterly and unrelentingly does he persecute compliance with 220 the rubric, and belief in the on#"Catholic and Apostolic faith of that portion of the University Church of which he is a bishop. Mr. Alsop strives to act up to that rubric, and he believes in that faith — thence the denial of justice which he has met with. As early as 1848, his diocesan — I refer for my facts to a pamphlet of correspondence which the Bishop himself printed in 1849 — taxed him with the smallness of his congregation, and the number of persons whom he was said to have driven away by his restoration of a proper service. Facts proved those charges to be the direct opposite of the truth. In the letter he wrote in reply, lured on to confidence by the invita- tion of his Bishop (who had previously, on Ms nomination, examined, ordained, and licensed a curate- to Westhoughton), to address him as " a friend and a brother clergyman," he penned these striking sentences : — " Again, I have been a troubled spectator of ministerial operations aroimd me ; on one side, uttei' apathy, carelessness, disregard of all duty except what was compulsory ; on the other hand, a desire for show with heartlessness ; a craving for larg-e congregations, but little anxiety for their moral renovation ; Christian doctrine in the pulpit, but mammonism in private life ; practical disregard of the poor, and tending to the vices of the rich, and the prejudices of the popular voice — a whole system of ' vidcri,' not of ' esse y' these, and many such things, have not unfre- quently made me ask, are we mercenary actors or indeed ambassadors of the living God 1 I am set now to test our Church, by trying fully to develop what I believe to be her principles ; and in this development my rubrical alterations are only the lowest, though first necessary round in the ladder. I would make the Church the educator of all, the protector and almoner of the poor ; in reahty, what it is in name, ' the congrega- tion o{ faithful men.' I do not conte;mplate the restoration of the Church of the past, but I must see it something very different from what it now is ; I must endeavour, as far as in me lies, to make it so, or, I wiU not hide the truth from your lordship, / must become mi infidel. Am I likely to make ritual observances dangerous ? "With my strong natural tendency to unbelief and not to superstition, am I not doing the best for myself as well as for others 1 Would you wish to give me a blow that might cause paralysis — ^then death ? I leave this argument of the inner life. I wish to sny here a few words about my tise of the surplice, as this is the only change to which the people have rrftZ/?/ objected." A little time, and the Bishop of Manchester had the assurance, at a public meeting, thus to make use of Mr. Alsop's free and full unburthcnings of his feelings, expressed in a letter which the writer believed, when he penned it, was to have been confidential : — ■ " If I find incumbents preferring their wretched ceremonials of a past time to the vital essence of Clnistianity ; if I find men dwelHng upon a dress in the Church, instead of the s]iirit in which the doctrines ot that 221 Church should be taught — clinging to the surplice in ministration, instead of clinging to the word and vital troths of God, and telling me (for, unfortunately, I am not speaking of imaginary cases) that they must clino' to those antiquated follies, unsanctioned aiid unauthorised alike by the letter and the spirit of our Church, and of the Church of Christ — telling me, I say, that they must cling to those antiquated folhes, or that they must become infidels ; then on them I will not bestow your bounty." Mr. Alsop, in indignation, replied : — " When, in the fulness of my trust in you, I used this strong and unguarded expression, I was thinking, as every word in the sentence itself discloses, of something very different from preaching in a surphoe. I was thinking of bishops Uke Paul and Athanasius, of deacons hke Stephen, of lay members of the Church like those who sold their all that the poor might not lack ; I was thinking of the restoration of a Church in which men should, not by paltry words and empty professions, but by substantial deeds, prove that they love God with all their hearts, and their neighbour as themselves ; I was thinking of a Church in which the ministers would not be compelled to tell lies and to desecrate their holy oifioes ; in which the godly discipline exercised by St. Paul against notorious offenders might be administered in the mild spirit of Christ ; in which there might be more faith, self-denial, lowhness, purity, and zeal j less worldUness, pride, covetousness, and sensuahty, in both priest and people. Such thoughts as these have driven many into dissent, as, when I considered what our Church has been of late, they have sometimes tempted me to doubt its Divine institution." And, lower down, lie exclaimed, in a burst of pardonable warmth, " / defrj you to the proof." Need I pursue my narrative? Westhoughton thenceforward was doomed — the interlude of the Additional Society occurred, and then the renewal of the persecution. You will not fail to note — I refer to it parenthetically, for in so great an injustice it really sinks to a minor feature — that the Bishop fastened his first quarrel on Mr. Alsop witli reference to his preaching in his surplice; and that, in asking for Mr. Findlay to be licensed, Mr. Alsop made voluntary surrender of this principle — and to no purpose. Such, sir, are a few facts relative to the Bishop of Man- chester's conduct towards Mr. Alsop. I leave them to the impartial judgment of your readers, and to the moments of sober, compunctious reflection which I turst I may believe occasionally visit Bishop Lee. I gladly close this letter — gladly dismiss that prelate from my thoughts. I may be told I have allowed him to occupy too much of them alreadj^. Too much, I readily grant for his own sake. But Bishop Lee has accidents of his station which place him in a position of a certain consideration at all events. He is a protigi of 222 Lord John Russell, and he is at the head of the ecclesiastical affairs of the second city of England, and of the greater portion of Lancashire. But, more than that, he is a model Bishop of the new school of liberal Christians which is, in some people's eyes, to regenerate the Establishment. This imposes a necessity upon those who do not share those expectations to examine the real contexture of the glitter- ing idol. They hear of the breadth of Christian charity which animates this school, and they are told that the followers of the orthodox faith are tyrannical, and persecut- ing, and unfair ; and it is therefore but common self-defence to show that, if ever there has been one Bishop more tyranni- cal, more persecuting, more unfair than another, it is Dr. Lee. XLV. THE SYNOD OP THE ENGLISH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. Apeil 23, 1851. " The Synod of the Presbyterian Church in England held its annual meeting " on the 14th instant, at Birmingham — so the papers inform us. And why should not " the Presbyterian Church in England " hold its annual Synod ? I hare no objection that, if there be such a body, it should hold synods ; and I have not met with or heard of any one who has. Synodical action on the part of Presbyterianism in Eng- land is, in a word, a civil as much as it is a religious fait accompli. Will any one, then, tell me why there should be so much alarm on the part of politicians, and of disloyal Churchmen, at a similar license being accorded to another religious body in England — that body which is governed by the Apostolic regimen of Bishops ? Observe who they are who have won for themselves the right. They are the descendants of Melvil and John Knox. If any one will tell me that this denomination is more supple and quiet — more deferential to the extremest claims of governmental control in religious matters, more ready to abandon the direction of its own spiritualities — than the Church of England, I yield at once, and own I see the differ- ence. If not, I again press my question — Why was the 223 'the Birmingham Synod so harmless a thing- — why will a Bynod of the English Church be so detrimental f It cannot be because one body is established and the other is not ; for the Church of England, in her most fully established form, has used — and used with vigour and judg- ment — her own synodical powers— as I read only this morning in your paper, in a most interesting letter uponTillotson's Com- prehension Scheme. It cannot be because the Presbyterians are so few, and we so numerous — for that would only be to use the coward's argument, and unblushingly confess a system of subordination of things most sacred to the selfish laziness of the day, of which Michiavelli might have envied the advocacy. What, then, is the reason ? Whatever it be, one thing is certain— let the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canter- bury think what they may — that every fresh instance, such as that of this Presbyterian Synod, of our own unfair treat- ment, compared with that of any other religious body, aggravates a depth of feeling which is not the less intense because it has smouldered on for many years — like those coal mines which rumour tells of, burning underground for miles and miles, until the day when the hollowed cake of delusive earth above is destined to sink down in a frightful ruin. The Synod of the Presbyterians is, yoil see, an annif&l matter. Its recent meeting was that of a body in a prosperous and a quiet state — in a normal condition of the fulfilment of the rule of its existence. And yet, even so, the Synod was a needful thing. But who will dare to Say that the present condition of the English Church is that of a prosperous and a quiet state, in the fulfilment of the rule of its existence — rocked, as we see it, to its centre by coiivulsive throes, to which none but its rulers are blind— its orders vilified, its sacramental system repudiated, its " principles" derided by its primate — " Ttaditor potestatis quafn Sancta Mater Eccle&ia a Sponso suo acceperat," as one of his own stfSragans proclaims him-^its sons, while suffering under these intolera- ble woes, invited by those to whom they looked for help and for protection, to drug their senses with schemes of compro- mise and mere external unity of action, for the sake of " the peace of the Church"—" that false peace which is nothing better than the lifelessness of a comatose body ?' Such, sir, is our condition, and yet the only hope of remedy is churlishly denied to tis. The • Presbyterians meet when they like, and no man stops them. One brave old man, p 224 the prime sufferer from the archiepiscopal betrayal of the faith, announces that he intends solemnly to meet some chosen members of his own clergy — those clergy from whose oversight he cannot, if he would, escape ; and at once the cry of disloyalty, of troubling the Church's peace, is raised by those who cannot, who dare not, answer the arguments by which that prelate, at more than threescore years and ten, establishes, with more than youthful vigour, with more than the clearness of middle age, the whole Gospel — the sacra- mental system of the Universal Church, by which — terrible presumption — he proclaims that he can find no excuse, in his own conscience, from the cowardice or the treachery of others, for not, alone though it be, playing the part of bishop of the Christian Church, and maintaining the Christian creed. The announcement once made, some have carped, some have railed, some have blundered — most have held their bated breath in simple astonishment at such doings. In the mean- while the banner has been raised round which the true sons of our own English Church will rally — the leader, one of her bishops, an " old man full of days," fearless for the truth, while younger men have paltered away a great position. XLVI. CHURCH EXTENSION. ApMt 24, 1851, An address to her Majesty upon the important topic of Church Extension has come under my attention— the list of signatures being headed by the two archbishops, and including the names of distinguished lords, bishops, and members of Parliament, of different parties both in Church and State. It taay appear presumptuous to offer any comment upon a docu- ment so backed ; nevertheless, I must entreat your considera- tion towards some remarks upon it, which I am perhaps the more anxious to offer from a consideration of the weight which some of the signatures will have with those who belono- to the orthodox side. ° The foundation of the whole document is the necessity for the further development of the parochial system in the Church of England. Nothing can be said against such a statement— 225 it is entirely, painfully, true. The only question is, whether the suggested remedy be the best adapted to meet the evil. The signatures are, as I have said, those of persons holding very different views upon Church matters — of persons whose devotion to the orthodox faith has made them subject to those misrepresentations which the advocacy of the truth so constantly entails— and of the Primate of all England, the Duke of Manchester, Lord Ashley, and others, notoriously, I fear, sympathizing in that dislike to Church principles which those dignified individuals have so unmistakeably proclaimed. In short, the document partakes of the nature of those compromises under which the great existing " Church Socie- ties are, and have so long been, maintained. I do not wish to breathe a word against those societies. The state of things under which they have assumed their present form is one of old standing, arising in the days when the armistice between High and Low Church was tolerably well understood, and tolerably generally acted upon. But the rase comes to be very different when we enter upon a new scheme, based upon a similar blinking of their differences, such as we find them in 18.51. This remark, by way of parenthesis, I conceive appli- cable not only to the scheme immediately before us, but to another — upon which I may, before I conclude, have to offer some further observations — having for its object practical, not theoretical Church extension. The differences existing in 1851 — 'as I have had need to say far more often than is pleasa,nt — are world-wide. They com- prehend repudiation by name of the " sacramental system " — which is the gospel of truth — -by Lord Ashley and his meeting, and the depreciation of " Church principles " by that primate who, having abetted a judgment which undermines the Creed, has now triumphantly resuscitated words of fearful violence against the very foundation of our Church, which he addressed officially ten years ago to another diocese. Whatever be the issue of the conflict, its objects are the essentials of the Christian religion. The contest has been hurried on by our adversaries, and they show no sign of any desire to withdraw from it. Is this a time for striving to multiply our entang'lements by voluntary and uncompelled adhesion to fresh schemes of compromise? To look at the matter in another point of view. The res- toration of the Synodical action of the Church is felt to be the only permanent — the only real — relief from a deep and eating sore, which is not to be healed by the temporary fresh- ness of cooling washes. The paper before us absolutely p 2 226 ignores any such recourse — the " Ecclesiastical Commis- sioners" — Parliament — "your Majesty's Government," are the machinery which it contemplates. We are all very deeply implicated in having pampered these make-shifts for true ecclesiastical regimen up to their present portentous extent of power ; and the immediate need of Church extension might seem to many to plead in favour of a fresh recourse to them — ^merely as a temporary expedient — -to meet the temporary demand. May be it would afford a temporary succour — so does selling out one's stock — so does borrowing money at sixty per cent. But, as in private matters, so in the govern- ment of the English Church — the day of settlement must come. The day will come, perhaps, when a minister of public worship will appeal to this very document for a reason for the support of many who would be the first to cry out against the creation of such an office. I do not wish to be personal — 'but Lord Ashley has placed himself in the position, not of a person, but of a principle. How can some of those whose names I see coupled with his in this paper, and in the other scheme, consent to act with him ? How can he consent to act with them ? Of all mistakes, one of the most fatal is to attempt to meet \he present crisis in our "wounded " Church by the fusion together of a " party of order," into which we may be sure that one side — not ours — has entered with the full determination not to abate one jot of its pretensions in favour of its over-confiding coadjutors. I cannot conclude these remarks without some observations upon the details of the scheme which I have hitherto only examined in its accidents. With the statistics with which the paper opens I have no fault to find. That, under them, an extensive manufacture of trusteeships in the Genevan interest may be cloaked, is of course a suspicion which I have no right to dwell upon. I must, however, remark by the way, that the system of dotting over our towns an infinite series of single clergymen-^each to have the unassisted heat and burden of a church and a parish— is, in my eyes, one of the most distressing symptoms there is of the universal ignorance of the first principles of ecclesiastical organization. More organised knots of clergy mutually helping each other,* more frequent services in existing churches, at all conceivable hours ; more chapels served from the mother church, with the support of all its resources, and its entire system to back them up — is the advice of common sense. A district church here and a district church there, and one unhappy, isolated, unsupported per- 2S7 petual curate to each, is the contrivance of fashionable sciolism. The paper before us, indeed, ventilates an attempt to meet this unsatisfactory state of things — but it is an attempt which no reasoning Churchman can be very hearty in supporting. It is the unhappy device of a cheap substitute for a curate in the form of that invention of our own days, the " Scripture reader" — an office which, from its name and its nature, must either imply a machine, or else the counterfeit imitator of the duties of an office for which — to take the lowest grounds merely — education has in no way fitted its possessor. From £50 to £70 a-year, it appears from the paper, is the cost of one of these anomalous functionaries — a saving, perhaps, of those few pounds for which in each case a better regulated condition of the Church would provide the duly trained and duly ordained deacon ? I now come to other objections of a different character. Two of the paragraphs run as follows : — " In the first place, it is proposed that the patronage of a portion of the benefices in the gift of the Lord Hig-h Chancellor of England should be resigned in favour of the proposed new parishes, and the value of the advowsons applied in successive years to the erection of churches. " Should this be considered inexpedient, and the whole of the Lord Chancellor's patronage be retained, the undersigned would humbly express a hope that some other mode may be devised, by the wisdom of your Majesty's Government, for giving the Church, where her ministra- tions are needed, the fuU benefit of these resources." These Sibylline recommendations point to a scheme openly embodied in the report of a commission on the sub-division of parishes which sat last year — that the patronage of the Lord Chancellor's livings should be sold to provide a fund for church extension. Some who have signed the paper must have overlooked this fact, for I cannot think that they would ever have given their consent to such a wholesale traffic in holy things. "The overwhelming duties which now devolve upon some of the bishops (owing to the enlarged population and the happy circumstance of an increase also in the number of clergy), appear to make it desirable that there should be a corresponding increase of the Episcopate ; and if your Majesty in your wisdom should see fit to recommend such a measure, the revenue and residence of the deanery in some places might be made avail- able, where fitting circumstances concur." This paragraph is likewise very vague ; but its meaning I believe to be — indeed the reference to the residence of the 228 deans leaves no other signification possible — that all or certain of the existing deans should be invested, in their decanal capacity, with bishops' orders, with a view to assist the diocesan in the exercise of the prerogatives attached to that order in the Christian Church. This is again a sad makeshift — a delusive, an unsatisfactory, almost an irritating proffer of a substitute for what we absolutely need, and must attain, if the Church of England is ever to keep her hold as the national form of worship — many more bishops, and those resident at their cathedrals among their chapters. The pro- posal before us, it will be observed, plainly ratifies — by making the dean a deputy bishop— that non-residence of the diocesan to which, as on a former occasion I pointed out, many of our existing evils may be traced. It is observable that out of the ten prelates who have signed the address, four (or five — for I fancy that I have heard that one who has hitherto been in that category has reformed the abuse, or means to do so — live apart from their cathedrals, and that a fifth has no cathedral to live at). The plan, in short, is a revival of an attempt which was made at the Eeformation, and which soon turned out a failure in practice, and fell into desuetude — the institution of what were absurdly called par excellence "sufiragan" bishops, as if every bishop who was not a metropolitan was not a suffragan. I said that I would offer some remarks upon another schenie which has appeared in your columns, as an advertise- ment, for a Church Extension Fund in antagonism to the Papal Aggression. As the paper which I have hitherto discussed begins with a perfectly uncontrovertible assertion, so does this one — for it says that practical work is the best antagonism to the advance of the Church of Eome. But, unhappily, it strives to carry it out in the same spirit of compromise which I have been compelled to blame in the address ; and it adds another feature, which seems to me too near akin to the desire after popular effect — the sweeping into its lists, of churches started and of moneys given towards various schemes perfectly independent of it, and set on foot for local reasons merely, and without any reference to sucli a united undertaking — very possibly the enterprises and the moneys of persons who would not be over-ambitious to con- tribute to an oi'ganization on the executive of which they beheld the names of Lord John Eussell, Lord Ashley, and Mr. Colquhoun — must I add, in whose presidents they recognise the two prelates who concurred in the Gorham judgment? 229 XLVir. CATHOLICITY OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. Mat 1, 1851. The last few days have given to the world, in a con- temporary morning paper, two letters by an M.A. — apparently the precursors of others — intended to reply to the statements of the Catholicity of the English Church contained in my letters to you. Written, as they are, in very temperate language, they show — under a veil of ultra-Protestantism, so flimsy that their author at last seems scarcely able to keep up the form of wearing it — the unmistakeable Kneaments of a Roman Catholic* To the first, entitled " Secessions," I have but few words to say. It endeavours to establish that, in asserting that defects in the administration of the Church of England had driven persons from her pale, I was mistaken — and that, on the contrary, the cause of their withdrawal was a conviction that the Church of England cannot stand the test of Church principles. I did not, of course, mean — I should have been simply devoid of comprehension if I had done so — that the seceders could have given any other interpretation of their own act. My object in writing was to trace the mental origin of the conduct which needed the interpretation afforded by such a conviction, which, while I hold it to be founded upon error, I owned in my letter to be a fact. " M.A." only proves the more incontestibly the existence of this fact, and therefore establishes the need of that letter of mine, which, in all deference to him, I must submit ought rather to be read as the sequel than as the prelude of his communication. One word more about the reductio ad absurdum to which he fancies he has brought the assumption that " Church principles" — i.e. sacramental principles — are "the true principles of the Church of England" — reasoning from the secession of those who have striven, as they think fruitlessly, to hold them in the Church of England. If such an argu- ment, drawn from individuals, be worth anything, it must be worth much more when nations can be brought into it ; and " M.A." would thus be found laying down that, because from * M. A. has written again to his paper to say he is not a Roman Cathohc. I can orHy say that he ought, according to his own theories, to he one. Having made, as in honour hound, this statement, I leave my letter as I wrote it, the first and genuine impression of M. A. 230 their anxiety for " Bible principles," Sweden, Denmark, North Germany, &c. &c., left the Church of Eome, therefore " Bible principles are brought to a reductio ad absurdum in the Church of Eome. They necessitate secession ; they cannot, therefore, be the principles of that Church, The correctness of the logic whereby this conclusion is come to is unimpeachable." This is, I assure you, a quotation from " M.A.," with the substitution of only two words — " Bible" for " Church," and " Rome" for " England." I now turn to " M.A." 's letter of yesterday morning, which appears as " The Tractarian Theory, II." I may remark upon the ingenuity with which the writer, preparatory to demolishing— as he assumes that he will do — the High Anglican interpretation of religious phenomena, annihilates a fortiori the Low Church claims by a comparison with the other system, of which he says that "a few of the latter" (High Churchmen) " are more than a match for the hosts of the former"- — and, a little lower down, that " the Low Church clergy are afraid and ashamed to meet the Catholic by the Protestant theory." How far these candid avowals will make "M.A." popular with those over whom he claims to throw his Jilgis, is his affair and theirs, not mine. Having cleared away his incumbrances, viz., the entire Low Church party, "M.A." lays down this proposition: — " Nothing but the fullest assertion of Protestant doctrine can repel not only the spurious Anglican, but the only legitimate form' — Roman Catholicism. It can be met only by a direct counter-declaration of principle. The CathoHe theory of the Church is either wholly false or wholly true." In the last sentence I fully concur. Of the rest, I assert that it displays the tendency which is the peculiar charac- teristic of the entire communication — that which logicians call petitio principii, and ordinary men " begging the question." " The Catholic theory of the Church is either wholly true or wholly false," says " M.A." I fully acquiesce. "M.A." then virtually adds — "the Catholic theory is the Eoman Catholic one — your Anglo-Catholic theory is a mutilated inconsistency, compacted of shreds of truth and shreds of falsehood." My answer is — You at least only give your ipse dixit for this assertion ; and, as long as you only give me that, I will only give you my ipse dixit in return — that I conceive the Anglican theory to be true, primitive, and consistent — the Western theory of former ages, and that of the entire Eastern Church until this day — for many centuries the theories of West and East united. 231 " M.A." impugns inferentially the truth of the Anglican theory, in the remarks upon the Reformation with which the remainder of his letter is filled. Here, as elsewhere, reigns the same facility for begging the question. The Roman theory granted, the English Reformation was a simple act of rebellion. The Roman theory not granted, but that of the Apostolic succession of all bishops from the co-equal Twelve assumed instead, the English Church has a locus standi— it may, or it may not, to external eyes, make good its claims. Of course we think it can ; but I am desirous, on my side, to beg nothing. This was the position which "M.A." ought to have assumed in the first instance ; he assumes it in the second, after he has raised a prejudice against the English Church, by his talk about "spurious Anglican Catholicism." And, having so pre-occiipied his ground, he closes discussion in a string of interrogatories so framed as, in his eyes, only to admit of a negative response. He triumphantly asks whether the Reformation was the deliberate and voluntary act of the English clergy — he appeals to the act of submission, forgetful of the limiting phrase with which the compliance of the clergy was accompanied, " as far as the law of Christ allows" — and he ventures to say that the Prayer Book never received the sanction of Convocation — as if there never had been a 1662 ; and with such arguments as these he claims to have demolished the Anglican pretensions. I will answer him not in my words, but in those of a Roman Catholic — of Mr. Pugin, in his late striking pamphlet, the " Earnest Address." In quoting him, of course, I only quote his facts. Touching that convocation which gave to Henry VIII. the title which (although "M.A." avoids telling us so) Queen Victoria has not — which no sovereign ever bore save Henry Vlll. and Edward VI. and Mary — that title under and by which the latter annulled the work of the former two — supremum caput, of the English Church — Mr. Pugin tells us: — " It was in a solemn convocation, when England's churchmen were assembled, a reverend array of bishops and abbots and dignitaries, in orphreyed copes and jewelled mitres. Every great cathedral, every diocese, every abbey, was duly represented in that important synod." Again, we learn that after the introduction of the verna- cular Prayer Book — " Still, it must be observed that the old clergy retained their Kvings, with comparatively few exceptions." So much for the continuity of the English Church. As 232 an external corporation it clearly did continue. This " M.A." cannot deny. He denies that it retained its internal virtue of Catholicity — and he appeals, as an inferential argument in favour of his position, to the secondary causes which led to the English Eeformation. To any expression of detestation of Henry VIII.'s character which he may utter, he will find a response in me, and I should think in every candid man of every denomination. But when he has vituperated to his heart's content Henry VIII. and those corrupt motives which I believe actuated him when he wrote his " Assertio Septem Sacramentorum," and when he split with Eome — when he wedded Catharine of Arragon, and when he divorced her — in every action, in short, of his most inconsistent life — he has not advanced one jot towards proving or disproving the Anglican or the Eoman theory, unless he can moreover show that it is the rule of God's providential governance of the world that only good men and good motives can concur towards fulfilling his will. And if " M.A." will tell me so, I will not argue — I will only write down four names of those who helped to bring about the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, or took a part in it when it had occurred, and all of whom I fancy were found on one side. These names shall be — Alexander VI., Tetzel, Philip II., and Catherine de Medicis. I quit with pleasure this argttmentum ad Jiominem, which nothing but the line which " M.A." has taken could have driven me into. There were men great, wise, and good upon, his side. But Henry VIII. is no more an argument against cur Catholicity than Catherine de Medicis or Borgia is one against the Catholicity of Eome. The real point at issue is — granting Henry VIII.'s base- ness to the utmost, and granting the servility of his followers — has, or has not, the Church of England, in spite of him, lived so long and done such things as to vindicate the sound- ness of the principle of which he was the destined though unworthy instrument ? Putting the matter in this light — and I defy " M.A." to prove unfairness in so doing — the worse he may have been, the more it shows the innate strength of the English Church. This innate strength it is not my present object to prove. Had our body not been Catholic, but simply Crown-made and new, it never, humanly speaking,, could have produced the men of the seventeenth century — it never could have produced the revival of 1833— it never could have moved on to that coming struggle in which the watch-word is : 233 " To this, the Sacramental System — with which our own Church is so bound up that they must stand or fall together — we, my reverend brethren, will, with God's blessing, faithfully, zealously, immoveably adhere." Hoadley once, and Hampden now — synodical action quelled, and heresy rampant in high places — would have exhausted the Catholic tendencies of a governmental denomi- nation. The Ashley furor would not have seized a portion of our countrymen, for they would have had nothing to rage about. High Churchmen would not have been the objects of active persecution, but of archseological derision — for they would long ago have gone down among the dead, and the " public " in the days of our great-grandfathers would have been " satisfied." I will even go a step further, and say that no candid Anglican could think that it would have been humanly possible for the reformation of one portion of the whole Church — involving discomm union with other portions — to have taken place without producing in the process much that was wrong and sad. The essence of the Anglican theory is — that when Our Lord said that the gates of hell should not jBre«3a«7 against His Church, He must have meant that they should have great, very great, power against it, though not power to bear it down hy force (the etymology of the verb Kariax^ui^ used in the original). Thus the gates of hell may at any time compel the patent evil of renunciation of communion, as a necessary condition of avoiding other evils which we feel called upon to avoid. Such, we conclude, was the state of matters here 300 years ago ; but, while so saying, we assume that it must have been a miserable condition of things which could have com- pelled that extreme act — a long deep-seated growth of corrup- tion in the Western Church, sufficient to account for all the evils which accompanied our Reformation, though not, of course, sufficient to excuse any crimes of those who took a principal part in that event. To " M.A.'s" facts about the doings of the Tudors I oppose, therefore, the phenomenon of the perpetuity and periodical ebullition, with augmented energy each time, of the Catholic element in our Church. Against any argument which he may build upon intervening periods of torpor, I marshal the infidelity which has, under the garb of Catholicity, eaten so deep into nations of the Eoman obedience. I repudiate the (by himself) unproven assumption, that the Papal is the true Catholic theory. He may claim the early ages for his side ; but so do we, and I believe with reason — for the novel theory of development has been found necessary to meet their pheno- 234 mena. The Eastern Church we also claim — he can but ignore it, or contradict its testimony, he cannot draw it into its own argument. What he m&j say destructive of the Anglican theory, in the letter which he promises upon National Churches, remains to be seen. As yet, he has only established his own position as being a member of the Roman communion, and his hardest blows have been directed against the Low- Church element of the English body. They therefore have the choice of answering him on their own premises, of accepting his dicta — in which case they must become either Dissenters or Romanists — or of closing with the High Church theory. XLVIII. LORD JOHN RUSSELL AND THE SYNOD OF EXETER . Mat 3, 1851. This has been a memorable evening in the House of Commons, for other reasons besides the majority of fourteen against the Ministry — if the two events are not, indeed, virtually one, for every great downfall of Lord John Russell has been heralded by a recurrence of his Nemesis, a Church debate, hurried on by an inopportime question from a truculent follower, and involving the perplexed Premier in a mesh of ever augmenting inconsistencies. This evening has extorted from the unwilling lips of a Prime Minister, in the shape of Lord John Russell, and of an Attorney-General, in the shape of Sir Alexander Cockburn, the confession that the coming Synod of Exeter is not illegal, nay more, that diocesan Synods, called by the bishops themselves, without the license of the Crown, provided they do not enact canons, do not come within the restrictive provisions of the Act of Submission. The bare recital of this fact is more eloquent than many words. Our English Church has, after all, some weapons in her own armoury, if her champions dare to use them — some semblance of the life befitting a portion of the fold of Christ ; and the men who have told us this are those whose voice has hitherto been most clamorous in the lower house against her just demand for synodical action — namely, Lord John Russell and Sir Alexander Cockburn, both of whom. 235 Have this very session gone out of their way to publicly denounce the idea of the revival of Convocation. Magna est Veritas, et prevalehit. That the victory is won, no one will say ; but that a great advantage has been gained, all will acknowledge. That Lord John Russell^^compelled to make such an avowal — driven to own that he and his policy had been foiled by one whom he dislikes and dreads, not without reason, as much as he does the Bishop of Exeter — 'should seek some consolation some- where, some topic which should enable him to sit down amid the empty honours of a cheer, was only to be expected. The shape in which he cast this shallow tactic was eminently characteristic. The device was a panegyric on the Archbishop of Canterbury, involving — as Lord John Russell's panegyrics somehow always do-^a blow at some one else. Mr. Ghilders, whose interpellation had led to the confessions of the baffled officials, had quoted some expressions from the Bishop of Exeter's Pastoral, in which he had been compelled to remark somewhat severely upon the doctrine and conduct of the present Archbishop of Canterbury. These allegations, I need hardly say. Lord John Russell made no attempt to disprove ; but, putting on his most impressive manner, and his most mellow voice, he told the house — " With respect to the language which the Bishop of Exeter has used towards the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is well known that the Arch* bishop of Canterbury is a man of peculiar mildness of character and of Christian forbearance. I think it is beoailse he is a man of peculiar mildness of character, and of mell-hnown Christian forbearance, that that language has been used. I feel sure, however, that without any inters position of the Government, without any interposition of Parliament, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chief of the prelates of this realm, the Primate of all England, will so conduct himself as to meet with tha,t g'eneral veneration which he has hitherto obtained, and that nothing that will be said against him by the Bishop of Exeter can in the least degree diminish the respect that is borne for him." This is of course as much as to say, the Bishop of Exetef is a bully^— a big boy who never dreams of thrashing any schoolfellow who he thinks can give a slap in return. The trick, as I said, took. Lord John Russell sat down, as if he were himself the persecuted Primate, and the truculent diocesan was inwardly anathematised. All this was Very well as a piece of Pariianiehtary naiim- ming — and that alone. Had any other man, woman, or child in England (whether aggrieved, according to Mr. Mangles, or not), save Lord John Russell, asserted of the 236 Bishop of Exeter, that he only dared measure his sword with those who were too peculiarly mUd and too notoriously for- bearing to reply, one might have thought him or her some- what unread in contemporaneous history — somewhat slow in deciphering character. But what shall we say of Lord John Eussell asserting this ? Lord John Kussell is not— I believe I may assert this, without hazarding a very rash remark — the ideal of the most peculiar mildness, and the moat noto- rious forbearance, even in the eyes of his warmest adherents. Lord John Eussell has been known to meet sharpness with something not unlike the same— and yet, in spite of this, in spite of his insinuation of this evening, there is no man in England who has come more severely under the Bishop of Exeter's lash than Lord John Russell. I do not allude to a certain Devonshire election now veiled in the shades of history. I will come at once to our own days — to the events of little more than three years back, when Lord John was already Premier, and had recommended TiTi Hampden for the see of Hereford. At that time appeared a letter : the author — the Bishop of Exeter ; the person ad- dressed — Lord John, Skimming this rapidly, I read such sentences as these, " My lord, if the conduct of the Minister of George I. on that scandalous occasion be not adopted by you as a precedent, show that you repudiate it" — which he did not show — and " My lord, I own that I am mortified at finding myself obliged to answer such transparent sophistry as this ;" and finally, in the concluding paragraph of the postscript, " I must also venture to suggest a question, whether this be the happiest mode of testifying that 'charity' which, I doubt not, your lordship feels, but of which you deplore ' the sad want in others,' or of allaying those ' feelings of bitterness' which your lordship, in common with all good men, must sincerely deprecate?" I suppose we are bound to " think that it was because Lord John Russell is a man of peculiar mildness of character, and of well-known Christian forbearance, that that language was used." 237 XLIX. THE CHURCH AT HOME AND IN THE COLONIES. Mat 6, 1851. I DO not remember ever to have seen so pregnant an exem- plification of our actual ecclesiastical condition, mysteriously combined as it is of good and evil, of hope and fear — of terrible practical corruption, and marvellous and sudden reformation — as that presented in your paper of this morning, in two articles entitled respectively, " Church Discipline in Norfolk," and the " Church in Australasia." Kemote as these places are — the antipodes of the physical world — they cannot be more separated in locality than they are in the spirit of the ecclesiastical regimen of the one same body — the English branch of the Catholic Church — " established" in this land by law, but little more than existing in Australasia. What I have to say of the Norfolk side of the picture may be comprehended in a very few words. The whole affair respecting Mr. Bland is so outrageous, so far beyond the wildest dream of anarchy, that there is but one word which I can employ to describe i^— incredible ; and yet it is true. More I cannot say of the thing itself. As to its consequences, it clearly gives episcopal sanction, if the scandal remain unre- dressed, to secession to any dissent, even to Socinianism, on the part of Churchmen — and of course therefore to the Church of Eome ; while it cannot fail to afford a colourable pretext for desertion to those who think they see the signs of hopeless decadence amongst us, which the dignitaries to whom the neglect is chargeable can scarcely. visit with much severity of language. With such an example before us of the practical results of the actual system — Mr. Bland, for such an offence, so easily let off—other clergymen, for so little, so hardly visited — there can be but one opinion among dispassionate men of the sys- tem which refuses to our Church her own goveriiment and her own corrective discipline. How those in power can justify to themselves the continuance of the actual restric- tions, is a mystery of conscience on which I had much rather not enter. Gladly do I traverse half the earth to welcome the growth of self-government in the young Australasian branch of our Church. The document which you have reprinted this morning is one pregnant with important results, far beyond the absolilte value of the actual accomplishment. 238 Viewed as a lawyer might view it, it is the procedure of six men — a mere joint paper of six Bishops having no power or delegation to act conjointly — a document, in one word, of the same nature as that lately put forward by a private meeting of prelates at home. But if we regard the subject-matter of its provisions, we find at once the difference between the. two productions. The English paper was meant as the substitute for — the Australasian, as the first step towards— recognised synodical action. One document is sedative in its tone and its provisions— the other progressive : one claims autocratic •power to existing bishops ; the other anticipates the day when individual action shall be merged in corporate representation : one assumes the existing method of episcopal nomination as if it were unexceptionable ; the other ventilates reform in that very particular. If these be not distinctions between the twO ■ documents, I do not know in what a distinction can possibly lie. This paper does not strive to " satisfy the public ;" this paper does not endeavour to confound between "general practice" and "common use" — 'it is the voice of "honest churchmen and faithful bishops" — to borrow a phrase of one of our home bishops — who dare to say that synodical action is the need of the Church, to be won for her at any expenditure of toil on the part of her children. They dare to face even episcopal fallibility, recommending a form of proceeding for the deposition of a heterodox bishop— they hazard the desira- bility of a recommendation to a vacant bishopric from the provincial synod being favourably attended to at home— they chalk out a scheme of synodical government at once provincial and diocesan, and with singular felicity of conception they recommend, alongside of the clerical synod, a lay convention, to legislate concurrently with it on matters affecting the tem- poralities of the Church. In this scheme and in the choice of names of the two bodies, we may, I believe, recognise the draft of first principles of constitutional government, and of the acknowledgment of the respective rights of the Christian laity and the Christian priesthood, which must and will react at home, in that reform of the entire English communion, between which and complete disintegration she and her goverhraental controllers must^sooner than the latter at least anticipate^make their election. In the provisions, disciplinary, ritual, educational, and missionary, of which the chief matter of the docilttient is composed, I see abundant cause to be thankful. One portion, indeed, there is of the minutes, which candour forbids me to slur over, which will cause a pang to many a Churchman 239 here — the statement, I mean, which one BuiJragan felt himself compelled (on this one point separating from his brethren) to put forward with his single name attached — the statement, I mean, of the Bishop of Melbourne respecting Holy Baptism. Wounded as our Church now is in this particular — the immediate cause, as we are told, of this very statement of the Metropolitan and his four suffragans — it would have been the deepest consolation to have welcomed the assent of the whole episcopate of the entire province of Australasia to the full Catholic faith of the one baptism for the remission of sins. But although this cannot be, we have yet great cause to be thankful that only one signature was withheld ; and even as far as this signature is concerned — remembering, as we do, the school in which that good and conscientious man, as I have a pleasure in calling him, the Bishop of Melbourne, was unhappily trained — it is gratifying to see him cast his view of the doctrine of Holy Baptism in the language which he chose — so different from that of the Bishop of Winchester at home, who calls a denunciation of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as a Popish dogma — zeal for the purity of the faith. I feel that I am violating no confidence in saying that I have heard from a private, but authentic source, that the conference with his brother prelates had great effect upon liis mind in elevating his own views upon the subject — a wonder- ful practical argument in favour of the benefit of synodical decisions. One or two other points require a passing comment. I have heard the somewhat quaint announcement that no clergyman can be suspected of holding opinions at variance with the sound teaching of the Church in consequence of his complying with the Rubric respecting the Offertory, blamed,, as wanting in the courage which ought to have prompted an explicit enforcement of this undoubted, and herein acknow- ledged, rubrical regulation. There is, without dispute, the appearance of weakness in the statement. My own notion is, that it is an instance of " irony" in the classical significa- tion of the word. Still, however, "irony" is hardly admissible in a document otherwise so grave as that before me, and I would have wished that it had run in this fashion — " so far from blaming this conformity, we desire its general adoption." In the " Eules fcfr Service on Saints' Days falling on Sun- days" (a frequent difficulty to our clergy at home), the bishops seem to me to have clearly committed an oversight when, in ordering the preference, on all but very great days, of the Saints'-day services, they state that lessons from the Apocrypha Q 240 should form an exception. It is surely manifest that our Church, in her regulations about lessons, does not draw a distinction between the Canonical and the Apocryphal Scrip- tures. Indeed, there is one fact, which cannot have occurred to the bishops, which is conclusive on this very head— that the first lessons for the principal of saints' days, those for All Saints' Day, are taken from the Apocrypha. Consequently their rule involves the inconsistency, that if the commemo- ration of an individual saint, the fu'st lessons for which were not taken from the Apocrypha, fall on a Sunday, they would have the preference — while the commemoration not of one, but of all saints, would be pro tanto superseded. The edifica- tion to be drawn from the particular chapter, was assuredly the mind of our Church in the selection, and the lessons for All Saints' Day are peculiarly appropriate. But Australasia is not the only bright feature of the day. Toronto, also, in another new continent, thousands of miles from home, still further distant from Sydney, has uttered its yoicG. This very day I have read the summons issued by the Bishop to his clergy and selected laity to meet him in joint deliberation, which— albeit on one topic only, and that affecting the temporalities of the Church alone — is yet, as a first step, most interesting and most hopeful, and still more so because a imion of Churchmen in his diocese, acting under his patronage, have taken their stand under the restoration of synodical self-government at home and in the colonies — especially, of course, their own — as the one great human hope of our Church. There is something to me almost awful in the combination of the last few days. The other day the Bishop of Exeter stood alone in a resolve of the deepest moment, a iife-or-death endeavour for our beleaguered and beti'ayed Church. Now see the difference. The machinations of his enemies at home cannot detect a flaw in his enterprise ; and, from the ends of the world, the sound is mysteriously rolled back. Tlie Antipodes, America, without concert with him — the former without the possibility, for many months from this, for a year from the time they did it, of learning his determination — re-echo the same voice. To us in England, to the Bishop of Exeter himself, contemporaneously with each other and with him — " One deep calleth imto another ;" and the joint munnur of the rising roar of many waters combines together in England, during the initiatory days of the Exeter Synod, to give joy to the bold and courage to tlie timid. All this must have its providential import. The valiant suffragan 241 attaches Bis metropolitan of unfaithfulness to the rights of the Church and the purity of the Catholic faith — responsive to him the wide waters bear the judgment of the youngest province of the English communion, Australasia — the future seat of Anglo-Saxon empires, the young power of the new Europe of the southern world — the habitation, it may be, of some future metropolitan of Sydney, who may hear himself saluted alterius orfns Papa, but not witli the sorrowful import which led Dr. Sumner to be startled with this high traditionary compliment to his ancient throne. I do not believe that our rulers— Lord John Russell or Archbishop Sumner — will realize this crisis. I pray they may. Our action, at least, is decided. The summons of the Synod of Exeter — the Australasian declaration — the determi- nation of Toronto — all concurring, have providentially combined to render it morally and prudentially impossible for us to cease until the liberty of the English Church is guaranteed. What shape the struggle may take — how far the " Establishment" may be affected — is their care — and all the consequences which may unhappily ensue, their responsibility. L. SIR BENJAMIN HALL AND LORD JOHN RUSSELL. Mat 13, 1851. AsAiN a question from Sir Benjamin Hall, and again an answer from Lord John Eussell. The question was encyclo- psedic, comprising the entire English episcopate — and yet precise enough to take in the doings of an individual member of that body. The theological baronet, with the manner of a schoolboy hurrying over his morning task, moved for infor- mation as to the result of the letter of Sir George Grey to the Archbishop, and he was curious to know whether the Bishop of London was preparing an appeal to the law against the alleged " histrionics." Lord John, with a curtness heretofore reserved for other men and other views, could not answer the first question, and would not answer the second. The scene took less than five minutes, and it was with great difBculty that the House could be persuaded to afford decent attention to the statement of the Prime Minister. Q 2 248 So ends the anti-Church campaign of the present session. Such is the language now of the author of the Durham letter. One thing alone is still unchanged since that production appeared — Lord John remains the Premier. As for the rest, the paraphernalia of popularity — the " unworthy sons/' the " verge of the precipice," the " mummeries of superstition " — are gone, or broken, or sold, or lost, or buried in forgotten cellars, like the used-up properties of an unsuccessful melo- drama. The piece of serio-comic bathos, and many other events of the last six months, are enough to show that, while we have very much indeed to make us careful and even fearful, yet there is likewise abundant reason to hold on with a firm heart, and with a confident determination that right shall have its own. Six months ago the land was torn in pieces by tumultu- ous meetings. The Papal Aggression was, from one county to another, made the stalking-horse for violent and ignorant attacks on the true principles of the Church of England, and on conscientious compliance with her prescribed practices, wounded as she had so lately been by the Gorham judgment, and apparently doomed to still further detriment. Inflamed by the uproar of their own shoutingj the speakers fancied all was theirs, and that their antagonists had been scared away by an artillery of inarticulate noise and unsubstantial dust. Then came a dark period, when hearts quailed where courage was wanted most — when the clamorous were mistaken by panic-stricken rulers for the " public," and their " satisfac- tion" accordingly decreed — the unhappy episode of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, was played through — the name-roll of the Lydian Address was built up with all the arts and craft of the most consummate petition-mongering — and an attack on the doctrine and the ritual of the Church was ventilated on every side as a probable and popular escape-valve for an entangled Ministry. The hints and facts which crept out — some here, some there — postponed this danger. The threat- ened sequel of proceedings against the impugned Churches in other quarters, mysteriously sank into profound oblivion ; and a document which was, in its intended shape, menacing, became at the very birth empty where it was not self- contradictory, and is already one of the things which have been. Still there was a gap. The evil had been averted ; but the positive good had not been tendered in its place. What was not the genuine voice of the Church of England had been 243 silenced, but her true utterance had yet to be heard from authority. At this moment a document appeared, via prima salutis, neither empty nor self-contradictory, but deep and grave, and irresistible in its logic — the pastoral of one Bishop — and the ancient faith of the Christian Church found an uncompromising expression in the statements of one whose official position compelled a hearing from the most unwilling. Thanks to the same Prelate, the long-lost power of synodical action is in part restored, and Lord John Eussell and Sir Alexander Cockburn have been dragged forward to speak its prologue. Finally, Australasia has testified, with a coinci- dence which seems more than human, at the moment when succour and support were most needed and were least expected, and her testimony stands unrefuted. Deep reason all this for thankfulness. High Churchmen are not expelled. High Churchmen are not quelled. High Churchmen — brought more closely into sympathy by the common wrong and the common danger — with a cause more clear and strong than ever, a leader in a position such as no leader of theirs ever before could have, and a line of opera- tions which has shaped itself by providential workings — -now stand the only men, the only party, uncompromised by the opening of the floodgates of violence — bold and erect because they have nothing to be ashamed of — confident because they know that the truth is on their side — tolerant because they know that they have suffered and not ofi"ered injury. The vindication of the sacramental system of the Church, the restoration of our own free government — things which were always duties, and are now necessities — are every day more and more possibilities. It will be our fault if they do not become actualities. The inference I draw from all this is, not that the time has come to sit down as, if the fight were done and the meeds of victory to be distributed — far otherwise. We are, indeed, stronger and more united than we were before the crisis — and we see the goal before us. But rough is the path that leads up to it. The antagonists who were so brawling then are still about us — the National Club — the Lydian " Defence Committee" — the impugners of the Prayer Book — the rioters of Pimlico. It is not likely, though they may dread us more than they did then, that they like us any better. By patience, by confidence, by vigilance, by determining not to abate one hair's breadth of principle to fear or expediency, we have gone through these critical months with marvellous siiccess. Let us hold fast to this conduct, and we are safe — 244 but let us think security already attained, and all is lost again. On us it depends whetlier this conjuncture is the com- mencement of the emancipation of the English Church, or its last decisive vital struggle. Exeter, Australasia — everything calls upon us— the High Churchmen, the "large party" — to be wise and to be bold, to be patient and to be unflinching. If we hold back, or waste our easy valour in loud talking, we shall deserve the discomfiture which will then assuredly over- whelm us and the Church of England together. LI. BISHOPS AND PEOPLE. ' May 22, I85I. I HAVE had occasion recently to call your attention to the remarkable phenomenon of the (to us) simultaneous protests of the entire cluster of colonies forming the ecclesiastical province of Australasia, and of the diocese of Toronto, con- curring with that of the old English see of Exeter, in favour of the rightful liberty of the old English Church. A daily contemporary of yours has most appropriately called atten- tion to another quarter whence a similar utterance has pro- ceeded — the diocese of Nova Scotia — where, some little time ago, at a meeting of the clergy and laity, presided over by the Archdeacon during the vacancy of the see, it was resolved : — " That it be an instruction to the committee of correspondence to men- tion to his Grace the Ai'chbishop of Canterbury a feeling among church- men in this diocese, that some measures be adopted for securing to them some voice in the nomination of their chief pastors after the present vacancy shall have been filled up." To say that this additional testimonial, swelling the rising cry, is very good and very seasonable, is almost a weak way of putting it ; but I should hardly have known what more to say but for the remarks which accompany the announcement of it in the paper in question. In these remarks, taken by themselves, there is very much in "which I most cordially agree, and I am sincerelj'^ glad to find it so ; for tiiat article makes its statements openly and calmly, and in a way which 245 may lead to those explanations of what one side really thinks which are as absolutely necessary to the other with a view towards a fair fight as towards an honourable peace. Differ- ing, then, as I do, -^o^o ccelo with many things which that journal has contained — protesting most strongly as I have done, and do again, against certain dicta which it has from time to time put forth, particularly one in which the word " figment," not unaccompanied with a strong adjective, is found — I beg for the present to dismiss all those feelings, and to meet it as a friend with whom one has many difi'er- ences, but in whom one yet discovers a vein of sympathy which truth, fairness, and charity demand of me to follow up and cherish. To sum up as briefly as I possibly can — when the writer in question states that " the Church is badly administered on account of the absence of lay co-operation," and when he says " that since Ohurchmanship has ceased to be a necessary qualification for the ofiice of a representative. Parliament has lost some of its fitness as a mediator, or controller in the affairs of the Church," I heartily and cordially agree with him ; and so, generally speaking, does the whole body of High Churchmen. To his first proposition Low Churchmen may also subscribe ; but to his second, he will not find among them that unanimity of assent with which he will be welcomed among High Churchmen; for Low Churchmen, not feeling the corporate character of the Church, as their opponents do, are very apt to lean upon the support of what they feel to have united strength — the secular legislature. I repea,t it, in both of these propositions High Churchmen, as a body, cordially concur. One High Churchman the writer