rrt o t I 1 1 3 i i I ft ff %OJ FO ). Let that which is saddening in the aspect of religious controversies, and that which is soothing in the thought what love must have dawned on the combatants, when the mists of this world were swept away from before them, move us to refrain watchfully from exaggerating the errours of such of our brethren as may differ from us, to look behind the mask of their opinions, which so often are nothing more than a mask, and that too disfigured and distorted by the blows and wrenches it has received, and. to rejoice in acknowledging whatsoever graces the Spirit of God may have enricht them with. Not that I mean hereby to question the duty, which, as it is incumbent on all the members of the Church, according to the measure of their knowledge, is so es- pecially on her ministers, of contending earnestly for the faith, for its purity, and for its integrity. Not that I THE MEANS OF UNITY. 21 would urge you to seek peace by lax indulgence to er- rour, and the sacrifice, or the compromise of truth. Such peace would be false and hollow ; and the loss would be far greater than the gain. If it be indeed the case, that any of the essential doctrines of Christ- ianity have been misrepresented and perverted in the opinions which have recently gained so much vogue, it behoves us to be even more than ordinarily diligent in proclaiming and enforcing those very doctrines. For this is ever the most efficacious and the most beneficial mode of putting down an errour; not by a direct re- futation, however subtile and cogent, but by setting forth the truth which it contravenes in clearer power and glory. This is the best mode, both for the person who adopts it, and for others ; because it is far wholesomer to be en- gaged in constructive, than in destructive operations, in the assertion of truth, which is a work of love, as well for the truth itself, as for the persons one desires to win to it, than in the exposition of falsehood, which is apt to breed harshness and bitterness and animosity and scorn ; and because, even if you succeed in removing an errour from a man's mind, you render him a sorry service, unless you replace it with something that will afford nourishment to his intellect and his feelings. Still, so wayward is the course of this world, so many tangled sophistries are ever springing up across the path along which Reason would fain advance, that it is often expedient and ne- cessary to assail errour with a direct contradiction. Thus St Paul felt himself bound to withstand St Peter to the face, in a matter involving the very ques- tion of justification, which in one way or other lies at the bottom of so many of the disputes whereby the 22 THE MEANS OF UNITY. Church has been agitated. Thus too all the Apostles were engaged from the earliest times in contending against the teachers of false and carnal and licentious notions, even within the pale of the Church. Indeed for the wellheing of the Church such a perpetual sifting and winnowing, in order to get rid of the chaff, is abso- lutely necessary. He who came to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, bore His fan in His hand. For though a large amount of errour with regard to dogmas may exist in the understandings of individuals, and yet lie dormant in their hearts, without material detriment to their spiritual life, the same errours, if generally received and openly taught, could not be otherwise than pernicious ; as we see in the Romish Church, which, notwithstanding its gross errours, has been adorned by many holy and godly men, yet in which these errours have exercised a noxious influence on the body of the people. Therefore every form of errour, with which Satan vexes and harasses the Church, is to be striven against, until it be exterminated. When we are commanded to begin by casting the beam out of our own eye, it is not with the intention that we should leave the mote sticking in our brother's eye, but in order that we may see clearly to cast that out also. Only let us ever bear in mind, that this is our aim, not to wound and lacerate our bro- ther's eye, not, as is the manner of some, to thrust in the mote stiD further, to the end that they may boast themselves against him, but to cast it out ; an operation, which in so delicate and inflammable a member should be performed with the utmost steadiness and calmness and gentleness. And if we are to do this successfully, we must endeavour in the first place to cast out all evil THE MEANS OF UNITY. 23 and bitter and hostile feelings out of our own eyes, as such a beam would inevitably darken them, and to set about the work as a work of love. Against falsehood, wilful or careless misrepresentation, detraction, slander, as against other sins, we may warrantably use the se- verity of rebuke ; but where the errour is of the under- standing, and where the heart, in spite of it, is to all ap- pearance pure and upright, our object surely ought not to be to confound and crush our brother in the midst of his darkness, but to deliver him, and bring him out into the clear glad light of truth. In this way does it behove those who are qualified for doing so, to combat the errours, if there are any in our days, lifting up their heads in the Church. I have spoken throughout problematically, without taking upon myself to pronounce in this