has quoted — the eminent non-juring bishop Brett. I will give him another, who is at this moment occupying no little of public attention — to pass over the High Church Prelates of Sidney, Newcastle, Adelaide, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Toronto ; I mean the Bishop of Exeter, who, in his speech made at his visitation at Exeter, said, relative to his synod : — " There is one point more in relation to that meeting. I should rejoice if we were to be assisted, if there could be some mode suggested by which We could have the assistance — the presence, at least, of the laity. Doubt- less, we are not at liberty to transfer to the laity the responsibility which belongs specially to us who have received the commission to preach the Word and teacli the Gospel truth. But the laity would support us. The suggestions of the laity might be useful ; their concurrence on all occa- sions is what we most earnestly desire ; but then the question of their admission is beset with difficulties. Is it suggested that the admission 246 should be made tlie subject of election? How is this possible, even among professing members of the Church ? Then should we invite individuals ? The admission of individuals might be open to insinuation on the part of enemies that it was a packed meeting; that we had packed an assembly which we called the meeting of a diocese. You will, I am sure, see that the difficulties are very great. Yet, great as they are, I should rejoice if any suggestion can be made by which, when we meet, we may have the benefit of the laity, and the expression of their opinion, if it should seem fit ; but certainly, I should say, not the suffrages of the laity on any point of doctrine." Here you have the following positions unequivocally laid down — that the Bishop feels that, in a properly constituted Church, the laity have a constitutional place ; but that, such place not having been yet formally canvassed and its limits defined, he feels that, in a council of war, called under an emergency to testify to a specific doctrine — such as his first synod will in truth be — when the difficulties will be so great, he cannot organise it in all its completeness, but must be content with a safe instalment. That instalment is a clergy synod, merely doing the special work of a clergy synod ; but not meant — far otherwise — to foreclose the question of lay co-operation. I am well aware that in offering this explana- tion many persons — perhaps your contemporary — may sus- pect me of sophistry or sharp practice. I know, as well as he does, that the aspect of High Ohurchmanship which I have just presented is not the popular one — not the one, for instance, which he is in the habit of laying before his readers. A main reason that it is not so is, I seriously believe, the unrighteousness of High Churchmen of a former generation, who have bequeathed to us a perfect California of odium, which it is our plain duty to face, and facing, to meet. The natural history of this unhappy state of Church matters in the last century I have no room to analyse now. The fact of its having been most unhappy is on all sides conceded ; but, in some extenuation of the shortcomings of the then High Churchmen, I may interpose the fact that the honest political convictions of their immediate predecessors had led to their decimation — and from decimation, by which they lost some of their best men, to their nearly universal deterioration. Some there were, like Bishop Wilson, who stood out against the growing evils ; but the majority succumbed to the world ; and the result of their treachery was that piety unchurched itself, as in the memorable instance of Wesley, who began as a very High Churchman, and only let go his first convictions when he saw the Church deride and repulse his zeal for souls. Many more, without formally 247 leaving the Church, abandoned her in spirit, by abandoning their belief in that sacramental system of hers, which, whether " monstrous figment" or not (I, of course, unhesitatingly say "not"), is, as a truth or as a figment, the informing spirit of the Book of Common Prayer. The Church, in abandoning her love for souls, let slip her moral means of protesting against the silencing of her synodical powers — which loss (incurred by an efibrt of then rare zeal) reacted, on the other hand, against the possibility of self-reform ; and with this loss she forfeited also most of her apparatus of corrective discipline — while what was left of it became either useless or actually mischievous to her, by the unhappy appendix of civil dis- ability, attaching to what ought to have been in its nature purely spiritual. Hence has come a state of disorganisation almost without a parallel in the history of any religious community. Syno- dical action is needful — and in that synodical action the laity must have their place. If the Church could call her laity her own — if she could be as sure that they all held her fundamen- tal doctrines, as the Wesleyan commonwealth is sure that Wesleyans hold their code of faith — if she could be as sure as the Wesleyan commonwealth is that she had had the means of applying corrective discipline of a purely internal and spiritual description — no way civil and no way fiscal — to those of whose steadfastness of belief she had just cause of mistrust — and if she could make participation in spiritual privileges as much the correlative of ecclesiastical privileges as the Wesleyan commonwealth can do — if, I say, she could do all these things, the knot would be untied, at once and for ever. Biit such things cannot be done for many a day, I fear ; all things concur to make the exploit superhuman — " Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra." The remains of a state of things when Church meant State — when nonconformity was rebellion, and Parliament the lay synod — meet us at every turn; and in the meanwhile we cannot even get a patient hearing for what we really mean. Men will obstinately continue to believe that we are hug^ng the chains which we are striving to throw off, and to fancy that we wish to employ powers for trampling on their independence which we feel to be the livery of a slavery and not the insignia of a tyranny. When we write of the Church, her privileges, and her powers, in glowing and affectionate language, they think at once of our "vested share" in the Establishment. When we laud ideal episcopacy, they conjure 248 up coaches and wigs, nepotism and fines upon renewal, while our thoughts were far away in days when to be a Christian was to be despised of all men— when to be a bishop, was to stand in hourly risk of the rack and the wild beasts of the circus. Such a portentous misunderstanding cannot, however, always last ; our views and our claims cannot be always misstated and mistaken. Hampered we are, indeed, in our desire for lay emancipation, from the lack of a really Church laity for whom to win this emancipation. Consequently we are bound at first to press for things which, to such writers as your contemporary, seem secondary — such as guarantees for the election of sound bishops ; well knowing all along that sound bishops will make sound laymen — laymen with whom and for whom we can fight for synodical liberty. There is also (I do not wish to blink any difficulty) a clear inaptness of appreciation, on the part of latitudinarian Churchmen, of our jealousy for the oneness of the " One Faith," as simply a duty we owe to God — not connected with temporal afi'airs. If they realize it, they have a difficulty in believing that this jealousy is, and is intended by us to be, quite consistent with confirming to all those who do not agree with us all the civil privileges which we enjoy in the common State — -and all the ecclesiastical privileges in their denomination which we may enjoy in ours. Still even now we can do something. You remember that you printed two or three days since a petition emanating from the South Church Union, in favour of gua- ranteed freedom to chapters to reject an unsound nomination to a bishopric, and of the guaranteed right to oppose, upon just cause shown, the confirmation of a suspected prelate. The latter prayer is distinctly a claim for " lay co-operation" — for the bond Jide confirmation of the bishop involves the just and constitutional right of all men — lay as well as clerical — to take due and orderly means to oppose the intrusion of a false shepherd over them. Witness a very recent confir- mation — that of the Bishop of Manchester. This was opposed by a layman — who of course gained nothing by his move, and indeed suffered, for having made it, in a court of justice ; but still he testified to the inalienable privileges of the Christian laity, and he unconsciously afibrded to us the most unambiguous evidence of what will be the bearing and eSect of that which we claim. In very truth the Christian Church is one ; and, being one, she can have but one interest, the interest of the great body, each member of it once baptized, now a communicant — all separated indeed by Divine constitution into different 249 classes— some bishops, some presbyters, some ministers in sacred things, some laity— each class with its work before it, which it has to do, and not any other — but all conducing to the one end— "the edifying of the body of Christ." In such a Church— the pure and undivided Catholic Church- there can be no clashing interests, no clergy party and laity party. All and each are One as nothing else on earth can ever be^ " One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism." LII. THE TROUBLES OF THE CHURCH, AND THEIR REMEDY. Mat 30, 1851. Uneventful in novelties of very striking importance aa the ecclesiastical annals of the last fortnight have been, they yet present, as your paper for the last few days indicates, various matters bearing upon our actual ecclesiastical condi- tion. First, I must notice a meeting, of which you give a report this morning, which was held in Freemason's Hall, by a party of Lydians of the extreme left, for the promulgation of a scheme of Church reform, intended to eradicate distinc- tive Church doctrines from the Prayer-book. In that pro- ceeding various persons, as yet unknown to fame, took prominent parts, and delivered themselves of sentiments, in which the most remarkable feature was the hardihood — not to call it effrontery, or want of principle — with which positive disobedience to the express orders of the Church on the part of clergymen — " men eating the bread of the Church," in tliat slang of the day which they themselves are so fond of hurling at those who differ from them — was quoted as an heroic and praiseworthy thing. Further than this, the meet- ing, in itself, was not very wonderful in any respect. The talk seems to have been of a most ordinary kind, and the talkers are not those to whom we have been accustomed to look as leaders of the Low Church section. Whether they be the pilot engines of more distinguished men, or merely an officious clique of self-constituted marplots, who are not patient enough to wait for "that organization of which the world should know nothing," of which Mr. Power spoke to Mr. Wray's friend, I, of course, cannot guess. At present 250 the fact of such a meeting having taken place is chiefly noticeable as a warning to us to be continuously watchful, and as an irrefragable exemplification of the grievous confu- sion into which all discipline has fallen, when a body of clergymen could gather together as these have done — say what they did — and then return home with, I conclude, a moral certainty that they will never hear a word from their bishops of such a dereliction of the first principles of obedience, as calling, in the words of one of the speakers — a beneficed clergyman — the formularies of the Church an "evil" and a " cankerworm." Nor can we here forget how Mr. Bland, that "shining light" of Norwich, would have apparently been left in undisturbed and guaranteed possession of a church from which he sallied to vindicate the cause of Socinian dogma, but for the reclamations of one of your correspondents. Such things happen all around us and continually — seldom in such flagrant and monstrous shapes, but in the germ, very often indeed ; and then some men, in despair about our Church, fly off to Rome ; and there are rumours of wonderful episcopal vigilance to check such secessions, and it does not check them ; for it avoids going to the root of the evil — and so the evil is ever rankling. One remedy alone for this miserable state of things exists — the action of the Church herself in her lawful synods — a remedy allowed by the constitution, dictated by common sense, directly opposed by two — only two — classes ; those who will not allow the Church her remedy, and those who are afraid to do so. To the former I have nothing to say — argu- ment would be wasted upon them ; to the latter I appeal to the spectacle which has been, within the last few days, enacted in the northern capital. There are two simultaneous gather- ings have been taking place — the one graced by the patronage of a titled representative of Royalty, and inaugurated with the pageantry of hereditary ceremonial ; the other destitute of all these glittering appendages, but illustrated by the enthusiasm of a thronging multitude. These gatherings were the General Assemblies of the two communities into which the old Scotch Kirk has split. The first, as your report of yesterday informs us, busied itself with a pains- taking trial and righteous censure of a minister, who had oifended, not against doctrine, nor against ecclesiastical disci- pline, but against social order ; the other told its voluntarily subscribed funds by tens of thousands. With such apparent causes provocative of mischief— two bodies so near alike in almost everything — so equally ba- 251 lanced in numbers— enjoyed synodical action at one time and in the same city — what disturbance, what breach of peace has occurred? All very well know, none at all. Then, I ask, what curse hangs over our Established Church in England that it may not — constituted as it is with checks and counter- checks, which neither of those bodies enjoy — exercise the same synodical action which the Established and the Free Kirk of Scotland make their own, first by use, and then by the absence of abuse ? Such is the plea of common sense ; but your columns of this very morning contain another argument as strong of its sort in confirmation of our claim. It is comprised in a petition presented by the Earl Nelson to her Majesty, at yesterday's levee — a petition deliberately adopted at the great meeting held last year, in consequence of the Gorham judgment. This petition records the fact of the standing promise of the Sovereign contained in the declaration prefixed to the Thirty-nine Articles and, as the usual practice, bound up with all our Prayer-books. " That out of our princely care, that the churchmen may do the work which is proper unto them, the bishops and clergy, from time to time in Convo- cation, upon their humble desire, shall have licence, under our broad seal, to deliberate of and to do all such things as, being made plain by them, and assented unto by us, shall concern the settled continuance of the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England now established, from which we will not endure any varying or departing in the least degree." Who can say that the contingency contemplated in this provision has not yet occurred? Her Majesty's advisers must full well know that it has done so. How grave, then, is the responsibility of those that take upon themselves the perilous ofiice of dealing the Church like a pack of cards — of colouring it here, uncolouring it there, and meddling with everything according to the half-forgotten reminiscences of an Edinburgh education, where one thing that might have been learnt has not been dreamed of — the fact that synodical action and an Established Church are not incompatibilities — and the lesson picked up has been obstinately, offensively, and ill-temperedly to refuse its prayer to be allowed to seek its own remedy in its own legitimate way. LETTERS CHURCH MATTERS. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE "MORNING CHRONICLE." No. VI. ' The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON : JAMES EIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1851. CONTENTS. Laity LIII. Me. Bukgess, Dr. Merle D'Aubignb, and our Old Ditikes LIV. The MEEiiifG or the National Society . LV. Geneva and England .... LVI. Archdeacon Sinclair's Conversazione . LVII. Mr. Burgess and our Old Divines LVIII. The Bishop oe .Exeter on the Rights op the ' LIX. Mr. Burgess again LX. Mr. Burgess in Conclusion LXI. Synods and Convocations LXII. Dr. Merle D'Aubigne Speaking por Himself LXIII. Dr. Merle D'Aubigne for the Last Time LXIV. Chujioh Extension and Church Sittings LXV. The Gospel of the Poor LXVI. The Debate on Convocation . Appendix to Letter LIX. VAGB 253 25!) 261 26i 266 271 273 282 287 289 293 295 303 304 309 PETTEB, llUFP, AND I'O. PlilNTEKS, CRANE COUHT, FLEET STREET. LETTERS CHFRCII MATTERS. LIII. MR. BURGESS, DR. MERLE D'AUBiaNE, AND OUR OLD DIVINES. Jttne 2, 1851. I HAVE more than once had occasion of late to point out with satisfaction the signs around us of the severity of the storm through which we have passed having lulled, and while I have done so, I have never failed to add some monitory- word of caution to those who might be tempted to relapse into dangerous self-confidence. Your paper of yesterday justifies me in my cautions, containing as it does documents which prove how much, even now, we have to bufi'et with. I refer to the communications, headed by one from the Rev. R. Burgess, and illustrated with letters of the Bishop of London and of a committee of the Foreign Aid Society, signed by Lord Oholmondeley, and fourteen other names, inclusive of Lord Ashley, Mr. Colquhoun, and Ms. Burgess himself. The upshot of these various documents in French, in English, and in the language of Archdeacon Baggesen, is to establish an entente cordiale, such as has not hitherto existed between our Church and the " Reformed " communities of the Con- tinent. I use the word "Reformed" intentionally, in its foreign antagonism to " Protestant" or " Lutheran;" for M. K 2 254 Monod, who will not accept the invitation, and M. Duby, Dr. Merle D'Aubigne, and Archdeacon Baggesen, who do accept it, are all " Reformed," i.e., Calvinists. Of the general bearing of this movement, I shall have to say something before I conclude this letter. But I must first bespeak your attention a little at length to an argument ■which is hinted by the Bishop — blandly expounded by the Marquis— jubilantly proclaimed by Dr. Merle D'Aubigne, and at length fairly thrown at you by Mr. Burgess — neither more nor less than that this joint action of Mr. Burgess, and Lord Ashley, and Mr. Colquhoun, with the Geneva of this day, is a legitimate fulfilment of the views and practices of Laud, and Bramhall, of Usher, and Cosin. Grateful as I am to Lord Ashley and Mr. Colquhoun and Dr. Merle D'Aubigne for being so very anxious to pay posthumous honours to those great exemplars, whom they are now pleased to select as their rule of action — Laud, and Bramhall, and Cosin — they must allow me to demur a little to their assumption of having been successful in their method of so doing. Mr. Burgess having only offered to give you Laud's opinions upon the matter, he will excuse my forestalling him with the actual facts, which he hangs in terrorem over you. I will begin with a concession of the fact that the High Church bishops of the seventeenth century did maintain a posi- tion of distant friendship towards the Lutheran and Reformed bodies, such as does not at present exist. So much of plausi- bility is there in the plea of Lord Cholmondeley and Lord Ashley, of Mr. Burgess and Dr. Merle D'Aubigne, for voting themselves the true disciples of Laud and Bramhall. How much tliis is, I think I can soon demonstrate. The proceedings of the seventeenth century being called in evidence to justify an offshoot of the "Aggressive" panic in the nineteenth, the question at once arises — Were the circum- stances of the English Church and of those foreign bodies iden- tical at the two epochs ? Who will venture to say they are ? When those divines of ours wrote and acted, the Reformation was comparatively a new thing, just emerging from the century needed for its consummation. The foreign Protestant and Reformed bodies were still hopefully looked upon in England as communities anxious to recover the loss of Apostolic regimen, and to corroborate orthodox doctrines. Many reasons conduced to such an expectation. Luther, for example, professed much sound doctrine on the Sacraments. Calvin showed his zeal for discipline, and for that modicum of orthodoxy which he retained, by a strictness amounting to 855 cruelty; and so— not unreasonably under these circumstances —our bishops tried to make the best of the communities which they found so situated, under an hypothesis, which it was still possible to hold, that the English Church was that type of reformed Catholicity towards which they could not fail to converge. Since then two hundred years have gone by, and the real character of these communities has shown itself. Socinian in Switzerland — rationalistic and pantheistic in Germany — dead to all holiness in Sweden— they tell the tale of their own deficiencies. Union with them is now no longer possible except by a dereliction of Church principles which Andrews, Laud, and Bramhall would never have patronised. Let the Foreign Aid Society, if it likes, put up its horses with those bodies, but do not let it invoke the companionship of Andrews or Laud on the perilous journey, for this is not the way those prelates travelled, nor this the end they set before themselves. They wished to raise Switzerland and Germany- — Mr. Burgess, Dr. Merle D'Aubigne, &c., would fain pull England down to the level of those countries. The last attempt at anything resembling their policy was that unhappy scheme to plant an Anglo- Prussian bishop at Jerusalem, which has so lamentably failed in the judgment of all unprejudiced men of all opinions. You see that I have conceded to the Foreign Aid Society that Laud and Bramhall may have spoken as orthodox, divines are now precluded from speaking. They must, in turn, concede something to me ; and first with reference to Mr. Burgess's first-mentioned friend, Archbishop Laud, who, from his position, was the acknowledged leader of his school. As we have seen, the churchmen of Laud's school had an hypo- thesis about tho foreign bodies, on which they could afford to act, as they had not anything officially to do with them. But there were also at that time certain congregations of these men, in England, towards whom they were compelled to act officially — congregations not temporarily formed under the attraction of a Great Exhibition, but regularly and perma- nently established, and affording the most admirable oppor- tunity for them, had they been so minded, to " testify their sympathy with those foreign churches" who were enjoying " the means of attending the public service of God according to their own forms of worship, during the" (not) " short period of their visit to this country." What was Laud's sympathy towards those with whom he had to deal, not as the theorizing divine, but as the Bishop ? For the reply I refer Mr. Burgess to Prynne's " Canterburie's Doome," 256 where he will find not less tlian twenty-four f ages of that close printed little folio, from 388 to 409, and from 539 to 543, devoted to this very subject. I am not the apologist of Laud's proceedings in the way in which he endeavoured to reduce the "reformed" congregations to conformity — toleration was not at all comprehended in his day by either side, and Laud was, of course, in politics, a politician of his century. But those proceedings are most valuable for the present purpose —pour fixer les idies, that is, of Mr. Burgess and Dr. Merle D'Aubigne, as to Laud's views of the duties of the English Church. The latter of those two passages comprises, with a copious annotation by I'rynne, Laud's vindication of hiuiself for these proceedings, and in it I find one passage which I commend to Mr, Duby and to his co-signer, and to Archdeacon Baggesen : — " But it hath been objected, that Bishop Montague's book determmes expressly, that there can be no Church without bishops, nor ministers but such who are ordained by diocesan bishops, distinct Irom an ordinary minister, and that no minister (no, not in case of necessity) can be ordained by any other : therefore the foreign Protestant Churches, which have no such bishops, and their ministers being not ordained by bishops, lout other presbyters, can be no Churches nor ministers. I answer that this book and opinion of his concei'ns not me, being none of mine, but the author's. Yea, but I maintained and approved the same opinion in effect in Bishop Hall's propositions touching Episcopacy, to which I endeavoured to procure a general subscription, pressing it upon others ; and therein I " determine, that there was no Church of Christ upon earth ever since tlie Apostle's titnes governed otherrvise than hy hisho-ps ; and that t7iis ffovem- ment is unalterable, and ought to be perpetuated in the Church to the end of the world." Bramhall also have been cited — will Mr. Burgess, then, and Dr. Merle D'Aubigne consent to refer the arbitration of the question to the same authoritj^ to which he would fain yield himself? " Howsoever it be, I submit myself and my poor endeavours, first to the judgment of the Catholic Ecumenical essential Church, which if some of late days have endeavoured to hiss out of the schools as a fancy, I cannot help it." .... " Likewise I submit myself to the Representative Church, that is, a free General Council, or so General as can be procured ; and until then to the Church of England, wherein I was baptized, or to a National Enghsh Synod. To the determination of all which, and each of these respectively, according to the distinct degree of their authority, I yield a conformity and compliance, or at the least and to the lowest of them an acquiescence." So speaks Bramhall : but I have not yet done with him, for the fifteen members of the Foreign Aid Society have the ■ inimitable coolness to draw in Archbishop Bramhall as a 257 witness against the necessity of tlie Apostolic Succession, by a vague passage picked out to suit their purpose, from his works. So ttet, as to Bramliall they have appealed, from BramhaU they shall hear what he thinks of them, and of their way in talking : — "Agood Christian ought to regard more what the whole Christian world in all ages hath practised, than what a few conceited persons in this last age have fancied. Among all the eastern, southern, and northern Christians, who make innumerable multitudes, their neither is, nor ever was, one formed Church that wanted bishops. Yet these are as far from submitting to the exorbitant power of the Iloman Bishop as we. Among iiU the western Churches and their colonies there never was one formed Church for 1,500 years that wanted bishops. If there be any persons so far possessed with prejudice that they choose rather to follow the private dictates of their own frenzie, than the perpetual and universal practice of the Catholic Church, enter not into their secrets, my soul." Such arc Laud and Bramhall, using their own language, and speaking their own genuine sentiments. Will Dr. Merle D'Aubigne, will Archdeacon Baggesen, will Mr. Burgess, deliberately assure us that in doctrines 6uch as those of the Apostolic Succession, and Baptismal Regeneration, and the Eucharist, they are willing to accept the teaching of Andrews, and Laud, and Cosin, and Bram- hall ? Will they, as men of honour, assure us that, in hurry- ing on this imauthorized amalgamation, under the excitement of the Great Exhibition, they are faithfully and honestly carrying out the views and intentions of those old bishops ? If they are not prepared to do so, their appeal to these great men is a delusion and a scheme. They must very well know tliat, in dragging them forward, they only drag forward the charitable desire that influenced them to make the best of that which they did not approve of. They drag forward, in short, the most convincing proofs to a sincere Anglican of the unjustifiableness of the position which the foreign bodies of this day maintain. These men — the three last of them sufferers in life itself, or in their worldly all, at the hands of men who held the views which the Lydians of our own time and our city hold — charitably believed that abroad, where there was no Apostolic Church besides Rome, for these men to close with, their faults were those of position and not of intention ; and so, while perilling all at home for truth, they strove gently to win as friends persons standing, as they deemed, aloof from all which formed the essence of their desperate contest. But before bishops, and pastors, and secretaries can band about their venerable names as justifi- catory of proceedings like those we now see lauded, we must 258 obtain from them a categorical solution of this case : — Laud, then a prelate, not to mention the rest, fell into great disre- pute, not merely with the mob, but with noble lords and members of Parliament, because he dared to maintain the " monstrous figment " of an " apostolical succession " and the " sacramental system," and because he presumed to express this belief by altars, and chancel screens, and tapestry, and other "mummeries of superstition." Did he, or did he not, try to save his own neck by writing to a committee, comprising Prynne and Sir Harry Vane, to offer the sop of additional intercourse with foreigners whom he knew to symbolise with those antagonists, on the ground of their so symbolising ? If I can learn that he did so, I own the parallel to be a just one. But if I learn that Laud went to the block, Bramhall and Cosin into exile, rather than truckle to the opposition, I must protest against the method in which their names have been dragged in to justify the present policy, as an insult to their memory, and a misrepresentation of their principles. I have left myself but little space to discuss the subject- matter itself. In all respects this interlude is most unfortu- nate, most especially at the moment which has been selected for its, enacting. The motives of charity and hope which may have led the divines of two hundred years ago to adopt the line which they chose towards foreign Protestants exist no longer. Anxious as we must be to think of them with all Christian love, and to win them to the unity of the Catholic and Apostolic Church, our way to effect this most clearly is not to show them an example of our own disregard of all that guarantees to us our distinctive position. The Bishop of London — ^who last year proclaimed his adhesion to sacramental religion, in his refusal to confirm the Gorham judgment — has now beheld a fierce and open on- slaught made upon what he then proclaimed to be the truth, by that league in which Lord Ashley and Mr. Colquhoim are conspicuous leaders — persons whom his lordship can hardly regard as truly English Churchmen at all ; and yet during this very crisis he has, I grieve to say, paid these persons the com- pliment of abandoning in their behalf a consistent maintenance of Church — that is, sacramental — doctrine, in a volunteered and perfectly unlocked for surrender, which — under the plea of treating their differences from the English Church as mere forms, discipline, and so forth — cannot fail to open the loopholes to any dereliction of the Universal Faith. After this letter, what ground has his lordship left himself to oppose effectually the Evangelical Alliance — or that Church Eeform Association 259 which met on Wednesday last ?* The only principle on which they can be resisted has been conceded to foreign Protestants, in terms which make the refusal of its extension to England impossible, without the sacrifice of consistency. We may be sure that there are plenty of those who have the perception to grasp, and the will to press, this fact. Now one word in conclusion, to Mr. Burgess and Dr. Merle D'Aubigne. They quote most freely, when they think they may make a profit of it, the names of Laud, and Cosin, and Andrews, and Bramhall. If they really mean to say that they attach any value to the judgment of those men, let them show it in a somewhat difierent manner from that which they have hitherto chosen — let them try to learn what the princi- ples and the deeds of Andrews and Laud, of Bramhall and Oosin were, and then go and think and do likewise ; and their deeds and their thoughts will be very different from anything which they have ever yet done or published. LIV. THE MEETING OP THE NATIONAL SOCIETY. June 2, 1851. " Talibus insidiis Credita res captique dolis lacrymisque coacti Quos neque Tydides nee Larisseus Achilles, Non anni domuere decern, non mille carm2e," is the record of yesterday. The future is to be told in another quotation, relative to the same Troy : — " Quae nee Dardaniis campis potuere perire, Nee quum capta capi, nee quum combusta cremari." The stratagem of yesterday will not have consummated the unholy alliance between the "high and dry," and the "low" sections of the English Church, against the much-dreaded "men holding extreme opinions" (as a consistent adherence * It is needless to say that this letter was written solely with reference to that unfortunate letter of his lordship's to the Foreign Aid Society, which produced the attempt of Mr. Burgess and others to introduce the pasteurs into our pulpits, and which his lordship had to explain in his correspondences with Mr. Richards and Mr. Reeve. 260 to the Prayer Book is characterised) — to accomplish which they have so eagerly clutched at the " aggression " panic. It will not have handed over the education of our Christian poor to an Erastianised governmental department, as the price of " peace " — which means secular position ; and of " unity " — which means indifferentism. The circumstances of the day I will not touch upon. Yon have described them sufBciently for my purpose. The occasion rather calls upon me to bespeak your attention to the cardinal evils which lie at the roots of that crop of lesser mischief which covers our soil with so rank a vegetation. You have not yet forgotten the paper of the twenty-four bishops, though I suspect that many persons have done so. The capital mischief of that document was, that it was the crystallization of an existing compromise of principle — the action of an irresponsible confabulation of bishops, appointed, without check, by the fortuitous representative of a House of Commons majority. So framed, and without a view to a better state of things, it could not have failed to be what it was. Precisely such are the evils of that emanation of our actual ecclesiastical polity, the committee of the National Society — a close-packed corporation — -traceable as its ultimate source to the appointments of Ministerial influence — " One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never." Year after year has the general body of that society de- manded justice for the educational enterprises of the English Church — year after year the committee has failed in taking that high uncompromising line which such a demand should have emboldened them to take, and which must be taken, if it means ever to be successful. Finally, it has consummated its policy by stigmatising those who invited the Society to express its regret at the beha- viour of the State — no mention being made, in the resolution which was moved, of the committee of the Society — and to assert in most moderate language its own value for its own consistency, as turbulent disturbers of peace and order. No wonder that, so coerced at tlie instant — so drilled beforehand — the National Society forfeited that consistency yesterday. Still that result is not a defeat ; but it is a crying proof of the need of Church ropi'esenlalion to defend Church rights. Ycslerday has much advanced tlic cause of (hose who are striving for the restoration of Synodical action. 261 LV. GENEVA AND ENGLAND. June U, 1851. The blossom has fruited. The invitations to Genevan notabilities, issued through Mr. Burgess's office, have been accepted on the family footing. The identity of the pasteur Episcopal government. Sept. 2il There are some peculiarities of phraseology in the Arch- bishop of Canterbury's letter to Mr. Palmer, when read in comparison with that to Mr. Gawthom, which I am surprised to find have not attracted the attention they deserve. I refer particularly to the wording of the following paragraph : — " To be convinced that Episcopal government, and therefore that Episcopal ordination is most agreeable to Scripture, most in accordance with primitive practice, and is in itself the more excellent way, is per- fectly consistent with the judgment of Hooker, that the lineal descent of power by Apostolic succession is not, in certain cases, to be urged absolutely, and without any possible exception." You observe a sort of preference for Episcopacy is here maintained — just as, in the Gorham judgment, a preference for baptismal regeneration, in opposition to Mr. Gorham's bold utter denial of it, is to be discovered. Indeed I think I am keeping strictly clear of exaggeration when I say that, if the Palmer letter lays down sufficiently the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession, then the Gorham judgment lays down sufiiciently that of Baptismal Regeneration. To take only the passage I have quoted, the Gorham judgment did not forbid EngKsh Churchmen holding the doctrine in question — if anything, in words, it patronised it as " most scriptural," " the more excellent way," and so forth ; but it manufactured loopholes enough to make the profession of it on the part of our Church perfectly nugatory — it allowed, as Archdeacon Denison truly puts it, of two different (so called) truths to be held. This is precisely the tone which the Palmer letter takes in reference to Episcopacy. In short, the Gawthorn note is parallel to Mr. Gorham's book — the letter to Mr. Palmer to the gloss passed upon it by the Judicial Committee. I say all this, of course, without reference to the way in which Mr. Palmer moulds the issue in his letter, or to the way in which the Archbishop moulds Mr. Palmer's issue in his reply to him, so as combinedly to avoid entirely the real question — namely, what, in the Archbishop's opinion, is the z 2 346 doctrine of Apostolic succession in the Church of England ? — and what, in his opinion, is the acceptance of this doctrine, whatever it may be, among his clergy? Of course, I look upon Mr. Palmer's letter and the answer as a composite work of art. The utter inapplicability of the exceptional cases contem- plated by Hooker to that of the "pastors" under discussion, has been well exposed; and the amusing assurance with which his Grace makes Mr. Palmer's mind at ease as to his not holding higher doctrine than Hooker has not been over- looked. But still I imagine that the entire value of the passage has not yet been estimated as clearly as it should be. You recollect that the gravamen of the letter to Mr. Grawthorn was the slighting reference made to the " sole want of the imposition of episcopal hands" — i.e., to the doctrine of the Apostolic succession — to the doctrine which holds that Dr. Sumner is the descendant, through this imposition of hands, of the Apostles, and therefore has a right to the appellation which the Church and the language of England allot to those so descended — " Bishop," or " Episcopus," or " Superintendent " (the literal Latin translation of the Greek episcopus) — subaudito, by apostolic descent, not by statutory creation — and that, as such, he has the right to " govern " " apostobcally" — which we please to term "govern episco- pally" — ^his portion of the flock. Assuming, then, that what the Archbishop treats of in the paragraph above quoted is the Apostolic succession, it is at once manifest that he only substituted a comparative pre- ference of it, for the contemptuous indifference which stood in the Gawthorn letter. But is it certain that he expresses any preference at all for the Apostohc succession? Is it certain that he commits himself to the assertion that the derivation of bishops, priests, and deacons from the Apostles' times by the sole imposition of bishops' hands is " the more excellent way?" Casual readers of the Palmer letter gene- rally seem to have taken this for granted. I wish I were sure that I should find it there. I do not say that the Metropolitan may not have intended to imply it ; but I do assert that the very remarkable phraseology used would bear an entirely different interpretation, and one which might very completely save the consistency of this letter with the ipsissima verba of that to Mr. Gawthorn. Had his Grace expressed his preference for "Episcopal ordination" (and "consecration," if added, would have re- 347 moved ambiguity as to what was the object of his comparative regard), and therefore "Episcopal government/' he would, pro tanto, have pronounced for the succession from the Apostles as the origin of the deference yielded by congrega- tions to their bishops, and of the power the bishops claim over them. But Archbishop Sumner inverts cause and effect. He prefers " Episcopal government" — ^the government of an ''Episcopus — a superintendent — a statutory superintendent it may be — and therefore he is in favour of "Episcopal ordination." He is in favour, that is, of this superintendent appointing the " ministers." Of the meaning he affixes to " Episcopal consecration" — of the way in which the Epis- copus has to receive his commission to exercise " Episcopal government" — the Archbishop vouchsafes no explanation, beyond the notion to be gathered from the negative view moulded out of Hooker, that there are " certaia cases" in which " the liaeal descent of power by Apostolic succession " is not " to be urged absolutely," or " without any possible exceptions." When, and where, and how it is to be urged absolutely, his Grace avoids explaining. In short, all that we can make sure oi is, that Archbishop Sumner prefers a stationary, life-long superintendence, exer- cised by one man, to a Synodical form of Grovernment without a standing president — an opinion which any one might have easily gathered by inference from his speech on Lord Redes- dale's motion. Such stationary superintendence is found in the Danish establishment, where the governing pastors at once assume the name of "bishop," and disclaim, alike in fact and in theory, the Apostolic succession. The American Methodists, too, have been pleased to revive "episcopal government " without a succession — and are called the Epis- copal Methodists in consequence; and they no doubt will tell us that " episcopal government — and therefore that epis- copal ordination" — that, namely, performed by their own soi-disant bishops — "is most agreeable to Scripture," &c. There is a very wide distinction between the Catholic and Apostolic Episcopate, and that by statute, or self-assumption. One's ideal of the former is, the bishop amid his presbyters synodically governing his portion of the universal fold, ac- cording to the dictates of a mild charity and the customs of a wise tradition — reverenced and deferred to by them as one who has received higher gifts than they — reverencing in his turn, and deferring to them, as men to whom he or one of his predecessors has imparted large gifts of the Holy Spirit, 348 and whom the unbroken voice of the Ohiirch bids him look to as his friendsj his assessors^ his counsellors. Such is one sort of " Episcopal government." There is another — somewhat fashionable^ it may be, in modern times. The type of the species is a gentleman who is eternally obliged to the Prime Minister who appointed him, and who professes vast zeal for the " Koyal Prerogative/' knowing very well that this, in his mouth, is a circumlocution for the power of that Minister — one not unwilling to see the Church torn to pieces by internal convulsion rather than in actual possession of her own inherent powers of self-govern- ment, and not afraid to iavoke that same prerogative — which he is very well aware is wielded by the minister — to check its rising energies. The " government" of such a bishop may well afford to be stringent — arbitrary — summary — autocratic — one-sided even, when the occasion presents itself; for he repudiates the old constitutional aspect of the diocesan Synod, and the old idea that the members of the Catholic Episcopate, as descended alike from the Apostolic coUege, are one body, owing joint duties to their equals, joint duties to the whole Church, joint duties to their clergy, joint duties to the entire body of the faithful. " I and the Prime Minister " is for- mula enough for such a bishop ; he well knows how to use it on occasion. I can readily fancy an exercise of this sort of Episcopal government. Your readers must pardon me if I seem to exaggerate. I can fancy such a prelate, in the gloomy solitude of his own study, issuing his ukase — it may be to some friendless perpetual curate — it may be to some illustrious divine — to some man whose learning and abilities Asia and Europe alike have known, whom some University of illustrious prestige has placed in one of her most honom-- able chairs ; I can fancy him, I say, issuing his ukase to such an iacumbent as this — to an incumbent whom the mild wis- dom of his predecessor may have been pleased to honour — ■ and, in his case, repudiating aU the forms of Christian courtesy or common equity, due from a father to a son, or from one acquaintance to another, and thrusting it into his hands, by a menial retainer, like a summons to the Comity Court from a recalcitrant cabman. I can fancy such a prelate, so commanding such a man, whose means of grace are multiplied as those of no other Church in the diocese, to yield immediate obedience to orders for which neither law nor custom ai'e alleged — this Prelate well knowing all the while that he does so to " satisfy " some few litigious 349 brawlers, wliose insignificaiice and irreligion that same incum- bent may very recently have proved to him in friendly con- verse. Such, I repeat it, may, so far as the Archbishop's letter to Mr. Palmer goes, be another interpretation of " Episcopal government." Churchmen have a right to know from a Primate who has placed himself in the position which Archbishop Sumner has assumed, which of these two definitions of that most am- biguous phrase he means to adopt. This very day I see in a public paper — the well-known organ of the Irish Roman Catholics — a letter, the taste of which is very much more than questionable, the spirit of which is very much less than gentlemanlike, but which is still a letter — a public letter bearing the real name of its writer — a Mr. Dayman — who is known as one who unhappily lost heart, and deserted the communion of his confirmation and his ordination for that of Rome. This gentleman, not writing under an alias, and therefore not trapping anybody, tells us how, when he was an English clergyman, he had to prosecute an appeal to Arch- bishop Sumner against his diocesan, and how, after his interview, he craved on his knees the archiepiscopal blessing. The Primate's reply, he states, was a refusal, because "we have not the gifts of the Apostles, we have not the powers of the Apostles" — i.e., not their extraordinary powers of miracles, but the ordinary one of giving a blessing. Further, he was told that the Archbishop was willing to pray that he might have a blessing. In corroboration of this I have heard, from more than one quarter, that it was especially remarked, when the Archbishop broke up the last memorable annual meeting of the National Society, that he converted the English Church's form of blessing into a prayer. Straws show how the wind blows, and the Archbishop cannot be angered if Churchmen, in their perplexity, have recourse to all sources of information which are put at the disposal of the pubhc, to ascertain the real import of his Delphic letters. Mr. Day- man's charge has been made — it is pubhc — and its writer has authenticated it with his full name. His Grace is bound not to let it pass unnoticed. Mr. Palmer is bound to open a fresh correspondence. Such is the Archbishop's letter, and yet it satisfies the Me- tropolitan Church Union. That body could not be too active or too ready on the G-awthom letter. A protest was on the nonce drawn up, repudiating its doctrine in the strongest words of which language was capable ; a petition to Convo- 350 cation was announced ; and a series of leaders appeared in its weekly organ, taking the highest ground upon Episcopacy. The Palmer letter pubhshed, that organ declares that, upon aU points connected with the doctrine of Holy Orders — " We are happy, therefore, as we are in duty hound, to take it for granted, that ufon all of them his Graces sentiments, if be were called upon to express them ' in an authoritative or official docu- ment,' would be found consistent with that strict orthodoocy, the mainte- nance of which is not the least sacred among the duties incumbent on the Primate of this important branch of the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church." And the Metropolitan Church Union at a special com- mittee resolves — " That, forasmuch as the indispensable necessity of Episcopal ordina- tion to the validity of holy orders, appears to this Committee to be recognised by his Grace in the above letter, no further steps be taken to procure signatures to the protest issued by this Committee, and that the petition to Convocation on this subject, now in draft, be dropped." Contentment is a jewel, they say, and that of the Metro- politan Church Union and its organ must be a very Koh-i- noor. It is only a pity 'for their present consistency that they were not as complacently disposed to take the Arch- bishop's "strict orthodoxy" on trust last year — when they inundated the meeting of July 23 with their demmciations of his Grace, for inducting Mr. Gorham — when they wrote him that letter which will, I trust, remain on record beside their recent resolution— and when, in their organ, two weeks ago, they gibed at those High Churchmen, whom they have pleased to honour with their want of confidence, for lulce- warmness to the orthodoxy of the Church of England. There is only one difficulty about the Palmer arrangement, as far as they are concerned. What will they do with their clients — with those whom they lured to be their clients, through putting out so strong a protest — and whom they now so unceremoniously throw overboard? I am not concerned to discuss whether a protest was the wisest way of meetiag the Gawthorn letter. It is sufficient that the Metropolitan Church Union adopted it — that earnest Churchmen closed with it — and that they now find themselves sacrificed to a sudden and incomprehensible policy, ostensibly emanating from that Committee of which Mr. Palmer is a member. If that body does not find itself somewhat sharply called to 351 account for this monstrous exercise of an arbitrary judgment, I shall be much astonished. If there were room for personal feeling in an event so deplorable to the Church as the misconduct of any body claiming to exist for the defence of the faith I could feel some satisfaction in seeing the estimate which I had formed of the Metropolitan Church Union, and of its satellites and auxiliaries — which it was my paiaful duty to make public in your columns not long siuce — so speedily and glaringly justified. The Palmer move, I should think, must be its crowning exploit. LXXVl. THE BISHOP OF LONDON ON EPISCOPACY. Oct. 1. The Archbishop of Canterbury is not infallible. The Archbishop of Canterbury does not hold the proxies of aU the bishops but one, and of forty-nine out of every fifty clergymen. The Bishop of London looks to something more than the prohibitions of a human law as a reason for not thinking difierently from the holy Apostles, and from the whole Church of fifteen centuries, and from the Church of England siuce the first day the gospel was preached upon our island. The Bishop of London is not sublimely indif- ferent whether he has or has not himself received the imposition of episcopal hands. To the Bishop of London, for this uncompromising avowal of his belief, in these times of rebuke, the thanks of Churchmen are justly due. I am, for my part, individually the more anxious to lose no time iu renderiug them, because I have had, in the cause of truth and of Church privileges, more than once to criticise his Lordship's policy in your columns. The form in which the avowal came — a letter to that eminent theologian. Dr. Mill — renders it of the greater value. Dr. Mill is one whose learned and powerful advocacy of the Catholic faith, as held by the Church of England, and 352 of Catholic worship as exhibited in the Church of England^ has more than once exposed him^ and may still expose him, to misrepresentation and persecution by men wlio^ in all but their power of doing mischief, are ludicrously his inferiors. That he, therefore, should have been the channel through whom the Bishop of London has testified to the truth of the one Catholic Apostohc Church is well and wisely done. The form in which the Bishop has cast his protest is the revival of his Three Sermons on the Church, preached in 1842, which he desires should be accepted as expressing his fixed sentiments. In these Sermons he tells us that, for many ages, " it was never even thought of that there could be a Church without a Bishop ; nor that any person should claim authority to minister the "Word and Sacraments who had not been ordained by a Bishop." While making this unhesitating statement, his Lordship is anxious to maintain that position of charitable suspense in regard to foreign non-episcopal communities which we find laid down in the writings of Andrewes, Bramhall, and other divines of their school. He "cannot consent to speak of those communities as being altogether ahens from the Church of Christ, nor to deal with them as though they were entirely destitute of the privileges which belong to it." Having made a brief survey of the history of the foreign Reformation, his Lordship comes to the conclusion that the " earlier Lutherans and Calvinists were not schismatics j" — and he continues — " If so, I would desire to know at what period their descendants became so ?" In great submission to the Bishop, I apprehend that a more practical question, and one easier of solution, has the priority to this. Are these communities, or are they not, heretical or schismatical now, according to the acceptance put by the Church ot England upon those terms ? Do they, that is, or do they not, hold what the Church of England understands by the Catholic Eaith ? and are they, or are they not, anxious tp recover the Apostolic ministry ? You observe, I ask my question about the communities as such, in contradistinction to the indi- viduals composing them. The latter, if duly baptized (and I have never heard that there is any defect in the form of administering baptism in those bodies to invalidate it), and if acting conscientiously up to their hght, do, in proportion as they fail not in this, make good their individual claim to be true members of the Catholic Church — more meritorious members, it may be, than many persons belonging to com- 353 munities of whose claim to he int^ral portions of that Church there is no douht ; because they have wrought out their salvation with so much inferior advantages — with such a destitution of the means of grace which the Cathohc commu- nity holds in store. Further on in his Sermons^ the Bishop gives us criteria which we can use in the solution of our question, in a quotation from BramhaU, which I recommend to the Arch- bishop's attention : — " Many things may be lawful, many things maybe laudable, yea, many things may be necessary, necessitate pracepti, commanded by God, of divine institution, that are not essential nor necessary necessi- tate medii. The want of them may be a great defect, it may be a great sin, and yet if it proceed from invincible necessity, or invincible igno- rance, it does not absolutely exclude from heaven. The essences of things are unalterable; and, therefore, the lowest degree of saving faith, of ecclesiastical discipline, of sacramental communion that ever was in the Catholic Church, is sufficient to preserve the true being of a Church." To adopt Bramhall's phraseology — is the want of Epis- copacy among foreign Protestants the result of " invincible necessity or invincible ignorance?" Our bishops of the seventeenth century, as I have had to repeat over and over again, as a rule thought so, and thinking so, they proclaimed this belief ostentatiously — " scourges sent from God," as they were in Dr. Merle d'Aubigne's eyes — in hopes that this pro- clamation of kindly sympathy would allure these members to seek the lost gifts at their hands. Two centuries have rolled away, and the gifts have not been sought for. No formal attempt ever seems to have been made towards their recovery, except the abortive one in Tennison's days. Have the rela- tions of England towards Germany in the interim changed ; and, if they have, is the change one likely to facilitate the restoration of Episcopacy derived from us, or the reverse? They have changed, and the change is one which would have greatly facilitated that restoration if it had been desired. When Andrewes and Bramhall wrote, the royal dynasty of England had no especial connection with Germany. Now the house of Hanover is on the throne, and the limitation of the succession, acting upon the natural aifections of relation- ship, leads the Royal Family perpetually to seek its consorts from that land. Had the desire for Episcopacy been very active, it would hardly have failed to make itself manifest under circumstances so favourable to its accomplishment. 354 This is the more certain^ because, in the interval, the world has had a specimen of an Episcopacy given at Lambeth to another nation, under circumstances the least likely to render such a consummation probable — an Episcopacy given to a nation, whom, not very many months before, we had regarded as contumacious rebels, and with whom we had engaged in a bloody civil war. And yet, for the sake of the United States of America, Archbishop Moore obtained an Act of Parliament which gave him the civil capacity of laying hands, " for the office of a bishop in the Church of God," upon citizens of that new Republic. In this fact, then, I seem to find one element towards deciding whether, in this age, we can with safety accept un- changed the seventeenth century view of those communities. Another element in our decision is the language which may be in use among leading living members of that body in regard to Episcopacy. I may, without fear of contradiction, assume that of the laity of Protestant Germany, the m.ost distinguished in a theological aspect is Chevalier Bunsen. His formalised sentiments on this head will be, therefore, of peculiar value in an iavestigation proceeding, as this does, upon presumptive evidence. Thus, I find in your paper of Saturday last, appended to a letter from Mr. Nutcombe Oxenham — " If an angel from heaven should manifest to me that, by intro- ducing, or advocating, or merely favouring the introduction of such an Episcopacy into any part of Germany, I should not only make the German nation glorious and powerful above all the nations of the world, but should successfully combat the unbelief, pantheism, and atheism of the day, I would not do it, so help me, God. Amen." I really must apologise for the quotation of such lan- guage — used in a letter to Mr. Gladstone — the passage is an oath — it is summed up, " So help me God. Amen.'^ What, then, does the Chevalier adjure the awful name of God to certify ? He adjures the name of God to say that, if an angel were to reveal to him that Episcopacy, as we hold it, would successfully combat the unbelief, pantheism, and atheism of the day — not to talk of temporal advantages — he would not introduce, advocate, or even favour it in his native country. He would rather, as he values his salvation, see Germany immersed in unbelief, pantheism, and atheism — the souls of her children training — for where? — than provided with an Apostolic ministry. The Bishop of London, I am sure, would not adhere to his hypothesis if he were to see 355 good cause to suppose that Chevalier Bunscn spoke^ in these words, the language of his countrymen. It is certain, how- ever, that Chevalier Bunsen is a man of weight in his own land, and, speaking as he does in this passage of that unbelief and pantheism which we all know to be too prevalent there, he must intend to exonerate himself from participation in it. In short, he speaks as a representative of the more believing class — of a class which does not hold to atheism, but only prefers it to Episcopacy. Such an opinion, then, is a further assistance to us in our investigation. I take another man, a leading minister of the Calvinist body, the chief of its more believing section — Dr. Merle d'Aubigne. This gentleman, as I have had occasion to reiterate — I trust not ad nauseam — can find no milder words for the belief in Episcopacy than " dogmatic and sectarian." It is fair to him to say that he uses them without adjuration, and expresses no comparative preference for unbelief. What gentle epithet he applies to our divines of the seventeenth century I have already had occasion to recite. As M. Bunsen affords presumptive evidence of the behef of the non-episcopal bodies of Germany, so does the Genevan divine apparently represent his own denomination and his fellow-citizens ; and neither of them, I apprehend, give much colour to those sur- mises of our seventeenth-century divines which the Bishop of London has literally adopted. Grateful, then, as I am to the Bishop for the positive enunciation of the truth which he has given, I feel that I may, in common with other Churchmen, press upon him, if he still holds that view, to put it to the proof. It was to be sure, only a view, two hundred years ago — and it is only a view now — but the reasons for holding or rejecting it at the present day are totally difi'erent from those which operated at that time. But possibly the Bishop does not still hold the view. When the Three Sermons were published, those fearfal words of the ChevaHer Bunsen were not in print— the foreign pastors had not made their aggression upon the English Church. But whether he hold it or not, the charity of attempting to see at last, whether those bodies are patient of orthodox Episcopacy — whether, that is, they truly hold the faith, and are truly eager for the ApostoHc ministry — remains the same. The obhgation of doing all in his power to give it to them on such conditions is alike. The necessity of with- holding it, if it appears that it would be misused to the pro- 356 pagation of false doctrine, or profaned as a thing of no importance, is also, unhappily, as self-evident. Anyhow, the Bishops, especially the Bishop of London, stand in that position where standing still should not be thought of. What the Bishop of London may have said and done towards the propagation of Episcopacy has, as in the recent case, and in the case of Chevaher Bunsen's pecuhar Jerusalem bishopric, been used against it. His Lordship must, in his future actions, give the true comment to his former words. The international communication, religious or secular, is far difPerent from what it was two hundred years ago. The Evangelical Alhance compasses it — the pastors who have caused the recent disturbance availed themselves of it. Railroads, the electric telegraph, the post-office, have made the relations of man to man totally different from what they were even in the last century. The prelates, therefore, who feel the same zeal to restore to our Continental brethren Episcopacy, with, and as the guarantee of, sound doctrine — as the Andrewes, and the BramhaUs, and the Cosins, and the Taylors felt — must not be willing to rest content with the same apparatus as that which was at the command of those great men. LXXVII. HIGH CHURCHMEN AND PUBLIC OPINION. Oct. 7. Permit me to offer you some observations supplemental to your admirable leading article of yesterday, in which you so clearly shew how High Churchmen, after Aveathering a year of unparalleled turbulence, are at length beginning to meet, at the hands of the public, with the common justice of being recognised as honest men — as men who desire and strive single-heartedly to carry out the doctrines and practices of that Church to which they belong — doctrines and practices which they firmly believe to be as consonant with divine. 357 immutablej truth as they are clearly the literal voice of the English Church. The question is, how are they to deal with the present aspect of matters. As a party triumph, or an opportunity of extended good ? — an occasion for epigram, or an opening for work ? I have, for my part^ no hesitation as to the advice which I should offer. We have now the means of shewing, not only the abstract honesty of our opinions, but ILkewise their utilitarian advantage to the whole community. The first prejudice overcome, we are on our trial before the bar of public opinion as citizens — we are called upon to shew proof of the service which we can render to the general body politic: and it will be the fault of ourselves, not of oui- priuciples, if we are unequal to the iuterrogatory. The prejudice against synodical action was the first obstacle which we had to overcome. By abstract reasoning, and by bold experiment, the clouds have been dispersed ; the justice of the claim is now conceded, and only time and detail stand between us and the complete accomplishment of our constitutional wishes. Compare the language of an influential organ in January about Convocation with the distinctions drawn in the same quarter between a national representation and that of diocesan synods — with which, some weeks after the Synod of Exeter had closed its meeting, that journal found itself so suddenly enamoured, and you will own — " Tempora mutantur, nosmet mutamur in illis." Compare the " not unlawful " that was wrung from Lord John Russell, while he still hoped that the Synod of Exeter would in its results overwhelm the man whom he dreaded and disliked the most, with eternal confusion — compare that with the floundering special pleading to which the Metropolitan had recourse in the House of Lords when that Synod had closed — and you will gauge the growth of that common sense which need not be tricky, and need not be cowardly, to be true to the Reformed Church of England. If you look at Episcopal charges, you see Whig-sent pre- lates — the Bishop of Down and Connor, for instance — not fearing to say that they look upon the restoration of corpo- rate action as the best hope for peace and tranquillity ; and you find papers like the Spectator, which dare to think for themselves, closing with it as the only far-sighted alternative. 358 But the victory of synodical action hi itself would be simply a victory of energy — it need not be that of orthodoxy. The Westminster Assembly was one of the most real synods^ as far as the work it did went^ we ever saw; yet that work was the undoiQg for the time of the temporalities of the Enghsh Church. We have something else to appeal to — we have the establish- ment — virtual and indirect, but not the less real — of the true character and constitution of the English, as a branch of the Universal Church. For this our thanks are due to Arch- bishop Sumner's fussy anxiety to enact the Liberal. Of the shiftings and changes of that eventful episode — the delusive soiree — the unmistakeable prohibition which came to season it — the patronising confidences to the glaring impostor " Francis " — the Palmer feint — the contradiction rendered_by the prelate whose connivance had been so strangely reckoned on — I will not again discourse. It is sufficient that our an- tagonists did their all to nullify the acceptance by the Enghsh Church of the Apostolic ministry, and that their all has been just enough to leave them in the inevitable predicament of having entirely, from their own temerity, got where their friends are unwilhng or unable to extricate them. It rests now upon us — upon the men who have been de- fending the Apostolic Succession, because we know it to be the truth — to shew that ours and the Church's dogma is one of charity, and not of persecution ; that we cliug to it^ not because other persons are worse off than ourselves, but because we feel our Church to be trustee of benefits which she can confer upon them, and which we desire she should so bestow. This doctrine — which the prejudices of some men, and the clumsiness, or hauteur, it may be, of various of its advo- cates, have hitherto made (why should one conceal what one need not be ashamed of saying one knows?) a rather un- popular element of the High Church, or, as I think I must for the future call it, the genuine Church theory — is now, by the assaults of its impugners, placed in its veritable aspect. It is upheld because it is a fact, and not from any antagonism to the men who do not live under the primitive regimen. Towards them individually we are bound to feel, and I trust that we do feel, the kindest sentiments. The disadvantage of their position renders all the good they possess, and aU the good they have done, the more interesting and the more precious. This very kindliness of feeling may often have made us unduly deUcate — falsely kind in our wish to conceal 359 our knowledge of the difficulties which intervened between our present status and entire Christian community with them ; and the result has naturally been that we have met and parted with unmeaning civilities — or else a surrender^ on the part of mdividualsj of our own distiactive trusts. Now we have been forced to speak the truth. We have made a clean breast- of it, and we demand our sincerity to be taken in proof of our friendliness. We can shew who are the true liberal Christians — who are the men who wish to impart of their abundance as a gift, and not as a triumph — as the pledge of affection, and not the means of recrimination. We can prove that when we shake our heads at Evangelical Alliances, and raise our voices at the admission of foreign ministers into our churches, it is not the Christian intention prompting those proceedings which excites our apprehensions, but the hasty and ill-con- sidered method of putting them in operation, which drives us to vindicate the imperilled polity of the one CathoUc and Apostolic Church. Peeling this very strongly, I cannot too forcibly impress upon Churchmen the necessity of co-operating in such a manner as was sketched out in the Address to Members of the English Church which you printed yesterday.* It is the logical no less than the moral sequitur of the late affair— the consummation which we must long after, if we have been fighting for the truth in the love of peace. It is almost com- manded, indirectly, in the Bishop of London^s letter — for he cannot have put forth those views without the desire that we might live to see their best and only corroboration. The enterprise is not a journey proposed along a garden path — it is one whose primary conditions are delay, discouragement, it may be seeming prostration. Forethought and a buoyant heart must be coupled. The utmost condescension to mis- conceptions must be tempered with the firmest grasp of the entire body of Catholic truth. Those who will embark upon the work in such a spirit may lay the corner stone of an edifice for which the blessings of children's children will attend them. There are signs enough abroad that indicate the upheaving of all society, religious as well as civil. The very schemes which we have to oppose testify to the cravings which they cannot satiate. In G-ermany itself the movement has com- menced. I have already had occasion to bring under your notice the orthodox tendencies of the " Old Lutherans," so * This address is reprinted as an Appendix to this letter. 2 A 360 called. At a great meeting of the " Chiircli Alliance " of the " Reformed Confessions/' lately held at Elberfeldt, " extreme High Church viewSj" says the Record, " were maintained by one or two speakers, especially of the old Lutherans." At the same meeting the well-known Dr. Krummacher read a paper bitterly deploring " the reigning infidelity in his native country" — that "infidelity, Pantheism, and Atheism,'' which Chevalier Bunsen inferentially tells us existing organizations cannot meet, which he tells us inferentially episcopacy might meet, and shall not meet, " so help him God." Such is the future — fearful and lowering — yet with its glorious gleam of hope. Can it be that God-feaiing, earnest souls win be ever blind to the true aspect of the one great corporation, which lives on earth to combat evil and to save souls ? Can it be that, if participation in its liberal consti- tution, the free bondage of its " easy yoke," be offered to them with an ungrudgiag hand, they wiU all refuse it? Nay, we see that some — some in Germany — some in Den- mark, are already stretching out their hands towards it. The awakened zeal, the renovated life of the English Church yields us the opportunity of meeting these advances. '^ Freely ye have received, freely give." By such a labour of love we shall approve ourselves the genuine sons of the English Church— we shall approve the English Church a genuine portion of the universal fold. LXXVIII. SYNODICAL ACTION. Oct. 11. Lord John Russell may, by this time, be beginning to fancy that it is not a safe game to trust to the weakness of one's antagonist for adopting a policy which— seductive as it might be to that flippancy which believes itself statecraft and dignity— is one which, when the antagonist has become strong, cuts ofi' the probability of that graceful retreat in which the Minister who lacks the inventive capacity of greatness could shine to the greatest advantage. Lord John would obstinately persist, at the onset, not 361 only in treating the Church as a State department, but in allowing nobody else to treat it otherwise. Those who held a different view were, indeed, his opponents— men whose plans he had to circumvent — ^but still they were men — persons who had, according to constitutional law, a right to hold and a right to publish their opinions. But not so in his eye — He dealt with them as traitors or bedlamites, mad dogs to be hunted out, or reptiles to be trampled on. For this opinion of us we are under lasting obligations to his Lordship. The charming frankness with which he never spared to tell us what he thought, and the creditable means which he ever took to give substance to these feelings, have done more to shew the real strength, and to consoHdate the exertions, of genuine Churchmen, than twice as many years of ministerial favour would have compassed. I trust that, amid the solaces of the ministerial holiday, our Premier may have found leisure to peruse the report you gave of the meeting held at Derby for deliberation upon the restoration of Synodical action. His Lordship may there perceive that Churchmen can be guilty of the unpardonable offence of meeting quietly, talking sensibly, nay forcibly — taking up and applying logically axioms of constitutional freedom — proving by those axioms that they, of aU men, do least enjoy that which in England is known and felt as liberty — devising methods for guaranteeing that liberty by a temperate course of conservative reform — and then parting — not as fanatics, not as revolutionists, not as inquisitionists — but as citizens of the British Empire understanding their grievance, and determined by British methods to rectify it. The Prime Minister might learn something even from the paper of the Anti-Church-and- State Association referred to by Mr. Dickinson, while, at the mouth of Archdeacon Denison, he would gather that the secret of success was to do one's duty — a maxim applied, to be sure, by the speaker to Churchmen and the Church's cause, but not very absurd when transferred to secular affairs. If he were to put himself to school under Canon Trevor, no one, I fancy, would discover either that his liberalism — according to the etymological sense of the word — or his large-sightedness, was vitiated. The sound, hard, practical sense which distinguished Mr. Trevor's address placed the matter in several points in an original aspect. The chain of irregular influences, all of which culminated in that complex "tyranny" — in its classical 362 signification — clergyman over parish^ bishop over clergymen. Prime Minister over bishop — mob too often over all^ with perhaps the police-ofSce as the court of last resort — found a narrator in the zealous dignitary whom it will not, I fancy, be easy either to laugh down or to argue down. The restoration of Synodical liberty for the English Church is now a coming fact ; but, as I have often said — and must more seriously repeat the more that fact approaches, restoration of synodical action is not our only object. Synodical action is not an end, but a means, just as con- stitutional government is the means and not the end of personal liberty. People do not cling to parliamentary government for the pleasure of debating (I mean the mass of people, as distinguished from the 656 who sit in one place, and the 400 or thereabouts who sit in another place), but because Parliament makes the laws which guarantee to them their safety and their comfort. So, too, in Church matters — if everything were perfect upon earth, deliberative assemblies and preventive enactments would not have their place. Genuine Churchmen fight for Synodical action in order to maintain genuine Churchmanship. Is there not a risk, if it fancies itself strong enough, that latitudinarianism might at last take up the language of common sense, and call for a Church legislature to consolidate its own influence ? Is there a man living who thinks Lord J. Russell so very con- sistent that — if he should believe he had. sufBciently (to borrow a definition of his pohcy which I heard the other day) "changed the religion of the country hy appointments" —he would not very readily grant a Westminster Assembly to reform the Church of England according to the independent far-sightedness of Archbishop Sumner, the evangeUcal mild- ness of Dr. Lee, the self-denying devotion of Dr. Elliott, and the well-tried erudition of Dr. Pepys ? While upon this point, I find a passage in the current Ecclesiastic, so curious that I cannot resist transcribing it. Of the means of information possessed by its writer, or even of its identity, I have no notion, but the danger which it points out is so possible, if not probable, that it would be wrong to withhold it : — " The Ministry nf the day is not, we have reason to hiorv, at all dis- pleased at the increasing crij of Convocation. They will eventually give Convocation, but it will be mhen they have sufficiently drugged both the Upper and the Lnmer House. We are prepared, therefore, to see every vac:i,nt see and deanery filled by latitudinarians, with now and then a 363 rare exception, in order to deceive the public vigilance. The Dean of Bristol, a recent appointment, and who it is known counts confidently upon his mitre, has said, ' that as to the Gorham case, he did not feel very strongly upon it. The Bishop of Exeter was wrong, and Mr. Gorham was wrong, but the point in dispute ^was not material ; the point of real consequence is \h.e: getting rid of the notion of a priesthood.' This is of course the essence of the German principle ; that the clergy are simply the State's officers for performing ecclesiastical duties." Do I wisli for one instant^ or in the slightest degree, by this quotation, to check the zeal of genuine Churchmen for the restoration of Synodical action ? Most ansuredly not. They are doing their duty in it, as Archdeacon Denison says, and in doing their duty they will find their success. But I wish to point out to them that, in doing this, there are other things which they must not leave undone, on pain of falhng short of that duty. For these not being left undone we have the earnest of the Church movement of the last eighteen months ; but still the caution is needful. The method in which this feeliag for Synodical action has grovm has been by a series of Providential dispensations for the sustenance of the Cathohc Faith, which justifies me in what I am saying. Two years ago the sense of the practical wrong iuflicted on the Church was abstractedly the same as it is now. But the practical grievance did not then press as it does now ; and, naturally, men had very diflerent feelings about the wisdom of agitating for what had fallen into an undeniable desuetude, for fear of its possibly corroborating, in its crude revival, the wrong and not the right. These most allowable cautions found their own solution in the denial by the Judicial Committee of an article of the Creed — and then the real movement for synodical action commenced. Then it was a movement in which energy and orthodoxy attempered each other. The faith is impugned; only synodical action can wipe away the stain. Synodical action is clearly, on practical and constitutional grounds, the proper thing, and so we are siu-e it wUl set the faith of the English Church right. These were the two ways of viewing the ques- tion — the theological and the practical aspects — and they found a concurrent expression in the great meeting of July 23. The bark was now upon the wide water, and Churchmen were too exclusively " going ahead " in the single direction of the immediate revival of Convocation, by an agitation too rudimental and brusque to be very hopeful, when the clear 364 intellect of the Bishop of Exeter recalled them to another channel^ more safe and more ready — to that of a synodical action which required no license from the Crown to act^ and which opened no avenue to ministerial iufluence in its acting — to that which it was in the breast of every bishop any day to call to life, and whose revival was morally antecedent to the resuscitation of a National Synod — the Synod of the diocese. In his own diocese of Exeter— the diocese in which the Church had sustained its heavy wrong — the experiment was tried, while every art of the antagonist was called into play to secure its defeat with utter failure to the machinators. The practical advantage of this assembly was perfect ; order and regularity marked the proceedings — working benefits to the diocese were the legacy of the Synod. Theologically the result was equally triumphant. The Catholic behef in one bap- tism for the remission of sins, was unanimously affirmed iu an assembly of the clergy of an entire diocese freely elected. Several Churchmen who had not hitherto taken a promi- nent part in the movement had the sagacity to perceive, and the enterprise to consolidate, the benefits of this experiment. They formed their committee, even before the Synod of Exeter had met — and they carried through the meeting which you have recorded. The Synodical question has now assumed its full working shape. It has its practical objects, and the practical means by which those objects are to be attained. The Synod diocesan and the Synod national are henceforth one and the same cause. Theologically, the understanding to which right-minded men have attained is no less complete. The vindication of the impugned faith of the universal Church must be their primary work, as it was at Exeter. Secondarily, as at Exeter, the affirmation of the Catholic character of the English Church. Thirdly, practical ameUoration, as Exeter has also taught us. Had the Gorham judgment not befallen us to produce the Synod of Exeter, the last consideration might have swallowed up all other aspects of the question. But my catalogue of Providential aids is not exhausted. After the Synod had closed, and while the meeting at Derby was in organization, the Primate of All England came forward to gi-^-e a fresh impetus to the re\dving energies of genuine Churchmen. Hitherto the hearing they had obtained from the public upon the essential constitution of the Christian Church had been hasty and incomplete. A Roman Catholic and an Archbishop of Canterbury combined to place 365 them in their true position, and to demonstrate that igno- rance was not charity, nor orthodoxy persecution. The desire expressed in one quarter to engraft this matter upon the Derby proceedings, though judiciously not persisted in, was — we may, now that the meeting is past, safely say — not inopportune in the extent to which it went ; for it was a genuine utterance of a deep feehng which found no other more formal outlet. All who met at Derby met, I am sure, as under the Gawthorn letter — and they all parted thoroughly resolved both that when the English Church should have her free voice, that free voice should herald, with bell-like utterance, loud and clear, " We, the English Church, beheve in one Catholic and Apostolic Church," before saying, " We, the English Church, believe in one baptism for the remission of sins." The Archbishop of Canterbury has done well for us — whether wisely for himself, I am not the judge. Whatever intentions there may be in any quarter to obliterate the dis- tinctive features of a Church in the English establishment — whatever wish may exist to blot out the Christian priesthood — Archbishop Sumner has rushed to the tocsin and pulled it wildly, while he thought he was only luring on the gentle Francis. Forewarned we are, and forearmed also. Germany in its worst aspect might dream, of deluging England, but the feeling which late events have raised has made England anxious to win back Germany. It has made her confident that truth and love combined must find their response there. The holy enterprise to which your columns have called Churchmen is a fresh impulse to the movement, practically and theologically — practically, because it points out a great work to be done — theologically, because the essence of this work is the doctrine of the whole Church of all early days. The Elliotts and the Sumners, sitting in Synod, may do their worst to undo us ; we meet them with the endeavour to do well to others. We hold our own so firmly that we dare impart it elsewhere. Only let us know how to impart it. A few years since — I beg to impress this caution upon " Y. Z." — when our Primate was named Howley, that good old man thought to do something of the same sort, and negotiations were entered into with Prussia. Prussia was represented by Chevalier Bunsen; and the result was the Jerusalem bishopric, the animus of which institution its prime mover, the said Chevalier, publicly exposed in a sentence which I quoted the other day. 366 Another such misadventure— another such fraud com- mitted upon EngHsh Churchmen — would be more than disastrous. I have^ not, however — although I feel bound to offer the caution — much fear of such a result. Your limita- tion of the movement in the first instance to the two inferior orders of the clergy and to the laity, and the prominence you gave to the Episcopate of Scotland and America, are the best preventives. A further precaution I hope will be taken — not to lean upon men in high official station, but to grasp the hands of the many, whose benefit, whose friendship, whose communion we are seeking. Let, then, energy and orthodoxy be the rallying cry, and all is safe. If we strive to gain either at the expense of the other, we lose everything ; if we labour equally for both, each supports and develops the other. I repeat it— energy and orthodoxy. APPENDIX. TO MEMBERS OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. The attention of the members of the Church has been of late much directed to the condition of the non-episcopal communities of Christians upon the continent of Europe, and to the relations of the Church of Eng- land towards them, in consequence of circumstances arising out of the visit of various foreign pastors to this country, and the correspondences which have ensued upon it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in a letter lately published, has stated that " episcopal government, and therefore that episcopal ordination, is most agreeable to Scripture, most in accord- ance with primitive practice, and is in itself ' the more excellent way.' " The Bishop of London again, in his Three Sermons on the Church, preached in Lent, 1842, which (as he has recently expressed) he wishes should be accepted as declaring his unchanged opinions, lays it down that— " I have shewn that the Church is a spiritual society founded by Jesus Christ, a mystical body of which he is the Head: that it was built up by the Apostles, acting with his authority, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit ; and that it was so built up according to a certain form and constitution, which were preserved in every branch of the Universal Church for more than fifteen centuries. " It appears that, in the execution of the solemn trust so confided to them, the Apostles constituted a certain form of Church government; and committed to the rulers of the churches which they had founded the power and the duty of ordaining and sending forth labourers into the Lord's vineyard ; that theij transmitted the sacred deposit to others: and that from the time of the Apostles, for fifteen hundred years, every 367 branch of the Catholic Church was governed by bishops, in regular spiritual descent from the Apostles themselves ; and that every act of the Church, specially that of ordaining ministers, was under their care and CQii^uct. " If then the episcopal form of Church-government be undoubtedly apostolical in its origin and authority; if the right and the duty of E reaching the word of truth and dispensing the sacraments of grace ave been transmitted through that channel from the holy Apostles themselves, to the ministers of episcopal Churches ; it cannot be other- wise than presumptuous and hazardous for men to turn away their eyes from that pattern, and to separate themselves, or to live in a state of separation, from a Church which can exhibit these credentials of its spiritual authority : and against which none of those charges can be brought which alone justify separation. " I wish to point out the difference which exists, as to the bearings of this subject, between those persons who separate themselves from a national Church, which is, beyond question, in all essentials, a branch of the Church Catholic — for instance, our own — and those who are members of national churches, or congregations, not under episcopal government — as, for example, the inhabitants of those countries on the continent of Europe where the Reformed religion prevails as to doctrine, but where the government of the Church is not, as we believe, apostolical. " Their own Church may not be in that perfect communion with the Catholic Church which would subsist if there were a unity of dis- cipline as well as of doctrine ; it may be the duty of their Church to desire that unity, and to take steps for its restoration ; and it may be the duty of individual members of that Church to promote that happy consummation by all prudent and peaceable methods ; but in the mean- time, not thoroughly knowing what may be the impediments which block up the way to Catholic unity, and of necessity render the progress therein tedious and difficult, I dare not pronounce that Church to be cut off altogether from the mystical body of Christ ; and I am sure that none of its members are chargeable with the guilt of schism who do not thwart and impede the efforts of the Church itself to assimilate its government and discipline to the apostolical model." Under these circumstances, the attention of members of the second and third orders of the clergy, and of the laity of England, Scotland, and the United States, is earnestly requested to the charitable obligation which the course of events has imposed upon them, to use their best endeavours to establish, as far as may be compatible with the strict maintenance of the distinctive doctrines of our Church, Iriendly rela- tions with members of these communities extending over so large a portion of Northern Europe. The object of this friendly intercourse will be to pave the way towards the restoration— either to those com- munities themselves, or to such congregations formed out of them as may be willing, from their belief in its Catholic obligation, to adopt the primitive polity of the Universal Church — of full communion with our- selves, on the only basis upon which it can be established — viz., an nnhesitating confession of the Catholic and apostolic faith " once delivered to the saints," and a recovery of the apostolic ministry of the threefold orders of bishops, priests, and deacons, upon the distinct understanding that, in accepting it, they do so as conveying blessings of which in their present condition they are destitute, but without fettering them to identify these with the ceremonies or minor organiza- tion of another country. 2 B 368 This appeal is, at present, made exclusively to the second and third orders of the clergy and to the laity, because they will be able to place themselves in a position of mediation which the Episcopate could not so readily adopt. Their endeavours, moreover, being voluntary, will not compromise either party in any formal manner. Viewing the momentous interests at stake in such an undertaking, and the dangers either of the admission of false or questionable doctrine arising out of too speedy a settlement, or of misapprehensions and ill- feeling being engendered by undigested endeavours hastily frustrated or repudiated — it is, in the first instance, proposed to confine the exer- tions of those interested in the scheme to the collection and propagation of information on either side, and the cultivation of private intercourse. It is trusted that such an enterprise, if entered upon with the single desire of the good of the Christian Church, cannot wholly fail. At the same time it must be steadily borne in mind, that it would be ridiculous, if not presumptuous, to expect (humanly speaking) any sudden or startling success. The evils which it is sought to rectify are too wide spreading and inveterate to admit of easy or speedy reformation. With the view of bringing the matter into practical bearing, several members of the Church of England have provisionally combined to collect and publish information upon the religious condition of the Con- tinent — having in their eye the furtherance of the undertaking, which has been briefly and incompletely sketched forth in this paper. It will be a principal study with them to bring the matter under the attention of the members of the Churches in full communion with ourselves, existing in Scotland and the United States. Those Churches, existing independent of the State, will, in a case like the present, be competent to act unfettered by those difficulties of a political description which might embarrass the Bishops of the Established Churches of England and Ireland in the gift of the Apostolic succession to communities who, although henceforward of the same communion with ourselves, would be of different nations and of varying rites. Those interested in the scheme are desirous, as a further fulfilment of their endeavours to restore Christian unity, to bring, as opportunities offer themselves, the true Catholic and orthodox aspect of the English communion before the eyes of members of the Greek and Koman communions. They likewise wish, as the occasion presents itself, to use persuasion with those ancient and wide-spreading Churches of the East, which have so long been separated from Catholic communion, to recover their lost position, by a distinct repudiation of the errors of Nestorius and Eutyches, for their participation in which — whether at present real or only supposed — they have been for so many ages alien- ated from the rest of Christendom. Those who may feel interested in the above proposition are requested to address their communications (if intended for publication) either to Y. Z., care of Messrs. Rivington, Waterloo-place, or to TJie Morning Chronicle newspaper; and if of a private description, to the former address. LETTEES CHURCH MATTE ES. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE "MORNING CHRONICLE.' IS[o. VIII. " The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears.; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON . JAMES EIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1852. CONTENTS. LXXIX. The Ahohbishop op CAKTERBUEy and the Bishop of Eoohester ..... 3(59 LXXX. The Spirit op Popbky 375 LXXXI. Ikteroour-se with Foreign Protestants , 384 LXXXIl. The Bishop of Manchester's Primary Chargb 388 LXXXIII. Opportunities of Chukchmen .... 393 LXXXIV. Lord Ashley and Lord Shaptesbury . . 398 LXXXV. Education and Toleration — I. . . . 408 LXXXVL Education and Toleration— II. . . . 408 LXXXVIL Education and Toleration — III 411 JJXXXVIIl. Christmas, 1851 . 4]^ LETTERS ON CHIIECH MATTBES. LXXIX. THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY AND THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER. October 25, 1851. It is at all times a comfort to know where one is standings and to have measured the length and breadth of the fact which has been perplexing ns. Mr. Mayow has done this work for the Church of England in regard to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has fairly and legitimately led that digni- tary to say what he really means ; he has removed the Metro- politan from the tutelage of "Prelatus/' Mr. Palmer, and other kind, but officious friends, who had undertaken the thankless task of interposing between Dr. Sumner and the Primate of Canterbury, and striving to discover some middle term to reconcile those incongruous characters. He has vin- dicated for his Archbishop the privilege of being allowed to hold his real belief, and give it utterance according to the dictates of his discretion. The sum of the Archiepiscopal dogma is found in the letter of the 13th of October, which you pubhshed yesterday, from which we ascertain, that our MetropoUtan declares as his opinion that certain foreign Protestant ministers — particularly Dr. Merle d'Aubigne, who pronounces the belief in the Apos- 370 tolic Succession dogmatic and sectarian — " are not to be con- sidered as mere laymen having no valid ministry, solely for the want of episcopal ordination," because Archbishop Sumner "cannot see" the subject "so clearly settled by Scripture, as to warrant a more definite opinion than that laid down in the 23rd of our Articles, or the Rubric prefixed to the Ordina- tion Service/' the said 23rd Article laying it down "that it is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of public preaching, or ministering the sacraments in the con- gregation before he be lawfully called and sent .... by men who have public authority given unto them to call and send ministers iato the Lord's viueyard ;" and the Rubric pre- fixed to the Ordination Service — which his Grace couples, as I did in a former letter, with the 23rd Article — unequivocally stating that " it is evident unto all men diligently reading the Holy Scriptvres" ["all men," without an exception made even in favour of Aichbishops of Canterbiuy] " and the an- cient authors that, from the Apostles' time, there have been these orders of ministers in Christ's Church — Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, which offices" [i. e. the only "orders of ministers" Christ's Church ever Icnew], "were evermore had in such reverend estimation, that no man might presume to execute any of them" [still in " Christ's Church ;" we do not come for some time to the Church of Englaxid] , " except he were first called, tried, examiaed, and known to have such quahties as are requisite for the same," [qiicere, whether considering Epis- copacy dogmatic and sectarian be one of them ?] , " and also by public prayer, with imposition of hands, were approved and admitted thereto by lawful authority." Then come the pro- visions for the continuance and reverent use and esteem of " these orders" in the Church of England. Here, sir, I leave the Most Reverend Dr. Sumner. That he is Archbishop of Canterbury is certain — that he owes his being so to Lord John Russell being Prime Minister, no less so — ^that while he is Archbishop of Canterbury he has certain prerogatives, equally assured — that he does not underrate his own prerogatives, an allowable conjecture — that Archbishops of Canterbury, over and above their legal powers, have moral claims to deference on the part of the great English Church, either positive or negative, an established fact. The oidy un- known quantity, therefore, thafftemains in Dr. Sumner's case to be ascertained, is the precise amount of these moral claims on the part of the actual Primate. Each man wiU probably have his own conviction on tliis head. Each man, I trust, wiU Ije prepared to act up to this conviction. 371 I wish I oould similarly leave his suffragans of Canter- bury : but there is one, a prelate, whose bishopric, until reaent changes, stood in a position of pecuHax dependence upon the primatial see, who occupies a conspicuous place in your paper of yesterday beside his metropolitan, whom I can- not pass over without notice. The first recurrence of the Bishop of Rochester's triennial charge since the G-orham judgment was an event not wanting in interest to those who recollected how manful and honest a part that prelate — for some time the favourite aversion, in consequence, of the Record — ^had already played in his own diocese in vindication of the article of the faith impugned in that decision. It was therefore a reasonable expectation to entertain that the Bishop of Rochester — a " High-Church" bishop, as people call him — would, at the first opportunity which the conventional fetters, self-imposed by bishops, gave him of speaking out, come forward with well-considered words to cheer and warm-hearted counsel to guide those who had shown their anxiety in binding up the wounds of the dis- tracted Church. He has, indeed, given words, and he has tendered counsel — of what weight his words are, of what im- port his counsel, Hertfordshire and Essex will best be able to reply. His lordship commences with clearly enouncing that, in spite of the judgment, the Church of England's doctrine still is the " One Baptism for the remission of sins." So far his charge has its value -as a testimony. We only wish that it had terminated here — all the rest of it is best expressed in algebraical language as ( — x) . A greater amount of repudia.r tions to a smaller quantity of enunciations the world never beheld. To the revival of Convocation there are "vahd objections;" there are " stiU stronger objections" to diocesan synods — " such assembhes of the clergy would not tend generally to the peace of the Church." (I could not help thinking, when I read this, of something in a late episcopal pastoral about a "false peace," which was nothing else but the " worthless life of a comatose body.") Of the possible admission of laity into them, his lordship does not seem to have had an idea . The Rubric is to be dis- regarded when " usage supersedes it" — the surplice is npt to be used in preaching — prayers are not to be intoned in parish churches — congregations are not to grumble at candles on the altar, when incumbents do not light tliem except at evening service— the Eucharist is not an unbloody sacrifice — chanceli? 2c3 372 are not the more relatively holy part of churches — daily ser- vices are not always compatible with other ministerial duties. " The emissaries of the Church of Rome axe not making much progress among them ;" and yet the bishop " speaks with sor- row when he says that many of the former ministers of the Established Church have apostatized." Such is the first meetiag in St. Alban's Abbey of the High Church Bishop of Eochester with that flock, which mo- dern legislation has sent to his old Kentish see, since the Gorham judgment and the Gawthom letter ! As a literary or a theological document, the production does not, to judge from your report, aim at an exalted place. Still it is the re- capitulation of a bishop's sentiments, and therefore has its value — in this case, we fear, somewhat a relative one. It is an indication which cannot be mistaken, of the tendency of that poUcy of all the more orthodox section of the bench which — had not churchmen promptly seen and overmatched it — had not the Bishop of Exeter, supported by the Bishop of Bath and "Wells, spurned to be implicated in it — would have by this time, in its uncourageous subtlety, undone the Enghsh Church. It has not — thanks to where thanks are supremely due — done so ; but the bishops, as a body, are not at all the reason of the result. As we have had experience enough to feel, the bishops of recent nomination know very well their vocation, and act up to it ; they are always ready deliberately, ostentatiously — the Primate at their head — to repudiate their own position, and the doctrines of their ovra Church. " High Church " bishops, for the most part, too dearly remembering the good old days of apathetic quiet — blind to the progress of events — instead of meeting the opposite audacity with equal firmness, have clutched convulsively at compromises to " satisfy the public" — compromises which would only — when and as they were offered — result in the sacrifice of the men whose cause they claimed to fight, and with the men, of truth itself. The epis- copal paper issued last spring, of which the charge before us is the enlargement^ was the turning point ; some might think the opposition to its washy and indeterminate enactments prudish, or arrogant, or narrow-minded, but it was not so. It was not that white gowns or black gowns, intoning or mouth- ing, touched the essentials of the faith. But they had their relative value — a value given to them by the opponents, not by the advocates, of genuine Churchmanship, whose opposition converted decencies into symbols, and obedience into cham- 373 pionship. At this stage of the matter, the episcopal paper made its appearance; headed by the name of Archbishop Sumner — not yet, to be sure, the writer of the Gawthom letter — followed next but one by that of the Bishop of Lon- don ; and had it prevailed — I will not say in that first aspect, which everybody knows it presented, of substituting an Anglican for the Catholic faith, but in its latter and diluted shape— the moral victory of the opponents of Churchmanship would have been decisive. But one man — one bishop — braved the turmoil, and saved, to speak in human language, the Eng- lish Church — saved it — aye, vindicated for it a position it had for years been striving to attain. Let the High Church bishops consider what would have been their position now, if not two, but many, had chosen the better part. Let the eloquent and able Bishop of Oxford answer this ; and that eminent prelate whose policy on the panic of the Papal aggression aU good Churchmen so deeply and sincerely lament — that Bishop who had the heart to stand alone at the Council Board in March, 1850 — the Bishop of London. Still it is not for me to criticise. The bishops did not take the valorous side — they did not put themselves at the head of their true and genuine friends — and these friends have had to fight the battle for themselves, and win their own impregna- ble position. Hurt as they must all have been at that docu- ment, they all, I am sure, can feel no bitterness to impede their fighting as heartily, whenever the bishops dare to re- assume their natural attitude. Signs of this are here and there manifesting themselves. The Bishop of Salisbury has closed with synodical action. So has the Bishop of Gloucester. The Bishop of London, in his place in Parliament, has said the same — in his letter to Dr. MOl, has repudiated his metro- politan ; so the Bishop of Rochester, of his school, yet seems to stand alone in absolute adherence to that paper ; for, be it well remembered, the idea of the revival of synodical action is not compatible with the animus of its composition. The Bishop of Oxford's charge is pending. Good Church- men in the meanwhile everywhere are understanding each other as they never did before — realizing their own position — ^resolving what to vindicate, and how to vindicate it. It is now the moment for the Bishop of Oxford to assume his position in the great coming conflict of the Enghsh Church. Such a responsibility has never yet devolved upon him — only times like these can cueate^such positions ! 374 At such a momentj too^ a charge like that of Bishop Murray has been thought adequate resolution of a three years' silence ! It is thought so by a bishop who had, when it was an easier task, come forward to vindicate sacramental doctrine in the coercion of Mr. Capel Molyneux. That gen- tleman can now fairly turn round upon the bishop and ask him why he persecuted him ? If the Gorham judgment, bad as it was, because it did not wipe away the doctrines of the Church, is therefore to be quietly sat down under — why not Mr. Capel Molyneux? Five hundred Capel Molyneuxes would as little vitiate the " One Baptism for the remission of sins." Did his lordship ever care to understand what the " Church" means, or what "human nature" signifies? He can come forward and sententiously enunciate a scrap of or- thodoxy. But let the Church, cut to the quick in that parti- cular of the orthodox belief, manifest the least wish to right itself in its own constitutional way, and it feels the dull cold hand of the Bishop of Rochester laid upon it ; it hears his voice haughtily enunciating peace before truth — our palaces, our revenues, our ease and our baronies before the eternal faith of Christ's Holy Catholic Church. Rather than such unreality as this, one is almost tempted to close with Arch- bishop Sumner's downright repudiation of Church, doctrine, and everytliing ! Such policy as that of the Bishop of Ro- chester's is, he may be convinced, only playing iato the hands of the enemy ; the game may suit the English Review ; it may animate Mr. Palmer in his correspondence with the Pri- mate ; unwary men, unversed in poKtics, may fall into the snare ; but all it does is to increase the score which wiU have to be settled at some not distant day of reckoning. May the bishops of the Church of England soon and clearly see on whom, as men, they may rely — on whom, as rulers of the Christian Church, which is "the piUar and ground," not of popular satisfaction, but " of the truth." 375 LXXX. THE SPIRIT OF POPERY. Nov. 3. "Popery/' as distinguislied from Catholicism — that, in short, which makes the difference between Catholicism pure and Roman Catholicism — is all built upon the substitution of one Bishop who happens to be called Pope (the name has no- thing to do with the thing), for the entire voice of the Uni- versal Church wherever that may be vested. This no one, not being a Roman Catholic, will deny — neither the highest Anglican or Oriental, nor the most unshackled Independent — though they may differ as to the starting point of the devia- tion from the true constitution of the Christian community. The Anglican and the Oriental rightly look for the model of all Church government in the New Testament; and there they find the two principles for which they contend — Epis- copacy simple, adumbrated in the independent delegation of each of the Apostles ; collective Episcopacy, the united voice of the Cathohc Church — which in its full perfection the world has not beheld for about two-thirds of the whole life of Chris- tianity — authenticated in the synodical gatherings of the Apostolic College at Jerusalem, recorded in infalhble writ. The growth of the novel substitution " Popery'' — i. e. of the theory of the divine right of one bishop who happened to be the first in dignity in the Christian world, to the in- alienable privileges of the Universal College — is a topic which I have not now the time to narrate. It is sufiicient to say, that it grew up little by httle, and that in its first exhibition it was a practical contrivance, not a theory. Put into work the practice was found convenient ; the theory was framed to justify that practice. Anghcans and Orientals regard the Papacy in great degree as a political expedient, to which the Church had recourse to defend herself, with weapons bor- rowed from the enemy's arsenal, against secular oppression ; and they perceive that, like all not very justifiable expedients, it has once and again been turned against the Church accord- ing to the interest of those very oppressors. All, therefore, who are not technically " Papists," are of opinion that it is very expedient to check the first germs of 376 tlio system. Some folks^ Dr. Merle d'Aubigne and Mr. Biii- ney^ for instance — the men^ in shorty whom " Frau«is" under- took to personate^ and whose cause Sir T. Blomefield now represents — by way of effectually stifling Popery^ would abo- lish the Christian ministry. Others may think the cure worse than the disease. Anghcans, for their partj are satisfied with the vigorous advocacy of what they believe to be the application of the primitive system to the actual condition of the world — moderate sized dioceses — not such as Lincoln was and Manchester and Ripon are — combined into moderate sized provinces, with a representative system so arranged that local exigencies shall be looked after by those whose position, physical as well as mioral, shall allow them the time and the means of knov/ing something about that which is re- ferred to them. Anglicans, I repeat it, are satisfied that such an arrangement combines the requirements of a divine constitution with the promptings of an utilitarian common sense. They are, on the other hand, satisfied that to delegate to one man, or to one ofiice, the ecclesiastical supervision of all the Anglo-Cathohc Churches whose members own the sway of the British Crown, would be to estabhsh in its un- mixed undesirability the Papistical principle, just as palpably as to withhold from our growing colonies the gift of responsi- ble government would be to establish that centralized bureau- cracy, which is in temporal, the correlative of Popery in ecclesiastical, politics. These considerations "have been impressed upon me on the perusal of yesterday's Record, which contains a letter of seventeen of the clergy of the diocese of Melbourne, headed by the Archdeacon of Geelong, addressed to their diocesan, on the subject of the resolutions of the Australasian Synod. The Bishop of Melbourne, Dr. Perry — though, as all who know him will be eager to testify, a thoroughly earnest, self- devoted man — is unhappily a disciple of that school of theo- logy which, thanks to the sinful worldliness of former High Churchmen, has acquired a footing in a Church whose formu- laries are in direct contradiction to its main principles. Dr. Perry, a distinguished alumnus of Cambridge in the days of Mr. Simeon's prime, attached himself to that leader, and, when consecrated to the see of Melbourne, took out with him — as a missionary bishop to a new colony must do — a body of clergy sufficient to give its colomnng to the diocese. We may take Melbourne, therefore, as a better than ave- 377 rage specimen of what a diocese worked on pure Low Church principles would be. I say better than average, for I have a higher opinion of Dr. Perry's standard than I have, for in- stance, of that of the Archbishop of Canterbury : it seems to me at once less courtly and less subservient to the public. In the document before me, which bears date March 25, we have the opinions of the collective Low Churchmanship of an entire colonial diocese, which, as we learn, impatient of Episcopal convoking, forestalled Bishop Perry in a private gathering; and freely spoke its whole mind under the three conditions of exultation at the Gorham judgment — depression at the results of the Provincial Synod, which the gentlemen saw were not to the advantage of that judgment, on which one point their Bishop stood alone among his brethren — and of ignorance of the entire cycle of events arising to the mother country from the Papal Aggression. A document so circumstanced has a peculiar value — it is one of those insights into the springs of action which only rare conjunctures can afford — a sort of window into the breast of time — an event which the accelera- tion of intercourse must render every day more impossible. The recommendation, with which the " letter" commences, of diocesan synods embodying the lay element, and of the virtual election of Colonial Bishops by these Synods, are fea- tures in the document with which I should not be disposed to quarrel. They show that, as I have argued in former let- ters, synodical action in some shape is a matter of common sense, and must, irrespective of all doctrinal consideration, become an active fact, to the restoration or to the bane, as it may be, of the English Church — to its restoration as / tho- roughly believe. Little did these Low Church clergy of Port Philip imagine, while they were signing their recommendation of Diocesan Synods under that name, that in just fifteen days ■ — on the 9th of April, the dreaded Bishop of Exeter would convoke his flock to meet him in a diocesan synod, and that the result of that Synod would be the unanimous enunciation of what this paper deprecates — a declaration upon the subject of Holy Baptism. I briefly pass over the somewhat democratic proposal to take patronage entirely out of the hands of the Bishop, although (and this must not be overlooked) he be, as they sug- gest, virtually elected by clergy and laity combined, and to vest it as the rule in the vestry of the parish. The Bishop, in his reply, is unmistakeably startled at this sweeping sugges- tion. Neither do I touch upon the sufficiently amusing 378 tecomtnendation of ritual nonconformity. I return to the paragraphs entitled " Provincial Synods or Conventions," and " Metropolitan Authority/' which seem to me peculiarly instructive, as reveahng the whole spirit of the party to which the Archdeacon of Geelong and his sixteen co-signers belong : — " We are of opinion that no advantage can be gained hy the formation of any provincial assemblies whatever, so long as the present close con- nection of our Church in the Australasian colonies with the Church in England continues ; and we would further state that it appears to us that such assemblies mould have a direct tendency to weaken that connec- tion, and by the assumption of authority which belongs only to the Queen in Council, to interfere with the independence of the individual bishops and their dioceses. " We are of opinion that, in order to maintain and strengthen our union with the Church in England, it would be advisable for each diocese in the separate and independent colonies of Australasia, in matters of metropolitan jurisdiction, to be subject to that of Canterbury only. We should therefore, submit that no metropolitan should be hereafter appointed, but that the senior bishop for the time being should be ex officio primus of the Australasian dioceses, without possessing any judicial authority over the same." I demand, sir, if herein we do not find, under the hands of these low Church clergymen of Melbourne, the spirit of pure and perfect Popery, confessed in its most glaring form ? Diocesan synods there may be — ^individual Bishops may be tolerated; but on condition that these "independent" bishops shall have no joint organization, nor any superior to whom they may have recourse in any, the most urgent emer- gency, nearer than an archbishop at Lambeth — whom they cannot reach in less than six months, and who, when they have reached him, will of course be found overwhelmed in home affairs, ignorant comparatively of their condition, un- able to give them his first and fresh attention — and whose ad- vice, if given, will probably reach its postulants just in time to find them in totally altered circumstances, and quite incapa- citated by existing facts from acting upon it ? The reason for this absurdity is stiU more monstrous-— it would, says the sapient conclave, interfere with the rightful " authority of the Queen in Council" — (" Gorham judgment, to wit" might have been added as a foot-note.) We know in England by this time how to estimate such lip-loyalty as that expressed in this as- severation. The phrase has been well used amongst us, and we have learned that it implies anything but a genuine regard to monarchy — its person or its principle. It has sufficiently shewn itself to be the last, most cunning, most unspiritual 379 device of the degenerate offspring of the "ironsided" PuritaQ. It comes naturally to the lips of an Archbishop of Canter- bury when he desires to keep down the rising Church — it is the first idea of seventeen clergymen at the Antipodes, igno- rant of our changeful fortunes at home ! The simple ex- planation of the whole problem is, that the entire party, arch- bishop, archdeacon, and " assistant minister at the Cathedral" (a new title in the Ecclesiastical commonwealth), alike feel that the Christian Church, in its independent and constitu- tional aspect is dead against them ; and for it they therefore endeavour to substitute a mere Parliamentary department of public worship, administered in the Puritan spirit, nominally subservient to the Crown, careless of Catholic doctrine or Catholic discipline, and kept together by a fiction of the QEcu- menical Bishopdom of Canterbury, degraded into an office which all in the undertaking — except perhaps Dr. Sumner — feel no man can really and effectually exercise in its vastness — and which all, except Dr. Sumner when it stdts him, are determined shall not be really and effectually exercised. Such, sir, is the charmed philtre sent from Melbourne to restore youth and vigour to our enormous Colonial Church. The language in which the Bishop — one of the very best of his school— treats this proposition, so very discrepant in its piddling priggishness from the spirit which dictated the meet- ing, at Sydney, in the preceding November, is noticeable : — " Your objeetion to the union of a number of colonial dioceses into a province, under the presidency of a metropolitan, mould have great weight with me if such a union should, as you fear, tend in any degree to impair the connection of our hranch of the Church here with the Mother Church in England, or to encroach upon the authority of the Queen in Council. For I quite agree in the sentiment which manifestly pervades your letter, that this connection is the great security, under God, against any corruption of doctrine, or any organic change of constitution in the Church in the colonies. On this account I feel it to be of the utmost importance that the supremacy of the Queen should be distinctly re- cognised, and that an appeal should always lie from every colonial court to the highest ecclesiastical tribunal at home." You observe, sir, that the whole acceptance of the clerical formula is an hypothesis raised upon the foundation of " con- nection with the Church of England," and not upon the " authority of the Queen in Council." Assuming this or that, says Bishop Perry, to invalidate this connection, this intercommunion (as more ecclesiastical language would shape it) between two branches of the one Church, distant the half circumfer^ce of the globe — I will none of it. The prudence 380 of the prelate, so different from the raw audacity of his flock, is noticeable — the traces of a higher and better tone of Church feeling are also not to be overlooked. Destitute of such palliative quahfications as those emxjloyed by the bishop, the suggestion of the seventeen is simple Popery. It is, m. other words, the substitution, for their own ends — which I will not believe are not iatended by them for the furtherance of truth — of one bishop, on account of the dignity of his see, for the collective Episcopate of Catholicity. True, this substitution is for the advantage of Puritanism, while the Pope of Eome subserves Komanism. I do not, however, accuse them of Romanism. I do accuse them of Popery — of the attempt, in other words, to advance their own cause by the creation of a turanneia, which is, under vene- rable names,, to over-ride the old, and true, and divinely- appointed Christian commonwealth. It must be remembered that those who propagate such views of pohcy are not men writing in their closets about things of which aU they know is from books and maps. They are persons living amongst those mighty regions of which they so coolly dispose. They grasp among their things of every day that almost continent of Austraha — the broad island of Van Diemen's Land — the fertile and wide-spreading group of New Zealand ; they feel that what they belong to is the story told elsewhere — in the enormous promontory of India — the southern termination of Africa — the wild gigantic tracts of North America — the great constellation of islands in the "West Indian seas. They behold, day after day, the shoals of emigrants which every wind bears across the ocean to their antipodean home — they see whole nations springing up about them ; and yet, with all this marvellous panorama open before their eyes, they have the audacity, or the imbecihty, to pro- nounce that the English Church, which they trust will grasp the diverse realms within its glittering coronal, is for ever to be cramped and fettered in her development — not permitted to make her ecclesiastical provinces commensTU'ate with states and parliaments which they behold arising in every continent ! They have the courage to claim for her the station of humble dependence upon that Colonial Church Secretaryship to be created as a portion of Dr. Sumner's public worship minister- ship ! I have said above that Anglicans perceive that once and again temporal oppression has turned the contrivance of Popery against the Church of which it was devised as the bulwark. 