place that any particular errours are indeed prevailing. Not that I would be understood in so doing to imply that I am in a state of uncertainty as to whether this is the case or not. But, though it may be right for a person invested with episcopal authority, when addressing his spiri- tual children, to warn them against errours which he may deem likely to mislead them, without detail- ing the reasons of his apprehension, it would not be- seem me to speak on so grave and solemn themes, unless I prepared the way for my sentence by such a full ex- position of the subject matter, as would be very inap- propriate on this occasion, were it only from the de- mand on your patience, which even without will be more than sufficiently taxt. All of us however, so many as deem that there are hurtful errours spreading in our Church, may do something in the way of resisting 24 THE MEANS OF UNITY. them, and of winning back our brethren to the truth : even those may do much, who do not feel qualified for entering the lists of argumentative discussion. In the first place, we may all be more diligent and strenuous in bringing forward those truths which we think likely to be thrown into the background. Again, to the end that we may not exasperate our opponents, and confirm them in their errours, we may refrain, and should do so carefully, from all that bitterness and violence of speech, and from those sweeping condemna- tions of whole classes for the extravagance and folly of a few hotheaded or halfwitted zealots, which are especially common where persons are ignorant of the real nature and grounds of the controversy, and have taken no pains to clear up this ignorance, but pin their flimsy faith to one or other of those noisome journals which amuse and scare the so-called religious public. Moreover, as union in action is ever among the best ways of producing unity of feeling, we may one and all rouse ourselves, and call upon our brethren to rouse themselves, to greater energy and assiduity in those high and arduous works, which God has appointed for this age of His Church. Alas ! while we are quarreling and reviling each other, the Man of Sin is gaining ground against us. Can we not unite to repell him ? Would not this be a nobler and more blessed work than tearing each other to tatters ? We have much to do to resist him, much, each of us, in our own hearts, much in our several parishes, much in England at large, much in every quarter of the earth. I have already detained you so long, that I must confine myself to THE MEANS OF UNITY. 25 touching very briefly on two or three of these subjects ; and I am the better able to do this, as in both niy former Charges, and in the Notes subjoined to them, I have endeavoured to set forth some of the main obli- gations, which appear 1 to me to be imposed on us by the present condition of our Church. In such matters it is not to be expected that each year will supply a fresh series of topics. That which was our work last year, is still our work this year, and will conti- nue to be so, until it is accomplisht: and though the Church of late years seems in some respects to have partaken in the universal acceleration, a long time, I am afraid, will elapse, before the objects, to which I have formerly called your attention, will be thoroughly effected. At all events it will undoubtedly be long before we can establish anything like a sound system of moral discipline in our parishes. On this question I will add nothing to- day to my previous observations, except by recommending it again to your gravest and most earnest consideration, both privately, and when you assemble in chapter. I have received additional assurances that the measures suggested in the Notes on my last Charge have been attended with beneficial results. Penally they may be deemed feeble ; but they are not without effect in awakening and fostering, what we so much desire and need, the feeling of shame in the bosoms of our women. As to the course which it may be expedient to adopt toward hardened offenders, it would perhaps be premature at this moment to say anything. I trust that, ere many years have past by, our Ecclesi- astical Courts will be rendered more efficient for this c 5 26 THE MEANS OF UNITY. purpose also. But as a Bill is about to be brought before the Legislature, to regulate the jurisdiction of these Courts, as nothing is yet known concerning the provisions of this Bill, and as at this period of the Session it will scarcely be introduced with any intention of its becoming law this year, it will be better to suspend our remarks on this subject till we are possest of further information. With regard to the Circular however, which I addrest to you last summer, requesting you to supply me with a statement of the number of illegitimate births in your parishes, during each of the last twelve years, taking this period in order that we might have six years anterior, and six subsequent to the introduction of the new Poorlaw, in the hope of getting some sort of means for judging what the operation of that law in this respect has actually been, you will doubtless be anxious to learn the result. From a few parishes, owing probably to some accident, no returns have been sent to me. But a tabular survey of those which I have received enables me to form a tolerably accurate estimate of the result which would have been obtained from the whole Archdeaconry ; and when I first cast my eyes along that table, a ghastly sight it was. Yet, although it exhibited a fearful increase of above twenty per cent, in the number of illegitimate children bap- tized since the year 1834, I will not take upon me to assert that this is a decisive proof that the clauses of the Poorlaw bearing on this matter are on the whole injurious. Even if the result had been the other way, exhibiting a considerable diminution, I should have hesitated about allowing that this was attributable THE MEANS OF UNITY. 