381 Once and again has it been the tool of the persecution of zeal and piety, the means of " satisfying "-^if not " the public " yet that which, in other and more oligarchical days has been the correlative of the " public " — the " Court." Another such instance would be afforded by the reahzation of the Mel- bourne Papacy, particularly if it were consummated in the days of Archbishop Sumner, and if it represented, as it claims to do, the Queen in Council — i. e., as those gentlemen really mean, the popular wlU, in antagonism to dogmatic Christianity. There is something gigantic and striking, with all its error, in the aspect of a bishop of an Old World's metropolis, who believes in Episcopacy, while he maintains himself to be Bishop of bishops, and who claims to wield as none other man the keys of the kingdom of Heaven. But what spectacle more piteous and mean and preposterous can be imagined than that of a man who arrogates as Archbishop of Canterbury, "the heathen for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession," while he tells them that he does not think " the mere imposition of Epis- copal hands" has made him a bit more a "minister" of "Christ's Church" than any ranter in the far West with a " call" to preach, and who never dreams of possessing or desires to acquire any keys but those of the back doors of the Home and the Colonial offices ? Bnt I may be asked, why I make so much of the talk of these seventeen Australian clergymen ? I may be questioned whether I think the actual tenant of Canterbury is of their way of thinking, and would be likely to aid in its propagation. I unhesitatingly declare that I do so, and that the man must be very blind to facts who does not see that there is not a better Papist living than Dr. Sumner, provided his Vatican be in Lambeth — not a man more ready to push that depart- ment of the public service — the rehgion office — over which he holds himself to preside, into any vexatious position of inter- ference and coercion which he thinks he can make sure of, than his Grace the Most Eeverend the Lord Primate of All England. I will not recapitulate the many instances we have beheld diuing the last year of this spirit — his Grace's treatment, for example, of these very Australasian bishops in his plea for Church slavery, urged upon Lord Redesdale's motion — or his prior repudiation, to the Lydian deputation, of Church prin- ciples. Your paper during the last week has given two instances of what Churchmen might expect under a Sum- 382 nerian papacy — so flagrant, both of them, that I wonder they have been allowed to pass so silently. The first is the easy oflF-hand denial, which the Primate is reported to have given, of the right of a Christian man to hallow his gift to God's Church, at God's altar, except as the Churchwardens may choose. The second is that fearful profanation enacted — so far as yet appears — without his Grace's disapproval, by the spies set in action by the proctor, whom Archbishop Sumner pays, in Brasted Church. I cannot beHeve that Dr. Sumner could have meant his servant thus to act; but he has so acted, and the fact has been pubhshed to the world ; and therefore, until the Ajchbishop as pubhcly proclaims at least his indignation at the deed — even supposing him still to con- fide the law of matters of our primatial see to a man who could so fulfil his trust — he makes huaseH pai'ticeps criminis ; and, making himself so, he hardly acts up to that dehcacy, and reverence, and decorum which one is wont to connect with an Archbishop — with, to go no further. Dr. Sumner's predecessor the kind and generous Howley, who gave that very living of Brasted to his own chaplain — ^to Dr. Mill, whom the emissaries of Dr. Sumner's lawyer dog hke a sus- pected pickpocket, while the Bishop of London considers him worthy to make the channel of his repudiation of that Arch- bishop's theology. But large and public proofs of a late date of our Primate's estimate of his position are also forthcoming. The case of the concurrent jurisdictions of the Bishops of Shanghae and Victoria compendiously enunciates the archiepiscopal idea of the Church of England, as centering in himself. Here two Christian bishops of diiferent nations, but " in full com- munion," find a point of junction, or of collision, as the case may be. The senior of them offers terms to bind indissolubly that junction, and to avoid the collision. The too adjective diocesan of Victoria cannot initiate negotiation with Bishop Boone without the sanction, not merely of Lambeth, but of a voluntary society, in London, much patronized by the Pri- mate. The Lambeth bull is just what might have been ex- pected. Such an infringement of the new papacy as any pai'- tition of the cure of souls with one Avhose mission has not percolated through Downing- street, was not to be heard of. Bishop Boone must not only be refused, but he must be snubbed — politely, to be sure — in a few civil words from his brother of Victoria; but not the less subjected to a snubbing, and left in his difBculty, for which his Grace has not thought 383 fit to propose his alternative remedy — the very least return which Christian courtesy might have anticipated. And so Lamheth Popery is rampant and established along the China seas. What guarantee has the Chtirch that other Colonial bishops — or commissioners, jobbed, as the corre- spondent of the Record suggests, to do the work of bishops — may not be sent forth to propagate the^faith, and estabUsh the disciphne — if not of the Church of England — at least of the Primate, whose "manliness/' too little acknowledged among us, can be appreciated among the " Papists" of another communion ? It will be seen by the papers that the prospective see of Sierra Leone has been allotted to a Mr. O. E. Yidal. Most people wiU ask who Mr. Vidal is — who is the person destined to such an onerous and awful post as that of the first bishop sent from the English shores among the negro nations. I am able to gi'atify those inquiries with one fact in the previous history of Mr. Vidal, which may serve as an index to his capacity for such an office. Mr. Vidal is one of 299 clergymen and laymen who in the beginning of 1844 put out a declaration "respectiag several controverted truths," in which, for the " defence of the Gospel " against " Anglo-Catholic^ doctrines," they assert — " Every Christian is therefore bound to examine and to ascertain the meaning of the Word of God for himself, in the use of all the aids within his reach, and to receive no doctrine as the doctrine of Scripture unless he sees it to be declared therein : otherwise he may receive error as truth upon a fallible authority, against the plain testimony of the Word of God. " There is no Scriptural authority for affirming' that our Lord is present with his people at the Lord's Supper in any other manner than that in which he is. present with them whenever they meet together in his name (Matt, xviii. 20) ; and his body and blood are verily and in- deed taken and received by them at that ordinance by faith, just as they are verily and indeed taken and received by them whenever they exer- cise faith in his atoning sacrifice, so that the imagination of any bodily presence, or of any other presence effected by the consecration of the elements, is unscriptural and erroneous. " There is no Scriptural authority for asserting that those only are rightly ordained, or are to be esteemed true ministers of Christ, who have received episcopal ordination." The entire declaration, names and all, from which these extracts are taken, can be found, as in other papers, so in the English Churchman for January 25, 1844. Such, sir, is the person who is to go forth, with the office 384 of an Apostlej from Lamlieth to the teeming races of Central Africa — a person who has repudiated the necessity of the order to which he is to be raised, more explicitly — ^if possible — ^than the Archbishop who is prepared to consecrate him. I feel that further comment would weaken the pregnancy of the fact. It stands clear that the scope of the more pushing members of the school to which Dr. Sumner belongs, is to demolish the true theory of Episcopal government, with the recognition of true Episcopacy itself — to have men, called bishops, of the Vidal School in our colonies — and of course at home, if they can — and even to give these men the help of synodical counsel, but to subject them aU to the Papacy of a simulated " Archbishop" of Canterbury, who is to be but the mouthpiece of that indecent use of the Royal name which is only the favourite cloak of vulgar and noisy Puritanism — which, having long pretended to be the Church of England^ is now, in its drowning condition, fain to clutch any straw, however ahen to the old Puritan belief or the Evangelicism of Newton and Scott, LXXXI. INTERCOURSE WITH FOREIGN PROTESTANTS. Nov. 7. It is no little advantage to have what one does not intend clearly laid down by one's opponent, and the non-intention characterized much as one would have done it oneself. Such an obligation has been conferred by the Tablet upon the per- sons who published the Address to Members of the Chxirch of England in your paper of the 6th of October. The gentlemanlike and charitable journal to which I have just referred, has bestowed upon the scheme in question the honour of one leading article, the cream of which is to be found in the following extracts : — " Give and take, borrow their chasubles, and let them (if only they will apply to Mr. Sumner for it) receive the inestimable benefit of An- glican ordination. " The simple assertion of Apostolic succession, with an utter indif- 385 ference to all other dogmatic truth, is altogether unmeaning, when we recollect that very few, if any, out of the ancient heresies were destitute of that succession. What would the ancient Fathers have said to any committee that wanted to correspond with Arians, Eutychians, and Nestorians, to establish an omnium gatherum Catholicity apart from the See of Peter. " If Anglicans will be such more than idolaters as to fall down pros- trate and salute with the title of Catholic, no matter what heresy or blasphemy, if only it has not discarded the use of chasubles and candles on the altar, of course we have nothing to say. We call it a portentous instance of the danger of trifling with grace." Well, so do we ! Such an undertaking would be worthy of all the ugly names which Tablet, Record, and Patriot combined^ and in correspondence^ could invent to heap upon it. This "portentous trifling with grace/' however, hap- pens, rather unfortunately for your contemporary, to be just simply the exact antipodes of the undertaking, to the pro- gramme of which you gave insertion. This programme states clearly and emphatically, that " the only basis on which fuU communion with ourselves (through their reception of Epis- copacy) can be established," is — " an unhesitating confession of the Catholic and Apostolic faith ' once delivered to the saints' " If these words are synonymous with " iitter in- difference to all. other dogmatic truth," then I must sorrow- fully confess that the apprehension of dogmatic truth, except by immediate inspiration, is a physical impossibility, from the non-existence in the world of that vehicle of communicating thought which has been heretofore supposed to exist under the appellation of language. If they are not synonymous, then we must, I fear, ovm an " utter indifference" to another sort of " truth" — the truth of every- day life — in a writer who could, with the address before him, so caricature its purport. Let the Tablet say what we, the Anglicans, consider a sufficient confession of this "faith once delivered to the saints," they, the Roman Catholics, might not, and he will become a fair controversialist ; and on this ground may legi- timately challenge us to meet him ; but the ground will be the old well-understood battle field on which the Bellarmines, the Fishers, the De la Milletierres, the Petavius's have stood up on the one side, and the Andrewes's, the Lauds, the Bramhalls, and the Bulls on the other. We conceive our heritage to be within the Catholic Church— we conceive that we possess the life-giving sacraments. Into ovjc position, therefore — not into any different one less dogmatic, F.nd less assured — we desire to lead those whom we, in sorrow, believe destitute of those 2 D 386 advantages of which, with equal sorrow, ^e know ourselves to be biit little worthy. It may suit the object of the Tablet to misrepresent this desire, and to quote it as a proof of our abandonment of the care for dogmatic fixity. Such gibes aud falsifications merely serve to render us less ambitious of involving ourselves in the practical workings of any system, of which such a journal can be the faithful exponent. It does not make us distrust the charity or the duty of that upon which we are embarked. It does not make us less earnestly long that the Church of Rome herself might one day be led to break down the barriers she herself maintains against the consummation of unity. Very weU assured we are that when that unity is gained, she vrill as little tolerate, as we can now respect, the temper of such would-be advocates of Christian truth and love, as the writer in the Tablet, whose clumsy facetiae I have been compelled to quote. Ingenuity is at least a praise which I will accord him — none but a very ingenious man could have made that use, which he has done, of the particulars of ritualism in some Protestant countries, which one or two persons have recently contributed to your columns. " Chasubles and candles" made the " Cathohc in their eyes." This is the resumS of his accusation — "no matter what heresy or blasphemy may lurk beneath." To say that this charge is a deliberate invention may be to say what is not polite — ^but it is the only phrase I can think of which is adequate to the feebngs with which I read the passage. One thing in the article is true, namely, that all ritualism, except it embody dogmatic truth, is a sham. Here is the starting point of both sides. We say, in all this ritualism sham as it may be now, there may yet be the un- developed germs of what may grow up into that great reality — the Catholic Church; and anyhow, there is a vantage groTmd towards the re-importation of sacramental religion into this country or the other, in the absence in them of that blinding film of Puritan prejudices which, albeit only concerning externals, may yet — such is the weakness of humanity — be tougher and more difficult to penetrate than the surmounting of absolute and real doctrinal difference. The refutation of doctrinal error, we plead, is a matter of argument and reason — not of the sight and the smell, aud the unformed judgment of the undiscriminating many. Let us then not overlook, we urge, an instrument ready to our hands — let us not be besotted enough to neglect informing those with whom we may be in communication. 387 that our endeavoTirs would result in the consolidation, not in the destruction, of what they are familiar with, and cherish from national feeling. Such, sir, I assert, is the spirit of the references which have been made to the ornate worship of the countries appertaining to the Lutheran branch of Protest- antism. How, on the contrary, would the Tablet deal with the same phenomena ? It would stand by, dooming the people in question, as far as it has the power — them and their rites — ^to everlastiag ruin ; not helping them, and impeding those who would do so ; refusing itself to make use of any assist- ance it may find in their systems towards the revived appre- ciation of sacramental blessings, and jeering and gibing at those who think nothing too trivial to allude to — ^be it but a velvet dress — which may indicate the absence of those trivial and merely external obstacles which stand the first in the way of all great enterprises. Which way of acting, sir, is the more Christian, which more in the missionary spirit of those Apostles who were sent out to " teach all nations," without an exception made against the fature Protestants ? One more falsification of the Tablet must be noticed ere I conclude. Having told the world that we were ready to seU the Catholic faith for a chasuble and pair of lighted candles, your contemporary would have its readers believe, that we would fain estabhsh an " omnium gatherum Catho- licity" — (the phrase is his, very slang, but just the slang word, it struck me, by which an infidel would parody the gathering of the elect from the four winds of Heaven, predicted by the Holy One) — of Arians, Eutychians, and Nestorians, " apart from the See of Peter." All this of course implies that, pro- vided they remain " apart from the See of Peter," and have those chasubles and candles which have dazzled your con- temporary, we will allow them to remain Arians, Eutychians, and Nestorians. What says the address, however ? " They likewise wish, as the occasion presents itself, to use persua- sion with those ancient and wide-spreading' Churches of the East which have so long been separated from Catholic communion, to recover their lost position, by a distinct repudiation of the errors of Nestorius and Eutyches, for their participation in which — whether at present real or only supposed — they have been for so many ages alienated from the rest of Christendom." By his own Church the Tablet shall be judged. Does the Chm-ch of Eome uncharitably and impiously hold, that be- 2 D 2 ■ 388 cause a body has once lapsed into Nestorianism or Euty- chianism, it is never to recover the CathoUc faith? No — it holds the direct contrary ; and it labours with a zeal which we should do well to imitate, to induce these bodies, by the allowance to them of their national rites, to join that " omnium gatherum Cathohcity" which holds in its entire compass the Niceiio-Constantinopolitan confession. "Will the writer in the Tablet, who pretends to plead the cause of his own Church, dare to sneer at her for this ? I know his quibble will be " apart from the See of Peter." Here again we have worked back to our old battle field of the funda- mental difi'erences between Anglicanism and Romanism. Here let us stand ; and if we do so fairly, we shall not have recourse to vulgar and clumsy tirades, which only point a witless jest at the sacrifice of those principles and rules of action which should be as dear to Roman, as to English Catholics. We wish to have an " omnium gatherum Catho- licity," for we wish to gather all men into the one true fold — the Catholic Church. So, too, we trust, the Tablet does. Let it then strive to prove to us that our undertaking is empty and delusive, because our notions of this one true fold are defective, and it will show itself, and be acknowledged by us to be, a Christian and a candid controversialist. Let it continue to handle oui- scheme as it has already done, and while by every fresh attack it makes us more convinced of our own position, it at the same time establishes itself to be no more than an empty, mouthing declaimer. LXXXIl. THE BISHOP OF MANCHESTER'S PRIMABY CHARGE. Nov. 14. The primary charge of the Bishop of Manchester is a production likely to be read by many whose position does not compel them to look upon his lordship as their spiritual father, and whose inclination may not lead them to image out in him the model Bishop of an ideal Church. In their eyes it will probably be — it is so to all but a portion of Lancashire — Dr. Lee's pamphlet on the state of the Church, and in this aspect I bespeak your attention to its contents. The emphatic stress laid by his lordship, in the earlier 389 portion of the document, upon " brotherly love and kindness/' is very refreshing — it is refreshing in a prelate to see these virtues so advocated — how much more refreshing, therefore, to see the living fruit of the advocacy — the long-suffering, the patience, the gentleness, the accessibility to the hardest- worked perpetual curate no less than to the wealthiest mill- owner, the reverential deportment in the Lord's house, the consideration for the departed, the charitable judgment of the living, which must fiU up the character of " brotherly love and kindness" in a Christian bishop. The next topic which I find strongly and distinctly advo- cated, is the making the laity partakers of the occasional ofiices of the Church by their celebration during service time ; after which is found a recommendation of the weekly offertory. Here, again, we find ourselves agreeing with the Bishop of Manchester, a public man, far too clever and too alert to the times to fall back upon that frigid humdrum which is, as we know, in so many quarters offered as the panacea of the religious excitement of the nation. That such occasional services should be made public and congregational in any diocese and under the influence of any bishop, is a gain — that they should " be made so in Manchester, and by direction of the Bishop of Manchester is therefore that gain. But we might gain a loss if we thought his lordship a better Churchman for this ! This recommen- dation of his is only another proof of what I have been for some time endeavouring to enforce — that energy without orthodoxy may easily result into a portentous development of energy with heterodoxy — an English "Church of the Future," that no man can blame for its inactivity, nor for its want of a sort of a care for souls after its own fashion, but which wiU shew its activity and its care for souls in the direct teeth of the Catholic Church. Of this new and most dangerous school the Bishop of Manchester is the typal prelate. The Rochester mould is broken — the Sumner type is dangerous — rather as the catspaw and instrument of the coming men. The Lees are the adversaries whom the rising generation of genuine Churchmen have most to battle. As I have already pleaded, these persons, when they fancy they have it their own way, may not think so gloomily of synodical action as they now do — as it is, they are willing partially exploiter the rubric, when they suppose they can do it in a popular and taking direction. With these remarks I only say that I sincerely trust that the portions of 390 the Bishop's charge^ to which T have alluded, may be acted upon in his diocese. But the Bishop soon turns his attention from rubrical questions to the all-important one of synodical action. Here we are tempted to ask if his lordship be in earnest ? The spectacle of Dr. Lee jesting is, to be sure, one to which we have not ordinarily been habituated. But why should he not have his sportive moments ? Whether serious, however, or in good-humoured raillery, the Bishop of Manchester in the Bishop of Rochester's garb is a spectacle worthy of re- cord. To be sure, one must, as the French politicians say, accept one's situation; and I can readily conceive that a philosophic Churchman of the Future, sent to his post by that singularly unphilosophic Churchman of the present shift. Lord John Russell, must, while his lordship is still in office, feel that every situation has its difficulty. Synodical action brings his lordship by a short cut to the Gorham judgment, of which — although he discoursed at con- siderable length upon its bearings — he briefly and charac- teristically disposes at the outset, rejoicing at it "because it compromised no tenet of the Church of England, contradicted no article, declared no formula, it simply pronounced that" — "regeneration does not invariably take place in baptism." How inconsequential! How unreasonable men are to grumble at this judgment for such a trifle as its declaring that the " one baptism" may often not be " for the remission of sins." Let loose from the judgment, we find ourselves hurrying along a whole panorama of topics — Jewish emancipation and the Church in general, the Manchester and Salford scheme in particular, and the question of baptismal fees — in which question his lordship's shrewdness, as on some other points of detail, is found upon the right side — ^till we are deposited, high and dry, on the very sandbank of the Gawthorn question. The ardent prelate rushes to the aid of his venerated predecessor, the now primate of another province, and, clearly realizing the impenetrable tangle in which Dr. Sumner has involved himself, he offers a solution of the question which we doubt not will be duly appreciated by all those persons who, like Dr. Lee's predecessor, are so sorely and so evidently per- plexed by the discovery so suddenly thrust upon them, that their tenets happen to be precisely antagonistic to the whole teaching of that Church of which they may have been fancy- ing themselves the only faithful ministers :— " Even if their 391 sacraments are not sacraments to us, dare we say they are not so to them ? I do not mean in the intention of the adminis- trator ; hut Scripture, if taken as a penal statute, must he con- strued strictly, and not wrested hy implication to cut off from the body of Christ all who call upon him as their only source of aid, adopt his word as their only guide, and seek his sacra- ments as their appointed means of salvation." " Sacraments to them though not to us," and " / do not mean in the inten- tion of the administrator," i. e., for this is what it signifies. Sacraments are unpalpabilities — they have no form, no defi- nition, no rule of existence — nothing whereby to measure their fulfilment of the conditions of their existence. They are, in short, what we please to make them — a mental fact, possessing only subjective existence. Such, sir, is the formula by which Dr. Lee accommodates the new religion and the old prayer-book. It is ingenious, it is bold, it is seductive to those who cannot probe its meaning — it sounds innocuous to those who do not take the trouble to see how utterly it anni- hilates one condition of the Church definition of a " sacra- ment generally necessary to salvation," that it shall be " ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof." Far better than such subtlety is even Dr. Sumner's imperturbable con- tempt for even the attempt to reconcile the Catholic Church and the Church of the Future ! The hollowness of the one is self-evident, the other in the arcana of the new philosophy stores up a whole arsenal of non-natural interpretation. I well foresee that if this charge ever reaches a Palmer stage, the Bishop or his advocate wUl put it to us, that all that his lordship really imphes is what aU not-bigoted Churchmen hold — what by the way in my letter in the Palmer-Sumner correspondence I drew out — namely, that the intention of those who may imagine their rite a sacra- ment will, we charitably trust, be accepted. This his lord- ship, to be sure, point black denies; but a Palmer might easily draw a distinction between administrator and recipient which would give the loophole. If Dr. Lee puts his hand to this, and to nothing else, being his meaning, he, of course, win put his hand to an orthodox statement : but it will be a statement of just the opposite complexion from that which you report as falling from his lips at Bolton ; inasmuch as the one theory pre-supposes that objective something which is a " sacrament,'' and which there may be the bona fide, albeit the unaccomplished, intention of fiilfiUing ; while the 392 otlier makes the mere intention equally in all cases the defi- nition of the sacrament. It is worth parenthetically remarking the perverse obsti- nacy with which our antagonists, from Primate downwards^ continue to deal with the question, as one of sacraments in the pku'al number, as if the validity of the sacrament of baptism in the continental countries under discussion were matter of controversy with us. The conclusion of the charge is mainly devoted to a sort of apology for his lordship's tactics in reference to Broughton and some other churches. In these remarks I find one pas- sage, and only one, observable : — •' It is the Church, as a congregation of faithful men, that has the power to decree rites and ceremonies — not the caprice, or humour, or the antiquarian taste, or the sense of propriety of any individual minister." Quite true. Dr. Lee has proclaimed, and no man can gainsay it, that no "caprice" of "any individual minister," of whatever order, can contravene the law of the " Church ;" no " humom'" of his, good or bad, overbear it ; no " taste," cor- rect or vitiated, bend it aside; no "sense of propriety," healthy or diseased, trample it under foot. As to the kind wishes and anticipations with which the primary charge of Dr. Lee winds up, one must sincerely hope that time may accomplish them. It may be thought rather unfortunate that little family jars between the father and the flock has somehow occurred in that diocese as they have not done elsewhere. The episode, for example, which you pub- lish to-day relative to that Church-Building Society at which the Bishop presided the other day, and of which he speaks so highly in his charge, hardly tones in with the roseate colour- ing cast over that document. Of course, however, the omni- potent force of explanation will set all things straight, and make everybody happy, contented, and united in the diocese of Manchester. 393 LXXXIII. OPPORTUNITIES OF CHURCHMEN. Nov. 28. The time has gone by when every opponent could paint High Churchmen, as the Nuremberg Chronicler did the natives of unknown regions, in any monstrous guise his fancy dictated. The time has gone by when malice and invective could season any falsehood and give currency to any fabrication. The Perpetual Curate of Cheltenham may rave to empty benches, and the heroes of the Lydian meeting have lost their opportunity. Mr. Colquhoun might mount the steeple hat, or Mr. Drummond's butler brandish Jenny Geddes's stool, without arousing the public or satisfying themselves. Because a man believes in ApostoUc Succession he is not therefore to be set down at once as ui league with the Pope — nor is the desire to act up to the Prayer-book the infallible diagnostic of a Jesuit in disguise. " Bowing to the east, and curtseying to the west," is not considered the supreme end of that movement which has for more than eighteen years been extending through the length and breadth of the land, and deeply moving hearts of all conceivable diversities of character and circumstance. The longing for synodical government cannot be misrepresented any longer as the craving for platform notoriety, the desire of hearing one's own voice, the wish for one's own mock Parliament, or the instinct of the spouting club — such imputations, as the world's common sense has learned to feel, come with a very 01-grace from Exeter HaU. The solid fact remains, that there is now — occupying an important position, and wielding an influence in the country — a body of men who did not form an element in the social or political calculations of a year ago, and that these persons are commonly called the " High Churchmen." The con- viction, moreover, is rapidly growing, that these men, once assumed to be a party, are not an "impossibility" — that they are not a clique of antiquated enthusiasts, holding theories and advocating practices chimerical and ridiculous for the England of this age, with its liberal institutions, its manufacturing and scientific resources, and its educational progress. ' 394 High Churclimen have vindicated their claim to hold all these material and intellectual advantages as dear as any men — to be as truly English citizens^ as aHve to the necessities of that position in these times, as any other natives of the empire; and to enjoy, therefore, the common English right of having their views respected, and their requisitions im- partially considered. They had, indeed, a vested claim to this justice, which nothing but the indolence of a former generation iu pressing it could have suffered to faU into obscurity. Two centuries back, the monarchical and the republican principles on the one hand — and, respectively allied with them, the principles of the Church and of Dissent — combated for exclusive mastery. The political result of the struggle was a fusion, or a compromise, call it what you will — ^the actual hereditary, yet very limited, monarchy — and Dissent won the toleration it aspired after. It was but fair that the Apostolic party — having forsworn the extreme, and now intolerable political principles with which it had then (not less and not more than the antagonistic party with its extreme) alhed itself — should share in the benefits of this fusion, and be allowed to hold its own persuasion as unmo- lested as the Independent or the Presbyterian. To the recognition of this our true status, we have, through much discouragement and denial of justice — through, finally, the most menacing tempests of a year ago — step by step attained. We have, therefore, now carefully and temperately to consider our duty to our fellow-citizens of the British body politic. To this topic I briefly bespeak your attention. It stands to reason that persons convinced that Christianity comprises both a poHty and a body of doctrine — a " faith once delivered" — and assured that this pohty and doctrine are embodied and set forth in the Book of Common Prayer, which is the standard of the Enghsh Church — are bound to use all proper exertions to propagate them, so embodied, among their countrymen; and it is no less manifest and important to recollect that these exertions are to be used as a means, not as an end — as the means of the moral and rehgious welfare of mankind, not as the propaganda of a party symbol. As such a means to an end, I have advocated, in common with other High Churchmen, the revival of Synodical action. But even as we are, with all the lack of discipline and unity amongst ourselves, there are — and we should be thankful for it — many opportunities of usefulness, many means of compassing this end, irrespective of political influence and 395 coemve legislation — on which the Church has happily learned not to rely ; and these it is our solemn duty not to neglect in our righteous zeal for the establishment of rational Church government, else we should commit the absurdity of the man who would not touch the water till he could swim. I am thankful that the absence of any immediate topic of excitement gives me to-day the opportunity of urging these considerations. I am thankful, especially, to you, for having recently given such substantial assistance to them, by re- publishing at much fulness the pamphlets of Mr. Woodard, Mr. Freeman, and the Chapter of St. Ninian's Cathedral, at Perth ; and I trust that those of your readers who have not had the brochures themselves under their eyes, wiU have mastered your digests of them. They are eminently in- structive and suggestive. Mr. Woodard, with a bold hand, paints us as we are, not as we fancy ourselves. He proclaims the truth, that the Church has not the hold upon the middle classes which she might and ought to have, and he tells us why. Nor does he stand stiR at an hypothesis, for he shews what he has done himself, and is doing, with remarkable patience and energy of purpose to grapple with the mischief. His colleges — for they count already by the plural number — are a visible proof of what we mean by the Church movement ; we mean morality, rehgion, sound education^ manly Enghsh habits, under and through the Cathohc Church, set forth in the Church of England. Mr. Freeman is the complement to Mr. Woodard. What good would there be — or, rather, what possibility of good — in a system of Church colleges, if there were no training on the part of the ministers of that Chtirch to give them their genuine character ? To the root of this matter Mr. Freeman, a devoted son of the English Church, directs his remarks; and they, too, are not the remarks of a theorist, but of one who is practically giving life to that which his pen is depicting — the accomplished and laborious Principal of a seminary of pastoral training. He shews, in language whose moderation increases its force, the lack among us of the formation of the clerical character — of sound grounding in orthodox learning — of the realization of the Christian Year, the devotions and duties adumbrated in the Prayer-book — ^which has eaten so deep into the useful- ness of many of our best-intentioned and hardest-working parish clergy. It is surely no disloyalty to our Church to pause and inquire what would be the result among us of the simultaneous 396 development of these two great works — viz., of the education of the middle classes, carried on upon such a system as that of Mr. Woodard, and of the citizens thus educated finding parish clergymen to tend them, such as Mr. Freeman demon- strates can, with a little forethought, be provided. Surely here are opportunities, and, more than opportunities — duties • — for Churchmen. I have, I observe, overlooked the third pamphlet to which I called your attention, that of the chapter of St. Ninian's Cathe- dral, Perth. It does not, like those which I have already noticed, appeal to general considerations. It is the record of a single institution ; but, as such, it is, as it were, the practical commentary upon the views broadly laid down by Mr. Wood- ard and Mr. Freeman. It is, to be sure, but one church and one scliool — ^but that one church and one school aim at realis- ing the complete ideal — a Cathedral Church ; i. e. not a big building where gaping rustics are to see pursy vergers, and listen to their impudent rubbish about the monuments of departed nobodies — not a row of snug red houses of Queen Anne's day, the choice patronage of Ministerial chicane, and episcopal nepotism ; but the Mother Church of the diocese — a large church in a large town doing missionary work, main- taining day by day, with stateliness and reverence, the appointed round of the Church's ministrations — and yet not stopping there — not satisfied with service time, as if that com- prised all the duties of a Cathedral corporation, but tending likewise education in its most practical and neglected aspect. The circumstances of the Scottish Church have rendered possible the institution of such a work, as it could not have been set on foot in England. A Cathedral, we know to our cost, is as yet a stereotyped affair with us ; a Church imitating a Cathedral — a ponderous chapel to a middle school — is the utmost that our unliving system here can give. In Scotland, where the Church, at the cost of temporal station, has the means of self-government, the case was otherwise. The practical Cathedral — the middle school in direct connexion with the ecclesiastical system at its fountain head — were at one and the same time, as parts of the same whole, united. Of course, if Perth Cathedral is to remain a speciality, it may do good in Perth, but it will do harm elsewhere. It will proclaim itself an exotic — it will court comparisons which cannot but be baneful. Sush, however, there is no reason to fear will be its destiny — rather we should wonder and be thankful that the Church harvest has borne alrcadv such a fruit. 397 1 have looked at this Cathedral chiefly in its middle school aspect. In that of the " Church"— in that, I mean, of the daib) service, and solemnly appointed Church — its use is no less manifest. But this is a topic on which I have not space to dilate. It was well and wisely handled not long since in your columns, by one who signed himself " Laicus Oxonien- sis.'^ Such, sir, I presume, are a few examples of what the High Church movement means. Yet all these institutions are but specimens of a class which is every day more numerous. I purposely refrain from noticing the development of older societies, and older collegiate bodies, which has taken place of of late years, even where they have assumed a new aspect — sncli as St. Mark's College, in connection with the National Society. The new creations of the High Church movement, educational and moral, are sufficient to arrest the most careless attention. There is, for instance, that unique specimen of high training, St. Andrew's CoUege, Harrow Weald, founded by the energy of a country clergyman, Mr. Monro — similar to this also is the College at Cumbrae, in the Isle of Arran. There are, for the behoof of the higher classes of society, the College of St. Peter, at Radley, near Oxford; Trinity College, Glenalmond, in Scotland, which is likewise a seminary of theological training, and in Ireland, that of St. Columba, which promises, imder its present warden, to be an institution whose foundations are deeply and securely laid. Again, the teaching of the most destitute, the reform of the most neglected, is cared for in that proverbially profligate and crowded town Devonport and Plymouth, by that loyal- hearted woman, whose name is already proverbial for courage of the most Christian, most enduring nature — Miss Sellon. Part of her work —the reformation of the most unhappy class — is carried on at Wantage, and at Clewer, and elsewhere. Your paper is exerting itself to stir up London to do something — and this something, I doubt not, will be done. The multiplication of training schools for masters is another necessary work now taken up in earnest. It is the memorial of the Synod of Exeter. Oxfordshire has just embarked in the same work ; so have many other dioceses — so soon must all. However, to detail the particulars of this movement would detain me too long. Neither can I tell of the cathedrals and collegiate institutions which stud our colonies, from Newfoundland to Sydney and New Zealand ; nor of the similar instances of ^dgorous life in the daughter 398 Church of the United States — at Burlington, at Nashotah, in Minnesota, and elsewhere. All these are living witnesses to the one faith, preserved amid neglect, apathy, and unsound teaching in the English Church, whose irrepressible vitaHty has now, by the irresistible law of its existence, burst forth. Such, sir, are some of the opportunities of Churchmen — opportunities of which they have availed themselves, and of which they must avail themselves still more extensively. They are means of doing somewhat of the Church's work, even while the Church's own hands are tied. They are under- takings which we must develop whilst we assert broad prin- ciples of general polity — work which we must maintain if we mean, when synodical action is restored, to behold and to enjoy a Church of England, Cathohc and Apostolic — if we mean to reahse that for which we are contending — energy and orthodoxy- — the energy of saving souls in the orthodoxy of the Universal Church. LXXXIV. LORD ASHLEY AND LORD SHAFTESBURY. Dec. 3. I OBSERVE in your columns of Saturday the report of a large meeting, held in Freemasons' Hall, on Friday last ; the Lord Shaftesbury in the chair. T looked back to a former paper, and I then saw the report of another meeting, held in the same place just one year ago wanting a single week, on the 5th of December, 1850, whose chairman was the Lord Ashley. The idtimate cause of each of these gatherings was identical — the inauguration of some course of aggressive action as antagon,istic to the aggression of the Pope. Here the parallel ends. "With a similarity of professed scope, a diversity of means has been, in the short cycle of fifty-one weeks, attained, as great as the change of style of the noble chairman. In 1850, as in 1851, a move was adventured — not a perfectly legitimate, but the only way of dealing with a coimter move in the political world, which as little recognises direct knocking down, except in a few cases, as private society itself. " The Pope had made his profit — \vliat profit are we 399 to make of his speculation, how outbid him?" So thought Lord Ashley in 1850. So thinks Lord Shaftesbury in 1851. In 1850 Lord Ashley answered himself, " I think I see the way to dis-sacramentalise the Church of England — turn out the ' Tractarians' and remodel her after our own \dews — many thanks to the Pope and Cardinal for the opportunity." In 1851 the Earl of Shaftesbury has framed a different reply, " Church of England? — and what is the Church of Eng- land ? — how are we to handle the Church of England ? — least said soonest mended — common Protestantism — man of sin — minor differences — common enemy — common cause — no Maynooth — no Peel — mem., Tractarianism sine die." In plain, broad' Enghsh — last twelvemonths saw a great game played — very boldly, and utterly lost. The shoe had begun really to piach — the declaimers against " Tract- arianism" had begun really to feel that what they so nicknamed was the only exponent of the Prayer Book interpreted ac- cording to the rules employed to interpret one of yours, or one of the Record's leading articles. And so, under cover of Dr. Wiseman and the Guys, they struck their blow : first came a running fire of meetings, speeches, sermons, and addresses ; then Mr. Colquhoun's petard from the National Club ; and, following close upon it, the meeting of December 5 . Then — I will not tell these thrice-told tales — a year has gone by ; a willing Premier — a collusive Primate — a deluded populace — an affrighted Bench — have aU determined in leaving the members of the Church of England whose rule was their Prayer Book much stronger than they were before — respected and respectable — unassaHed and impregnable. I will not weary you with the stale reminiscence of last year's froth, set free at the gathering, which, thanks to the prepared and well encored sentence of the day, wdl, if it lives at all, go down in minor history as the Lydian meeting ; neither will I analyse the speeches of that other meeting, which — thanks to its prepared sentence from the same orator- ical chairman — a sentence even greater nonsense, if less mischievous than that touching Lydia and " the banks of the river side," — about two temples of concord nodding to each other like Gog and Magog — will probably be similarly cog- nominated the " Gog and Magog meeting." In its colourable object, the repeal of the Maynooth Grant, I have no concern ; it is no part of the topics to which I bespeak your attention, and I do not pretend to have an opinion about it, save so far as it may affect indirectly the broad main question of toleration. But happily, the inop- 400 portune — or, it may be, the deeply considered —honesty of the weekly organ of the Evangelical Alliance, to whose revela- tions we owed so much seasonable precaution in the com- mencement of the year, has again come to our — if not to Lord Shaftesbury's — aid, and dispelled the pretence of the gather- ing of Friday last being merely political. I pardon your contemporary the gibes upon High Churchmen with which he seasons this communication, in consideration of the real favour he has bestowed upon the Church of England, in unmaskiag, over and over again, those of her pretended sons who are compelled to resort to the subterfuges of an oppo- sition to Maynooth— an opposition to the Cardinal — an opposition to any body or anything but that which they are really combatting — and whose diplomacy frets and perplexes the fiery three-quarter-nonconformity of their able and all but honest organ. " We can tell these gentlemen at once what it is that connects and unites the members of the Protestant Alliance. There are certain master principles of eternal truth which, descending' ex exoelsis into the human heart, enable it to receive and appreciate that expression of the Divine mind which becomes patent in the great verities of revelation." If this somewhat transcendental language needs an illus- tration, it can be found in the tableau which Freemasons' Hall presented on Friday. In the chair of presidency sat a noble Earl — one who has been selected more thaa once as the especial representative of the Chtirch of England — an Eccle- siastical Commissioner, and the Chairman of the Commission on the Division of Parishes — the representative, I repeat it, of that Church of England which has solemnly testified her acceptance of the Cliristian Faith, as epitomized by the early Church in the eighth of her Thirth-nine Articles : — "The three Creeds— Nicene Creed, Athanasius's Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles' Creed- ought thoroushly to be received and believed ; for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture. The first resolution had been moved by another active layman of that same Church of England, one likewise attached, as I hope, to those Thirty-nine Articles of Religion— Mr. Colquhoun ; and it had, in due course, to be seconded by a ''reverend" seconder, the first and foremost "reverend" to mount the rostrum. This gentleman, by name Tidman, by rank a doctor, and by office Secretary of the London Missionary Society, had been on his legs not many minutes, the assembly encouraging him with their applause, the noble Ecclesiastical Commisioncr, I conclude, nodding his assent. 401 as Gog or Magog might have done; and he had abeady attained that chiefest test of oratorical success in such a gathering — cheers attempered with laughter. The climax is thus reached : — It might be presumption in him, a man who never signed a creed, to make a creed f'or this association [laughter and cheers] ; but he wished to prove that, whether they had a creed or no ; whether they were Churchman or Dissenters ; they had among them strong- points of agreement,'' [cheers]. I quote the words as they are reported. The meeting presided over by Lord Shaftesbury, the Ecclesiastical Commissioner, just addressed by Mr. Colquhoun, about to be addressed by the self-satisfied Rector of Upper Chelsea, Mr. Burgess — this meeting, I say, cheers and laughs with a " reverend" gentle- man, making game of the three creeds which the Church of Lord Shaftesbury, Mr. Colquhoun, and Mr. Burgess pro- nounces " ought to be thoroughly received and believed " — boasting he has never signed them, and telling his auditors that, " wheAlier they had a creed or no, they had strong points of agreement ;" and the Ecclesiastical Commissioner, who, later in the meeting, with an energy of depotism worthy of M. Dupin rating the Mountain, told a gentleman ''to sit down and hold his tongue," then continued sitting down himself and held his tongue, endorsing by his silence — the silence of an Ecclesiastical Commissioner — the possibility of "strong points of agreement," leading to practical fusion between professing Christians outside, and irrespective of, their holding the Creeds "which ought thoroughly to be received and believed, for they may be proved by most certain warrants of an Holy Scripture." To be sure he told the meeting, when he took the chair, that the gentleman forming the Alliance " had tossed to the winds their differences" — which " he rejoices to say are only minor differences" — and we owe our thanks to Dr. Tidman for bringing before us, so graphically, that among the dead leaves Lord Shaftesbury, Mr. Colquhoun, Mr. Burgess, Mr. Close, and Sir Thomas Blomefield have so readily tossed to the November blast, are the creed of the Apostles, the creed of Nice, and that of St. Athanasius — the Cathohc faith, in short, of the whole Church. Your columns for the last year have testified that, to make good against the assertions of the Church of Rome the claims of the Church of England to be a true portion of the fold of Christ, it is not necessary to make such a sacrifice. The attitude of the Earl of Shaftesbury^f he would see it 2 E 402 as others are enabled to do —is, in truth, sufficiently humilia- ting for a man who meant to have carried out the duties of his station, as I believe him to have meant. Last year the ground he took up was intelligible. He wished to make good his tenure of the Establishment by radically revolu- tionising its terms of communion. The attempt proved with all the unscrupulous machinery set on foot to work it, a dead failuie. The noble lord so discomfited, continues where he was, and he does not make the amende to that Church which has so plainly taught him the discrepancy that reigns between his opinions and her doctrines. His consolation at once, and attitude of defence, are public sympathy, mental communion, with those to whom the name of a visible Church is abomination. The Ecclesiastical Commissioner belongs to a body which says, that from the Apostles times there have been bishops, priests, and deacons in Christ's Church — which tells us that the sacraments "ordained by Christ himself" are " generally necessary to salvation" — which predicates of the one that it makes its recipients " the children of grace," and of the other, that in it "the Body and Blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful" — which lays it down that the creeds "ought thoroughly to be received and believed." — While the Earl of Shaftesbury heads a religious confederation, of which the bond of sympathy is indijQference as to " whether they had a creed or no," and all such " minor" matters. The Commissioner-Earl may, for the time, flatter himself that there is no sophistry — no self-deceit — nothing non-natural in such a combination, and, for the time, he wiU find many, who do not have a creed, ready to give their lip homage to that " hberal and enlightened Church- man, the Earl of Shaftesbury" — just as last year his prefer- ence for worshipping with Lydia raised the Hall into a hubbub. But I very much mistake the character of his allies if this harmony will be perpetual. Already the clouds of the future storm are gathering — and, ere long, stern voices wiU be muttering to the noble Ecclesiastical Commissioner names such as those of Wesley and Whitfield of old, and in our own days. Baptist Noel, who dared to set the seal of self sacrifice to the earnestness of their convictions. But Lord Shaftesbury's future is not my business. I have no wish to drive him out of the Church of England. I had much rather see him a more consistent son of his Spiritual Mother. Neither am I concerned, save inciden- 40.3 tally, with the pretended object of the recent meeting. It- is passed— so is the Lydian meeting — the latter was the dis- cordant and frantic war-whoop of an undisciplined horde, madly endeavouring to scale the fortress on the everlasting hiUs. In the Gog and Magog meeting, we find the desperate attempt to recall the discomfited and wandering stragglers to some new standard — the assault, the siege, the discomfiture — the unconfiding policy of the new campaign have lasted precisely fifty-one weeks, just within the limits of the same Church year. Not to us are the thanks due ! LXXXV. EDUCATION AND TOLERATION.— I. Dec. 11. It is curious to observe the metempsychosis of fallacies, so active in these days of mental restlessness. Theories which have been absolutely worn out, and found plainly imprac- ticable in some old familiar garb, have their drapery a UttJo changed' — a new appellation conjured up— a new shown- an procured — and the extemporised novelty is launched upon its wayward course. This truth is especially noticeable at t he present conjuncture with regard to the " State-conscience," or " forced conformity " theory — for the two are degrees of the same principle. The question of toleration, so far as it aflects positive rehgion — religion, that is, under the name of religion — has long been for practical purposes, settled in England. Test and Corporation Acts are now recollected only with shame, as evidences of the blinding effects of political acerbit5^ The right of the citizen to his conscience — the duty of the State to protect that conscience — are primary axioms. And yet, with all this apparent enlightenment — witli all this apparent accord upon broad and intelligible principles— we are startled by a blindness little less than judicial, the instant we cross the narrow path which separates the Church from the school-house; and, strangest of all, the bhndest, and the most intolerant of educational independence, are those who are most suspicious of aggression on the score of their religious liberty. Liberty of conscience to tlie adult, 2 E 2 404 ■to be taught the more matured truths of religion as he may think proper, is a matter in their eyes to be vindicated at any cost. But liberty of conscience to the child, in the person of its natural guardian, to receive, at the age when ideas are fresh and malleable, those first notions from which all future life may take its colouring — is to be denied. The cloak for this inconsistency is the liberal use of that ridictdous nonentity " secular education " — a phrase as plainly self-con- tradictory and self-destructive as would be " secular religion," " unsupernatural worship," and so forth — an assertion which I hope to make good in the course of this letter. " Ignorance is very rife," say the advocates of the system. Granted. "The State should do something to meet it." Granted again. "Then let there be a system of uniform secular education." Pause, my friends, I reply — let us test your panacea in a parallel instance. Irreligion is rife — it is the duty of the State to do what it can to check so patent an evil. Therefore, says a Torquemada or a Calvin, have your compulsory State education, and drive your subjects to it; let it be their fault, not yours, if they have not a religion, and that religion a uniformity from one end of your State to the other. Manipulate the question as you please, regard it from any aspect you like — the most purely supernatural or the most merely material^you wiU sooner or later find that the ques- tions of rehgion and education — the questions, that is, of the training of the intellect at different ages, are one and the same under distinct — yet scarcely different — aspects. You will, sooner or later, have to confess that the same justificatory pleas which are brought forward to vindicate compulsory so- called secular education, are equally potent to uphold the (in England) outworn dogma of State-conformity. You will, sooner or later, have to own that, in practice, the one system is as little likely to accomplish most effectively that educating of the people which it aspires after, as the other has proved itself capable, in any country, of substituting the conscience of the State for the conscience of religious communities. - This condition of failure — as the condition of existence — is born with the system from its own intrinsic nature, not from the possibility of foreign and hostile agencies; and its un- eradicable cause is the impossibility of ever realising, in fact, purely secular education. Conceding, for argument's sake, secular learning pure and simple — ^just as we may be called upon to concede national unity of religious belief, and with 405 this unity, infallibility — nothing can be grander or more practical than its development under State influence. But it just happens that the "pure and simple" is an Icarian dream. If you have not dogmatic religion, you must, in the very first imparted elements of the knowledge of words and things, have undogmatic religion — the mere recognition of a First Cause ; or, if you have the negation of this recognition, you must, you cannot fail to, lapse into the alternative (convertible in practice, if not in terminology) of the affirmation of its non recognition — the affirmation, that is, of the dogma of atheism. Turn, twist the matter as you may, a State system of com- pulsory education resolves itself into one out of three inevitable alternatives : — the compulsory propaganda of theism under the garb of some dogma ; the propaganda of theism unshaped by dogma, and therefore inferentially vilipending the necessity of dogma ; or the propaganda of atheism. I may parentheti- cally remark than I believe no man in England is more alive to this fact that the ablest and most active advocate of the system, Mr. W. J. Fox — a gentleman heretofore known as the occupant of a pulpit, whose phase of religion was Unita- rianism and something more. I shall not indicate to which of the three alternatives I should conceive him most attached, save that, for justice sake, I specifically exclude the third. Take, then, these three alternatives in practice. The first arrays against itself all the schemes of dogma save its own, and all negations of dogma; the second, aU dogma without exception; the third, all theism, dogmatic or undogmatic. Such are the theoretic unpopularities (to look at the matter in its lowest and most selfish aspect) which a system of State education has to face at the outset. But who wiU say that its difficulties would be only theoretic? No such system can work itself. All its impopularities must embody themselves in a Ministry of education, in Grovernment inspectors, Go- vernment normal colleges, Grovernment teachers, an education tax or rate — a machinery, in short, all paid for by a tax-con- tributing population, whose unanimity is neither certain nor ascertainable, and who will not only be bound to contribute, which is comparatively a matter of pocket, but also to use the institution when created — a matter of conscience. Such an establishment, if traditionary, might be tolerable ; but the present question is the feasibility of its creation out of nothing, and in England — in a country all whose mental progress for years past has been in a directly contrary courss — that of the emancipation of the conscience from Governmen- 406 tal control, whether directed for or against particular forms of belief. Even without the example of other countries to hold up the lamp of warning to us, a priori considerations might teach us the perilous rashness of such an experiment. In Prussia, the system-mongering of modern times combined a machinery of State education by compulsion with that of — in the case of its Protestant population— a bold, dragoon-like enforcement of aggressive intolerance. The result was the moral and social crisis of 1848. In France, a similar deve- lopment of State education by compulsion was joined to a fiddling, vexatious, bureaucratic interference with every form of tolerated religion in that country. The result was also in France the yet tmsolved moral and social crisis of 1848. In Naples, rehgious and educational iatolerance combined have culminated in that system upon which your columns have thrown so much light. Nearer home, in Ireland itself, our readers have heretofore dabbled in experiments of cast-iron educationism — with what success I shall not pause to ex- amine ! What, then, remains for a conscientious Government to do ? Leave education to fare for itself? tide on in Epicurean indifference as to the general state of culture of the entire population ? Most decidedly no — this is not the necessary result of the impracticability of compelled uniformity. There is something which men are ready enough to understand and to fight for in other matters— toleration in rehgion, dis- cou.ragement of monopoly in commercial transactions, freedom of the press in literature, liberty of transit in locomotion- all and each of them considered as peculiar blessings and privileges of England. Let our rulers, with a large unjealous heart, try something of the same sort in the matter of education. Encouragement does much. The sinews of war do more. Neither the one nor the other need be hampered with tyrannous or unequal conditions. I do not believe all Government necessarily corrupt or oppressive. A Govern- ment can be, and often is, as conscientious as any indi^ddual. Such a Government can always arrange a system of en- couragement — a tariff of dealing out the sinews of wai-, based upon considerations which create themselves out of denomi- national consistency and zeal — arithmetical considerations, of course, I mean. Such an attempt, I take upon myself to assert, made as it never has been made in England, would produce results which it is not safe to make light of till they have been tested in practice. 407 " Patchwork !" I think I Lear some doctrinaire of the Manchester school exclaim. Well, and if it be patchwork, what of that ? What is all Government but patchwork ? What Grovernment has ever worked without hitches and stoppages? What Government has made all human-kind religious, all men honest and industrious, all women chaste and home-keeping? Approximation is the brightest hope of the most sanguine pohtician who has not studied ia the school of Fourier or Cabet. Education is subject to the same law of approximation. The most exalte Poxism, the most rotund Entwistlism cannot claim a happier lot. What is, I repeat it, approximation but a more polite phrase for patch- work ? Anyhow, the national conviction of the national lack of education has not existed so long among us, either as individuals or as a nation, to have worked through the experiment of approximation — the experiment of the genuine, conscientious, and impartial development of denominational zeal and resources, by an unhypocritical recourse to tolera- tionist support. Let us, in the name of common sense and civic peace — to appeal to no higher motives — at least, learn to walk before we try to fly ; let us endeavour, as citizens, to do something great in this less ostentatious way ; let those of us who are not only citizens of England, but also Churchmen, meet the State when acting fairly, with an equal fairness — and contribute our quota of our duty as citizens, and as Churchmen, by a joint movement ia favour of genuine Church education — such as, thanks to our divisions, our jealousies, our self seeking, we have never yet adventured. If all this great apparatus of zeal proves abortive and comes to nothiag, it will be time enough for us to cast, in the gigantic mould of philosophizing optimism, unproven systems of State-compelled uniformity of so-called " secular educa- tion !" Having endeavoured— too briefly, I am well aware, for this subject, and incompletely — to lay down some first principles of educational toleration, I shall essay in a few subsequent letters to apply them to a few of the pressing difiiculties of the day — rival Manchester schemes, compulsory management clauses. Government inspection, and so forth — viewing each question in the separate characters of a citizen and of a Churchman. 408 LXXXVI. EDUCATION AND TOLBRATION.-II. Dec. 17. In the last letter which I wrote you^ I endeavoured to lay down clearly some first principles relative to general educa- tion^ which I apprehended that the doctrinaires on either side were too much in the habit of overlooking; and I promised to apply them to some specific cases of the day, viewing eacli both as a citizen and a Churchman. These first principles^ briefly recapitulated^ are, that secular education ia its abstract signification is an impossibility — and that the attempt, therefore, to establish vndogmatic education, which is the real aim, under that appellation, and to make it general, can only result in a struggle to establish a new intolerant State Church, with Theism for its creed, a Ministry of Public Instruction for its hierarchy, and the various sects of men in England who hold, with more or less reality, some dogma, or some semblance of dogma, as the enforced paymasters of that which is the common antagonist of all their shades of opinion. That such a scheme was foredoomed to ultimate failure I predicted ; but I could not predict that its failure would be hurtful only to itself. It might turn out an abortive birth — it might be a foundering bark, which only proved the unseamanship of its crew, leaving us, after it had gone down, where we were, minus only time, money, and patience. But it might, in what is irreverently called the chapter of accidents, gain a footing. It might be sent forth to fulfil its mission of multiplying differences, inflaming passions, and magnifying suspicions ; and though its ultimate success were as impossible as that of the Marrast Constitution, yet, like the Marrast Constitution, it could not die out without leaving enduring marks of its baleful existence. I based my predictions, I repeat, on the moral impossibihty of " purely secular" education — of an education which should teach the nature of material things without a reference to their cause — which should not deny theism, and yet should avoid stigmatizing atheism — which should be civil to atheism, and yet keep clear of shocking theism. So-called secular education, I assumed, and I will assume till I am refuted, must either be undogmatic theism, or dogmatic atheism. Having established my ground, I promised to apply myself to 409 certain educational controversies of the day, viewing them both as a citizen and as a Churchman ; to this I direct myself in the present letter^ I need not detain you very long with arguments upon the general principle of Mr. Fox's scheme. It is, under the thin gauze of secular education, which I have endeavoured to strip off, so absolutely the distinct, unflinching, uncompro- mising exponent of the doctrine of State-enforced theism, that, in what I have already said in this letter, as well as in the whole of my preceding one, I have handled it as completely as my limits allow me to do ; and to endeavour to dilate any farther upon it would only be to repeat myself ivith an array of proper names, which I have been happy enough hitherto to avoid. Still, there is a line of argument, fashionable enough among those missionaries of the new Church who condescend to strive to make it palatable among men who have a prejudice for some dogmatic teaching, which I cannot quit without exposing the fallacy upon which it rests. We are told all round— Churchmen, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Independents — " Why this alarm ? all we want to do is to save you trouble and expense : your school apparatus if left to you, comprises so much secular teaching, and so much religious — both requiring time, money, teachers, books. AU we desire is to save you all round by giving, at prime cost and best quality, that secular teaching which you must all be one about — to impress upon your united yoimg ones that the earth is round, the moon a satellite, and Julius Caesar first Roman Emperor— and leave you to yourselves with purses husbanded through our self-denying exertions, to lead off your respective squads on your own days to your own schoolrooms, and train them to your hearts^ content to hate each other with the proverbial hatred of theology." That clever men could be deluded by this transparent trap is passing strange. I do not rest my surprise upon the impossibility of any common training being really colourless, but upon considerations more homely and more fiscal — and therefore, perhaps, below the consideration of philosophizing pseudo-liberal intellect. All dogma, embodied in Church organization, must be missionary and proselytising — not only that of the Cathohc Church, but of every sect which claims anything like fixity of belief — the Methodists for instance. I will, then, plead this point as in the interest of that denomination ; every- 410 thing which I say applying, of course, a fortiori, to the case of the Church of England. Why do Methodists establish Methodist schools ? A bald question, in sooth, and the answer is no less bald — to educate Methodists. Holding a certain formula of faith, and a certain discipline to be the best — and anxious, on the one hand, to win and to secure as many: o that faith and that discipline as they can compass — and on the other, to give those so secured the same educational advantages as the members of any other denomination, both for their own salies as individuals, and as members of a community for the good name and consequent sustentation of that community — they adopt the common sense expedient of a system of schools in which, to Methodist children, Methodist masters and mis- tresses give general education with that colouring which is indehble, and pervades everything from the contact of their joint profession — over and above direct religious teaching. To the very affluent, and the very high-minded, this combina- tion of tkeir " truth" with mere secular attainments, is a privilege. To others it is something more than a privilege — it is a bonus — a perfectly legitimate and recognised one, stiU and absolutely a bonus ; and every one knows it to be such. Educational advantages are among the most obvious and the most laudable means adopted by any reUgionism to preserve its hereditary adherents, and increase the roll of its conquests. The Methodists — whose advocate I now am— know this, and act up to it ; so do the Roman Catholics, so do the Anghcans, when not lost in apathy or false liberalism. What cares a selfish and money-making father for rehgion, except so far perhaps as he may have a pride in not " turning his coat ?" But he does care a great deal for his young hopefuls reading, and writing, and cyphering, with the rest of their fellow-com- batants in the life struggle. Let them be able to gain this reading, writing, and cyphering, of the best, at the denomi- national school — and that amount of pride in consistency which the father may retain, will prevent his opposing the religion they may be compelled to swallow besides — perhaps he may applaud it. Cover the land ynt)i Foxian secular schools, and where is all that vast population, the younger scions of the house of Mammon ? where that other multitude, the children whose school time is physical deprivation to their parents ? How many of them will be spared on " reUgious days" from the essay of their " secular" acquirements — their reading, writing, cyphering, and so forth— in their parents' 411 interests^ or from positive labour towards earning subsistence ? This is, of course, an argument whicb I do not expect to tell with any who have not a real belief in the necessity of reli- gious instruction. But I do expect it to tell with them, and still more do I expect it to tell with those who are not ashamed to confess and to vindicate the missionary character of Christianity. To these I repeat, with all the emphasis of a profound conviction, that to accept the Foxian plea of the economic character of mixed " secular" education, is to betray their belief in the missionary duties of their denomi- nation, whatever they may be. But the scheme fostered by Mr. Fox is not the only Man- chester fabric. Competition runs high in that city. It would not suit its book to m^eet the aggressive intolerance of his invention by a simple negative, and so we find in the market a Manchester and Salford article, to combine the interests of the Church of England with all the doctrinaire comprehen- siveness on which the rival scheme bases its claim to popular favour. This competition, which appeals to Churchmen with a character given by that calm, judicious, straightforward pre- late, the Bishop of Manchester, cannot be discussed in a few lines. I shall therefore reserve it to a future letter, after which I will handle the points of controversy which bear exclusively upon the existing machinery^ such as it is, of Church of England education. LXXXVII. EDUCATION AND TOLERATION.-III. Dec. 22. In my last letter I discussed Mr. Pox's general system of education — " the National Public School Association," as I should have called it — and gave my reasons for total dissent from it. Having done so, I must pay it the compliment of saying that, such as it is, it is a substantive system, having its own consistency, and its own scope. To-day I am occupied with the antagonist Manchester and Salford scheme — a pro- 412 ject no less dangerous to the soundness of the faith than that of Mr. Fox, hut totally different from it in its character, being as adjective as the other is substantive, and as incon- sistent as the other is consistent. The Manchester and Salford proposition is plainly and broadly a very audacious attempt to trade upon borrowed capital. It is a daring flying of kites, such as one would hardly have expected to have fallen in with in such a quarter, were there not a more than moral conviction that, as in other such speculations, the real actors are behind — the real hands that pull the strings are out of sight — the real profit to be made is not that of the apparent leaders, who have unhappily fallen into the hands of men who know too well how to make their trade of the unwary. To drop metaphor — I dismiss from my consideration Mr. Entwistle, Mr. Kichson, and even the eloquent and charitable Canon StoweU, and proceed at once to the throat of the matter — to the real movers in this enterprise, of which those gentlemen have been induced to become the referees. How to describe the scheme briefly and clearly is, I own, one of the most difficult tasks which I have ever attempted. Each half of the picture so completely neutralises the other — each element in the plan is so antagonistic to the other — that I feel my utter inability to give even the most indiflerent synopsis of the comphcated and most unnatural programme. The object of the undertaldng, we are told, is to combine universal education with a regard, on the one hand, to the distiactive teaching of difi^erent denominations, and, on the other, to the rights of conscience- — ia short, to create an educational Eden out of the jarring atoms of religious differ- ences in this land of free toleration. And the notable device to gain this end is this : — Raise an education rate, collect it along with water rates, highway rates, gas rates, &c. &c., by that bland and popular official, the rate collector, whose eponymus, thanks to Dickens, will ever be Mr. Lillyvick. By this preliminary step you will have made your scheme uni- versally palatable, and wiU have brought minds, heretofore exacerbated by sectarian animosity, into that cdm and charitable state in which John Bull will most assuredly realise the blessings of sound general education. Having got your money, your next step is to spend it. You take two adjacent ecclesiastical districts, St. X. and St. Y. In St. X, you fintV that there has been, for years, an 413 inefficient incumbent, and that consequently the Chiu'ch is weak, and her schools nil; while the people, driven to seek their own pastures, have fallen away to so many denomiaa- tions, that none have been able to do much in the way of education. Then, as regards St. X., your duty is at once to set up schools in which no distinctive religious teaching at aU is to be permitted; and to spend upon these schools the money which flows so cheerfully into the bag of Mr. LUly- vick from the pocket of the Churchman and the Methodist, the Roman Catholic and the Quaker, the Huntingdonian and the Huntingtonian — all and each of whom, if he have any belief in his own persuasion, must look upon the said schools as a religious curse, and upon Mr. Lillyvick as the plunderer of his pocket and the vexer of his conscience. I leave you to conjecture the pleasant state of the parish of St. X. Its condition would be about the same as if it were placed under the rival " National Public School Association." But the state of St. Y., and the functions of Mr. Lillyvick within its precincts, are very different ; and here we are pri- vileged to appreciate the peculiar and distinctive beauties of the Manchester and Salford scheme. The incumbent of St. Y. is young, energetic, self-denying, and sensible, without being a wonderful preacher, or a strScingly clever man. Still his solid good qualities have their effect; about three quarters of his parish own themselves Churchmen, and the Sunday services are well attended, while those on the week days show a refreshing knot of poor people past work. The school is quite a sight — the children so clean and happy, and well behaved — the master and mistress so respectable. The funds somehow, are never wanting, for there are some warm-hearted souls in the parish who give largely of their abundance, and the pence-money makes up the rest. The school, I should say, is in connection with the " National Society," and, ac- cording to the Charter of that Society, the Church Catechism is taught to all the children frequenting it " without excep- tion ;" and, as Mr. A., the clergyman, is never tired of re- peating, he has not found a single complaint of this practice since he was incumbent of St. Y., except one from Mr. Brokeley, the greengrocer, who, although he comes to church in the morning, preaches at a Primitive Methodist's meeting three milss off in the evening. The remaining quarter of the parishioners, with some stray exceptions, are pretty equally divided between two dissenting meeting-houses —the one belonging to a straight-laced race of ancestral ultra- 414 Calvinists, proud of an unbroken descent from 1640 — the other^ far more modern, the place of assemblage of some easy-going Arminian sect. Neither of these two congrega- tions can do anything in the way of schools; the Calvinist school died away twelve years since, and the Arminians have ever since been thinking of setting up one. StiU the respec- tive ministers - each really a good sort of man, though igno- rant and narrow-minded, and hating each other and the Chiu'ch right cordially - say that, with a little direct help from the State, they might do something, for though their respec- tive flocks within St. Y. are small enough, yet each has his relay of out- worshippers from the wilderness of St. X.— to the schooling of which parish St. Y. might thus, in a super- denominational aspect, contribute. Here, to my mind, the politician, if called in to deal with St. Y., has a clear course. Three-quarters of the parish school themselves in their own way; the other quarter, by a little help, and no meddling, would school itself in its own two ways, and school part of St. X. also ; and a little help given to the Church school, in a similar spirit, would do still more for St. X. — for T am sure its worth-Httle clergyman would not trouble himself to refuse leave for his children to go to Mr. A.'s school, and so would allow it. But how do our Manchester and Salford physicians deal with the case ? What function in their behoof is the em- bodied education of the country — Mr. Lillyvick — to fulfil ? Strange enough, the three quarters of the parish are first called upon — paying for their own schools, as they do, out of their own pockets — to meet the education rate. This is a good beginning. Then comes the remaining quarter. It likewise finds the merciless Lillyvick knocking at its doors. Perhaps, if it found the rate returned back to it in its own proportion, and divided between its two congregations, it might not grumble so much, though it would be pretty sui-e not to like the stand and deliver way in which it was dragooned to educate its children. But this is not to be. The rate of the three-quarters and the rate of the one-quarter are poured together into one fund, in order that, by act of Parliament, the three-quarters of Churchmen may be vexed and annoyed, and driven out of all their religious bearings, by being com- pelled to open their school-rooms to the children of the one- quarter, who are to have the run of the scliool — minus cate- chism — to sit (no, stand) there, fingers in mouth, while their compeers are learning their religion from their pastors — idle 415 themselves, and the cause of idleness in all the rest. And, by some fiddle-faddle enactment on the other side, the one- quarter of dissenting children are to be driven into school and compelled to stand by and listen to prayers which (as their parents and their ministers are dinning in their ears day after day) are fulsome, unnecessary, and soul- deadening — Mr. B., the Calvinist minister, and Mr. C, the Arminian, being as little consulted in all this as unfortunate Mr. A. himself, and, if possible, worse off even than he, deprived of the possibility of ever having their own schools — and all united in only one thing — perfect hatred of Lillyvick. This, sir, is no exaggerated panorama of the Manchester and Salford proposition. Whether such a rickety production can ever stand as it is, is a question not worth an instant's consideration. It is slain in the womb —before it exists it is exploded. The Congregational Union — the most complete exemplification, perhaps, of pure dissenting zeal — has exposed this, and the " National Public School Association " in a report of considerable ability and sufficient moderation of tone. This document is now going the rounds of the papers. But " as it is " does not indicate its true destination ; it does not mark the end of those who are working for its establishment — the real and secret motive of those who have induced the well-meaning Mr. Entwistle to work as chair- man, and the turgid Canon Stowell to bluster as fugleman. Cats-paws the scheme has — but, as in the apologue, something moved the paws of the cat. I beg to leave it in ambiguity whether among the cats-paws I enumerate the Bishop of Manchester, with his pleasant plan of crushing the charter of the National Society of the Church of England by act of Parliament. The "National Public School Association," as I shewed the last time I wrote, is the mask of a new State Church, with a creed of Theism. The Manchester and Salford scheme is as palpably a new State Church, with a general acknow- ledgment of something which calls itself Christianity as its creed — but divested of all inconvenient reference to any existence or organization independent of the State, or any fixity or particularity of doctrine, beyond the function of the fleeting breath of legislative opinion to alter and re-alter — "the Church of the future," in short, which M. Bunsen systematised, and Lord John Eussell flounders about, which the Bishop of Manchester subserves, and the Archbishop of 416 Canterbury truckles to. To expose the workings of the .pro- paganda of this aggression upon positive dogmatic Christianity has been one of my principal objects ever since I became your correspondent. Its manifestations have of late been so frequent and so notoriouSj that its existence can no longer be questioned, and certain characteristics are universally foimd to accompany them which are not wanting in the present movement. The chief of these is that melancholy spectacle of the abandonment, on the part of the leaders of the so-called Evangelical party, of their former profession of some dogma, in their rage at that success which is attending the growth of the dogma of the Church which has so often come before our eyes within the last few months — ^the spectacle of the Evangelical party endeavouring to purchase a dishonour- able advantage by upholding claims of the prerogative which the Tudor days would hardly have surpassed — the spectacle whose prominent performers are, Mr. Colquhoun stirring popular prejudice into violence, the Primate of All England pleading for the regale as against constitutional representa- tion, and Lord Shaftesbury throwing to the winds the " minor" difference of having or not having a creed. It was in this spirit we saw, upon the Manchester platform, that orator (if he be not a leader) of the party — Canon Stowell — abandoning the Church Catechism. But, as if this indication of the animus of the work were not suflEicient to make assurance doubly sure, the chief and highest advocate of the Manchester and Salford scheme is the stormy petrel of all opposition to all religious dogma — Bishop Prince Lee. If Churchmen are not satisfied by these signs of the moving causes of the new scheme, I leave them to Mr. Stowell and Bishop Lee ! Their advocacy, the education rate, the ignomi- nious ostracising of the Catechism, the new and extraordinary powers to be given to the Committee of Council, all combine to shew which way the bubble Manchester and Salford scheme is meant to float, and the nature of the blast that is impelling it. Much as 1 have opposed Dr. Lee — reason as I have, like all Churchmen, to complain of, and to distrust him — I cannot do him the injustice of supposing that, with the sharpness he possesses, he can patronise so self-evident an absurdity as this ready-made opposition to Mr. Fox's great, though mischevious plan, for its own sake, and without ulterior objects. I have now, in this and my preceding letter, pointed out the impossibilities of the " National Public School " and the 417 Manchester and Salford plans of State-compelled education. I am now at a point where I am bound to adventure (such as it is) my theory of what the duty of the State is, in order to meet the undeniable evil and scandal of immense educa- tional deficiency throughout the land. My system is a very simple one — indeed, in my first letter I broached it. It is liberally and consistently to carry out, in the matter of educa- tion, that system of toleration which is more and more — ^with a few checks whenever a Whig Ministry succeeds ia obtaining ofiS.ce — ^becoming the rule of the British Constitution. No doubt, to the shallow observer, toleration, even in religion, seems to have its daxk side ; no doubt, a compulsory State Church seems to possess capabilities which nothing else can claim of ostensibly putting down wholesale manifes- tations of rehgious destitution. But the experience of years has shewn how illusory are these advantages, how tmreal is the sort of rehgion which comes to one in the guise of the tax-gatherer and the agent of police ; and England is wisely emancipating herself every day more completely from the idea of leaning upon such broken reeds. Just the same intellectual process — though at an earlier stage of its course — is being gone through in regard to educa- tion. Intolerance and compulsion are on the wane as respects positive religious teaching — they are on the increase at this instant as respects the indirect moral and religious teaching inseparable from education. The same iaHviie must await the Foxes and Prince Lees, which has befallen the supporters of State persecution of conscience. In the meanwhile the State wilj have let irreparable time and money slip away in the futile attempt. Her course is yet open before her. England claims tolerai- tion as her self-chosen motto. Toleration she must take with its apparent defects, as well as with its real advantages. She cannot be liberal, Anglo-Saxon, self-assisting in her churches — and at the same time centralising and persecuting in her schools. If she will be the latter, she must be the same at church also — she must persuade, or she must dragoon, all men to be of one mind in their religious convictions — she must emulate S'weden or Naples. If she is not prepared for this, she must cast aside all chimeras of enforcing uniform education — she must stimulate individual earnestness — she must enfranchise individual energy — she must assist individual self-sacrifice, without interference with sectarian differences so long as primary morality and good order are not transgressed. 2 F 418 ThuSj and thus alone, can the educational problem be solved in free and tolerant England ; and ia this solution the Eeformed Cathohc Chiirch of the land must not be left the golitary exception to the right of holding sacred its own convictions i LXXXVIII. CHRISTMAS, 1851. Dec. 26. liVEN had I Controversial matter to briug before you, writing on this day, I should abstaiu. Journalism itself should partake, as far as it can, in the cheerful influence of this happy hallowing season; joumahsts should, as far as they may, keep their Christmas, and aid their friends to do the same. But, as a correspondent of yours upon Church matters, I must take advantage of the time to drop you, as my Christmas greeting, a few words of sympa:thy, and of encouragement in the line which you have so unflinchingly taken up — -the defeUce, upon its true principles, and in its true aspedt, of the Church of England. Buffeting, as Churchmen have dbne-^buffeting, as Churchmen will have to do— so many waves of popular opposition, they yet cannot but feel, what they could not feel at Christmas, 1850, that they stand before the public— *as opponents, it may be, of some, as antagonists even of others-^but before all as men who have a cause, and a principle, and a claim to their place at the tribunal of popular justice. How far your advocacy of our cause has tended to this change, it is not right for me, writing to your columns, to expatiate upon— ^the future his- torian of Church revival of this century, whoever he may be, wiU see to it. This Christmas, at least, we can go to our churches, bright with the ted-berried holly and the perennial yew, and take part iu the merry respond of choral worship, without dread of the mob without and the brawlers within — of the brutal jest, and the stiU more brutal violence — of official justice torpid, and popular fair-play distorted. This Christmas, instead of having to dwell upon lowering anticipations of a coming year fraught with portentous and unmeasurable dangers, we see 419 our bark safe in its anchorage, with crew unscathed — save the few who chose themselves to leave us — having weathered the storm that looked so black, the waves that swelled so big, the winds that howled so dolorously. Any high Churchman who recollects his anticipations this day twelve months ago, who considers where he is now standing, and who does not feel his heart swell and burst with thankfulness, does not deserve those blessings for which he shews he is so unthank- ful. But enough of this. Our success is too broad and solid to be made a matter of self-congratulation — sUence best beseems it. It is Christmas tide, and Christmas tide is best observed by practically realizing the lessons of that sweet old hymn with which our churches to-morrow* will^ by the thousand, be resounding^ " Peace on earth and mercy mUd." At Christmas I never can understand religious controversy in otir Church. I never can understand, that is, how any persons who hold to the Church of England can fail to be high — that is genuine — Churchmen. Christmas is so thoroughly the type of the Church festival — of the real observance of the Church year — that every man who throws himself, as all I hope do, with heart and soul into the cele- bration of Christmas, can only by a volunteered inconsistency hold back, and enact the Puritan throughout the rest of the year. Nor only this, but every one who keeps Christmas as a Christian, keeps the festival of the Divine Incarnation ; he keeps that festival which commemorates till time shall be no more, that wondrous fact which has created, and on which depends, the Sacramental system of the Universal Church. Cluistmas teUs of God incarnate. " G-od incarnate" sup- poses all matter to be halloTred with the hallowing of human flesh. This is the Sacramental system — the Cathohc faith — the lifespring of the true and everlasting Church, of which we are the sons, and within which, God helping us, we ever shall strive to maintain the English communion. But I am entering upon themes hardly beseeming the occasion, although so easily arising from it. I must conclude, from the bottom of my heart wishing you and all your readers a merry Christmas and happy New Year. * Written on Christmas Eve; LETTERS CHURCH MATTERS. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE " MORNIFG CHRONICLE." No. IX. " The world ia nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON- JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1863. CONTENTS. PAGE LXXXIX. Education and Toleration — IV. . . . 421 XC. Extension of Church Services . . . 426 XCI. The Gorham Judgment as it is . . . 430 XCII. Education and Toleration— V. . . . 436 XCIII. Churchmen, and the coming Session . . 439 XCIV. Convocation in Action ... . 443 XCV. The Church and a new Ministry . . 445 XCVI. The Australian Church in Synod . . 448 XCVir. The Pew System 449 XCVIII. A Churchman's Politics .... 454 XCIX. Cathedrals in America, and Synods at home 457 C. The Laity in Synod 463 LETTERS ON CHUECH MATTERS. LXXXIX. EDUCATION AND TOLERATION.— IV. Jan. 10. I KESUME the subject of Education and Toleration. In my former letters^ after discussing the two rival schemes of com- prehensive education, and showing their impracticabilities, 1 touched upon the one feasible method of State encouragement of education — the impartial encouragement of denomiaational and private enterprise. I have now to deal, in further ex- planation of my views, with some details inseparable from any Government patronage of education. Pour fixer les idees, I will regard them from the point of view which they present at the annual meetings of the National Society, at the same time grappliag with them as affecting denominational educa- tion in general. These details are the questions of trust deeds and governmental inspection. The trust-deed question has been of late years very famOiar, as that of the management clauses, in our great Church Educational Society. I fully and entirely beHeve that there is no point upon which the feehngs and motives of Church- men have been more mistaken, to the detriment of their credit for sense and moderation, than upon this one. The aspect which the controversy has superficially presented is, 2 G 422 that the Committee of Council offered to the founders of Church schools a choice of certain wisely and well drawn systems of constitutional administration^ beyond which the desires of reasonable men could not stray ; and that a clique of factious and mediaeval agitators have kept the National Society in hot water for years by their pertinacious refusal of these management clauses, , and their equally pertinacious enforcement of a demand that the Church education of the country should be placed under a sacerdotal despotism worthy of the Vatican or the Westminster Assembly. This aspect of the matter has just enough of surface truth in it to be the most untrue thing conceivable, while that surface truth renders it a serviceable weapon to not very scrupulous adversaries, and unhappily, also, a loophole for friends who may desire to take a " managing" line upon the question. I am sure there is not a man of all those who have crowded the barn-Hke central school-room in the Sanctuary, June after June, who will say a word against the abstract justice of the State demanding carefully drawn management clauses as the price of its assistance towards building schools. We have all paid too dearly for the atrociously bad management clauses — or the no clauses at all — of the older national schools, not to feel this ; and those persons, we assert, who think they can or ought to conduct their schools without a constitution — while at perfect liberty to do so — should be prepared in return to forego State help — just as a correspondent of yours a few days since argued that the builders of Trustee Churches should be prepared to forego help from the Incorporated Society. There is equally little sympathy with those who desire to shut the door of co-operation in the face of the laity — the true laity of the Church, the devout communicants, that is- - and who desire to see a soU-clerical management clause the type of our national system of Church education. No one, I believe, of all those who have voted with Archdeacon Denison, would wish this ; certainly Archdeacon Denison himself does not wish this. But this case is as wide as the Poles asunder from our actual grievance, which is that the Government has taken upon itself arbitrarily to enforce its limited array of buckram constitutions, and thus to exclude millions of others — one of which millions happens to be the sob-clerical one, as was perhaps too prominently enforced by us in the outset. The Committee of Council party, so long as the battle was fought over the body of this constitution, had caught an 423 advantagej and left us at a disadvantage — at the disadvantage of a seeming bigotry, and jealousy of the laity of Christ's Holy Church ; but, by a blunder of policy for which " mira- culous " would scarcely be too strong a term — in a moment of weakness — a bilious instant of capricious power-showing, it may be — the Committee of Council tore off its own mask, revealed its own feelings, and planted us in that position which the unlucky first issue of the contest had seemed for ever to have rendered it impossible for us to gain. The petty village of West Mailing was its Capua — the Churchman who denounced the wrong was a Kentish squire of the old school — true and staunch to the good cause — Mr. Gipps. The condemned constitution of West Mailing school, the claim which the Committee of Council repudiated, was no parsonocratic despotism — ^no superstitious mummery — no in- quisitorial surveillance. It was the sole and simple require- ment that the Church schoolmaster should he a Church communicant! Explanation weakens some facts. Pre-emin- ently would it weaken the fact that the condition of a Church schoolmaster being a Church communicant is a disfranchisement in the eyes of the Committee of Council on Education. This is an outrage, I should have thought, to the " principles," as much as a grievance to the " conscience " of any Churchman — a flagrant and truculent denial of the keystone of Church membership, and an abandonment of a requirement, which can only be deemed a mere private matter between a man and his God, on the hypothesis of a visible Church being a fallacy ; and, over and beyond all, it is a cruel tyranny upon the clergyman, who sees his teaching of the Church Catechism in his school neutralised — made a mockery and a jest — by the virtual denial of it which the life of that schoolmaster exhibits — who can teach for six days that Holy Communion is " generally necessary to salvation," and habitually and invariably refuse it upon the seventh. At feast, the phantom dread of clerical meddling has at once and or ever exploded. The animus of the opposition to Church demands has been stripped bare in its hideousness. Distinctive doctrine, distinctive discipline, are proved to be the things really aimed at. The system to be " unostentatiously " pushed is, after all, the reduction of the so-called Church to a bureau of theism, with, perhaps, an acknowledgment of the divinity of the Saviour — the rumoured concession of a notorious Bishop of the Northern Province. Those who, through the wintry and freezing night of mis- apprehension, have been contending for liberty for the Church 424 to be the Churchy may well bless the West Mailing case. JSxoriare aliquis, they prayed, to vindicate their moderation. Aliquis appears as the Committee of Council itself. Against trust deeds, necessarily combining management clauses, they feel no enmity — nay, they demand them. They also entirely, and without equivocation or modification, re- cognise the equitable right of the Government which gives aid to satisfy itself most folly of the legal and constitutional trustworthiness of the clauses which are to regulate the school, and of the bona fides with which they are to be ad- ministered. But to go beyond "legal and constitutional" in its relation to the general body politic is not the province of the Committee of Council — i. e., of the representative of the State. The greater or less desirability of this or that con- stitiition, its greater or less accordance with the spirit of this or that religionism which the proposed school is to subserve, is the concern of that religionism itself in its corporate and constitutional aspect ; nay, I might add, in an extreme case, it is the concern of the founder of the school himself, if he pleases to be a Church to himself, and gives, as a Chiu'ch to himself (more difficult by far for one man to give than a cor- porate body), sufficient guarantee that the education which he proposes to create wiU be, secularly speaking, useful, and, rehgiously, not immoral — a thing about which, of course, in such a case, the State would be justly jealous, and in which it would be bound to take extreme precautions. This is fair play both for Churchmen, and for those who differ from the Church of England. The contrary principle — the motto as yet of the Committee of Council— is justice to nobody ; and it has accordingly excited the just suspicion of all bodies. The sects, happy in the possession of self-government, are able to fight their own battles ; the Roman Catholics have vigorously pushed their advantage ; the Church of England alone, ingens litore trimcus, is at once, from the paralysis of synodical action, unable alike to make her tmited complaint heard, to suggest her own remedy, or to tender her own sufficient guarantee of super- vision of endowed schools — which she could provide by sub- jecting them to the overhauhng of a Church legislature, composed of the representatives of the clergy and of the lay communicants (as Government offices are subject to Parlia- ment). The annual meeting of the National Society is the only channel left — an irregular and spasmodic, though solitary, substitute for legitimate representative government. Church- 425 men, hating this annual fights are yet compelled to enter it : and^ in entering it, they know that they are building up the noxious fallacy that the National Society is the " Church by representation " in her educational aspect. For such a concatenation there is but one remedy — that we should consent to look the educational question in the face, as not an isolated and special matter, but as one item merely in the long catalogue of Chtirch wrongs. We must vindicate our forwardness upon broad principles — the only true ones. Church Unions are not our ideal of Church deli- berative gatherings ; as little is the annual meeting in the " Sanctuary" — to hear the annual report of the National Society, and elect its committee by a suffrage about as real as the late oui ou non — such an ideal. But, nolentes volentes, we must put up with both as means to the end of consti- tutional government. All that we wish is that those who in Parhament advocate synodical action would in the " Sanc- tuary" come forward to give life and reality to their advocacy. Very valuable as are the speeches of such champions as the Bishop of London and the Bishop of Oxford in a Convocation debate, they yet need the life they would display through the hearty co-operation of those prelates in the endeavours of Churchmen to supply, however imperfectly — and to prepare the way, however feebly, towards — that consummation, by vindicating, even under the presidency of Archbishop Sumner, the great cause of education and toleration — first and directly for the Church — secondly and indirectly -for the State. Indeed, if there were no other motive to make our Bishops long for the restoration of synodical action, a sufficiently strong one would be found in the diminished responsibility which they would incur in personal dealings with the Govern- ment. As it is, they have to bear the brunt both ways — to take upon themselves to speak authoritatively (and yet upon their own surmise, in truth) the " miad of the Church" — to be disowned by that Church if they have spoken that mind incorrectly. In very deed, the indecision of some of our Prelates on this momentous question wdl, by the impartial historian, hereafter be brought forward as some extenuation of the Government tactics during the discussions of past years. I am again compelled to pause. My next letter will shew how honestly Churchmen accept, in its constitutional aspect. Government inspection of assisted schools; and how that aspect, as being the constitutional one, can alone, in the long run, succeed and be accepted either for Church schools or for those of the denominations. 426 XC. EXTENSION OF CHURCH SERVICES. Jan. 14. I HAD occasion last summer to denounce the -working of reckless new-church majmfacture under the illusive plea of Church extension, whilst the cheaper, readier, morepractical ex- tension, that of Church services — was comparatively neglected. Since that time, this obvious truth has, I rejoice to say, been making its way in independent quarters ; and there are at this instant two schemes of sendee extension before the public — the programme recommended by a committee of the Ruri- decanal Chapter of Leeds, whose report has been printed — and that of Mr. Miller, vicar of St. Martin's, Birmingham, repubhshed not long since in your paper, which is by this time in actual operation under the sanction of the Bishop of Wor- cester. The latter plan is, indeed, so completely an amplifi- cation of the Leeds recommendation, reduced to working order — and so evidently founded upon it — that I shall not, in the observations which I am prepared to offer, have occasion to refer particularly to the older and more incomplete docu- ment ; since all that I have to say of Mr. Miller's praiseworthy, though, as I shall shew, not felicitously devised arrangement, will bear upon that which was its germ. Mr. Miller's starting point is the dogma — as historically true as the practical disregard of it has proved detrimental to the custom among our Church poor of public worship — that " our ordinary morning service consists of a combination of services, which were not originally intended to be read to- gether." He should, by the way, have qualified his statement by the somewhat opposite view, that there is nothing in our formularies which prevents this amalgamation; they are so many services, in fine, which may or may not be combined — not intended to be so joined — not intended, on the other hand, as a matter of course, to be dissociated — the question, on either side, being one of expediency, which unhappily, with few and rare exceptions, as in a few cathedrals, the desire of saving oneself trouble has led our clergy to decide all in one direction. Having chosen his starting point, Mr. IMiller develops his system of reformed Church services upon it. His one idea 427 in this development is, that there are four Sundays, as a general rule, in every month. Sometimes there is a fifth, in which case number 5 may be treated as number 4 bis, as they say across the Channel. Given his four Sundays, he distributes each into four services : 9.15 and 11 a.m., 3.30 and 6.30 p.m. These four services are diflFerently made up of the disjecta membra of our ordinarily amalgamated services, with the originality of" Com- munion Service " and " Lord's Supper " being treated as two distinct services. The " Lord's Supper," as distinctive from the Communion Service, is fixed on the first Sunday at 1 1 ; on the second at 9.15; on the thii-d at 3.30 p.m.; while on the fourth Sunday it is entirely omitted — two " Communion Services," so-caUed, being discoverable in the day's pro- gramme. Here the table of amended services stops. I have no hesitation in saying that, appealing, as Mr. Miller does, in his initiatory pastoral — I do not doubt with the most perfect honesty — to "the original design of the framers of the Prayer-book," he has as completely disregarded or mistaken that intention as, in the course of a short pro- gramm.e, it was possible for any one to do. I look for those intentions where alone I expect to find them — in the Prayer- book itself, especially in its prefatory matter ; and there, diligently seeking for something which may bear some re- semblance to any directions about the successive Sundays of the month — something which may shew that there is so much as any relation between months and Sundays — I utterly fail in my search. I find, indeed, a classification of Sundays ; but this as completely ignores Mr. Miller's system, as Mr. Miller's system gives it the go-by. The Prayer-book deals with Sundays in Advent, Sundays after Christmas, and Epiphany ; and then three Sundays, each with a long name of Latin origin; and then come Sundays in Lent, with the penitential season which they divide, and Easter Day, and Sundays after Easter — Ascension Day (always a Thursday), and the Sunday after that — Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday — and the long line of Sundays after Trinity. Then there is a class of what call themselves Holy-days ; and last of all there is every day in the year, which has its " Mattins " and " Even ■ song," with particular lessons and appointed Psalms; and twice a week, besides the Sunday, the Litany is commanded to be said. These various days, taken together, compose what has been well termed the Christian Year ; and upon this Christian Year must be built any system of Church-service extension that is to be lasting. 428 Mr. Miller's plan, as we have seen, absolutely overlooks the Christian Year. It is solely and simply a system of fifty- two sets of Sunday services, without so much as, on the face of it, a recognition of the great Sundays of the year — without so much as a promise that, when Easter-day or Whitsunday shall be the fourth or fifth Sunday in the month (and in 1852, Whitsunday will be the fifth Sunday in May), the "Lord's Supper" will be celebrated upon that day. The ritualistic ignorance which attempts to draw a dis- tinction between the " Lord's Supper" and the " Communion Service " is too palpable to require exposure. At the same time I cannot but remark upon the perversity which has ledMr. Miller to hold back and deny to himself and his Church the blessed privilege of weekly communion, by arbitrarily expunging the fourth, and, when there is one, the fifth Sunday iu the month ; thus, iu the latter instance, viz., four times in the year, creating a void of three weeks between successive celebrations of the Holy Communion in his enormous parish of 44,000 inhabitants. To say the truth, sorry as I am to say so, I cannot but think that, when a little analysed, Mr. Miller's scheme will be found to have a rather fine weather gloss upon it. I mean that, when the tariff of services (only Sunday ones) shall be divided between himself and the two curates which the Clergy List for the present year assigns him, it will not be found to involve so much greater an amount of duty, though taken in smaller detachments of time, than ordinarily falls to the lot of an incumbent and two curates, ia any town parish of that or half that amount of population. I could, from personal knowledge, mention parishes with not half the population of St. Martin's, Birmingham, and with not a larger clerical staff, where the Holy Communion is celebrated twice every Lord's Day — how often at other times it is not my present object to detail — and yet the papers have not been full of praises of the doings of these churches. I have purposely reserved the last one feature in Mr. Miller's scheme, which has come to him in derivation from that of Dr. Hook — the afternoon or evening celebration of the Holy Communion. As a correspondent of yours forcibly pointed out the other day, this is a proposition simply and absolutely repugnant to the nearly entire consent of the whole Christian Church in all ages ; and its being so is, to my mind, a strong presumption against it. But there are further argu- ments which ought to have their weight in quarters where I 429 am surprised to see the plan promulgated or vindicated. It is needless for me to say — Lord Ashley and his friends said so for me in December, 1850 — that in the Church of England there is a floating body of nominal Churchmen, who chng to the Establishment while they pare down the Church — who are " Episcopalians " for the honour and glory of the thing, while they deride that sacramental religion without which episcopacy is a btirden and a tyranny. These men, of course, are amongst those who, with the Communion Service and the Church Catechism staring them in the face, persist in regarding the Holy Communion as nothing more than a com- memorative repast — a supper, the memorial of a supper. To those who wish to propagate such notions I have nothing to say ; but of those who hold these views in that dread which they must excite among all well grounded Churchmen, I ask, will you not be wise in time — wiU you not see how fatal an encouragement you are giving to the casnacular view, by en- couraging men, be it at Leeds or at Birmingham, who are pleased, in opposition to almost all the Universal Church, to make a rule of post-prandial communions ? That, with 365 days in the year, a system of communions cannot be organised to meet the requirements of all classes, without violation of the venerable custom of Christendom is sheer absurdity. The supposition is a part of the miserable sys- tem which regards religion and worship as only a Sunday mat- ter. In Leeds Church, the practice is very different from such a theory. There, long before it had become so common as it has since happily become in all quarters of the land, the solemn morning and evening worship of God set up by a former generation, was continued with new life and vigour under Dr. Hook. It has never ceased to be said in its ma- jestic choral aspect, in the sumptuous temple, on the site of the former church, of which he is the parish priest, since its ceremonious consecration, now eleven years ago. How then can Dr. Hook now make himself the fautor of recommenda- tions whose tendency has so soon manifested itself in the Birmingham fashion ? To conclude, the scheme of Mr. Miller, sanctioned by the learned Bishop of Worcester, is valuable as an indication of public feeling ; but this feeling it strives to meet with about as unsatisfactory a machinery as can well be conceived. I trust it will have its weight, to stir up other clergymen to devise their ways of meeting it ; and I trust it will also stir them up to avoid its deficiencies and its errors. 430 XCI. THE GORHAM JUDGMENT AS IT IS. Jan, 10. All thanks to Mr. Goode ! All thanks for what no man but he could do — Mr. Goode, laureate and coryphaeus of Lydianism — elbow prompter of Archbishop Sum.ner — of a Primate whose garblings (by deputy, as I charitably suppose), of elder theologians to babk up the Gorham judgment, are history and fact. " Fatal and perfidious bark," as was the judgment, none could have imagined that its chief shipwright was doomed to be its cacodcemon — none could have foreseen that, in his eagerness to caulk up its yawning leaks, he would still fur- ther bare the rents, and expose his own banthng's utter unseaworthiness . And yet it is so — and the character of that decision is now unquestionable. In fact, wild as was the clamour of delight with which the anti-sacramental party hailed its sentences, slowly dropping out in Lord Langdale's silvery tones — as soon as in the calm of their studies they weighed the gain and loss of it, they found their triumph Yery ambiguous, the use they could make of it very uncertain, the disgrace of usiag it the only thing unambiguous and certain. They had anticipated the solemn enunciation that the Church of Eng- land repudiated Baptismal Regeneration — that it was a masterpiece of Satan, and a treachery to the Reformation. They found instead a subtile and minute argument to show that, albeit the Church of England held very distinctly Bap- tismal Regeneration, yet it was neither illegal according to her constitution, nor immoral according to her spirit, to continue reaping her emoluments while denying her primary tenets. They had anticipated beholding her portals of state thrown open to the entire throng of Puritans — they saw Mr. Gorham smuggled in by an artifice tlirough the back-door. They had dreamed that the judgment would quell for ever the sacramental school; all that they netted of personal profit was to witness the amiable and popular Vicar of St. Just transferred from the parish he had made too hot for himself, to the less opulent incumbency of Bramford Speke. " Another such victory, and we are undone," was the half whispered comment of the more sagacious; and they set themselves to work to make good the advantage they had 431 lost in the winning it. Lord Ashley's tui'bulent and revo- lutionary proceedings filled the largest space in the public eye ; but meanwhile the diplomatic Mr. Goode was quietly working to enlist novel allies into the ranks of his discredited cause : preparing a combination^ of which the shameless impudicity has not been — I speak deliberately — exceeded in any of the transactions which have complicated and dis- graced the last four years of European history. To estimate rightly the whole bearing of his tactics, I must bespeak your attention for a short time to the last century. At that epoch, why or wherefore I need not say, cor- ruption had run riot in the English Ghurcli. Nepotism, simony, pluralism, neglect of duty, positive immorality, were the plague spots of the " Establishment." And the men who were most deeply tainted with these vices for the most plumed themselves upon their orthodoxy — mainly, we must suppose, because it would have been troublesome to have professed heterodoxy. But of all the distinctive doctrines of the Catholic faith, the only one which had maintained any prominence was that of Baptismal Regeneration, though it maintained this at the cost of all its spiritual significance — no longer as the foundation of the Christian's life of holiuess ■ — the aid and the iucentive to growth in grace — but as the discharge in full of a man's outstanding score with heaven — as a very comfortable and easy-going dogma in short — not, as it really is, one of the most awful of existing facts. Above this vast dead level of corruption rose a small knot of men, zealous, but ignorant — lovers of souls, but careless of Christ^s appointed way to win those souls — members of the Estab- lishment, while sceptics as to the sacramental theory of the Church ; in one word, the early " Evangelicals." In their battles with the barren orthodoxy of their times there was no doctrine which they assailed with more inveterate acrimony than that of Baptismal Regeneration — partly from the logical conviction that the admission of it barred the access to their entire theory— partly from strong unreasoning indignation at the men whose parody of it, misused and mutilated, was lapping immortal beings in the lethargy of sin by those very doctrines which should have been the proclamation of Heaven to be won by the warfare of the cross. Meanwhile the " old orthodox'^ — or, to adopt a modern designation, the " high and dry" — lived on in their bishoprics, and their deaneries, and their rectories ; improving on the whole, it is fair to say, hke the rest of the world, as times 432 became more earnest, and gross corruptions were more easily exposed, but still always contriving to lag in the rear of their neighbours' improvements. And so years moved on — the niueteenth century was heaping up its decades, and the old conditions of Church and State, on which those men built their hopes, were crambliag away under them, and they knew it not. When their fears were abruptly awakened, the rottenness of their position was instantaneously revealed by a new foe from an unexpected quarter, out of their own bosom — by a younger school of High Churchmen, who had the audacity to understand what they professed, and to practise what they understood. The old sham fell to pieces in a moment, tried and found wanting by that to which it had itself appealed — the formularies of the Church of England. Its routed members took their different courses. Many and many of them have chosen the better way, and have embraced, with more or less of cordi- ality and of completeness, that fuller manifestation of Church privileges and Church responsibilities which it was their great blessing to live to witness. The rest, heartless and hopeless, wildly gazing on the whelming tides on every side — real Churchmen with their Prayer Books — Horsmans and Halls with their Blue Books — Parliaments and Convocations — Commissions and Synods — their consciences and their pockets — ^were eager to avail themselves of the succour of any barque, from wherever coming, and wherever due — manned they cared not by whom. And yet it is to these men — with whom, if they had any faith in the reality of their own convictions, and any zeal for God's truth according to their estimate of it, they were bound to have proclaimed internecine war, far more than with " Tractarians," who at least strove to hve a life of Christian usefulness, and who preached conversion while they taught regeneration in bap- tism — that Mr. Goode and his set had the unparalleled meanness to go crouching for a morsel of bread. They haie gone to these men, and they have begged them — as Mr. Goode himself, according to your paper of Wednesday, re- quested you to publish — to join them in a protest to uphold the judgment as being a cause of " thankfulness," and " wise and Just," a position of which " they feel called upon" " to state their conviction" " under present circumstances (whether holding or not the view which called forth THE judgment)" — that is, whether or not agreeing upon a point, difference on which makes one or another gospel. 433 Fancy might run riot in endeavouring to trace all the motives of self-interest which may have been pressed by Mr. Goode and his " committee" in that "private correspondence with persons known to them," of which he makes so much in his letter to the Archbishops. But some broad features there must have been which ran through all the letters to those who do not hold Mr. Gorham's view — some special claims which were the stock of the general canvass. ' Let me briefly recapitulate (with the disadvantage of not having been behind the scenes of that reverend conclave) what must have been the model circular, which won over the " high-and-dry" to the Gorham standard. " Things are getting very pressing for both our coteries — the entire Prayer Book, sacramental system, daily services, rubrics — a ' party of order* must be formed — a little give and take will do it — a few trifles waived on either side. For our part, we will not press you to yield your ' baptismal regeneration ;' for a little while the ' soul destroying heresy* shall be a tolerable thing — the ' seed plot of Popery/ a pleasance within the wide limits of the Estab- lished Church. You for your part will not have any difficulty in putting into the back-ground your ' scriptural truth and apostolic order,* for we will not be so very hard upon you with the articulvs stantis velcadentis ecclesia. A subscription or two to ' Church Missionary' — a speech or two to back 'brother Klein' — a compliment or two to the Venerable Archbishop — a vote or two at the National Society — are all that we demand ; and we leave you your annual hash-up out of ' Tomline' upon Baptism. Keep and use it, and press regeneration as is your wont — as the talisman which is to make conversion a figment, and newness of life a fallacy. Only sign this little paper, and gladden the hearts of our persecuted Primates. A few old scores, to be sure, remain between us, but don't let these interfere with our new-formed sympathy. We will canonise your chosen pluralists. Our Newtons, our Romaines, and our Simeons— men whom we know you would, if you could, have whipped and put into the stocks as rogues and vagabonds — shall be an open question. Just merely sign our little paper, and give peace to our dis- tracted Church." And so the bargain was struck — and parties heretofore enemies, bitter and relentless, " were made friends together." Which section of the crew led on by Mr. Goode has most disgraced itself, which has most flagrantly violated all that it had by which to claim respect, I cannot tell, and will not try 434 to discover. In sucli bold mutual corporate sacrifice of principles, the " nicely calculated less or more" can have no place on either side. And how many were found to endorse the unholy com- pact ? — how many to proclaim, not their behef in error, but their disregard to truth — not their adherence to the dogma of an anti-sacramental school, but their carelessness that this anti-sacramental school existed ? Not a quarter of the clergy of England — not one quarter of the clergy of England of all classes, including those who cling to the Record, and those who cling to self — those to whom Mr. Goode is an oracle, and those to whom principle is an incumbrance. So, then, at last we know what the real strength of that party which has been so boisterous this many a year — which has carried its chosen prelate to Canterbury, and its lay chairman to a Commission to reform our parochial system — is not. It is not 3,262 strong ; 3,262 polls it plus all the do nothings and all the care-nothings — relics of a former gene- ration; and further thanks are due to Mr. Goode for the laboured infelicity with which he calls our attention to the fact in his characteristic letter to the two Primates. I have dwelt so long upon Mr. Goode that I have not left myself much space for the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Happily, their letters do not require very lengthy handling. Much comment is not requisite to shew what must be the spirit of an Archbishop of Canterbury who " sincerely hopes" that diflferences which do and will exist upon a cardinal doctrine of Christianity " may no longer be permitted to disturb the peace of the Church," and who estimates two irreconcilably opposite theories of the Gospel to be " freedom of opinion within reasonable limits." More noticeable, perhaps, than anything else is the very dolorous joy with which he welcomes his equivocal triumph — as if (true enough, by the way) his primacy was all but being signalized to all ages as the epoch when the practice of the Church of England was conformed to its doctrine. His Grace remarks that he would have been " seriously grieved" had this been the case. Many things may yet happen diu-ing Dr. Simmer's archiepiscopate. More jovial and briefer is the northern metropolitan, who expresses his " sincere hope that the judgment may be con- sidered, by all parties, as a final settlement of the point in dispute." Coolness can sometimes attain heroic dimensions. Lamentable as is this flagrant proclamation of insincerity 435 on the part of memoralist and of Primate alike^ it is one of the manifestations of what aU lookers-on must have long been prepared for as the next phase of the actual warfare of the world against the truth — an alliancej at the sacrifice of dis- tinctive principle on either side^ of Puritan and high-and-dry^ resulting from the events of 1851. The Lydian assault spent^ the emptiness of high-and-dry exposed, each party, if still determined to act within the " Establishment," had either to strike its colours or to open some new campaign. Their atti- tude is peculiar — the high-and-dry stand between the Prayer- book and the Lydian parties — the Lydians between the high- and-dry and the latitudinarians. The magnetic science of attractions now comes into play. The sounder of those who are still but high-and-dry must rank themselves with those whose motto is the entire Prayer-book. The more reckless Lydians, to whom the " Establishment" is all in all, have the claims of latitudinarianism to win them to its side — that Para- dise where creeds are "minor matters." The residue of them can only close with those high-and-dry who are not for quite the whole Prayer-book — their animating principle the " whether or not" — their scope, among the more worldly, self and ease — among the better sort (the cue which the English Review has already given them), not truth or prin- ciple, but instalments, mistermed practical, of temporising reform — Jerusalem bishoprics — Miller-hke service dissections — encouragements of trustee church building — understand- ings with Committee of Council — Scripture Readers in place of priests and deacons — and the " peace of the Church," when we were asking for the Catholic Faith. Such a combination Archbishop Sumner is pre-eminently fitted to head. A Puritan by circumstance, he has found his Puritan campaign yield him no fruit but trouble and discomfiture. Circum- stances have changed, and his dogmatic fixity is perhaps not unduly obstinate. It could not well be so, or he would not have headed last spring's Episcopal manifesto. Oppressed with the hardship of his archiepiscopate being possibly the appointed epoch for the Church of England to shew in prac- tice that she has some Creed, that she preaches some Gospel, that she cannot hold Baptismal Regeneration to be at once an everlasting verity and a soul-destroying-heresy, his Grace ■ — not yet prepared for German transcendentalism — timorous of Geneva simple— hopelessly anticipating the indefinite post- ponement of the alteration of the Prayerbook — can do but one thing — viz., accept the truth-uprooting compromise of 436 Mr. Goode, and make himself the leader of a party whose rallying cry must be " black is white^ and white is black, and ease is everything.