27 solely, or even mainly, to the new Poorlaw. For some beneficial effects, in this respect also, might surely be expected from improvements in our parochial educa- tion, and from the increast activity of our Clergy. But it was truly dismal to see, that, notwithstanding these counteracting causes, the change had been so greatly for the worse ; and when, on casting up the numbers, I found that above eleven hundred children have been born out of wedlock during the last six years in the Archdeaconry, the startling spectacle did indeed convince me that we have ample work for far greater strength than we are at present able to muster in fighting against the Man of Sin in our parishes (E). In one or two parishes only has any considerable diminution taken place ; and when I tried in one case to ascertain the cause, the improvement seemed to have arisen from the conscientious exertions of the Minister, who, in reply to my enquiry as to the means he had used, said, he was not conscious of any other, than fervent, constant, and, he hoped, faithful prayer, bold, uncom- promising preaching, and exhortation in private to matrons and mothers of families with regard to the younger women. Through God's blessing vouchsafed to these means, the number of illegitimate children baptized in his parish has been reduced, from nineteen in the first six years, to five in the last six; and I venture to recommend the same course to you all, which, if you follow it perseveringly, God will assuredly bless, so that, with His grace, you may hope to lessen the prevalence of this terrible sin among our people. This too is a part of England, which in many respects may be deemed peculiarly favoured. For in our county 2 THE MEANS OF UNITY. we have none of those hotbeds of sin, which Mammon has been heaping up so assiduously during the last half century. But when we cast our eyes over some parts of England, does it not indeed seem as if the whole head were sick, and the whole heart faint ? as though from the sole of the foot to the head there were nothing but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores ? All of you must have read some accounts of those horrours, of those disgraces to human nature, which have recently been brought to light by the energy and perseverance of the noble protector and champion of the poor. You will have read stories of the abominations which in this nineteenth century of Christianity are habitually perpetrated in our coal-mines ; abominations, the like of which have scarcely been found among the most savage tribes, or the most corrupt nations of Heathendom. And this is only a portion of the vice and misery, of the degradation, moral and physical, on which the commercial wealth of England rests. Here then, my brethren, is work for us. If we have any strength to spare, beyond what we need for the culture of our own parishes, and if we must spend it in fighting, I would not dissuade you from doing so : let us do so by all means ; let us fight boldly and continually, with the arms which God has placed in our hands : only, instead of fighting against each other, let us fight against Sin ; let us fight against Belial ; let us fight against Mammon ; let us fight against Ashtaroth ; let us help Lord Ashley in his heroic and godly endeavour to deliver the children of England from the moral desolation, to which the Spirit of Commerce is dooming them. It is a painful thought, that, although our Church is so in- timately united to the State, and although her Ministers THE MEANS OF UNITY. 29 ought to have deemed it their great political task to prompt and urge the State to the fulfilment of its moral duties, and to rouse it to noble and generous enterprises in the cause of humanity, we have wofully neglected this our task for the last hundred and fifty years. "We have been quarreling interminably with each other, and quarrel- ing in all manner of warfare with the Dissenters, instead of calling upon the nation to serve God, and to cast away its idolatrous abominations, and to consecrate its mighty powers to the holy work of spreading the Kingdom of Christ through the whole length and breadth of that enormous empire over which the Soverein of England bears sway. Had we been more diligent in this work, we should have had less time for quarreling, and less inclina- tion, and fewer objects of contention. Union in action would have prevented division ; and so it would do now. Another great work, in which we may all unite, is the diffusion and improvement of education. Having said so much on this head in my former Charges, I will only again remind you that education is not a work which can be done once for all, by a single spirt of zeal, but that it requires continuous, patient, persevering