-" XCII. EDUCATION AND TOLERATION.— V. Jan. 29. I NOW resume, with the object of concluding them, my letters upon Education and Toleration. I have still to say something upon Government inspection of assisted schools — a claim, as I trust I shall shew, as equitable, within just limits, as it is unfair and tyrannous when pressed beyond them. My thesis is, that the State, in giving pecuniary help to educational enterprise, has a claim to see that its bounty is honestly disposed of, not merely as a theory, but as a prac- tical duty which it is bound to fulfil in the interest of the tax contributors. In saying this, I do not intend — nor should I admit being quoted as supporting — any imputation either on the trustworthiness or the capacity of the subsidised bodies. This obligation which they incur, of submitting to inspection in return for help, is but one out of the ianumerable instances of that necessity which is after all at the bottom of aU law, which compels the good to make individual and cor- porate sacrifices on account of the bad. It is this principle which drives them to enact systems of repressive police, of which they look to enjoy the protection, but under whose stringency, in order to this protection, they place themselves. After all, what is the audit of an outstanding account but an inspection ? What is every receipt given and accepted but the voucher of a transaction in which the priaciple of inspection is involved by the mutual acknowledgment of value received on either side ? To come then at once to the question of Government inspection of schools. It resolves itself into the simplest of mercantile transactions. The State decides that education is a thing of sufficient social value to be worth aiding out of the national coffers. The State itself cannot consistently with the admitted principle of toleration — as I have shewn 437 in former letters — provide this education for itself. It is^ therefore, in the attitude of inviting tenders for the work from the various bodies which can do so within their re- spective limits — namely, from the different religious denomi- nations — and, in so doing, offering them that assistance which self-respect can give and take. Its duty then is, preliminary to any other step, to call upon them to shew that their respective forms of belief are not, in limine, repugnant to that social morality upon which it as a State exists, such as the last few days have shewn Mormonism, e.g., to be in regard to the United States, or contradictory to those primary axioms of scientific truth which the united intellects of the various sects now combine to accept (e. g., that they do not, like the visionary Hutchinson, conceive, as he is said to have done, that Scripture compels us to believe the earth to be flat and quadrangular). If they cannot present a clean bill under these two heads, according to the social circumstances of the country in question — a necessary limitation in an empire, whose laws of succession and property are based upon mono- gamy in England, while in India they recognise polygamy — there is nothing more to be said. If they pass the ordeal, their moral claim for the subsidy is estabhshed. The State recognises and assists the secular education involved in the competing systems of denominational education offered by these respective bodies. At this stage the State has contracted a twofold obliga- tion to its taxpayers. It is bound to see that it gets — or in other words that they get — the money's worth for the money, through the denomination which it has recognized as a suffi- cient channel of education giving its education in practice ac- cording to the sample. This necessitates the inspection about which I am talking. On the other hand, it is equally bound to the assisted denomination not to interfere — when once it has set its seal to its claim to assistance — with its denomina- tional characteristics, or rather, indeed, as general protector, to take care that they are allowed within their own sphere to hold their own, without risk of interference from any other denomination. In this aspect, therefore, the State inspec- tion should be, if it have any colour at all, rather conserva- tive of these distinctions, in order that, by acting in this way all round, it may in the general be the universal arbiter of fair play. Of the first of these obhgations the State in no way shews itself unmindful. Of the second it is palpably and unques- 2 H 438 tionably heedless in its dealings with the Church of England, and thence arises the existing unpleasantness of feeling between State educationists and Churchmen. It is not my province now to draw out a plan of model inspection, calculated to meet the independent but not conflicting claims of the entire body pohtic, and of the Church herself. It is quite enough to require that the results of such inspection must be made to the scrutiny of the State and of the Church iu their representative assembhes, and that each must possess some recognized machinery for bringing its grievance under the cognizance of the other, according to some pre-stip\ilated schedule of mutual rights. How stands the case, however ? The inspectors of Church Schools are appointed by the State, in the shape of the Com- mittee of Council — they report to the Committee of Council, and theyborrow their colouring from the Committee of Counci!, and are the channel of recommendation to that Committee of Council of the enormous pecuniary influence which in the way of scholarships and grants to pupil teachers the State now wields. Nay, more than all, through these in- spectors the Committee recommends with a douce violence the school books prepared under State influence, and sold at a price which brings economy to the succour of interest. The Church in the interim is where she always is — ^nowhere. It is almost an insult to the understanding of your readers to argue that, in opposing such a machinery. Churchmen mean any opposition to a just and reasonable inspection, iipon the single basis of the inspectors satisfying themselves and the State that the Church, or whatever may be the denomina- tion with which they may have to deal, in the first instance acts up to its own professions in its own fulfilment ; and, in the second, shews that sufficient amount of zeal and con- scientiousness which enables it, in a material sense to do as much in proportion to its financial means as the common sense of all educationism points out to be its bounden duty. To this condition of matters Churchmen never can attain until they vindicate for their own corporation that which is thought a crime and a blunder to deny to civil polities — in- dependent and representative government. As I said in my last letter upon this topic, as things go, they are forced to take up with the National Society, vice synodical action, and are, therefore, of necessity, in a false position — while the State, acting through its Committee of Council — the emana- tion of Parliament — is for the interests of its own side in a 439 true position. All this is, howeverj inevitable. The problem of inspection, impossible of solution as it may at present be if handled per se, is yet an important item ia the catalogue of Church wrongs — an important fact among the thousand facts, which all bear towards the necessity of reviving the corporate life of the Church. As such, if we are wise, we shaU deal with it. If we fight the battle as an isolated one — if we meet the National Society as the educational mind of the Church in any but a provisional sense — we shall deserve the defeat which we are courtiag. Let us deny the very possibility of such isolation ; let us appeal to the constitution of the National Society as the very proof of our destitution, and we do good service to the Church in promoting her emancipa- tion, while we are benefactors to the State ia giving potent aid to the cause of general education. XCIII. . CHURCHMEN, AND THE COMING SESSION. Feb. 3. This is the last occasion on which I shall have an oppor- tunity of addressing you before the commencement of the session of 1852. I am desirous of snatching it to say a few words upon the temper in which Churchmen, in and out of* Parhament, ought to meet an awakening of the constitutional life of the empire which promises to be more than ordinarily eventful. I need not trouble you with a lengthy letter, for I have little more, in reality, to do, than to point out in how peculiarly felicitous a state of ripeness Church matters are standing for this especial season of the year — ripe enough to make the Parliamentary course of Churchmen who have seats in the Legislature more clear and systematic than it has ever hitherto had the means of being — and the policy of those to whom they look for support out of doors, clear almost beyond the possibility of blundering ; and yet not so pronounced as to be, in a phrase more readily felt than explaitied, " com- promising " on either side — that is to say, not within the grasp of prudence to hurry on, or to pause over, as wisdom may best dictate. 2 H 2 440 Within the last few days the question of Synodical revival has moved on another stage^ of an importance greater than perhaps most men will at first sight recognise^ by the ap- pearance of Mr. Gladstone's letter to the Bishop of Aberdeen. Whether we consider the man^ the time, or the subject, this publication is no ordinary contribution to the stream of pam- phleteering literature, no bundle of light words to cause a nine days' wonder. The man, a Cabiaet Minister once — a Cabinet Minister to be again, if talent and principle, wedded together, are ever again to hold up their heads in State affairs ; the time, just before the meeting of Parliament — neither too long before to prevent its first freshness from being still upon it, nor too late to confuse the impression of its calm argument by the coming hubbub ; its subject, synodical action, as a thing that must be, with the lay element handled as a feature of indispensabOity, and the form of its introduction clearly drawn out. To conclude and crown all, Mr. Gladstone raises the ques- tion, not upon the Church in England, where Parliament must first step in, but upon the Church in Scotland, which has the power to save or to undo herself on her own responsibility. For in this Church of Scotland has Mr. Gladstone's lot pro- AT-dentially been cast ; and therefore, to her, and through her to aU the Anglican Churches, he can address his counsel in a form and vrith a completeness which would seem in England premature, but which there becomes the needful minuteness of a statesmanlilie and practical reformer. In one word, by this timely labour of love and ability, Mr. Gladstone has placed the coping stone upon that edifice of which, in the session before last, he laid the foundation stone, in his scheme for Church legislation in the Australian colonies, and whose walls were raised by the Bishop of Exeter in his own cathedral city, and by Lord Redesdale pleading within the House of Lords during the last session. AU these harmo- niously combined, yet independent, triumphs of the truth have made the concession of synodical privileges to the Church of England not now a mere matter of justice, but a Parlia- mentary question — a thing which there is no more moral courage in speaking to on the aye than on the no side. To those who understand the humour (to use an antiquated phrase) of the Legislature, this fact speaks volumes. To Churchmen at large it ought to preach volumes in the way of caution towards fighting their battle as a winning one — as one in which the very proximity of success should dictate prudence 441 in the method, and moderation in the matter, of their claims. A " winning " cause is always based upon a practical case, and the complement to the position in which our friends have placed us regarding Parliament has also come to hand with that ripe completeness which offers itself to be plucked by the most imheeding passer-by. I refer to the view which has been expressed, in the highest ecclesiastical quarters, of the need of some more stringent methods of enforcing spiritual discipHne, and the rumours that the same ready-made expedient of a Parliamentary enactment, which has proved abortive for six successive sessions will be again resorted to. If such is to be the case, respect forbids my saying more than great inattention to the signs of the times must reign where more sagacious coimsels might have been expected. To say that compromises which in 1846 might have been borne with are now simple impossibilities, is to say very little ; but I am not disposed to say more until persuaded, which 1 am not, that the last recess may not have worked its work of conviction. Our business as Churchmen is to deal with clergy discipline as the immediftte motive, the practical plea, for synodical restoration. Our means are petitions, like that of the London Church Union — addresses, too, if it is preferred, to individual bishops — motions in ruri- decanal meetiags — anything, in short, which is not factious, or violent, or unreasonable, or swaggering, for those of us who are out of doors. For those in doors, whether in Parliament, or in that Convocation which sometimes snatches twenty minutes of life, firm faith, with a good conscience, a stout heart, and true unfaltering love to our spiritual Mother. So armed themselves, and so supported out of doors, they must do something towards Church independence. This great cause must make some progress in the coming session — if not formal and legislative, moral, at least, and intellectual. On the other side, schemes of Church discipline, like the one before us, or of Church extension, like that brought forward at the close of the last session — tmwisely pressed with the animus, intended or inevitable, of buying temporary and merely material advantage at the cost of further entanglement in an outworn and vicious system — will find their own level, and wiU behold their own unhappy tone of compromise neutralised in the dissensions which they will assuredly create themselves, impotent to fight their own battle througia them, or, even if withdrawn, to lay the waves of discussion they have aroused during their transitory moments of inchoate existence. 442 To take another practical case, of a question which has every year attained the dignity of a debate — and last year that of a select committee — Church rates. How can Church- men more fairly — jnore popularly — meet any attempted legis- lation on this tangled pomt than by an appeal to the common justice of Parliament, that, while the various dissenting bodies can and do press their ^evances corporately, the Church should not be prejudged by their distorted pictures of her grasping greed, nor even by the good-humoured pertinacity with which, year after year. Sir Eobert Inghs, in the name of the Church of England, protests against so much as a discus- sion upon this — as he imagines — more than settled question ? Churchmen have but to say one thing in Parliament ; and that is, to appeal to the Government to call upon the Church, synodically and representatively, to speak her OTvn mind on this subject — one in which her spiritual prerogatives, and her secular duties to the co-citizens of her members who do not belong to her, are so curiously mixed up together, in a way which few men now on either side will be found to say is satisfactory. She should be invited, I say, to offer her own scheme of reformation, and say what she would be willing to waive in consideration of an altered political constitution. If she churlishly (a thiug I will not believe) refuses to grapple with this topic, in a broad and liberal spirit, then she is self- condemned ; and bound as we should be still to fight her battles, we could not but say that, in their view of things. Dissenters had much to say for themselves in promoting a parliamentary solution of Church-rates. Till this is the case, I assert — and I appeal to Mr. Trelawny's sense of justice to bear me out — that the expedient to wind up the matter in an Act of Parliament, is simply an instance of castigatque auditqiie — of first treating the Church as a State department, and then reducing her to that condition. I must further say on this head that Church rates, being one of the topics which would most reasonably and soonest occupy the attention of a really working convocation or synod, is a most pregnant proof of the indispensabihty of this convo- cation or synod comprising a representation of the lay element. Education iu general, and its immediate bearing upon the synodical question, I say nothing about, as it formed the staple of the last letter which I sent you. I have hitherto been speaking of the coming session in that aspect of European peace under which our generation of EngHshmen has grown up. It may be — which God in His 443 mercy avert — that tlie whole face of matters may be changed, and not either by our own fault. If so, farewell, of course, for the time to public interest in Church questions. But in the interim Churchmen wdl do their duty as citizens — Churchmen will shew as earnestly as any men that they love their country with that love which shews itself in deeds, and not in speeches. And when at last they might have time to turn again to their own matters, I feel confident that nothing they may in the interval have done or said, would indispose their countrymen to deal fairly by them — I might add that I am persuaded that they would have done much to win the affections of many whose unfriendly feeling is now the mere result of ignorance. XCIV. CONVOCATION IN ACTION. Feb. 9. Another step onwards ! The Convocation of Canterbury itself, by a majority m the Upper, by unanimity in the Lower House, has pronounced its opinion that it ought to act — nay, more, it has acted in pronouncing this opinion ; it has recovered a life which could only be checked by a violent and unreason- ing coup d'etat by its Primate President. The Convocation of York was prepared to make the same protest ; and it found the doors of its own Assembly House shut in its face by the insolence, premeditated or reckless, of the northern Primate President. Morally, as weU as legally, Convocation is now our ecclesiastical governing body. Morally, as well as legally, it has regained its action. But, immorally and illegally, its action stands for a short time deferred by the audacity of the Primate Presidents. The whole event of Wednesday is, as enacted ia London, so complete a success — as enacted in York, a victory so dis- graceful to the victors — that I cannot afford to say anything derogatory to the Primate Presidents. It is quite certain that the exhibition of tactics which they — ^men not usually decisive in action, however arbitrary in pohcy and speech Dr. Sumner may be — were forced to make, as their only resource. 444 goes furtlier to shew the truly despotic, unfair^ and capricious policy of themselves and of their party than a dozen meetings or twenty leading articles could do. And, after all, if the Primate Presidents are anxious to live in history, and select their own form of immortality, why should we grudge it to them ? They have put it into the power of the future historian of the Church to say of them : — "Whether Baptism were for the remission of sins, the two Archbishops could not undertake to say ; whether the mere imposition of episcopal hands had anything to do with Holy Orders, was not in their province to decide upon. One thing they had no doubt about — that the only function of the Pre- sident of Convocation was to prorogue it. In doctrine, Mr. Goode — in organization. Dr. Merle d'Aubigne — iu govern- ment, Priace Louis Napoleon — were their teachers and their exemplars." There let us leave them. The duty of Churchmen is manifest. They have at once to improve upon their advantage, and to cultivate the good seed sown on Wednesday — ^by petitions, addresses, memorials, to render such a course upon the part of the Primate President of Canterbury on the 19th of August (should Parliament last so long) still more perplexing — or, if the Legislature be mean- while dissolved, to place him and his brother of York where, even if they wished it, they could not repeat their conduct of this week. Churchmen have now both Houses with them, and it will be their crime, not their mistake, if they do not daily improve that position. Much opposition they will meet — that opposition which is the last expedient of a party so completely beaten that it cannot even preserve its temper — and this will render their success still more conspicuous and more complete. Especially the clergy must look to the elections. A dis- solution of Parliament, as it cannot be too often instilled into them, means a dissolution of Convocation, and a general election of the Lower House. The clergy must learn that the machinery of electionism — not electioneering — is the duty of electors in a free constitution. They must, without a day's delay, organise, prepare their lists of voters, determine on their lists of candidates, canvass and record the promises they obtain, and take care that no single candidate among those who aspire to be diocesan proctors shall receive the countenance of genuine Churchmen, who does not promise to be in his place (but for some Providential obstacle) on the day of the meeting of the new Convocation in the Jerusalem Chamber 445 or the Chapter House of York, and fearlessly maintain the right. One real general election to Convocation— and even the Primate Presidents must soon yield. A single caution I must offer in conclusion^ and that I do most earnestly — it is that Churchmen should be very careful not to forget, and not to postpone, amid the eclat and the excitement of a general ecclesiastical election, the movement now so steadily in progress for the restoration of Diocesan Synods. The pressing claims of the Convocation agitation make this parallel enterprise all the more needful ; evident as it is that, in the realization of a well-balanced system of ecclesiastical government, the diocesan influence must be present, to check the inevitable tendencies towards centraliza- tion and bureaucracy of an ecclesiastical Parliament sitting in London, while it aids that Parhament in all useful reforms, and prepares and makes easy the business which is to come before it. XCV. THE CHURCH AND A NEW MINISTRY. Feb. 25. It is not my intention in any way to criticise the contex- ture of the newly-appointed Cabinet. I would, however, fain avail myself of the occasion to point out how completely novel an element has been thrown into the poUtical compli- cation which Lord Derby's or (tiU a satisfactory adjustment is attained) any future Cabinet will have to unravel in the present attitude of the Church of England. " The Church is in danger," has been howled and re- howled from St. Stephen's to the hustings, and from the hustings to St. Stephen's — it has been the slogan of the in- coming, and the rallying-cry of the out-going Ministry in the days of our fathers and our grandfathers, till it has been worn threadbare among the other trappings and banners of antiquated parties. But the " Church," whether in danger or out of danger, which at this day presents itself to a new Prime Minister, is quite a different affair from that " Church" to whose safety 446 the last generation of patriots were wont to pledge themselves nine bumpers deep ; and all the circumstances, therefore, attendant upon legislation for it, upon satisfying or dis- appointing it, are changed with the thing itself which is in question. The " Church" of Lord Eldon's days was, plainly speaking, the " Church Establishment" — a compound word, whose second member gave the whole its signification. Round this " Church Establishment," in its unreformed anomahes, the self-interest of some, the terrors of others, and the conscien- tious prejudices of others, clung convulsively. With the close boroughs, and the municipal corporations, the Church Establishment was an existing thing. It enriched some — it awed others — and, it is not to be denied, it was, in spite of all its neglect and mismanagement, the great machinery of prayer and of preaching, good, bad, or indifferent throughout the realm. Accordingly, it formed a distinct and most im- portant item in the political warfare of an age when bhnd defence of every thing estabhshed, and almost equally blind and crude assault upon it, were the masks of a contest of family and caste, of favours received and slights endured. This endangered " Church," unhappily for herself, was always in the attitude of standing in somebody else's light when looking to get something which in no way affected her doctrine or her disciphne. She was ever tripping up some well-to-do Methodist who wanted to be Mayor of Plymouth or Newcastle— or shutting the door of Parliament upon some millions of fellow-subjects. She always seemed to be, as I once read of an estimable baronet who still exists, the consis- tent representative of the bygone time — trying to keep every body out of every thing. And so it resulted, most naturally, that the " Church" became a decidedly unpopular cause, and those politicians who most loudly claimed to Tdc her friends saw this as clearly as the Birmingham Union itself, and acted accordingly. I mean that it became an acknowledged tradi- tion of Statecraft that the Church was to be more thankful for smaller favours, and more resigned imder greater snubs, than any other interest in the empire. Faithful to his character of the Horace Walpole of statesmen. Lord John Russell treasured up this belief among the nicknacks of the Strawberry-hill, and deemed he had paid off the Church in full for all coming insults by a bishopric of INIanchester, embodied in the person of Dr. Lee, and a dishonoured pro- missory note for three more. But " de mortuis," &c. Lord 447 John liimseK is now a subject for Strawberry-hill, and I trust not to have to name him much more. Though he knew it not, the Church in the meanwhile has assumed a position towards a coming Grovernment which she never held before. Her relations to the State have been altered by that wise legislation which established toleration ; while her internal concerns — her revenues and her territorial divisions — have been handled by that same State with so imperious and rough a grasp as completely to have placed her in the attitude of a party aggrieved. While her outward accidents thus suffered change, the Church herself was putting out claims founded upon no desire for temporal aggrandisement — no impotent despair after class privileges, which inevitable time has wiped out — but upon the modest, firm resolve to hold her own as a Christian community of British citizens, be it at the sacrifice of worldly position and of official encom-agement. In plain language, the " Church" which now demands to be heard, which now claims to be respected, is a popular body, a civic association, a collection of men whom a common conviction of truth — not wealth, or interest, or the table of precedence — brings together. The petitions which she proffers are not pleas for trampling on her neighbours' social rights, but for holding her own spiritual functions within her own capacity. No Test and Corporation Acts for her — no bills of pains and penalties against Popish recusant convicts — but the one emphatic resolve, "What Protestant Dis- senters and Roman Catholics may do, that members of the Church of England have a right to do ; that constitutional organization which, in all other things, the Englishman regards as his chiefest birthright, cannot in honesty or common sense be longer withheld from the Church of Eng- land alone ; that zeal for unity and purity of doctrine which among the members of every sect is held to be heroic virtue, cannot, and shall no longer, be bigotry and intolerance in the sons of the Church of England." A party there is — a strong party, and one that is daily growing— a party eminently popular and liberal in its Yeij essence — whose voice is thus embodied. This — not exclusion Acts, fat chapters, and family livings — is the " Church" which now comes into play iu a new Minister's balance-sheet. It comes into play, not in England only, nor in Ireland, but all over the empire — in Canada, Australia, the Cape, every- where where the Enghsh tongue and English race have 448 spread — nay^ even in foreign sea-port towns and European capitals. Everywhere the spiritual wants of English Church- men now assume a political value. Every day the import- ance of those claims, and the danger of trifliug with them and of irritating susceptible minds, wiU grow greater and greater. At the Treasury — .at the Home Ofiice — at the Colonial Office — at the Foreign Office— a legacy of iujnries to the Church of England to be redressed, and of claims from the Church of England to be considered, awaits the incomiug tenants ; and the method in which they may deal with them wiU not form so inconsiderable an item in the Ministry's pos- sibihties of success as any effete relic of the faded red-tape of Georgian days (if any still exist) may console himself with dreaming. XCVI. THE AUSTRALIAN CHURCH IN SYNOD. March 10. In the din of politics we are in danger of neglecting those great interests of a far higher character, which, while the State is rocking to and fro upon the ocean of incertitude, are moving onward with a rapidity of re-acquired life which tells its heavenly origin. We risk confounding the Colonies with Sir John Pakington, and making him the sun round which they are, in our eyes, to turn. Meanwhile, not oblivious of Sir John Pakington, but simply not knowing nor anticipating his being called to rule over them, they are themselves putting forth their own strong shoots of Anglo- Saxon Hfe. In Church matters — the topic on which I pre- sume to address you — they are ever outstripping the warmest exertions of their friends who are working at home in the centre of Church action. Mr. Gladstone has introduced a bill to enable the Churchmen in our Australian colonies to regulate their own concerns — a bill which, I must take the liberty to say, ought not to be unnoticed in your leading columns. Already the Church of Australia, forecasting its future — in advance of the Mother country — has boldly, rudely in many points, but broadly, and above all, honestly, rough-hewn its own future constitution — a constitution 449 embodying the great elements of Synodical action, lay repre- sentation of communicants, and Church, judicature. You printed it a few days since, so that I need not recapitulate its details. To say that it is a perfect constitution would be absurd ; to deny its great merits would be unjust. By way of parenthesis one may note that, whilst stringent upon clerical discipline, it quite ignores the necessity of, in some manner, strengthening the hands of the Church in making the elective function of "communicant" among the laity something more than a proclamation of universal suffrage, purchasable by an attendance at the altar, solely left to the uncontrolled judgment of the communicant himself. But I cannot but suppose that the new South Australian Church legislature will take this topic into its serious consideration. Again, under the head of patronage, the claims of, on the one hand, the bishop, and on the other of individual patrons, are somewhat summarily passed over. The question of patronage is not one which has been sufficiently investigated, according to the actual framework of society, for any trenchant legisla- tion on such matters ia such a new country to be either desirable or even possible. With these remarks I leave for this day the constitution of the Church in South Australia. To its working we all must look with anxious eyes. If it be worked in a narrow, parish- vestry spirit of mere South Australianism, everything iu it will be a failure. It will be not less a failure if in its action it put forth that spirit of Popery which I had occasion in a former letter to point out as so rife among the Low Church school — a spirit which has so glaringly manifested itself in the neigh- bouring colony of Victoria — the spirit of submitting every- thing to the caprice of an irresponsible bureaucracy at home. XCVIl. THE PEW SYSTEM. Mabch 15. I HAVE been much pleased in observing how, in various ways, your columns have lately been helping to overturn the unhappy pew system. Minor morals, they say, make a great proportion of the happiness of life — minor sins, of course, very much of its unhappiness ; and, by the same rule, a detail 450 in church arrangementj like that of pewsj may be, and I be- lieve has been, the source of more disgust at, and unbehef in the Church, and consequently in all religion, than many apparently more important matters. The uneducated man cannot enter into controversy — questions of doctrine and pohty come not within his range ; but he can, with his own mother wit, make out broad cases of selfishness, and osten- tation, and over-reaching — he can argue that these have no place in the Gospel scheme — he can see that the pew system — the allotment, the barricading, the buyiug and selling of portions of God's house — is liable to all these imputations. He draws his inference, and he acts up to it — the result being the Primitive Methodist meeting, or else scepticism, the pot- house, and perhaps the treadmill. The point which Churchmen are labouring to establish is not that open sittings are a good thing — a something to be petted and encom'aged, Hke pine-apples and deodara cedars — but that pews are bad things, a positive nuisance, to which no more mercy is to be shown than to wasps or rats. So long as the comprom^ise between rehgion and mammon is tolerated, so long as our churches are to mirror forth the distinctions, precedential or merely fantastical, of civil life, the worship of the English communion will not be that of the one mystical body, the Christian Church ; and the poor man will bring into the House of the common Creator the feeling of being merely tolerated or condescendingly patronised, and his interest in aU which concerns Divine worship will be proportionably dimi- nished, if not annihilated. Vainly may we proclaim " churches for the poor," vainly may we make loud professions of charity and zeal, so long as we make a merit of a right, and try to palm off the claim of the poor man upon us as a concession on our part. I never was more strongly impressed with the essential difiference be- tween a half and a whole rejection of pews than I was the other day, on a visit to the now nearly completed " Church for the Poor,'' which is being fitted up iu Portman Market, under the superintendence and patronage of Lord Shaftesbury and others of his way of thinking. I had been prepared for many things which I could not approve in the structure, but I did not anticipa,te that which I discovered. There was one thing I was prepared to praise, and that I found was absent. Of its architectural shortcomings I shall say nothing ; of its cold and uninviting character — so little likely, as the Duke of Newcastle ably put it at Newark, to win the poor man to 451 church — I shall be silent. I will not even describe such glaring vulgarities as the hen-and-chickens arrangement of the Ionic pilastres at the altar end. One vast unreality broods over the entire work. Often as I had seen the long advertisements in which its claims as the church for the poor were pressed, I felt sure that it would have at least the one merit of being that — of beiag a church into which every poor man, and every poor woman, could enter, and could feel that the rich man or rich woman who might have strayed into the same Church, were worship- ping in one and the same guise as himself or herself. I felt sure that, from one end to the other, the sittings would be all ahke. My first inspection did not negative the anticipation. The whole ground area was laid out in similar and open benches — ugly enough to be sure, and so narrow in their en- trances, that even a thia man could not go into themj as I myself saw, without sideling, — and so high in the sitting, and narrow from back to back, that kneeHng must remain a pro- blem; but still, for all that, they were similar and open benches. However, round the entire structure ran deep and suUcy-looking galleries. I ascended into one of them, and a new light broke upon me. They were all divided into pews, duly lotted out, and furnished with protective doors. The Church for the poor was, after all, only an ordinary church of the modern type, with a somewhat larger allowance of free sittings than usual. Of course, had it been proclaimed with a not larger than ordinary number of advertisements, and these of the usual tone and pretension, one would only say, so much the worse for the system which makes pews possible. But when we consider the character under which it has so long been appealing to the public, we have a right to protest agaiast it as a wrong and a delusion. The poor man will be invited into it as the par excellence poor man^s Church ; but when he has entered it, he will find the doctrine of man's equality before his Maker — ^taught by aristocratic classifi- cations and slamming doors — and thus he is to be trained in the " pure Gospel." And how are the children of the poor treated in this free church ? I may lay it down as axiomatic, that, if there be any class for whose best accommodation in church more care ought to be taken than for any other, it would be the chil- dren of the poor — those whose whole future life will more than probably derive its colouring from the cheerful or gloomy aspect in which religion was presented to their youthfid 452 minds. Will it be credited that, in the Portman-market church, the children are to be remanded to the most distant gallery over the entrance, where they are to be disposed upon narrow benches without backs, so as effectually to bring home to them the tedium which long sermons always create in the childish mind— and so disposed that kneehng miist be to them a physical impossibility. I do not suppose that these defects proceed from anything but carelessness and want of thought, yet it is a carelessness which is instructive, while so truly painful in its results. Not long since, in another church, a grim parish beadle broadly and undisguisedly defended to me the thesis that it was not necessary nor intended that poor children should see or hear in church — all that was meant by bringing them there, quoth he, was to keep them out of the streets. I have no doubt that Lord Shaftesbury would have listened to this assertion with the same feehngs which I did ; but his lordship should consider how much is done to create such notions in a beadle's inind, by persons who build chil- dren's galleries like that in Portman-market. The fault, in one word, of the entire adventure in Portman- market is the imperfect realization by its founders of the fact that the pew system is an evil. It is one of the questions about which there can, by the nature of things, be no com- promise. It is right or it is wrong. If it be right, it has fiscal and administrative advantages which demand that it should be placed iu our system upon the same footing which it occupies among dissenting bodies. If it be wrong, war to the knife should be proclaimed against it everywhere, and most chiefly in founding a church for the poor. Its beiug right or wrong is a question of a religious character. The solution depends upon the degree in which the Christian Church is realised as " the communion of saints." In their power of appreciating this doctrine. Dissenters are confessedly most deficient, and hence their penchant for pews. High Churchmen, who hold the Church to be a sacramental body, can and do appreciate it thoroughly, and hence they have been the foremost in the fight for free and open worship. That section of members of the Church of England which Portman-market church represents, have, as we know to our cost, brought into the bosom of the Church the doctrines, feelings, and customs of dissent, and hence the anomaly into which they have fallen. It needs no prophet to say which party will, in the long run, when their true bearings come to be discovered, most securely grasp the sympathies, not of 453 tbis class or of that — of the higher or the middle exclusively, hut of the entire people — of the poor to whom " the Gospel is preached." No one need fear that, with the downfall of pews, will come m a hap-hazard, first-come-first-served method of taking churches by storm. There cannot be two questions more thoroughly disconnected than that of allotted seats, and that of rented or inherited pews. The former distinctly recognises the Christian Church as a corporation — the latter as distinctly deals with it as an aggregation of units. The allotment, without payment or favour, of sittings, by the Church officers, to those who do attend their own parish Church, as the cor- relative of that attendance, is based upon the parochial system of the universal Church — a system which assumes that, for every Christian, there is one Church at which he has an in- herent right to be accommodated in the performance of his equally inherent obligation of worship somewhere. Certain officers, the representatives of the congregation, are charged with the administration of this principle, and they find the parishioner his seat, simply as a member of the flock — as one of the faithful — and not from any mercenary considera- tion. This seat is altogether personal — forfeited in perpetuity by constant non-attendance — forfeitedpro hac vice by a casual absence. In such Churches, on the other hand, like that in Portman-market, as are not parish churches at all, but chapels of ease — missionary stations in short in theory, and in practice too — instances like St. Barnabas, Pimhco, such obligation does not exist; and therefore the correlative allot- ment cannot find its place. Siich is the law of church sitting, which the law of the church and the common law of England recognise ; and if both parish churches and chapels of ease are combined in sufficient proportions, will inevitably be found the most practical one possible. The rented-pew system is a mercantile matter, a simple bargain, as for a box at the theatre. A. pays his money, for which 13., the minister, church- warden, or clerk it may be, sells him his article, of which A. then enters on possession in his own person as a purchased property, or vested right — to be exercised, if he will, to the detriment of the undertaking, as a method of Church exclu- sion, if A. and his family do not attend, or do not fill the pew. And this is the system which modern legislation has created — which Portman-market Church seems destined to throw a gloss over — which, as I understand, it is intended should, in an aggravated form, be thrust upon the parish of Paddington. It may be all very well for our Church, in her mere aspect of 2 I 454 " establishment/' to have committed herself to such arrange- ments ; but for her members longer to remain without repu- diatiugj in her sacred aspect of a portion of the Universal Fold, such desecration of the sanctuary — such abandonment of the entire spirit of Christian and united worship — would be simply suicidal. To return to that point at which I have often concluded before, the pew system — no less than the education question — no less than the Church-rate controversy — daily testifies to our lack of synodical action. Were the Church once in legislative deliberation, it is impossible to conceive that, what- ever partial excuses may be devised for it, that system could ever find very confident advocates — still less a majority on a division to back it up. XCVITI. A CHURCHMAN'S POLITICS. Masch 22. That " a Churchman should have no poHtics" is a dictiun which, like many other oracular saws, it is easy enough at most times to utter, while there are occasions when its genuineness can be tested. When a Government is in office whose benevolences to the Church are Durham letters and appointments of Hampdens and Elliotts and Lees, it takes little trouble, and it is laudable enough, to do all you can to trip it up, with the consolatory observation, " Why should we help the Ministry — a Churchman should have no politics ?" The value of this parenthetical remark shews itself after such a Grovemment has been tripped up, by the conduct of Churchmen towards its successor. What I mean is, that if — when a change of Government like that which I have adumbrated, takes place — ChiLrch- men go on as they have done before, resolutely, honestly, and straightforwardly pursuing the same ends they have hitherto pursued, because they believe them righteous — employing the same machinery they have hitherto employed, because they believe it lawful — sticking to the same friends who were forward to help them when they were in the lowest depths of despondency, because it is honourable and grateful so to do — they will approve 455 themselves men of political character ; and, so approving themselves, they will make themselves he respected by all those organizations whose husiness it is, in the cause of self- interest, to weigh political character. And thus, in aU pro- bahihty, they will in the long run gain a great deal more than they would have done by a premature surrender at discretion, by which they would only succeed in making themselves despised, and, as the consequence, snubbed. Lord John RusseL. is out — Lord Derby is in. The diifer- ence to the Church of this fact is, in one word, that she has lost a known enemy, and gained one who assuredly cannot be taxed with such an epithet, but of whom it is as certain that he has never yet committed himself to the Church other than as an establishment, and who is therefore equally open to favour it in its Lydian as in its sacramental aspect. It is impossible, out of aU that his Lordship, before he became Premier, or since he has held that post, has stated, to extract more. To High Churchmen, then, the Derby Cabinet presents the one aspect of a release from Lord John Russell. To qther parties and other interests it has more distinct characteristics. But questions of economic politics are not within the province of Church Synods ; ergo, they are not within the province of that party whose bond of union is the restoration of ecclesiastical free- dom. Lord Derby may be right or wrong — you may hold sound views or the contrary — that is not the subject of this series of letters. Pree-trade or its opposite, during the six- teen months since the first of my letters appeared in your columns, has never formed the topic of a single one of them. All that I know is, that for that space of time — sixteen months, which have been years in the rapidity and gravity of the ecclesiastical events which they have comprised — your paper has never faltered ia its vindication of those Church priaciples whose cause it undertook when they seemed, humanly speaking, at the lowest ; and whose course it has accompanied through the successive stages of the defeat of the Episcopal paper, the Synod of Exeter, the Colonial move- ment, the Convocation debate in Parliament, the rehabilita- tion of the chief victim of the Lydian insanity, and the unchaining of Convocation in the Jerusalem Chamber. What your economic views were sixteen months ago, such they are now ; what your Churchmanship then was, such it is at the present day. Then, and now, you believed your politics the most beneficial for the Church. Some Churchmen, of course, agreed in this — others did not, but aU. were bound to 2 I 2 456 be equally ttankful to you for your advocacy of Church prin- ciples. Had Lord John Russell — to assume an extreme case, for argument's sake — ever deviated into a manly^ honest line of Church policy, you would not have refused him the meed of just praise. And I feel as confident that it will be a pleasure to you to give your acknowledgments to Lord Derby for any step he may take to rectify his predecessor's injurious treatment of all rehgious interests ; whilst, with the same straightforwardness which you have shewn in opposing Lord John when he acted so unwarrantably towards that Church which he professed to befriend, you would resist a repetition of similar wrong-doing on the part of the actual Cabinet. What has all this to do with economic questions ? Lord John Eussell was a Free-trader, so are you ; and yet you were the most strenuous opponent of his policy — as on many points, so notably on Church matters. You conceive the position in defence of which Lord Derby has taken office to be untenable, and a misfortune to the principles of genuine Conservatism, to which you hold yourself not less attached than he is- — and you say as much ; but what has this to do with the affairs of Churchmen, " who have no politics V I have, perhaps, to apologise for writing so personally. I find that I can best shape my thoughts by throwing them into this form in the present instance. There is, as we all must feel, stiU afloat, a certain prescriptive, " Church and State" tradition, even among High Churchmen, dating from days of a very different character to those we live in, which may render the fact of your not cordially approving, in your character of a Churchman, of all the acts of your present Government, somewhat perplexing to many worthy persons, whose attention I am desirous on the present occasion of arresting. Briefly and emphatically, then, do I say to them — gain influence by being independent, make yourselves respected by being straightforward — earn weight in the administrative counsels of the nation by not rushing forward to coirfound social and religious questions. The cause of the Church is not that of this Cabinet or the other — it is the cause of all times and all seasons ; and they who have shewn themselves the most fearless in moments of depression are likely to be the most moderate and successful in times of quietness. I feel that I have said nothing which is not the reflex of your own feelings upon Church matters. Personally to yourself I tender, in simple duty, the expression of unfeigned gratitude for your cbnstant zeal in the good cause. 457 XCIX. CATHEDRALS IN AMERICA, AND SYNODS AT HOME. April 1. I NOTED in your columns some few days since, an article reprinted from, an American Churcli paper, tlie Banner of the Cross, including a letter from Mr. A. J. B. Hope, recom- mending his fellow Churchmen across the ocean to initiate the cathedral system hy the building of a national cathedral in Washington. I do not intend to discuss this proposal in detail, or indeed to say much more about it in the specific form in which Mr. Hope has cast it, than to remark that a national movement towards a cathedral, whether in "Wash- ington or any other important locality of the American Union, would, I feel comdnced, be regarded by Churchmen at home as a work towards which they were specially drawn, and which had a claim upon them for peculiar sympathy. Tua res ogri^Mr, in truth the American Church would have the right to say to us — just as the Scottish Church can address us, as she points to her advances made towards the establishment of the cathedral system at Perth, and to the inauguration of lay synodical action set on foot by Mr. Gladstone. Too long have Churchmen — even those whose doctrine and theory of Church government were sound — been dwelling upon views circumscribed by the formulae, " Church by Law established," and " United Church of England and Ireland." Upon such a basis, so essentially uncatholic, it was impossible that any consistent and durable system of Church reform could be reared ; for every attempt at Church reform, carried out in an exclusive regard to England and Ireland, must, however involuntarily, build up fresh exclu- sions as against our fellow-communionists in Scotland, in America, and in our own colonies. Such a consummation assuredly is not needful, when it is considered that a clergy- man ordained by a bishop of our own commttnion in Scotland is ineligible to cure of souls in England ; that a clergyman ordained by a bishop of our own communion in the United States is equally so ; and, that one ordained by one of our own colonial episcopate has to obtain a Lambeth permission 458 — wMle, on tlie contrary, a clergyman ordained by a Roman Catholic or a Greek bishop in Scotland, in the United States, or in the Colonies, has only to sign the Thirty-nine Articles to render him eligible either to an incumbency or a bishopric, according as his orders are those of priest or bishop. The reason of this fact — a fact of that class which is pro- verbially stranger than fiction — is, that the relations between our Church and those of Rome and Greece rest upon the broad, intelligible maxims of the Catholic Church, while those between us and Scotland, and Am^erica, are the bit- by-bit productions of temporary, half-informed, and narrow- minded Parliamentary legislation. In the one instance, the great truth that a priest of the Catholic Church is a priest all over the Catholic Church is affirmed and acted upon. In the other, all sorts of cowardly fears and pruden- tial delusions are allowed to interpose between theory and practice — between everlasting truths, and the actions which are their honest complement. Viewed in a very different aspect from that which dictated such prohibitions — not as trespassers to be barred out, but as brethren and fellow-workers in the one common cause — our co-Churchmen in Scotland, in the United States, and in the Colonies, stand in the present instance in a position as impor- tant to us of the " Established" Church at home as our tem- poral status can be of advantage to them. The problem to be solved — and, as by a divine afflatus, in the course of solution in all quarters of the Reformed Catholic Church — is the combination of ecclesiastical system with personal liberty and responsibility — the maintenance of the doctrine and the discipline of the Apostles with that duty of weU-ordered self- government up to which the world has been educated — and that not, as we must believe, in contrariety to the Divine Will. Vernacular worship at the epoch of the Reformation was a question of a similar import. The substitution then of a vernacular for a dead tongue, in the public worship of Almighty God, seemed a revolutionary expedient; but yet in England we tried it, and the attempt proved pre-eminently and absolutely conservative — to give a high import to a term of actual politics. This bold adoption of the vernacular was — who can doubt it ? — a main cause, humanly spealdng, of the sustentation of the Catholic Church amongst us — of the preservation, that is, of those " Ministers of Apostolic Suc- cession," among whom, as the American Prayer-book, in an 459 oflBce not contained in our own,* pointedly says, in allowable paraphrase of Holy Writ, Our Lord has promised to be to the end of the world. Abroad no National Church had the noble daring to make the attempt, and amongst them, of course, reformation, when it made head, became destruction ; and now, at last, the Church of Rome is compelled, by all sorts of expedients — litanies, and so forth — to furnish its laity with vernacular devotions, which are not those of the whole body, and therefore have no genuine stamp upon them. Correlative to this movement at the first estabhshment of the Reformed Catholic Church is that present one which we may hope and trust is the harbinger of its consolidation — the establishment, throughout its length and breadth, of government at once apostolic and representative — of govern- ment which shall recognise to the full the Heaven-imparted prerogatives of holy orders, and yet preserve for the great congregation, that " holy priesthood" of all those in orthodox communion, recognised and formal means of making their feelings known upon matters ia which they have in reality as much concern as the clergy themselves. In the attainment of this object, the very different condi- tions in which at this moment the Churches of England and Ireland, that of Scotland, that of America, and those of the Colonies find themselves, all tend to a solution which greater similarity either in the advantages or the shortcomings of each could not afford : — Faciea non omnibus una, Nee diversa tamen qualis decet esse sororum. A contrariety of condition in many points exists between them ; and to this we owe the means of studying, under different lights, either through their presence or their absence, the value of those checks and counter-checks which such a system of Church polity must contain, if it be intended to result in a constitution, and not in a chaos. One obvious form in which these precautions cast them- selves is that of the simultaneous development of the cathe- dral and synodical systems — an aspect which is touched upon in that letter before alluded to, which has induced me to * The " Office of the Institution of Ministers into Parishes or Churches," prescribed in General Convention in 1804, and "set forth, with alterations, in General Convention." This Office, the work of the early part of this century, is noticeable for its fearless tone of genuine churchmanship. 460 bring the question before you to-day. What I mean by the cathedral system I have already explained in former letters, especially, I recollect, in two which 1 sent to you more than a year since^ in illustration of what I conceived might prove the real danger to the Church of England of the Papal Aggression. I also alluded to it more recently in a few sen- tences having reference to Perth Cathedral. • The cathedral system — briefly to repeat myself — is that system which connects the bishop with some particular church — his ecclesia cathedralis, being the church of which he is peculiarly and specially incumbent, as each parish priest is incumbent of his own parish church. The bishop who has and who uses his ecclesia cathedralis is something besides the general superintendent of the clerical discipline of a diocese — he is a priest^ and something more than a priest. A s priest, he serves at the altar of that cathedral church of which he is the incumbent — as more than a priest, he mates that church the scene of episcopal ministrations ; and he gathers round him that council of priests whom the universal consent of the Church, in aU its best days, has ruled to be indispensable to guide and advise the bishop in the administration of his charge — his Synthroni, as early times called them — his Chapter, as the phrase now is. The chapter is to the bishop what the Cabinet is to the Sovereign ; and the genius of modern ad- ministrative science would naturally allot to each member of this body some distinct function of administrative utility, just as Cabinet Ministers divide the oflSces of secular government. But experience has shewn aU over Europe that the govern- ment of the Sovereign and his Cabinet, untempered by a representative body to perform legislative functions, is sure to degenerate into bureaucracy. A similar conviction in ecclesiastical affairs has created the synodical and conciliar system in dioceses^ which is to the Chapter what Parhament is to the Cabinet; while Provincial or National Councils throughout the Reformed Catholic Church (Convocations as they are called in England, Synods in Scotland, and Conven- tions in the United States) have been moulded into the form of an Upper House, consisting of bishops alone, and a Lower one either of clerical representatives, as in England — of the entire clergy, as in_ Scotland — or of representatives both of the clergy and of the laity, as in the United States. And thus they now afford a parallel to the two Houses which are the approved type of secular legislation, the one exception of the province of York being noted. Synodical action is not my present topic. The balance of 461 power in synods between bishops, the remaining clergy, and the laity, is a subject which a whole letter would not cover — not to speak of the small remaining space of this one. I assume that in a satisfactory system of Church government must be included the restoration, on the one hand, of the cathedral system, in its purity and efficiency, as the moderat- ing element ; and, on the other, the free development of the representative government, inclusive of the laity, in the shape of diocesan and of provincial synods; the capitular system, it might be, being expanded to meet this double view — as, for instance, by all suffragan bishops becoming honorary canons of the metropolitan cathedral, or something of the sort. Now let us see how far the various branches of our com- munion can bring their several contributions towards the desired whole. In England we have the materiel of our cathedrals — the fabrics, the revenues, and the incorporations. The thing needed is the esprit de corps to raise them from the resorts of " dignified" ease into the working administrative organiza- tion of the diocese. Towards this end the competition of cathedrals — founded on the reformed notion in Scotland, as at Perth — in America, wherever they shall first be organised — and in the Colonies, as already at Calcutta and in. New- foundland, and shortly at Fredericton and at Sydney — will be most efficacious. On the state of the synodical question at home, and on the assistance we shall derive from over the seas and across the border, I will not now dilate. To come to Scotland. The special value of our communion there, as the depository of sound doctrine held by a few in the midst of an adverse population, has hitherto precluded the development . of those forms which are the growth of a freer arid more tranquil time. But Scotland, in her very simple Church constitution, has held in solution, so to speak, the germs both of the capitular and of the representative sys- tems. These two are now in course of separation, and by separation they are being expanded and perfected. Hitherto the Scottish diocesan synod — composed of all the clergy of the diocese, and of no one else — has been something which was neither chapter nor representative assembly, and yet akin to both. The want of the cathedral to give the bishop his due place and locality, and the lack of the recognition of the laity in their legitimate sphere, have alike cramped the action of that Church. In one diocese, within these few years, the cathedral has been reared, while throughout Scotland the 462 plea for synodical development is making itself heard in firm yet most respectful language. Of the interest and value of such a portion of the Churchy which has always clung to its orthodoxy^ and now is putting forth its activity, no more need be said. In America, all the circumstances have been as different as possible from Scotland. Energy, boldness of administrative reform, capacity of representative organization, were never wanting there. What was at peril in the first outset of free America's gaining what England had denied her — a truly Episcopal Church — was that entire grasp of orthodox doc- trine which the untheological aspect of that age, and pohtical and sectarian prejudices, rendered peculiarly hazardous. But this, moreover, came safe out of the furnace, and the Ameri- can Church now stands — capable of much amendment, of course, just as we are — but a most remarkable and creditable monument of the vitahty of truth, and of the capacity of the Anglo-Saxon mind. A natural result of the method in which it came into being has been that it is deficient in the cathe- dral system; although — ^as the Banver of the Cross, quoted by you, has shewn — its disjecta membra are to be found in various portions of the country, as in Nashotah, and in the city of New York. From us it may well borrow this cathe- dral system in a reformed shape, when we have so much to learn from America in our synodical movement. The Colonies are so intricate atopic that there is no medium between discussing them in a few words and dwelhng upon them at a prolix length. Unlike England or the United States, they have to create both organizations — that of the cathedral and that of the synod — and both, in various mea- sures, they are creating. I have said enough to shew how every branch of our com- munion depends upon the others. I have shewn how the united efforts of all shovdd be bent towards marrying the cathedral and the synodical systems. I have demonstrated the varioiis degrees ia which the different Churches can help on one or the other of these two great ends. On unsuspicious union and co-operation, on giving and taking, and on mutual counsel and consolation, rest, humanly speaking, the hopes of the whole Eeformed Catholic Church. In the movement towards the development of the cathedral system across the Atlantic, I think I see one most important element in the combined struggle supplied ; and therefore I have thought it worth while to arrest your attention upon it. 463 C. THE LAITY IN SYNOD. Apbil 13. The admission of the laity into participation of synodical privileges is undoubtedly a change in the ecclesiastical con- stitutions, both of England and Scotland ; and those who advocate it are, on that account, bound to be rather pleased than offended when they find that it causes discussion, and meets with opposition, provided the tone of that discussion and the nature of that opposition be candid and kindly. Such a scheme, by the nature of things, could hardly be accepted at the first blush with perfect unanimity, and so it has only the alternative of falling stillborn, or fighting its own way upon its own merits. It is, therefore, with no apprehension that I read such pro- ductions as the letter of your correspondent " Sacerdos,'^ in your paper of Tuesday last ; or that which, under the signa- ture of " Cautus," has appeared, printed as a pamphlet, and addressed to the Bishop of Aberdeen, in reply to Mr. Grlad- stone's address to the same prelate. As this letter seems to embody the views of those church- men in Scotland who, agreeing with Mr. Gladstone in theo- logical views, disEigree in his proposal for extending the effi- ciency of the Scottish Church by the infusion of the lay ele- ment into its synodical constitution, I gladly avail myself of the assistance which it gives me to adduce some arguments in favour of such a change, by means of following those which it adduces on the other side. Previously to entering upon " Cautus's" arguments in detail, I must urge that he tacitly assumes, on the part of those against whom he is pleading, the patronage of principles to which, in truth, they are as antagonistic as he himself can be. The resume of his pamphlet, as a stranger -might inter- pret it, would almost be that there are certain High Church- men, more or fewer, who are ready, in the pursuit of a sup- posed expediency, to forget, if not to sacrifice, the divine constitution of the Christian Church, and in practice to reduce her to the condition of a democratic and social republic, all whose affairs were to be settled by mere divisions and count- ings of heads. I am not speaking too strongly in saying that "Cautus" is far too mild upon any who shall be found advo- 464 cates of such a reform. For one, I most emphatically repu- diate such intention. All I claim for the laity of the Church is to he allowed to contribute towards the practical remedy of a state of things the account of which by " Cautus" deserves to be written in letters of gold — " The secular part of RELIGION IS VERY DETERIORATING." So it is ; and therefore we are anxious to call in secular men to rescue^ by bearing their share of the burden^ the spirituality from the over " cumbersomeness" of the "many things" connected with those secular matters which are indispensable to the existence of the Church MiHtant. From these few words which I have just quoted may be extracted the kernel of the fallacy which appears to run through " Cautus's" argument. He draws forcibly^ and I fully beheve most truly^ the evils attendant upon synodical action, as it is in Scotland. " Prayers disturbed," " personal feeling engendered," " charity hurt," " an element of dis- turbance intruded upon the spiritual life," are the terms which he adopts to characterise the actual state of things. This is conceded on both sides ! AH, then, that has to be discovered is, how best to rectify so pregnant a mischief. " Cautus" appeals to the precedent of older Councils. This precedent we on our side admit, as far as it goes, to the same extent as the pamphlet can do ; and on this admission we base our claim for the lay element being conceded its share of synodical representation. Paradoxical as it may seem, I contend that hecause ancient Councils did not contain the lay element, therefore certain modern Synods or Convocations ought to do so. The expla- nation of this apparently flippant contempt of precedent rests upon the single fact that the duties of the modern Synod and Convocation are not conterminous with those of the ancient Council. The condition of modern society imposes upon any body of men who find themselves brought together into a room, as acting on behalf of any community — religious, poli- tical, or commercial — the fulfilment of certain businesses, of an administrative character, utterly unknown to any Council of the Church of earlier days, and of precisely that secular character which " Cautus" tells us is so deteriorating to men specially devoted to religion. Look over the records of Councils of the Church in earher times, and you find that their action may be mostly summed up under two classes — doctrine and discipline. It could not well be otherwise. Administrative science was not yet the potential acquisition 465 of all. Those wlio happened to possess it used itj and if bom in the noblesse hecame mighty barons ; if sprung from the commonalty, they entered for the most part iato holy orders, in order to bring their talents to the only market which then existed for secular advancement to such as they were. Ad- ministration was a series of " tyrannies/' in the classic sense of the word - a series of preponderances, that is, of one indi- vidual or the other, whom force of circumstances, not any fixed rule, had raised to pre-eminence. Under these circum- stances, a Synod, such as Mr. Gladstone adumbrates it, could not exist, and could not be thought of — ^just as The Morning Chronicle could not have existed, and could not have been thought of, till paper was introduced and printing invented. Journalistic advocacy of Church matters is every whit as great an innovation upon primitive times as laity in Synod. So are ten thousand other elements of our actual theologico-social condition, which, I doubt not, " Cautus" accommodates him- self to without scruple or misgiving. Can he, then, justly predicate of the one point — the admission of the lay element — the ecclesia discens, as he terms it — into formal deliberative action, that it is a revolution destructive to the first princi- ples of the Christian Church ? I have briefly alluded to the invention of printiag. This and the many other scientific discoveries which have followed in its wake have utterly changed the condition of the laity. Formerly, to be a learned layman — to be a layman endued with administrative capacity, unless he were a great lord or deep-read canonist — was to be a monstrosity. Now, every man may learn any thing, subject only to conditions of vary- ing personal inability from want of time, books, or money ; and every man may find himself compelled to assume admi- nistrative responsibility. The result of this shews itself as clearly in Church matters as anywhere else. Look no fur- ther than the writer of the pamphlet which " Cautus" replies to : Mr. Gladstone is a type of a something which does exist, and must be made its proper use of in the Christian Church — of a condition of the ecclesia discens, which the ecclesia docens of former days had not to deal with. " The secular part of religion is very deteriorating." This is a truth for all times, which has unhappily made its truthfulness ever most acutely felt. Of its effects in those middle ages when the clergy had perforce to wade up to their necks through the turbid waters of secular advancement, nothing need here be 466 said. The mischief is, however, no less possible now Seriously, then, I put it to " Cautus," and to those who think with him, whether the existence of such an ecclesia discens as that of which Mr. Gladstone is the specimen be not a moni- tion to those who are specially called to minister about sacred things, to avoid the deterioration that follows too close an attendance on their part upon the secular portion of religion, by calling in the help of such persons to aid them in bearing the burden ? As a fact, they have done so already, and they are every day doing it more and more. Not a Church society exists without a lay infusion into its committee : not a new Church is bmlt without some active, busiaess-like, well-dis- posed layman being requested to act as treasurer or secretary. On all sides, and in all possible ways, the orthodox clergy are encouraging the newly awakened zeal of the faithful laity, of the Church. Why, then, stop short at the door of synodi- cal action ? Because 1 apprehend those who wish this to be the exception have overlooked the vast amount of merely administrative business which is superadded in modern Church legislatures to the purely spiritual duties of the older Councils. A Synod is a committee of administration ten times, or a hundred times, to once that it is a " Council." All, then, I say, is — seeing, as we do, how indispensable the clergy find it every day of their lives to have recourse to the laity to keep their respublica goiag — let them boldly and honestly face the fact, and allow that laity to act in a formal constitutional manner, and not merely as Mr. This, or Lord That, as the secretary of one thing, the editor of another, and the com- mittee of something else. How this is to be done — how the balance of authority is to be maintained — how we must provide for those rarer cases in which the Synod becomes a Council — it is not for me to enter on. Let those whose care it is see to it. The science of constitutional government is far more difficult than I believe it to be, if such an expedient cannot be devised. In the meanwhile let " Cautus" not assume that we are such hot- headed democrats as to desire to reform, for instance, the Synods of Scotland, by simply pouring into the room, where the clergy now sit by themselves, so many laymen to bully — and, it may be, outvote them, by a simple shew of hands, and one division— upon the most cardinal points of doctrine and discipline. " Cautus" finds several difficulties in the adaptation of the 467 lay element to the circumstances of Scotland, which do not come within the scope of this letter, in which I desire to regard the question in that aspect which affects our entire communion. One of these — the probable preponderance of Edinburgh — can be very simply remedied, by repealing the prescription which would make the place of meeting the civil metropolis. This suggestion of mine is no revolutionary matter, when we remember that one of the most important general synods of the Scottish Church was held at, and called from, the village of Laurencekirk. But I must contend that he takes too gloomy a view of the sort of persons who are likely to be chosen as lay representatives, when I consider the distinction which exists between heartiness and faction, and the different amount of self-devotion these two states of feeling engender. While the very fact of vestries being the only place where the laity have now a constitutional voice gives the factious an undue preponderance in assemblies which only cost them an hour's odd time, and a walk down the street, it will, I am sure, be foimd in the long run that it will not be the vestry spouters, but the real, earnest Churchmen, who will be am- bitious of an office which involves the trouble and expense of a journey, and the detention of a legislative session, away from their individual cares and responsibilities. The mere demagogues, in the long run, will be pretty sure either not to stand as candidates, or, if elected, to absent themselves, which will be nearly as good. The men who will attend will be the Gladstones of the Church, provided always that the attractions of a metropoUtan life are not attached to the performance of synodical duty. An additional check will at once be given to the election of improper delegates by the " quahfication," both of electors and of representatives, being regular attend- ance at Holy Communion for some not inconsiderable space of time. This will at once cut off that most objectionable class of pseudo-Churchmen, a fear of whose irruption seems to have alarmed " Cautus." In the absence of this commu- nicant qualification resides the great deficiency of the Ameri- can synodical system. But surely, multiplied as communions now happily are on every side, it would be difficult, in an ecclesiastical constitution framed at this time, and by such a body as the Scottish Church in its actual soli-clerical Synod, not to make this quahfication the corner-stone of the whole superstructure ; and it would be equally difficult, while thus conceding privileges to the act of frequent communicating, to 468 avoid strengthening the powers of the clergy to reject un- worthy communicants. For one^ I must assure " Cautus" that I should be deeply pained to see it otherwise. I cannot conclude without resting the question upon the instance which " Cautus" brings forward, as his test of the whole matter : — " The question then is, can the ecolesia docens admit the eccksia discens to a share in her rule ? That an assent upon the part of the lat- ter has ever been given is undeniable, But, then, it has been an indi- vidual, not a corporate assent. It is one thing for the ecolesia docens to declare that Lent is to be kept, and for this or that member of the ecclesia discens to obey or to disobey the rule — it is another thing for the ecolesia docens to make the same rule, and the ecclesia discens as part of a synod to deliberate on its propriety. It is in the first of these senses alone that ' the brethren' are joined with the decree of the Apostles and Elders at the first Council of Jerusalem, mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles; for if any further meaning were extracted from it, it would infer that the laity of the Church of Jerusalem gave laws to the whole Christian world — a supposition perfectly untenable." Granted. But supposing the question not to be the pro- priety of the observance of Lent, but the possibility of some system being attained for ensuring a more general observance of that in whose theoretical propriety all were agreed. Sup- posing the Convocation or Synod to be engaged, not upon the abstract question of Lent or no Lent — a question which the Universal Church has settled — nor, again, upon the question of its maximum observance by the clergy themselves, consis- tently with due calls of health to fulfil their other duties (a matter which the clerical portion of the Synod should, by all rules of right and wrong, be allowed to adjust for itself) — but of that minimum public recognition of it which common pro- priety demands from the whole community, and which the nature of the voluntary system renders it possible to enforce — how could it better feel its way in this question of possi- bilities and proprieties, crossing each other's paths, than by collecting the views of a representative body of regular com- municants, who had sufficient heart in religious questions to induce them to postpone their own business and amusement for a session of Synod, and who, as representatives, could with knowledge speak to the likeUhood of individual assents to the proposed regulation ? " Cautus'^ may reply to this with that reference to clergy and people, standing to each other in relation of the shepherd and his flock, of which he makes use in his pamphlet. The shepherd, he contends, does not consult his flock ; he leads 469 it. Most assuredly. But we well know that this comparison of the shepherd and his flock is an image, and, like all images, must have its some one point at which literal paral- lelism fails — else it would not be an image, but a mere prosaic repetition of precisely identical details. Nothing seems to me easier than to define this point in the instance of the pastoral relation of clergy and people. The literal shepherd is a reasoning, responsible, and immortal being, who has the sole charge of a number of unreasoning, irresponsible, and perish- ing animals. But the metaphorical sheep are themselves reasoning, responsible, and immortal, like their shepherd; and of course, therefore, the pastoral relation between them and him must be discrepant in every detail from that between the literal pastor and the literal flock, however much the general resemblance holds good. Consequently, albeit un- questionably the train of thought which this phraseology suggests demonstrates the impropriety of the laity — the sheep — overruling and leading their shepherd — yet it is a weak foundation whereon to rear an argument against their beiag brought into friendly and confidential counsel. The truth is, I believe, that " Cautus" and Mr. Gladstone are not really so far apart in their views as they seem to be, but that much of the difference which appears to exist between them on the question of giving the laity legislative attributes in the Church, arises from the different meanings they re- spectively attribute to the very phrase which is the starting- point in the whole discussion — legislative attributes. " Cau- tus," I should apprehend, is more conversant with legislation in the form which it assumes in Scottish diocesan Synods than anywhere else ; and there it appears in its most rudimental, inartificial state, of a gathering in an inn parlour, of an after- noon, where questions of the most delicate character are started on the spur of the moment, debated, and adjudicated upon by one division in one sederunt, during a space of time which admits of being coimted off by the minute. If such is to be the future constitution of a laicised synod, he may well tremble for the result. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, lives in, and has thoroughly grasped, the spirit of the most elaborately and artificially ruled legislative body which the world has ever beheld — the Imperial Parliament of Great Britain — whose forms of preventive precaution against hasty legislation are so refined and comphcated as on many occa- sions almost to amount to an abuse antithetical to the possi- bility of headstrong injustice involved in the constitution of a 2 K 470 Scottish synod. Mr. Gladstone was, I doubt not, when he wrote his letter to the Primus, so thoroughly imbued with the Parliamentary idea that it hardly occtirred to him in how different an aspect his proposals — necessarily compressed by the shortness of the pamphlet in which he embodied them — would be regarded by those to whom the facts of Synods, and not the " forms of the House," were present things. No doubt he might have expressed himself more fuUy upon this point ; and he must allow an anonymous follower to take upon himself to set clear what his meaning must have been. He contemplated, I feel assured, the establishment in Scot- land, not of the system of the British Parliament — the growth of its own soil, and almost untransferable — but of some sys- tem of synodical government, more nicely poised agaiast a surprise or a prejudice than that which now exists in that Church ; and in this system he felt assured that room could be found — and with advantage, too, to the spiritual life of the whole body — for obtaining the collective feehngs of repre- sentatives of the devout communicants, without impairing that " witness" which, as " Cautus" truly says, the Scottish Church has especially borne — that witness which it is my prayer and my desire that it will ever bear as plainly and as boldly as heretofore — the witness "to the three divinely appointed orders of the ministry." Will " Cautus" peremptorily, and without further attempt, say that this is but a vain chimera ? Will he assert that the brotherly counsel and the proffered service of the laymen of the flock are inconsistent with a deference to the pastoral office ? Will he deny that a well-balanced system, through Scotland, of checks all centering in the highest tribunal — the Episcopal College — is at least not more dangerous than the actual rudimental system of insubordinate, independent, and irresponsible vestries, dictatiag all year long to the in- cumbent — ^jealous of, and feebly kept in check by, the one- day clerical synods, timidly holden with closed doors? If he is not prepared to admit all this, I call upon him, and upon all those Churchmen whose feelings he represents, seriously to consider, with a dispassionate mind and a fear- less heart, the future position in the Christian commonwealth of the educated and faithful laity. END OV TtllllD SERIES. LETTERS ^ ON CHUKCH MATTERS. D. C. L. REPRINTED FROM THE "MORNING CHRONICLE.' No. X. " The world is nat'rally averse To all the truth it sees or hears ; But swallows nonsense, and a lie, With greediness and gluttony." LONDON : JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 1852. CONTENTS. FAGE CI. Reformed Cathedrals .... 471 Cn. The Bennett Debate ..... 475 cm. Mb. Gladstone and Lord Blandfobd . . 481 CIV. The Christian Laity . . . . • 485 CV. The Balance of Ecclesiastical Power . . 489 CVI. Lord Derby and Sir John PAKiNeTON . 494 CVII. Churchmen and the coming Ei.bgtions . 500 CVIII. The National Society in 1862 . . .503 CIX. Parliament in Synod ..... 506 ex. The Church of England and America . . 510 LETTERS ON CHUECH MATTERS. CI. REFORMED CATHEDRALS. April 19, 1852. In a letter which I sent yoii not long since, I had to point out the connection which ought ever to exist between the movement for Synodical liberty, and that for the reformation and development of cathedral and collegiate bodies. I not obscurely indicated that the cathedrals of the future must be of a constitution, and its members of a spirit, very different from the type too prevalent amongst the capitular institutions of England. Since that letter appeared, an illustration, as apt as it was unforeseen, of what I was adumbrating in such a cathedral, has been published by yourself in the course of the present week — viz., the constitution for the chaplains of St. Gene- vieve, drawn up by the Archbishop of Paris as the sequel of the restoration of that church to religious purposes, which has formed an element in Louis Napoleon's policy. This constitution — the work of a Roman Catholic for Roman Cathohc uses — wiU be found, if perused with an impartial spirit, to have its great and immediate value for members of our own communion. The circumstances, indeed, under which this future col- legiate body will have come into existence, would have ren- 2 L 472 dered any clumsiness or want of practical scope in its organ- ization most inexcusable. The man of artistic perceptions might, it is true, lament that the Church which has been redeemed to the service of Him for Whom it was reared, should carry upon its front the impress of that age when the cold pedantic revival of an affected classicism for the time supplanted those architectural forms wMch the revived good taste of these days has owned to be pre-eminently adapted for the worship of the Christian commonwealth. 53ut to let this pass — religion, as John Bunyan said, was walking in silver slippers when the Archbishop of Paris was busy allot- ting its constitution to St. Genevieve. The structure was there — built years ago, and paid for — the endowment allotted, with carte hlanche to himself to regulate its distribution ; and he had nothing before him but that which Frenchmen can so well do — organize in an open field, where there are no antecedents to hamper, or complications in prospect, to dis- turb that well-poised uniformity which is the essence of all French system-making, and the interruption of which, by any disturbing cause, without or within, proves so often fatal to a Frenchman's system, which otherwise would, with admirable beauty of uniform motion, continue for ever gyra- ting through the vacuum of infinite space. But, not to lose myself in similes, the Archbishop found his materiel — Church and money — ready to hand; and he had to shew how far he was a practical man in the use he made of these advantages — and that he is so, he has shewn most incontestably. I should, before going further, observe that one of the features of this scheme, considering the quarter from which it emanates, is its mvpnpishness. The ritual of the French Church is, of course, assumed throughout it; but if for that we simply substitute the order of di^dne service set forth in the Prayer-book, and omit the 12th article of the second ordi- nance, which is of a local character, there will not be one word in all the regulations which would militate against their being adopted literally in any church of our communion in England, or iu Scotland, or in the United States. Literally, I say, they might be adopted as the substratum of the constitution of a cathedral body, or if without addition, as the entire purpose of what St. Gene-sieve will be — a Col- legiate Church. This distinction is not one of words merely. A collegiate church need, so to speak, only have a spiritual or pastoral function. The spiritual and pastoral function is a most important element of the cathedi'al also ; but it is not 473 all, for in a diocese \rhere tlie Church system is intended to be a thing of life and reality, the episcopal administration ought and will centre round the Mother Church — collectively in the Council of the Canons — distributively in the separate functions of government entrusted to each. The dean and chaplains of St. Genevieve might, I repeat it, with the alterations I have just indicated, find their con- stitution transplanted to Westminster Abbey or St. Saviour's, Southwark, with as little detriment to the principles asserted at the English Reformation as they would clearly be of advantage to the teeming population around. The system laid down is indeed one so very simple, that we risk over- looking its merits till we compare it with actual facts about us. A dean and chaplains, holding their offices during a few years of real work, living in common, exercising themselves in constant preaching — bound to be present in their proper places at all the church services, under penalty, in case of contumacy, of punishment amounting, if need be, to depriva- tion upon trial — devoted especially, as denizens of a huge city, to the spiritual welfare of the working classes — and the schools, with vacations of a single month, so arranged as never to create more than a single absence (in lieu of that single residence which seems the ideal of our Cathedral reformers of a few years back) — aU this seems so very much absolute common sense, that, when the vision is firmly im- pressed upon the mind, it positively requires an exertion not to believe that the same thing exists under the solemn vault of our Cathedral Churches. But I will pause, and not draw the other side of the picture, which may easily be filled up by your readers. The Dean of St. Genevieve, you will note at the end, has only a five years' tenure of his office — the chaplains hold theirs for three. This, of course, is a mere detail, and we must do Archbishop Sibour the justice to conclude that he had good reason for selectiag this particular term. For some places it may be so ; in others — as I should be incUned to say, in England — ^the time would be found too short ; but, admitting the fact that a stall in a cathedral choir need not be for hfe, it is a very valuable item in any scheme of reform- ation. Of course, being a Roman Cathohc body, the dean and chaplains of St. Genevieve, will be celebates. In our Church, where clerical marriage is wisely and rightly allowed, this permission must necessarily create a diflierence in the mode of life of a collegiate body ; but the truest member of the Church of England cannot deny that, if the rule of void- 2 L 2 474 ing fellowships in our colleges upon marriage is a wise dne^ some similar arrangement for enabling young clergymen to devote a few vigoroiis years of bachelor life to hard-working missionary labours in our crowded towns, with a forfeiture of that mission upon marriage within their given term, cannot be inconsistent with the spirit of our reformed Church. In this contingency I am inclined to think the three years' term would not be too brief. Why does not the Chap- ter of St. Ninian's Cathedral, Perth — a church, be it never forgotten, standing in a city of thirty thousand souls— endea- vour to work out some such experiment ? It is one which would be well worthy the attention also of those who will have to give constitutions to those cathedrals which must soon be rising in the great American cities — which are already rising in Australia, Newfoundland, Fredericton. The provision for opening the chaplainships to " competition," is perhaps the one which will sound strangest to the English ear. But I should implore your readers not hastily to repu- diate it. It will be seen that the form of trial, without which no man will be entitled to sign himself Chaplain of St. Gene- vieve, is sufficiently stringent, and peculiarly conducive to the desired object of selecting as members of a preaching community those whose forte is sermon writing and sermon extemporising ; and it must not be forgotten that no one can compete who does not produce a good-conduct testimonial from his diocesan. When, moreover, it is recollected that those who submit themselves to this strict public examination, with the risk of the mortification of being rejected at the first stage, are men grown up — priests themselves — it must be acknowledged that Archbishop Sibour contemplates no easy resort of sinecurist dignitaries in his restored chapter of St. Genevieve. I cannot leave off without adverting to the wisdom of one of the articles, which especially places St. Genevieve at the disposal of certain religious and provident societies, for their anniversary festivals. If the Church is ever to keep a hold over the working classes, it must be by descending from stilts and showing a human interest in their troubles and con- trivances — in their schemes of mutual philanthropy and laud- able forethought. Once a year, to be sure, an excuse is made to suspend, for several weeks together, the service in St. Paul's for one day of a pompous and histrionic display of amalgamated charity children. Here we English have hitherto stopped. The man who should suggest the potion of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey throwing 475 their portals open to the anniversaries of trades' benevolent societies would be set down at once as a Chartist or a madman. The natural consequence is, that these associations are quite estranged from the Churchj and that the mummeries of Odd Fellows, Ancient Druids, and such stuff, supply that bond of external ceremonialism which is a necessity of unsophisticated human natiu-e. I do not hesitate to say that no town cathedral can consider its organization complete without a provision like this of the Archbishop of Paris, to incorporate iato itself the volimtary associations of industrious men. Such is the scheme by which the once lordly abbey church of St. Genevieve — afterwards the Pantheon — is to be here- after the home of a missionary community devoted to the teaching, under their diocesan's eye, of the working classes of a demoralised and unbelieving capital. As yet it is a thiag on paper. Some months are to elapse before even the beginning can be made of its working efficiency. In the meanwhile, it gives us opportunity for useful thought. It likewise gives us occasion for much painful reflection, when we consider how many collegiate bodies there are about us, which neither now nor in October are likely to in\ite the competition of a pubhc trial, and the inducement of an eleven months' residence to recruit their numbers. Between this and the 11th of October, I trust that in dioceses of our own communion, in Scotland (for why should Scotland have but one cathedral ?), in the colonies, and in America, the lesson of Archbishop Sibour's ordinances will be conned vtdth prac- tical import, and with the stable conviction that for the reformed Catholic Church not to have her conterminous re- formed cathedral system is an anomaly and a shortcoming. CII. THE BENNETT DEBATE. ApaiL 26. Tuesday night witnessed a repetition of those theological discussions in the House of Commons, for which the last Session was so unfortunately notorious, the assailant being Mr. Horsman, and the subject-matter Mr. Bennett. The voluminous speech of the member for Cockermouth was very 476 like his usual effusions^ full of reckless assertion, together with a misleading appearance of documentary authority for all his statements. The main topics of his speech — the questions connected with Mr. Bennett's induction to Frome, and the tragic despair of those fifty-six malcontents, out of a population of nearly 12,000, who managed for the nonce, during an unexciting period of the year, to fill up for a few days some portion of the public attention, in the character of " the laity" of the Church — are, as most persons (the fifty-sis inclusive) very well know, disposed of in the gross by the popularity and success which have already attended Mr. Ben- nett's ministrations at Frome. Little, therefore, need be said to vindicate the proceedings of the excellent Bishop of Bath and Wells, the result of which is their own best vindication. All that mighty array of talk, that pompous pathos, resolves itself into two fresh charges, upon the strength of which the Commons were called upon to approach the Throne, and to claim that extreme remedy for extreme cases which, ia Church matters, is indissolubly bound up with the recollections of Stuart pohcy — a Royal Commission of Inquiry. The first of these charges was, that Mr. Bennett, when at Kissingen, a Roman Catholic town, attended the services of the Eoman Cathohc Church ; and the second, that certain " ventriloqual" (whatever this odd substitute for pervious may mean) pro- perties of German partitions enabled a "gentleman," who has not allowed his name to be brought publicly forward, to play the part of a spy at Kissingen, and of an informer in England, and to give his own ipse dixit for the tenor of con- versations which he asserts that he heard held by another person than Mr. Bennett, lodging in an adjoining room, and which this anonymous eaves-dropper considers of a nature to disqualify Mr. Bennett for the incumbency of Frome. The additional and flagitious enormity of having actually been on visiting terms with a Capuchin friar, in a country where Capuchins are established and exist, I leave in all its naked atrocity — if the "monk" be not, as report has it, no other than Sir John Harington himself, seen with distorted eyes. Mr. Bennett, it is assumed — for, mark it, the whole case is one of assumption and tittle-tattle, worthy of the servants' hall, more than of the parlours of the Hotel de Russie at Kissingen — attended mass while there residing. I have no intention of investigating the main question herein involved, or of judicially pronouncing what rule should bind an EngUsh clergyman residing for the time within the territorial limits of the Roman Church. I will assume that Mr. Bennett did 477 attend Roman Catholic services on Ms travels, while I knovr that such attendance did not win him to that communion, but the contrary. What then ? Is the case so plain of such attendance (within, 1 repeat it, the territorial limits of the Roman Church) heing manifestly unlawful and penal, that the interposition of the Legislature and of the Crown — or even of her Majesty's Ministers — is demanded to stand between that man and his induction to an English benefice ? One element there is in the case, which the " lords of the congregation," assembled in Westminster Palace on Tuesday night, might have brought, but did not bring, into consideration — viz., that, while there happens to be no law whatever of the English Church which throws the least light, one way or the other, upon this question touching the duties of an English clergyman on his travels in a Roman country, there is the entire framework of the Reformed EngUsh Church, which, in repudiating the errors and corruptions of the modern Roman Church, admits to the full the legitimacy of its " orders," as I have had to repeat again and again in your columns, tiU I fear tedium in further alluding to the fact. It cannot be so very illogical, then, to assume that, if the Church of England allows the Church of Rome (however marred by corruption) to be a true Church, she must also allow her sacraments to be true sacraments. These facts were sufiiciently brought to light last year d propos of the D'Aubigne and the Gawthorn scandals. Is it then — for I Umit my issue to this one mode- rate question — so very certain that what, in Mr. Horsman's or Mr. Mangles' eyes, creates a perpetual disqualification in the way of Mr. Bennett's active ministry in England, is a matter upon which the Reformed Church in England either has pronounced, or intended to pronounce, a dogmatic judg- ment ? But — to assume for argument's sake that these pro- ceedings of Mr. Bennett are suificient to demand an inquiry, friendly or adverse — I ask if that inquiry is to begin and to end with Kissingen, and if it is not to deal with the case, for instance, of Mr. Burgess, who ostentatiously — not attends but — leads, when abroad (as last year at Boulogne) the reli- gious services of those foreign communities whose " orders" the Church of England does not acknowledge, and whose ministrations, therefore, she does not recognise. If so, all I can say is, that it will be but one more of those instances of brasen- faced injustice with which that portion of the "public" which Archdeacon Sinclair wishes to " satisfy" and has not satisfied, is wont to compensate for its want of learning, logic. 478 or charity in dealing witt those who profess the doctrines of the Prayer-book. You will note the ingenious juggle by which Mr. Bennett's non-attendance at the services of Mr Le Grix White is trans- muted into his having turned his back upon those of the Church of England. The gentlemen who try to palm off this trick seem to have forgotten that Mr. Bennett is just as much a clergyman of the Church of England as Mr. Le Grix White ; andj therefore, he is just as much under the obligation to say each day the morning and evening prayer, as commanded in the prefatory rubrics . of our Prayer-book, as Mr. Le Grix White himself is — and, I dare say, he is observant of this duty as we must conclude so zealous a pastor as Mr. Le Grix White shews himself cannot fail to be. It might not be a vain chimera to conclude that Mr. Bennett's travelling com- panions formed his congregation. What peculiar mission Mr. Le Grix White may have had, which Mr. Bennett has not, to officiate at Kissingen, a town not situated in any English diocese, depends upon circumstances, upon which I will not now enter. Some chaplains at foreign watering-places derive their mission from a sort of compact mtli the Bishop of London, whom convenience has invested with quasi diocesan authority in sundry anomalous cases — others from the plenary and overruling episcopacy of a chapel-committee, which appoints and dismisses the chaplain — the rest from a bargain self-struck with the landlord of the big room, leading to a speculation on their own account, which, as it is quite beyond the control or recognition of any ecclesiastical superior what- ever, must, if the speculator knows at all how to play his cards, be not unprofitable. In none of these cases, it is clear, can the chaplain claim the position which a parish priest in Eng- land, serving under a recognized and territorial bishop, and himself the incumbent of a constituted cm'e of souls, holds, and has the right, both moral and legal, to hold. So much for the first part of this accusation. Now for the second — based upon the thinness of German walls, and the tones of Sir John Harington's voice. What can be said of the conduct of any Englishman who could silently keep awake night after night at a foreign inn, eaves-dropping the conversations of English gentlemen in the adjacent room, and then allow his tell-tale letter to be brought before the House of Commons as the warrant for a perseciition, without demanding the publication of his own name ? One advantage, at all events, there is in such behaviour — that it allows by- 479 standers to talk of it in language which the rules of society render almost impossible in the case of a traducer who has so much honesty as to identify himself. I have no desire to follow the intricacies of the debate which ensued. Mr. Disraeli spoke in the usual tone of a Minister desirous of getting rid of an irrelevant and incon- venient question raised by a private Member, and I will not criticise the mistakes into which he fell in. the course of it. Sir Robert Inglis's unchangeable position in this instance kept him standing precisely where he ought to have been. Sir H. Verney, Mr. Hume, Mr. Newdegate, Mr. Spooner, and Mr. Mangles said just what you might have anticipated. Lord John Ilussell gave another proof of his nature in rushing for- ward to aim a blow at that untitled clergyman whose dogged courage had so strangely crossed his own career of political creed. His insidious proposal of a "friendly" investigation was worthy of its author. But what shall we say to the part which another politician and an actual Cabinet Minister — the Colonial Secretary — played in the m6lee, when he came forward and asserted — • " He was not at liberty to make any authoritative statement to the House on the subject, but it happened to be within his knowledge, on authority he could not doubt, that the language used by the Bishop of London, on the occasion, was such that the had the strongest opinion that if such language were known to the honourable gentleman, he would not have the slightest disposition to complain of the Bishop of London?" I am sure that there can be but one feeliag among all good Churchmen at the unfortunate way in which the Right Hon. Baronet's brusque partisanship led him to handle the Bishop of London's name. The debate was abeady sufficiently distressing without a Secretary of State — sworn to keep his Sovereign's but not his bishop's counsels, and animated by an irrepressible energy of meddhng — jumping up, with a heedless unconcern for the feelings of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, to make perpetual the vague fact of some hasty words inconsiderately uttered at an unfortunate moment, and forgotten it may be by this time, or repented of by their speaker — words certainly never intended to form the subject-matter of a Minister's speech in Parliament — words the more damaging to the Bishop oi London, and the more cruel to Mr. Bennett, because their reporter, afraid to give them in their undisguised completeness, leaves us with the dim notion that they were such as would 480 entirely remove tHe complaints of Mr. Horsman. Such is the resume of one Cabinet Minister's contribution to Tuesday's representation of the School for Scandal. Sir John Pakington, I do not doubt^ thinks he has made a successful defence for the Bishop of London, and that he may look to his Lordship for being very much obhged for this volunteered half revelation of his private concerns. But I am convinced that his Lordship will view the question with very different eyes, and that he will owe no thanks to the Colonial Minister for the blundering fussiness with which he has bustled forward — " spargere voces Per vulgum ambiguas." It is at all events certain that, thanks to Sir John Pakington, the case of the " Bishop of London v. Bennett" is not ended. Justice to an attacked man, respect for the Bishop of Bath and Wells, his own relations to the various Churchmen with whom a Bishop of London is brought en rapport, rather as a public officer — a sort of second Primate of the national Church — than as their immediate diocesan, compel on the one hand those Churchmen who feel for Mr. Bennett, and on the other the Bishop of London, to be equally anxious that this most unpleasant matter should not rest where it is. If the question be burked and the minis- ter's explanation pronounced sufficient, the irritation may be, in all appearance, got the better of — but it wiU be got the better of as quacks imagine they have healed the fever, when they have only driven the deadly poison inwards to prey upon the vitals. Fair play will become discontented from the idea of episcopacy, and when the day arrives for the restoration of a constitutional regime to the Church, prelatic autocracy vrill risk finding its charmed sleep broken at an unfortunate moment of suspended confidence between the orders of its future Synods. For sowing the seeds of such a rank crop, if it grow up — for reviving the episcopal reminiscences of last year, which I trusted not to have had again to advert to — our gratitude, I repeat, is supremely due to Sir John Pakington. I have but, in conclusion, to observe that, undeniably and painfully true as is the fact confessed by Mr. Gladstone, that our ecclesiastical law is in a most unsatisfactory condition, yet I cannot but think that Mr. Bennett's case is not the one to mix up with any calm attempt to procure its remedy. 481 Eectify it by all meanSj but rectify it in a spirit of grave, unbiassed counsel. Introduce the least suspicion of a party colour in your scbeme — encourage a moment's idea that the names of Bennett^ of Russell, and of Horsman, are iavolved in the consideration — and. you vitiate and make impossible that sober and religious feeling with which all Church reform must be acoompanied to be efficacious. I shall, I feel sure, have the assent of Mr. Gladstone to these propositions in the abstract ; but because the casual reader — bearing off the few words which he dropped at the close of a debate long and anxious, and, as Mr. Walpole truly said, most painful — might assume that his feelings were otherwise, and that he desired to m.ake the induction of Mr. Bennett the pivot of a change of system, I must be pardoned for the remark. One thing at least is certain. — that the suggestion of which he spoke in approving terms is an emanation of the writer of the Durham Letter, having reference to that very clergyman whom it was the object of the Durham Letter to hound down; and it is also, I fear, undeniable that the result of such an inquiry as that which Mr. Gladstone calls upon the Ministry to make might result, not in the enfranchisement of the Church to do her own work, and reform her own system, but in the introduction of some fresh act of Church discipline calculated still more to complicate her position, and to render still heavier the chaius of her captivity. cm. MR. GLADSTONE AND LORD BLANDFORD. May 3. Again — once and twice — have Church matters come before the House of Commons since I last wrote to you ; but, on these two occasions, in a very different manner from that of Tuesday week — in a spirit at once of reverence and of practical desire for a sincere renovation of the Church in her character of the saver of souls, Wednesday was occupied by Mr. Gladstone with his Reform Bill for the "Church of England ia the Colonies"— Thursday by Lord Blandford, 482 \ntli his for the " Church of England in England." The speeches of both gentlemen were^ in their respective ways^ very valuable. Mr. Gladstone^ with unanswerable force of demonstration, pointed out how reform could alpne with jus- tice or with safety be achieved. Xiord Blandford, while en- deavouring to call into life a machinery of reformation — the insecurity of which was, at it were, by anticipation demon- strated on the preceding day — took occasion, with considerable point, to forecast many of the details which a Church legis- lature, sitting in England for the purpose of reforming the English Church, must seriously take into deliberation. Mr. Gladstone's thesis is a very simple one. Religious equality, as a fact, exists in the colonies. You cannot, if you would — you would not, it is to be hoped, if you could, reverse it. Then let your equality be not all one-sided, and all against that particrdar body of Christians which in num- bers exceeds any other, and do not let that one denomination which is called " the Church of England in the Colonies" have only a pre-eminence of internal paralysis. Lord Blandford's thesis can be reduced into almost as brief a compass. Because the " Church of England in England" is established, therefore she must be managed for — she needs palpable reforms in many details ; then let these reforms be effected for her by a Legislature in which Roman Catholic, Independent, and Quaker sit by the side of the English Churchman, because the Legislature, in days when unwisely it made Churchmanship the qualification for a seat in the House, was trusted to act as the lay Synod ; and let this body hand that Church over to a bureaucracy, the ulti- mate appointment of whose members can always be traced to Parliamentary iufluence. I only wonder that the juxtapositions of his Lordship's and of Mr. Gladstone's " days " was not in itself sufficient to show the former the fallacy of his assumption — not upon theo- logical inferences drawn from the constitution of the Christian church, but upon the mere matter-of-fact laws of Parlia- mentary possibility. Mr. Gladstone's speech alone might have brought before his eyes, with the vividness of the electric light, that the " United Church of England and Ireland" is but a part of a whole, from which it can no more amputate itself -without danger to the entire system, than a man in robust health can in a freak deprive himself of a leg or arm. Mr. Gladstone made us absolutely feel wide-spreading and vigorous Churches diffused over territories whose admeasui-e- ments are by the thousand miles — bone of our bone and flesh 483 of our flesh — whose political conditions of existence could never, and never would, coincide with that dependence upon legislative majorities which Lord Blandford desires to make the law of the Church of England's permanence — Churches whose orders, whose ritual, whose members are not parallel to, but one and the same with, those of the Church at home. Had his lordship looked a little nearer England, again he would have seen across the Cheviots another Church, whose members are, indeed, our fellow-subjects, whose ecclesiastical existence is intimately tied up with ours, but which the State itself, by its own deed of repudiation, has now for more than one hundred and fifty years placed in the attitude of inde- pendence, unquestioned and unquestionable. Casting his eyes across the wide seas, rather more to the south than Montreal — rather to the north of the West Indies — from the shores of the Atlantic at New York, to the Pacific at San Francisco — he would have descried another Church, deriving, an episcopate partly from us and partly from Scotland — one and the same in all essential things with us and with the Reformed Church of Scotland — which does not even own a civil allegiance to the British Crown or British Parliament. And yet, with all this wonderful panorama passing before him, his lordship can still go on dreaming of re-constitutiug the English Church by orders in Council, and by a Commis- sion deriving its authority from a merely Parliamentary sanction. Not many weeks ago I pointed out the danger which those who are in England working for the restoration of Synodical freedom might incur if they forgot these facts, and argued as if their only and highest aim was the resuscitation of an English and an Irish Convocation. How much greater is the mistake of those who will not even look so far as a Con- vocation of the two " United " and " Established" Churches ! Lord Blandford is, in truth, committing the gravest error a man can do in politics — deliberately choosing le petit jeu when it is as open to him to play le grand jeu. Will he take a warning offered iu no unfriendly spirit ? He has less diffi- culty than many men might have in changiug his policy, when the change necessitates the abandonment of no one single individual object which he now strives to carry — when, on the contrary, it would give him means he now does not pos- sess of urging them with boldness and with consistency. The fact is, that Lord Blandford is, without knowing it, striving to fill an inconsistent, and, therefore, an impossible position. He is too much of the real reformer to be a real 484 mere Establishment man, and too much of the mere Estab- lishment man to be either a bold or a safe reformer. The speech of Sir Robert Inglis should have shown him the weak- ness of his defences. Sir Eobert is, in the fullest sense of the word, an Establishmentarian — most consistently and fear- lessly so. He stands simply upon what has been established, because it has been so. Mr. Gladstone is as simply a Church reformer, who desires to reform in the safest way, by putting in action the Church's own energies in her own cause. Lord Blandford endeavours to take a position midway between Sir Robert and Mr. Gladstone; and in consequence he will every day find his standing ground more and more narrow and slip- pery, and he must at last recede to the one side or advance to the other. No earnest man can long be an Ecclesiastical Whig. I can assure his lordship that there is not a man in Eng- land more fully persuaded than I am of the necessity of various broad features roughly set forth in his scheme — taken on the whole, and with a distinct disclaimer of any opinion upon the details with which he invests them — such as the large increase of the Episcopate, the bringing the Chapters into working order, and the Bishops into a legitimate and close con- nection with their capitular councils and their cathedrals (the primitive constitution of these two halves of that one whole, the cathedral system), as their particular advisers and their own particular churches. Some letters which I have written to you lately show how strongly I feel upon these especial points, and I hail with unfeigned satisfaction the corrobora- tive testimony of Lord Blandford to their practical worth. But because I do so — because 1 rejoice to see him taking so sound and ecclesiastical a view of diocesan organization — I the more earnestly and loudly deprecate the marring such a good work by so unfortunate and unstable a method of advancing it. I deprecate it, and I protest against it, as an instance of striving on one day to build a system upon a basis which the same means may, on another day, with equal political right, overturn — of bringing into fresh relations of details with the Church that legislature whose y&cj fitness for temporal government, arising out of its non-sectarian charac- ter, is its unfitness when dealing with sectarian questions. Everything that Parliament has made, it can unmake — except a Bill of Rights. A Bill of Rights is the one and only thing which Mr. Gladstone demands for the " Church of England in the Colonies" — a Bill of Rights is the one thing which, in his elaborate system of reform for the " Church of England in England," Lord Blandford has forgotten to insist upon. 485 If Lord Blandford asks who is demanding this Bill of Rights, I answer, the entire Anglican Communion. Mr. Gladstone asked it in the House of Commons, the Australian Church has asked it at Sydney, the North American Church at Montreal, the Bishop of Capetown in. Africa ; and during this very week the Church at home has asked it, in the ancient episcopal city of Gloucester, under the shadow of one of our venerable cathedral towers, at that meeting for Diocesan Synods which, convened under the auspices of the energetic Mr. Pound, from time to time and at various places, never faUs — as now at Gloucester, as formerly at Derby and ia London — to gather round it its zealous body of anxious, pru- dent, and determined Churchmen. Such I answer to any one who calls for the proofs of a Churchman's demand for his Bill of Rights, are a few utter- ances of the deep and general cry. Let Lord Blandford listen to them in time — let him, when there is the oppor- tunity, forego marring his honest intentions through propping them upon the broken stafP of cut and dry bureaucracy — and let him join the ever increasing body -whose only plea it is that the Church shall have scope to manage her own concerns in her own way. CIV. THE CHRISTIAN LAITY. Mat 5. YouK. columns of this morning contain the announcement that the Episcopal Synod of Scotland has, by a majority, decided upon submitting to the Diocesan Synods the question of the admission of the laity into Synod. This result of its deliberations contains, I am fully satisfied, the germ of a great fature to the Reformed Catholic Church. That the question of the admission of the laity should have been affirmed in Scotland as soon as proposed is, I feel convinced, a subject of congratulation. That it should not have been affirmed unanimously was natural in a question of organic reform, and is not to be regretted if the matter ends, as I trust it will, in the unanimity of conviction, and not of 486 impulse. In the interim the decision will, of course, be strongly canvassed, for it is a subject about which people must either think in earnest or not all. It has already become matter of no little controversy, and now that it has attained its present stage it will become so still more markedly. The train of thought which most clearly manifests itself as running through the arguments of those who contend against the change, is that the enfranchisement of the laity is, if not a repudiation of, at least a derogation from, the grace of Holy Orders — from that mysterious something inherited by the Christian clergy as successors to the first great Apostolic mission. I am not now about to discuss the desirability of the change. I am not now going even so far as to consider whether it be a right thing or no. I simply propose to consider this fundamental objection, and to show that whether the admission of the laity to synodical privileges be desirable or right, it is or is not desirable or right within the conditions of the Christian Church — recognizing, that is, all the doctrines touching the Christian ministry for which our own communion is peculiarly bound to maintain her witness, open as she is to assaults from the non-sacra- mental side, arising from the circumstances of the Reforma- tion. The form in which we cast our petitions should be sufficient to demonstrate this. Our claim is not for the enfranchisement of those laics who call themselves laics, but of those persons whom the Church herself calls her laity — the communicants at the Christian altar. Surely in this one definition the whole matter is included, and the question of derogating from the sanctity of Holy Orders is disposed of. So far from derogating from this sanctity — so far from assaihng the sacramental system — we take the strongest, because the most practical, means of attesting the value we set upon it. We believe the sacramental system to be a real thing ; we believe in the doctrine that there is an Apostolic ministry appointed to be the stewards of the mysteries of G-od — of the sacramental blessings of the Christian Church ; and we, therefore, urge a claim that those who share in these blessings shall be recognised by their brethren and by their pastors as endowed with something of prerogative, and entitled to something of confidence in vu'tue of that very participation. " Communion" — that special characteristic of the Christian Commonwealth — that special act which, as we believe, derives its existence from the existence of the Christian ministrv — ■ 487 i« the one thing which we urge should be enfranchised. We believe, 1 repeat it, in the Apostolic ministry — we believe that to this Apostolic ministry the administration of the sacrament of the Altar is entrusted. We believe in the ineffable blessing which follows that sacrament — the ineffable grace which it sheds on the devout communicant. Then — not iUogically, not presumptuously, I must urge — we draw the inference that to ask for those so blessed, for those so endowed with grace, a share in the common concerns of all — an opportunity of relieving their pastors from some of the deteriorating burdens of the secular part of religion — cannot be treason against the constitution of the Universal Church. Indeed, the basis, the key-stone, and the coping of our cause is the sacramental system. We urge for our Church a test of qualification which is a portion of — an inseparable constituent in — the idea of the Christian priesthood. In praying that the claims of communicants be considered, we impKcitly assert the prerogative of that ministry through whose continued existence it is that such a thing as " com- munion" exists — and for the sake of which " communion" it is alternatively that, in a great measure, this ministry itself has its existence. Need I say more upon the argument that we undervalue the Apostolic Succession, and the doctrine of sacramental grace? The expediency side of the question, as I prefaced this letter by observing, I do not touch upon. No doubt much will be said of the risk of unworthy communions, in order to buy synodical privileges ; but the only answer which such arguments ought to receive is, " Of course there is that risk — a risk inseparable from human nature ; let us combine, and see how best to keep it down." There may be on the other side a risk — if our Synods are soli- clerical — of ambitious men seeking holy orders in order to play their part in the ecclesiastical legislature. But I should be very sorry indeed to hear any advocate of the enfranchisement of the laity have recourse to this line of argument, which would but irritate and never convince. A more serious matter is opened up by the fear which some entertain that doctrine may become the sport of elected majorities. No doubt such a risk would be much to be apprehended were the future government of the Church to be of that worst democratic stamp which engulfs the judicial in the administrative. This result is the real object of those persons' dread, cast into other language. There could not be a more serious blow aimed at the Church then such a revolution. But is there any reason to appre- 2 M 488 hend it in the scheme which we advocate? It mnst be remembered that, unless we accept the " doctrine of develop- ment/' we must confess that doctrine is a thing to be explained — rvled — not voted upon or enacted, in the parlia- mentary sense of " enacting"-^ that is, of creating something that did not exist before. The progress of governmental science has more and more defined the legitimate bounds of administrative and of judicial action. It has tended to remove the adjudications of individual cases, in the course of which (like the " precedent" of a secular court) the definitions of doctrine arise from indiscriminate Church Synods to Church Courts. This has not yet been done completely ; but I feel satisfied that the enfranchisement of the laity in Synod will be an important step towards this completion. For my own part this is one reason which makes me the more anxious to see it accomplished — but not accomplished without, as I have already argued, a corres- ponding development of the cathedral system, that is, of the episcopal or metropolitan council, upon which the future Church judiciary must be reared — if I ought not rather to say, of which the judiciary must form an element, with the addition of such a system of legal " assessorship" as may be requisite — a concession which " Cautus" makes in the case of the Episcopal Synod of Scotland. This last consideration has, I feel comnjiced, not yet had due weight given to it. Many excellent persons, scared by a first impression, think that elective laity in the Synod means elective laity in the Church Court, and they argue accordingly. To them I reply, if you want a Synod which shall be legislative, and a court which shall be a trustee of doctriae, lose no time in reforming existing institutions, which, in Scotland at least, are not exactly the one, and not exactly the other — and give in return, on a broad and there- fore sure foundation, a true Synodical Government and a real judiciary tribunal. 489 CV. THE BALANCE OF ECCLESIASTICAL POWER. May 10. The question of the simultaneous development of the capitular and synodical systems — combiaed, as regards the latter, with that of the enfranchisement of the laity — is, in other words, the question of the balance of ecclesiastical power. In this aspect, then, and under this fresh expression, 1 propose to-day to consider its bearings. You will have noticed that I have frequently claimed administration as the especial function of the Synod, while I have again at different times compared the chapter to the Bishop's Cabiaet ; and withal that, in the last letter which I wrote to you, I hinted at the approximation which must exist between the capitular element in the Church constitution and the judicial action of the Christian commonwealth. To those persons who derive their theory of the balance of power from that existing in secular governments — the British con- stitution, for example — I may have seemed to have been trip- ping when I talked of the same body in relation to such very different things, iu their estimation, as a cabinet and a court of law. But I have not tripped, nor been iuconsistent j for the conditions of the ecclesiastical and of the secular com- monwealth are sufficiently dissimilar to require — while equally demanding the balance of power — a very different distribution of it between its various elements. Secular government is carried on by " party" — by what Lord Lindsay calls "progression by antagonism," There is no Catholic faith in politics ; or I would rather say, there are no creeds to embody the scattered elements of complete pohti- cal truths, which no doubt exist somewhere, under masks and films, like those rare metals which modem chemistry dis- covers lurking in. combinations never yet seen — perhaps never to be seen — in their pure metallic lustre. Parliamentary government, then, in secular concerns is the organized antag- onism — the attrition which originates progression; and the Cabinets of the day are the sparks thrown out in this pro- gress — the creations, while also the controllers, of party. Consequently, to combine judicial responsibility, which must be of no party, with Cabinet responsibility, which derives its existence from party, would be to overturn all right and wrong, and to destroy the very foundation of general and legi- timate confidence, 2m 2 490 Now look to the other side. There is in religious matters a Catholic faith — there are creeds which embody it. Repre- sentative government, therefore^ in religious concerns should be not an organized antagonism, but an organized co-opera- tion to apply this Catholic Faith to practical concerns. Enact doctrine, as I said in my last letter, it cannot do, as secular chambers enact laws. It can only apply and regulate — administer, in short ; for a religious legislature comprises, in truth, a great deal more of the Cabinet — i. e. of the pure Executive — in itself, than a secular one, from its legislative vis being so much less. The Chapter, then, or whatever else is the Bishop's council, is not — or rather ought not to be — the index of a party triumph, but the result of a unanimous common concern. A bishop can only have a cabinet of such a contexture, if he means to be true to his sacred office ; and therefore regard the chapter as judiciary, and yet to deal with it as fulfilling the attributes of the chief ruler's intimate council, is not to present it under iaconsistent aspects. Eut how do I attain the idea that the judiciary ought to be in connection with the capitular council ? By the con- sideration of the connection of the Synods with the churches in which they were held, the presidency under which they were gathered, and the duties they had to fulfil. I need hardly repeat the statement, that in purer and more primitive days the connection between the Diocesan Synod of all the diocesan clergy of the small dioceses of those times, assem- bled in the Mother Church at stated intervals, and the smaller staff of these same clergy, who were in constant attendance for the double purpose of continuing the incessant worship of the Almighty at the Cathedral altar, and of being their bishops' counsel in the minor matters which come in between Synod and Synod, was much more intimate than any relation which existed between councils and chapters in later days of monastic self-sufficiency, when the diocesan chapters had been transmuted into lordly corporations, existing of themselves, for themselves, and by themselves (not if, as was too often the case) in antagonism to, at least in cold relations of arrogant independence towards the diocesan. Let us, then, recur to the primitive type, and we shall find that the capitular and the synodical systems of those days ran very closely into each other; and there was, I apprehend, no very minute partition of administrative duties. The technical views on such matters which are no\\' held in these days of representative government, did not then exist with their present distinctness ; and if we realize this change 491 in universal feeling, it is surely not a presumptuous thing iii us to strive to combine the perfect and unalloyed spirit of very early days with the state of opinion engendered in these times of responsible and balanced government. We are now in a position to apply our data to the actual condition of matters — and primarily to the important con- sideration of how to enfranchise the laity in Synod, with due regard to the preservation of doctrinal fixity. I flatter myself I can shew that the Synods into which we desire to admit the laity need not, and would not, have anything to do with doc- trine, while their existence would actually call to life those other ecclesiastical bodies which ought to exist for the different and liighest duty of preserving that very doctrine. You wiU concede that the primitive chapter and the primitive council ran into each other, in spite of those features with which they were confessedly non-identical. It is therefore now for the Church to choose into which form she will cast her future Church court — the form of a small body of picked clergymen, like one of the courts at Westminster, a few of the elite of the EngUsh bar, invested with the ermine — or of the entire council of the diocese, the entire body pf those ia priest's orders in it, with all their differences of training, opportunity, and so forth. My advice would tend to adopt the former plan. But if the Church prefers the latter, she has the un- questionable right to decide for herself. In this case the court — the " Court of Church Council," as I will call it, for the sake of having some name to give it in this letter — wUl occupy precisely and absolutely the attitude of a mediseval diocesan council, or of a Scottish diocesan synod of the pre-i sent day. Before, then, this " Court of Church Council," — whether constituted on the select or the indiscriminate plan — • and not before the Synod, all doctrinal questions must and will come. "Why this 'must and will?' " some one may ask. I reply, in nearly the same terms which I used in my last letter — Because, unless we admit the " doctrine of de- velopment," we must acknowledge that doctrine is a thing to be ruled, not enacted — that is, it must be evolved iu the solu- tion of some particular case of supposed erroneous teaching. It must, in short, be the verdict in a trial. Such always — implicitly or explicitly — has been the way in which doc- triue has been brought out in the Universal Church, even in General Councils ; for what was the Council of Nice but the closing scene of the trial of Arius ? — what that of Ephesus but the closing scene of the trial of Nestorius ? It is impossi- ble, except upon Ultramontane grounds, to suppose a doctrine 492 declaratorily moved, like an Act of Parliament^ without there being the person against whose exposition of it the enun- ciation is aimed. At this very instant this truth is being proclaimed by the Gazette de France, almost in my very words, as a plea against the doctrine of the Immaculate Con- ception, which that journal — not Ultramontane, though Ro- man Catholic — combats, referring in defence of its position to the Council of Nice ; and to its own the assertion, " faithful to the axiom, the Church has never made new dogmas, she has only defined her ancient faith in a more explicit manner when she has been attacked by heretics." At this very instant also the Univers — now not only Roman Catholic, but Ultra- montane — is in arms against the Gazette de France for its courageous independence, in making this protest. Pardon this digression. I could not refuse an illustration so apposite, springing out of a controversy actually in progress, though in a foreign country. Granting, then, that the enunciation of doctrine always arises in the coxH-se of £tn implicit or an explicit trial of some specific question, let the sincerity of mankind agree that it shall always be explicitly so raised, and the entire diffi- culty of the laity in synod question is solved at once. You have your two bodies : the highest and most sacred will be your " Court of Chm-ch Council" — the Chapter, or Clerical Synod, as the case may be — emanating from the bishop, and clustering round his throne and his cathedral churdi j deriving a hallowing influence — a fact never to be forgotten, but which in the strife of tongues may risk being overlooked — from those recurring and solemn rehgious offices and that missionary work which are the most every-day, most immediate duties of that very chapter within the walls of that very cathedral church. Before this Council-Court those trials will be held by which doctrine is affected, with such assessor- ship as the coru't in. its wisdom may think fit to call in. The second body is the Synod, or convention of mixed elected clergy and communicants — likewise, I hope, assembhng in the cathedral precinct — likewise, I hope, hallowing its proceed- ings by united worship at the Mother Church. The business of this Synod, or convention, will not be the judicial solution of doctrine, but the many concerns about which the clergy day by day find themselves hampered, when they are desirous to turn their minds to the higliest and most sacred contem- plations. It will concentrate and it will systematize the duties now irregularly and unsatisfactorily performed by that crowd of diocesan boards of education, diocesan church building as- 493 sociations, diocesan branches of the Society for the Propaga- tion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and of the Christian Knowledge Society, &c. &c., all of them — be it never forgot- ten — mixed organizations of clergymen and laymen, and the said laymen, moreover, not necessarily communicants. If a further balance be needed, this Synod or convention, while deliberating in common, will vote separately, though simultaneously, in its two houses of clergy and communicants — like the regent and non-regent houses at Cambridge ; and the bishop, of course, will have the veto on its proceedings. If such a system be estabhshed, it is not too much to suppose that the national or provincial convocation wiU, as a matter of course, be elected by a suffrage of two degrees — ^its two lower houses being composed of representatives, in fixed proportions of the clergy and the laity of the respective diocesan synods, who will import into it the characteristic of separate voting ; while its upper house — the bishops — will be the national or provincial " Court of Church Council" — the court of appeal from the diocesan courts of doctrinal judicature. I am quite convinced that " Cautus," and those who think with him, cannot have studied the matter in the aspect of the balance of ecclesiastical powers — that they cannot have con- sidered how really conservative of the Apostohc system a re- form would be of which the admission of the communicant element would be, as I have just sketched, an integral, but not the only, feature. They have, I believe, been alarmed by the actual anti-Churchmanship of many nominal churchmen, not considering that the cause of this tone may in a great measure be found in the absence of a large and hberal system of synodical responsibility. Let them take courage, and let them concede this system, and effect will follow cause ; the laity will see that the Church is a divine reahty, and not a State contrivance ; and they will show it that respect which, under their present feelings, they too often take a pride in refusing. Such effect does always foUow cause now, when a churchman is found to work his parish, not in anger, or pique, or foppery — not extorting from his flock what it is im- possible they can be ready prepared to yield, but guiding, training, exhorting them. A few weeks ago Frome would have been an argument with those who dread the laity in Synod. Now, short as has been the time that Mr. Bennett has ministered there, we see more than a thousand lay parishioners come forward with their volunteered testimonial, to their newly known, but already dearly-prized, pastor — a straw it may be called, to show which way the wind is blow- ing, but a straw which indicates a healthful and cheering 494 breeze. Show a generous confidence in the laity^ and the laity will show their confidence in you. Frome was not so favoured a spot. On the contrary, it stood but low in the Church movement— a large manufacturing town, long neg- lected by a non-resident incumbent; and yet you see the result of a few weeks — no more — real Church work in it ! With such a spectacle before them, can the clergy dread to admit the faithful, moral-living lay communicants to that portion of ecclesiastical power which a share in Synods of ad- ministration, disconnected from courts or coimcils of Church doctrine, would involve ? CVI. LORD DERBY AND SIR JOHN PAKINGTON. May 24. In one of my letters, which appeared in your paper upon March 22, entitled " A Churchman's Politics," 1 said, in reference to too hasty a surrender at discretion on the part of Churchmen to the name of Conservatism, "Lord John Russell is out — Lord Derby is in. The difference to the Church of this fact is, in one word, that she has lost a known enemy, and gained one who assuredly cannot be taxed with such an epithet, but of whom it is as certain that he has never as yet committed himself to the Church other than as an establishment, and who is therefore equally open to favour it in its Lydian as in its sacramental aspect. It is impossible, out of all that his lordship, before he became Premier, or since he has held that post, has stated, to extract more." I have reason to believe that this cautious and, I contend, moderate judgment has been far from palatable to many excellent but enthusiastic persons, whom the long blight of a Russell Papacy has smitten with a moral calenture, and who devoutly anticipate the immediate restoration of genuine Church influence, accredited at Downing-street, and prepon- derating in the constituencies. With the merits or demerits of the Derby Cabinet in questions of general policy I am no way concerned. But I do, in common with all other Churchmen, feel a pressing and individual interest in decjpliering the interpretation which our present Government affixes to the all-important mono- syllabic, " Church ;" and I conceive I can refer for this to 495 no more authentic dictionary than the parliamentary declara- tions of the actual Ministers. More satisfactory opportu- nities for such a research could not have heen afforded than the conversation between the Bishop of London and Lord Derby on the constitution of a Court of Church Appeal, held on May 1 0, and the speech of Sir John Pakington on Mr. Gladstone's Colonial Church Bill, delivered apon the 19th of the same month. My task to-day shall be to compare and to discuss these declarations. You will remember that the scope of the former conver- sation was a species of notice given by the Bishop of London, that he would, in the ensuing Session of Parliament, introduce a Bill to constitute an " Ecclesiastical Court of Appeal," " differing," as he worded it, " in an important point from the former one," which he introduced in 1850, and which was rejected by the House of Lords. This point, truly desig- nated as " important," is that the opinions of the assembled bishops upon points of doctrine to be submitted to them by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council should " not be binding, but merely communicated to them (the Committee) in the way of advice, and not of direction" — a provision which I simply state in his lordship's words, without offering any comment on it. This announcement of the Bishop — though, as he carefully defined it, it was not a " direct ques- tion" to Lord Derby, but only the expression of an " anxious hope" that the Prime Minister would not oppose the bill — naturally brought the noble Earl upon his legs, and elicited from him, first, thanks that the Bishop did not ask a " ques- tion," which " would have led to much inconvenience ;" and secondly, the significant acknowledgment that he "found himself placed in considerable difficulty in resisting this pro- position," because " it leaves the jurisdiction in the same hands in which it is left at present, and does not interfere in any degree with the ultimate opinion and the final judgment OF the judicial committee of privy council ;" the " com- munication by way of advice" of the collected bishops under the Bishop of London's scheme, as Lord Derby very truly remarks, " not laying down an absolute and binding authority on questions of false doctriue or heresy." A dangerous pri- vilege, it seems, to concede to a bench of bishops even of ministerial appointment, and with the ceremony of confirma- tion still left a mummery and a jest ! How far such language is compatible in any degree wi,th the belief in the ofiice of a bishop being of more than State creation, I leave to others to explain. The Bishop of London, 496 it is certain, does believe in the divine authority of Episcopacy, and deeply, therefore, it is to be regretted that he allowed Lord Derby's reply to terminate the conversation. But one opinion, indeed, can exist among Churchmen, upon the policy which the Bishop unfortunately adopted that evening. These are not days to play the reverse of the Sibyl in Church matters, and leave it to your opponents to make the biddings. In 18 50 Churchmen accepted his lordship's bill, in its integrity, as the minimum with which they could then be conscien- tiously satisfied. Less than, the bill — and this, in 1853, whatever 1853 may prove to be — cannot and ought not — ■ this is a sure and safe prediction — to satisfy any one who has been labouring for the renovation of our beloved Church; and yet, after having elicited this declaration from Lord Derby, the Bishop of London stands in a position of difficulty towards opinions of the Prime Minister vrith which it is impossible he can have sympathy and agreement, which he has let slip the earliest and best occasion of protesting against. I pass on to Sir John Pakington's treatment of Mr. Glad- stone's Bill to place the Colonial Church m. the position of minding ' its own concerns. You have so fully and ably handled the Colonial Secretary's Church policy in your leading columns, that I almost feel it would be superfluous in me to say any thing further ; nevertheless, I must note a few points in the Minister's speech. The first thing that I shall notice is, that Sir John Pakington's scheme for Colonial Church reform is a bill to be framed by Archbishop Sumner, " after the example of the Clergy Discipline Act" — after the example, that is, of a measure which, after it had been before Parliament in various shapes for many years, its proposer, the Bishop of London, felt himself compelled to withdraw, in deference to public opinion, no later than the present year ; the example being apphed to countries where our Church can hardly be said to be " established," except in a very different sense from that in which the word is used in the mother country. The framer of this bill, it must never be forgotten is to be Archbishop Sumner, who would of course bring it in ; and it will in all probability, if it ever see the light, be as currently known as " the Archbishop of Canterbury's Bill" as its exemplar is recognized as " the Bishop of London's BiU." The knowledge of such a scheme afloat is something to have gained ; but this is not all that we gather from the speech of the communicative Colonial Secretary. Cause 497 miast precede effect — results must have their antecedents — an unsound state of things must show its unsoundness by some outward manifestation. Sir John Pakington does not leave us in ignorance of what he considers the proof that the Aus- tralasian Church is in an unsatisfactory condition — a conclusion arrived at by Mr. Gladstone from very different premises. His grievance is, that at the Synod of Australasian Bishops^ all the prelates, the diocesan of Melbourne alone excepted, jointly signed a declaration affirmative of the faith of the Universal Church and of the English Church regarding the One Baptism for the remission of sins — a declaration to which, as he gave us to understand, " he never would be a party," " narrowing the broad and comprehensive basis on which the Church of England now rested" — affirmative, that is, in other words, that there is some one form of God^s truth, which some one form the English Church thinks it her duty to hold — a duty to which Sir John Pakington never will be a party. And so, to check this dangerous tendency in Austraha towards the Nicene Creed, the potent aid of a Clergy Discipline Bill, to be framed by Archbishop Sumner, is invoked, and our gracious Sovereign is proclaimed — not by the law, for the law said nay to that appellation tliree centuries back, but by Sir John Pakington — as supreme head of the Church ! This assertion was, by the way, grotesquely illustrated in another passage of the Colonial Secretary's speech, in which he said that he (Sir John Pakington videlicet) "had given the assent of the Crown" to some measure of colonial legislation — an imperial function of the Colonial-office in sooth, and incon- testably showing that, in the eyes of its actual representative, the Colonial Secretary can be none other than " Supreme Head of the Church for colonial purposes." We have now, I submit, attained a position to make our observations upon the Church principles of the Derby Ad- ministration. We have before us two speeches of two Minis- ters — the Premier and the Colonial Secretary — upon Church affairs ; neither of them post-prandial, nor intended for only a one day's effect, but dealing with two of the most important elements conceivable of the entire Church question — the adjudication of disputed doctrine, and the organization of the Colonial Church in all quarters of the British world. If these two speeches do not contain the elements from which to deduce, justifiably and reasonably, our impressions of the Church policy of the present Ministry, I know not when or where we are to find them, unless or until, we shall see in your advertising columns the announcement of a new 498 digest of the Canon Law, compiled and edited by her Majesty's Ministers in council. If there be anything more than another upon which Chtirchmen feel keenly at this moment, it is upon the divine and inherent right of the Christian Church to hold, to teach, and to judge her own doctrine — ^her own one truth, for the preservation of which she exists. Whatever doubts, policies, and expediencies may heretofore have reigned, the Gorham judgment swept them away. Whatever is, or is not, to be the Court of Church Appeal, the Judicial Committee, as it stands, is the great "cannot be" in all good Churchmen's eyes — it is the one convicted thing, which is the symbol against which they are bound to raise their unwavering pro- test. Aware, as he must full well be, of this strong and growing feeling. Lord Derby, with the eagerness of the prac- tised debater, jumped up at the conclusion of the Bishop of London's remarks, with his neatly turned " considerable difficulty which he felt in resisting the proposition" — because that proposition "leaves the jurisdiction in the same hands in which it is left at present" — because " the ultimate opinion and judgment of that comm.ittee are not interfered with" — because, under the cloak of a delusive reference to the Bishops, the supremacy of the Judicial Committee is to be confirmed and made perpetual — because the " absolute and binding authority" of the Christian Episcopate to deal with Christian doctrine, is in effect ignored and denied ! The Bishop, we must confess, made a trip, and handed over the keys of the citadel to the Treasury Bench. Lord Derby loses not one instant in pocketing them and locking the gates agaiast the turbulent crew who fain would claim for the Church licence to have and to hold her own belief. Can any- thing be more clever, more honest in its own sense, than these sentences of the Premier ? Can human ingenuity find more expressly enunciated that definition of " Church" which I have ever believed it the first duty of good Churchmen to protest against — the definition, namely, which, passing by, or else repudiating all notion of a divine constitution and in- herent doctrines and duties, resolves itself into the State de- partment of religion, under which, whatever be the hierarchy, that hierarchy must, in questions of doctrine no less than of discipline, be subject to the civil executive? But Wednesday last no longer left us to draw our inferences from Lord Derby's speech without gloss or comment. Could the least vestige of ambiguity rest upon its spirit, that was not effec- tually cleared away by the confessions of a less practised de- 499 bater, the Colonial Secretary? Not alluding by inference and inuendo to the Gorham judgment, the Right Honourable Baronet boldly grasped the question by the horns — name, and thing — and broadly told us he -would never be a party to narrow "the broad and comprehensive basis" which he claimed for the Church of England, of holding or rejecting the belief of the Catholic faith as things equally compatible in his eyes with the elastic formularies and the easily attained emoluments of so liberal an establishment. No, let zealots say what they like. Sir John Pakington is resolved that the Gorham judgment shall not be meddled with, not even in Australia ; and in order that he may most effectually obviate the least risk of such a contingency, the Colonial Church is to receive the blessing of a constitution octroyi by Archbishop Sumner himself, in the shape of a Clergy Discipline Bill ! If, after these two speeches, sound Churchmen stDl cling to the idea that the Derby Cabinet is either pledged to, or has the least notion of dealing with, the " Church," according to their definition of the word, I can say no more. I do not in the least intend to impugn the honesty of its intentions towards its " Church." I do not for one moment believe that it has either the wish or the audacity to embark upon a course of Church innovation, reckless and petty, insolent and frib- bling, like that of our late Knox-Brummell Premier. But I do assert, and I contend, with ample evidence for my asser- tion, that if the Church of England, as a branch of the Ca- tholic Church, demanding allegiance from her members on the score of her retention of Apostolic regimen and Nicene doctrine, it neither has, as an Administration, nor strives to have, the smallest notion, and therefore cannot be relied upon to help the cause of that sort of " Church of England." Lord Derby's "Church of England" is a thing we all know very well, and know but to plead against. It is the mere " Protestant EstabHshment" — the " Law Church," as Dissenters are pleased to call it — deriving its existence from statute, and looking up, as its ultimate source of jurisdiction, and of doctrine also, to the supremacy of the (in Sir J. Pa- kington's eyes) " Supreme Head of the Church" — a pom- pous and convenient paraphrase, I need hardly say, in the mouth of Ministers who "give the assent of the Crown" for the electorial papacy of a parliamentary regime. The preser- vation of the unity of the faith in this sort of Church is in no manner of way part of the ministerial responsibility — quite e contra. The Minister who chngs to it thinks he is best discharging his duty to his sovereign and his country while 500 judiciously patting upon the back all " shades of opinion" alikCj with a dexterous preference for the one which seems for the time highest in popular esteem^ and an unmitigated repugnance to men of " extreme views" on either side — in order, as he imagines^ by playing off one party against an- other, to keep the ground clear for that " broad and compre- hensive basis'' on which he wishes his Church of England to stand, propped up in its ecHpse of doctriaal character and ia- dependence by Governmental patronage. Briefly, then, but earnestly, do I counsel my fellow Churchmen — while, according to their sincere political con- victions, they support or else oppose Lord Derby's Cabinet ia its secular aspect — not to commit their confidence to it, and weary of their daily watching in their own holy cause, as if it were a Government which had taken office with the conscious mission of fostering the Catholic and Apostolic Church. CVII. CHURCHMEN AND THE COMING ELECTIONS. May 31. I RECAPITULATED facts iu my last letter, derived from the speeches of the Prime Minister and of the Colonial Secretary, clearly demonstrating that the " Church," of which Lord Derby at his advent to office announced himself the patron, is the actual " establishment" as it stands — Judicial Com- m^ittee and all — with the existing eclipse of doctrine, its Parliament-made bureaucracy by way of government. Arch- bishop Sumner, and a Clergy DiscipUne Bill for all the world. It is a great point gained on the part of Churchmen to have been made sure of this fact, disagreeable as it is in itself. As long as ambiguity reigned on the subject, the Church party was of necessity left in an unnatural and divided con- dition — each section misapprehending the other — one portion suspecting the other of faction, and the other complaining of the former for an error of policy which threatened fatally to relax precaution. Now, however, it is ne\t to impossible that any contrariety can exist, except on the part, it may be, of some very few enthusiastic individuals. But this is not all, for the Premier has smoothed away another obstacle, which might have hindered perfect identity among Churchmen 501 — that of temporal considerations, real or supposed, standing in the way of Churchmen employing their civic privileges in the pure interests of the Church. Protection versus Free-trade — as they all must feel, for they have been told so from the most undoubted authority — is not the controversy to be adjusted at the ensuing general election. Ruined or retrieved as the country may be by Free-trade, there it is qua Lord Derby. So we have come back to our bearings — to the point upon which we were all agreed some months ago — that, at the proximate, and now imminent, general election. Churchmen, relying on their holy cause and on themselves, must make " a pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together," for the Church, over and above any other consideration. Dispassionately weighing all things, I do not believe that the coming general election for the Members of the House of Commons is one in which the Church party can hope to make a great impression. The time must be — and at no very distant interval — when the Church of England question will distinctly tell upon the hustings ; but, as a fact, about which we have no need to feel the least down-hearted, it is not specifically " on the cards," as a national question, for the general election of 1852, for other considerations purely political create that election. The candidatures for most seats are already settled upon different issues, and all that the Churchman can therefore do is — when he is fortunate enough to find himself an elector of any place for which a good and sound defender of Church principles is candidate — to give that man his un- wavering support. But, because things are so —because the Church question is not the point upon which the national jury is to. be summoned to give its verdict — therefore, on this very account. Churchmen have, at the coming election, a field entirely their own — and all the more so in proportion as they are apparently standing aloof from the actual Parlia- mentary conflict.' Upon the day on which Parliament is dissolved, the Convocations of Canterbury and York are dissolved also. While knights of the shires and burgesses are being elected, the chapters and dioceses have to choose their representative proctors. Here then, at this conjuncture, is where the Church party ought to electioneer. Let our clergy return a body of proctors pledged to fight in their places for the restoration of synodical action, and the battle of representative govern- ment is won at the general election of 1852. 502 The attitude of religious parties at this moment is an opportunity so peculiarly felicitous for Churchmen to make a real and serious exertion to return to Convocation a trusty band of representatives, that their omitting so to do would be that which a wary diplomatist called worse than a crime — namely, a mistake, in the fullest and most pregnant sense of that full and pregnant word. The spectacle of the entire low Church phalanx thrown off the track of Church interference, cut off from any collective exertions to stop the course of Church principles, and quite incapable of even entertaining an idea of combining to influence the elections of Convocation — the Durham Letter at a discount, the Lydian address worse than forgotten, the hope of a similiar coup gone for ever — this is a conjuncture which might have been dreamed of, but hardly could have been seriously anticipated by the most sanguine observer. And yet this is precisely where we stand at the present instant. This is the advantage which it is open to us, with a little ordinary activity, and a little common forethought, to reap without let or hindrance from any quarter. Exeter Hall has its own hands quite full with its own work. It has made its own bed, and there it must seek its repose through the elections of 1852. It has chosen to set up Maynooth as its stalking horse, and Maynooth will give it ample occupation till the elections, Parliamentary and Convocational, are over, and some time longer. Whatever Churchmen may think of the Maynooth en- dowment, and whatever course they may have adopted in 1845, they have their own more pressing concerns at home to attend to at the present moment. "With the whole synodical and doctrinal question of the Enghsh Church on hand, they have too much sense to interfere with the views of any candidate about Maynooth. They are self-excluded from the fashionable epidemic, and so have gained, without the trouble of working for it, the time and means to make good their own standing- ground. Vote as they may for Members of Parliament — think what they may of the theology of Mr. Spooner, and of Mr. Newdegate — the mission of the clergy is at the polling places where proctors are chosen upon pledges to defend their own Church in its own Assembly; not at the booths where the cry wages fiercely — " Down with Maynooth, and never mind how you set Ireland in a flame." Some persons believe it a matter of principle to set Ireland in a flame, and the Churchman ^^ lio thinks so will of course vote for the anti-Maynooth candidate ; but still he will not 503 he cannot, when his own affairs stand as they do — give to that work more time, thought, or co-operation than is need- ful to bring him to and from the nearest polHng place. His interest, and the object of his prayers and his solicitude, will be the list of the proctors to the Convocation of Canterbury and of York. The responsibility of these proctors themselves, however the ecclesiastical elections may turn out, will be awful, Tbey cannot stop the upward movement of the Enghsh Church, but they may by cowardice or faithlessness retard it; and then, with them — and not with them alone, but with the clergy who shall have elected such a crew, either actively, or through default and laziness — will rest the reckoning. Let the clergy be prepared betimes. May is aU but run out — the Dissolution stands for June. CVIII. THE NATIONAL SOCIETY IN 1853. June 11. Again the National Society has met. Again Archdeacon Denison has addressed it. Again it has dispersed. Last year the same programme epitomised a day of heavy discouragement to Churchmen, and of joy to unscrupulous and jubilant oppo- nents — to laissez aller leagued with Geneva — to those who cried " peace where there is no peace,'' hand in hand with the troop which maundered over its firesides of rushing to the cold river side to worship with Lydia and Lord Shaftesbury, and which found itself upon Sundays among the admiring throng of Eng- lish ladies whose ambition was to work slippers, and worship in neatly stuffed pews. Under such a foe the Church cause last year suffered a rebuff — sharp at the time, and the sharper because so undeserved ; and many men, true and good and brave, retired, and thought the cause all up. As vexed as any — feeling as strongly as any man in the whole large room the cruel injustice of which we had been made the victims — I dared to speak of future appeals and to prophecy a coming countervailing triumph. Of such a future — such a triumph — as that of the meeting of 1852, 1 dared not, and would not speak. I can hardly speak of it this 2 N 504 evening^so simple in its grandeur and so facile in its complete- ness has it been. FalstaiF's regiment — the spectre of the Brocken — the ploughboy's ghost of old clouts and a scooped turnip — the whole hack property similes — cannot afford a figure to designate the opposition which has been swaggering and blustering and manceuvring against us in the great Church Education Society, for these many months, till it reached ripeness to receive its death-blow from the admini- strative hand of Archbishop Sumner upon the 10th of June, 1852, in the central national school-room, Westminster. There it rests — the forwardness of Mr.Girdlestone, and the pertness of Sir John Pakington have done their worst ; and our retributive worst shall be, to leave them fixed upon their own palisade. Mr. Girdlestone has one parish, and Sir John Pakington forty colonies, in the care of which they can respec- tivelycondescend to drown the recollection of to-day's discom- fiture ! Suffice it that the common cause is set straight, and the great principle affirmed that all religious education must have its one specific supernatural truth to teach, and be allowed fair play to teach that truth. Indifferentism is no longer to be permitted to surname itself condescension, nor bureaucracy to trade on the character of liberality. Such are the prin- ciples confirmed at this memorable meeting. The truthful- ness with which they may be carried out still rests as hereto- fore in the guardianship of Churchmen, who have to say for themselves whether they will let this day go by with an empty triumph and a completed cheer, or more surely — if more modestly — be written down as merely the inaugurating mo- ment of a fresh epoch, in which the peaceful labours of culti- vation are to take up all hours formerly set apart to the in- toxication of guerilla skirmishing. Whenever and however the Committee of the National Society and the Committe of Council on Education may, in former days, have disappointed the reasonable hopes of Churchmen through want of firmness, or confusion of priur ciple — this year, at least, they have respectively started on the right track, and therefore to the Bishops on the one side, and to the Cabinet of Lord Derby, it would be the height of injustice not to give the thanks which they have earned. Thanks given, work I'ecommences ; and, once for all, a deli- vering of thanks is a bad stimulant and as bad a spur — it may at times prove an agreeable narcotic. With this parenthe- tical hint, I leave the least agreeable portion of my subject. The practical effect of the meeting may be held to rest par- 505 tieularly in these two concessions ; but its value as a test of parties — its value, in other words, as an indication of the effective force which the Church herself possesses to see in her own behalf we quidrespublica delrimenti capiat — must be sought in the result of the election for new committeemen — a number unhappily swelled to four by the premature loss of that good and valiant Churchman, Mr. Talbot. Here, within the limited competition allowed by the rules of the society, the real competition of numbers takes place— and in every instance this day true Churchmanship was victorious, with a majority whose truth stands as proof of its credibility in the face of the swagger of the now crestfallen followers of Mr. Girdlestone, Mr. Close, and Sir John Pakington. To crown the mortification of a memorial of John Keble^s, the wise and venerated, triumphing at a gathering of bishops, and of a plea of Archdeacon Denison's gaining bearing and a favourable response at a meeting of the State Educational Board, they needed but the silent admonition from the ballot bag that their cause was gone and clean worn out: and that they earned unstinted — I cannot say unsolicited. They laboured for the harvest of to-day, and I wish them joy of the in- gathering. One more issue, of a private — nay, a personal — nature, was tried, to which it would be extreme ingratitude not to advert. For years past the constant gibe, when logic failed and invective flagged, against us was the headstrong arrogance, the uncharitable bitterness — the everything, in short, that the facile conventionalities of abuse would most easily fabricate — of Archdeacon Denison. Standing by that eminently good and real man was proof sufficient of the bigotry, the malevolence, the sacerdotalism, Popery, and per- secution of High Churchmanship. Well, without pretending infallibility for him or for ourselves — without pretending to stand up for his every action and opinion, any more than we dared to vouch for every action and opinion of ourselves — we did dare to say that when the man who could prove himself more honest and single-intentioned than Archdeacon Denison should make himself his accuser, we would stand aloof, and leave him to bear, unbefriended, the brunt of Exeter-hall and Cheltenham. Who ventures to-day to mutter that the gal- lant archdeacon did not represent, standing up in that great meeting, the charity and the moderation which ever must accompany sound principle and unassailed integrity of pur- pose? 50ft ■ Come what may — nearer or further off as may be the com- plete vindication of liberty for Churchmen— the 10th of June will ever be a name of joyful augury in a great cause, whose auguries vs^ill for ever live in good men's mouths. CIX. PARLIAMENT IN SYNOD. June 14. The Synod sits frequently as its dissolution hurries on. It has, to be sure, postponed ad infinitum reforming the Church upon the " platform" of that well-meaning though rather too eager constitution maker — Lord Blandford. Prior, however, to performing this generous act of cheap self-abne- gation, it had to shew how much the Church has lost in not being set straight from top to bottom by the Parliament of 1847, ™ the session of 1852. Various circumstances con- curred to render the House of Commons in this month of June peculiarly well adapted to disentangle the mesh of Church and State relations. It is within a few days of a general election, and the members — above sis hundred strong, and all proverbially "just" and "tenacious of their purpose" — are more than ever beyond the breath of a suspi- cion of any possibility of caring for aught save carrying out, with single-hearted earnestness, their conscientious opinions and disinterested impulses. Again, the singulai-ly unexciting and unpolemical nature of the questions which the mild wis- dom of Lord Shaftesbury, and the dignified statesmanship of Sir Culling Eardley, counsel the constituencies to press upon their representatives in the cause of Christian charity and the peace of the Empire, has attuned the oiitgoing senators to that grave frame of mind — that acute feeling of solemn re- sponsibility — which is the sm-est guarantee that justice shall temper zeal, learning go hand in hand with fervour, and mo- deration never be wanting to temper firmness. So admirably suited, therefore, as the House of Commons found itself on Tuesday last to fulfil the functions of a Council of the Christian Church, who can be surprised that, at the lead of Mr. Plorsman, that excellent assembly had the sound sense to vote a Committee to try issues which the 507 Law officers of the Crown have pronounced unapproachable in any Court, and the self-restraint to assume for that Committee the impunity of setting at nought pri\ilege3 of the subject which the Bill of Rights has long since declared sacred from the aggression of Crown or Court of Law. What mattered it that the highest authorities had pronounced that the Bishop of Bath and Wells had neither done anything which a bishop ought not to do, nor neglected anything which a bishop ought to perform, by the constitution of Church and State ? What mattered it that Mr. Bennett's pretended conversion to the Church of Rome was refuted, both by the very facts on which his assailants relied as the handle of their present in- quiry, and especially also by the marvellous success of his stiU brief ministry, in his new cure? The cry "Tractarian" was enough for the House of Commons equally to disregard law and fair play, and to grant, by nearly three to two, an enquiry which nothing short of an effrontery equal to that of M-V. Horsman would ever have dreamed of demanding, even so near the day when the constituencies have to be faced. Feeble and embarrassed, the Government, even with help from those whose support they cannot demand, made its un- availing protest and swelled the minority, and the numbers were told, amid frantic cheers, by Mr. Horsman, with Sir Ben- jamin Hall at his left hand. It was perhaps better in the long run that it should have been so— the Committee can do no real harm ; the exhibition which that night's adventure made of Parliamentary fitness to deal with Church discipline and administration — not to speak of doctrine — will do good service towards ripening the only true corrective of another such scandal — synodical self-government in the Church of England, upon a basis whose liberal organization shall give possibility to conservative safeguards. In the meanwhile the Committee is breaking down of it- self. It absolutely camiot come into a state of more than theoretic existence ; for, omnipotent as the House of Com- mons may be to do an act of corporate infatuation when tres- passing upon questions it has nothing in the world to do with, it yet has not the power to compel its own members to sub- ordinate their own convictions of right and wrong to its caprices. The Committee having been gained by such a ma- jority, the independence of four members has yet thrown it all at fault, and vindicated, against its own will, the reputation of a British Parliament. So much the better for that Parha- ment ! 508 That such a debate could have dragged on for so many hours -without some special flowers of eloquence and Icfgic was impossible. The impartial reader will observe with pleasure the proficiency which Mr. Horsman has made in casuistical science^ so eminently displayed in his dissertation and vindi- cation of anonymous eavesdropping ; while the admirers of what the Jamaica Daily Advertiser of March 30 — which I have before me at this moment — terms " the lordly bearing" of Sir John Pakington, will appreciate the eminent good taste with which he imitated the famous instruction, "no facts, abuse the plaintiff's attorney," in his attack upon the lady who administered last January, with the full consent of the incoming patron, the patronage of Frome. But there was a third point in the debate, which a painful sense of duty compels me not to pass over, much as private feeling and the recollection of former services to the Church of England would lead me to hold my tongue about it. You will not have forgotten that when the case of Mr. Bennett was first before the House, and the evidence of Mr. Horsman's keyhole friend was at its highest. Sir John Pak- ington, ever foremost in an ecclesiastical fray, jumped up to say, though "without authority," that had Mr. Horsman known the terms in which the Bishop of London had spoken of Mr. Bennett to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, he would have been quite satisfied with the former Bishop. At the time I stated, as you will recollect, how grieved I was at the officious forwardness of the Colonial Secretary, and that I felt convinced that so clumsy an attempt on his part to earn a cheer for Bishop Blomfield from the Horsman clique, would be far from agreeable to the object of his blundering patron- age. You will then readily conceive my consternation — to use no other substantive — when I read in the debate of Tues- day night, that the Bishop had allowed his very words (whe- ther to crush Mf. Bennett, the three clergymen who signed, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells, or to save himself from the distant and hypothetical risk of a paper persecution, it does not appear) to be conveyed by a clergyman to whom he himself gave them to Mr. Horsman, and to be read to the House of Commons — by no Cabinet Minister, but actually by Mr. Horsman himself— Mr. Horsman, of the Horfield Manor case, and the prosecutor-general, under his own sign manual, of the collective Episcopate. Into the inconceivably petty dif- ference of a marginal note and a separate letter, I refuse to enter. The Bishop's note was mistaken by Mr. Horsman, or 509 Ms intermediate with London House, for the heads of a letter — and clumsily, and not very straightforwardly, turned into the first person — but the matter was the same, only the " 1" and the " he" were interchanged. So, then, the entire case between Mr. Bennett and the Bishop, from first to last, stripped of all extraneous matter, can now be summed up in a very few words. Mr. Bennett offered to the diocesan and patron of his Church to resign that living, if that diocesan and patron should pronounce him unfaithful to the Church of England, and call upon him on that account to resign. The Bishop and patron never would so pronounce him, but did call upon him for his resignation, which demand Mr. Bennett, though not compelled by the terms of his own ofifer to acquiesce in it, complied with. Mr. Bennett was thus punished in a way which, even for a clergyman who had been convicted even of a considerable offence against Church law, would not have been light — which, for the man whom the Bishop, who was called upon to pronounce him " unfaithful," by his silence pronounced " faithful," was most unjust and most cruel — but which, for the man who was not only " faithful," but whom his enemies are driven to own was, above all other incumbents of the entire diocese, hard working and conscientious — was, what- ever term more strong than " most unjust" and " most cruel" can be found out. Punished, I repeat it, in this way, Mr. Bennett, returning home, after having passed through the furnace of Roman temptation at Rome itself, and been agaiu proved faithful there, found an unexpected field of usefulness open to him in a distant diocese. The Bishop and patron who had so punished this untried and unconvicted man, whom he allowed by default to be " faithful," had to forward his entering upon this field by a ministerial act of signature, and he converted this ministerial act into an endeavour to heap fresh punishment, fresh ruin upon the same unoffending clergyman. He did not even stop there, for he gave an incomplete version of the case in that endeavour — stating that Mr. Bennett tendered his resignation, and not stating the condition upon which the tender was made, and giving as his reason for the acceptance a mere pre- text of political expediency — namely, his own "belief '^ that Mr. Bennett's "remaining there would be injurious to the peace of the Church in his diocese ;" or, in other words, that Mr. Bennett's courageous opposition to Lord John Russell had made him obnoxious to the then Administration, and his 510 courageous fulfilment of his duty to the Prayer-book of his Chiu-ch had made him obnoxious to the swell mob (though why the swell mob had suddenly become rituahstic was not so evident), and, therefore, that he was to be turned out penniless from a living which he had served as no other in- cumbent in all that diocese had found the means or inclina- tion to do. Pinally, after having delivered himself of this efiPusion, the same IBishop and patron took an early oppor- tunity of putting it at the disposal of Mr. Horsman, to use against, not only Mr. Bennett and the signers, but also that brother Bishop who had become his new diocesan, the mar- ginal note notwithstanding — to use in the House of Commons, and after the form and method so familiarly identified with all Mr. Horsman's proceedings. This is a lamentable recital, and ten times more so when we recollect that the Bishop who lent himself to this wretched series of transactions was one who once enjoyed the confi- dence of Churchmen — who might still, vdth a little more firmness of purpose, have been their rallying point throughout a Sumnerian Primacy. ex. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA. June 25. I HAVE often had to refer to the American Church. At last that Church has become a reality to London, in the guise of a Bishop of Michigan preaching at St. Paul's, and of a meetuig of our great Missionary Society, called together to greet the brother prelates who have come to England to re- present the wide-spreading branch of the Reformed Church in the United States. The sermon and the meeting were both on one side, neither caused debate nor division ; and so they seem mere news, and not events, to those who judge of the magnitude of passing things by the dust which accompanies their progress. He who looks deeper wiU decide very diffe- rently. It was not this fact or that fact of last week which was the important event — nor all of them together, if they arc to end with themselves. It was not for nothing, to be sure, that a Bishop from the woods of the Far West stood up 511 in the pulpit of the Cathedral of London, to testify to the One Baptism for the remission of sins, witliin the Province, and in the hearing of the Primate who mainly assisted at the Gorham judgment. This, I say, was not for nothing ; but it was after all but an incident. The meeting gf Churchmen solemnly ^ convoked to meet the bishops, and as it were to apologise, in the name of the Church of England and the persons of her prelates, for past neglects and cruelty, was not for 'nothing. But this again was after all but an incident. The fruit of the jubilee — the main substantial result of the entire proceeding — is the idea of intercommunion, as a living fact, among the branches of the English E,eformation. Pa- tience and confidence were the lesson taught ; and if we do not look upon the visit under this colouring, we shall never read its history aright. The bishops came — they are in Eng- land now — and in no long time they will have gone again; and perhaps things here, and across the Atlantic, will for some time seem to be going on just as before. But in the interim a barrier has been broken down — a class prejudice on either side abrogated — a precedent created, whose value is for the future. In this respect, the most important event of the entire affair may, perhaps, be said to be the letter of Bishop Whittingham, of Maryland, read by Dr. Wainwright to the meeting gathered to welcome the deputation. Flying from generaUties, and eschewing mere compliment, this sagacious bishop pointed out the only true resource for either Church to help the other — a free and equal council for all portions of our one commimion — common deliberation — common enact- ments. To hear echoed from the other shore of the ocean, from one in chief authority, what sound Churchmen here in England have long been labouring to vindicate, is no little satisfaction. But I desire not to take a personal view of the matter. I will not, so to speak, take any view at all of it. It is sufficient that the plea put forth by a Bishop of Mary- land for a common council of the Reformed Catholic Church, has been read to an assemblage of bishops, clergy, and laity of the Churches of England and Ireland, in the stated meet- ing room of that Society which, in the torpor of Synod, re- presents the missionary aspect of the Enghsh Church. This fact shall stand on record now. Its practical use will not delay in coming.* * Since the above was written, Bishop Whittingham has been in England, and Dr. Wainwright has been unanimously elected Provisional Bishop of the most important Diocese of New York. 2 o 512 How great the questions are which must be grappled with in such a gatherings it is needless for me to remind you. Briefly stated^ they are nothing less than the adjustment of tlie changeless faith and composition of the one Church to the requirements of an age and a race of general education and liberal politics — the solution of the co-existence of Church- manship and Anglo-Saxon freedom — the maiatenance of doc- trinal truth side by side with perfect social toleration — the exhibition of the apostolic regimen of the Christian corpora- tion sustaining, and sustained by, a representative administra- tion chosen from the whole body of the faithful. Many other matters of great moment, both disciplinary and ritual, will then have to be discussed ; the magnitude and number of which preclude me from even the desire on the present occasion to bring them before you. But before aU other questions must of corrse come those which I have briefly adumbrated. Till such a council gathers^ aU work as yet done in England, in Scotland, in the Colonies, in the United States, can only be provisional, and leading to the one great end of unity and common counsel. No reason this to slacken such work — while it is a reason not to be overproud of what is being done, as if it were the final all. TiU all the Churches of our communion meet together in the bond of that conunu- nion, the Anglican problem is manifestly yet unsolved, the English Reformation unaccomplished; and on the heads of those who may neglect the accomplishment, or falter in the solution, must rest the blame which never can be detached from such as rest contented with half-finished labours. We believe in the Church of England ; we believe in her orders and in her sacraments ; and we believe that she pecu- liarly possesses qualities enabling her to grapple with these times of self-reliance, self-government, self-education. The call has now gone out to give this Church of England fair play, and to bring together all she has of good and true, not merely in fifty-two counties of England and Wales, but wherever her episcopate spreads, ia all quarters of the world — following, as it has done, though yet with faltering pace, the marvellous increase of our Anglo-Saxon stock and tongue.