exertion. A few years since, when a plan of education was brought forward by the Government, which, it was deemed, would deprive the Clergy of the superintendence of our national education, we were all on the alarm, all on the alert. We exclaimed that it was an unholy measure, that it ought not to be, and must not be ; for that the Clergy alone were qualified to be the educaters of the people. That this is indeed so, that, through our relation to our parishioners, if we fulfill our duty, and if we do not allow 30 THE MEANS OF UNITY. sectarian prejudices to warp and cramp our minds, we are better fitted than any other persons could be to superin- tend the education of the children in our parishes, and that this would be the best safeguard against the numerous temptations, which, in this age more especially, would seduce parents into caring little about any education for their children, except such as may help them to get on in this world, I am fully persuaded. Let it not be said of us however, that our zeal in the cause of education was merely kindled by opposition, and that, when the opposi- tion subsided, it died away. In many cases, I readily believe, this has not been the case : the activity which was then excited, has been lasting, and has even increast. But may I not ask you, my brethren, whether you all feel the same lively interest in the education of the people, the same strong practical conviction that it is the office and duty of the Clergy to watch over and direct that education, which you manifested four years ago ? There is nothing invidious in such a question. On the contrary it is the universal tendency of human nature to be astir in a storm, and to flag in a calm. Therefore, when the calm has returned, we need to be frequently reminded of our former professions, and admonisht not to let our activity fall short of them. Under the impulses of that zeal, it was resolved to form a new branch of our Diocesan Association, connected with education, and to found a Training School for Masters ; and this has now been followed by the establishment of a Training School for Mistresses at Brighton. About the former, I believe, there is some difference of opinion : on the desirableness of the latter all are agreed. For my own part I am convinced that both are excellent institutions, and that THE MEANS OF UNITY. 31 our Diocese, though one of the smallest, is well able to support them both, if we awake to a right sense of the duties of our Christian calling. At the same time our undertakings are of such magnitude that they cannot be carried on without general efforts to support them. Hence, at the Meeting of the Committee of the Associa- tion in December last, the members present, without the expression of a difference, united in requesting our late Bishop to issue a Circular this year, and every year, calling upon the Clergy of the Diocese to make a collec- tion in every parish-church in support of objects of such wide and lasting utility. And here, my brethren, I regret to say that there must be some amongst you, with whom I feel bound to remonstrate. When I lookt over the list of Collections made in compliance with the Circular of last year, I was much grieved to observe that the names of nearly eighty parishes in this Archdeaconry, about half of the whole number, were wanting. Surely, my brethren, this is not as it should be. Surely, when the Diocese has such great works in hand, and still greater, with God's blessing, for the promotion of His glory, before us, when God is stirring up the hearts of many to make sacrifices and to practise self-denial for the promotion of these works, surely it is not right, it is not becoming, that any parish should be deprived of the privilege of taking part in them. For this is the true light to look at the matter in. It is a privilege and a blessing, for the poor as well as the rich, for all, one with another, for the lord, for the squire, for the farmer, for the tradesman, for the mechanic, for the husbandman, to be called upon to join together in giving of that which they have received from God, for the building up of His Church in the hearts and 32 THE MEANS OF UNITY. minds of His people. Look upon it, I beseech you, in this light. Let me not be under the necessity of thinking that you do not deem it a privilege, that you deem it a burthen, and that from that burthen you would shrink. For suppose, we view this Diocese as a portion of the Church Militant, that is now gathering her strength for the battle against ignorance and ungodliness and sin ; what must be the portion of those who would lag behind, or slink away from this glorious battle ? what must be the portion of those who would keep all they have to themselves, and will not spend any portion of it in the cause of God, and for the endless good of their brethren ? (F). You may think this is a string on which I harpt sufficiently last year. But I am afraid it is a string on which, if my life be prolonged, I shall have to harp year after year. For alas ! in this country, which is enricht so greatly above all others by God's bounty, there are still vast multitudes who have no notion that they hold their wealth in stewardship, or that they are bound to give back any portion of it to the Giver. It is true, many munificent persons are to be found at this day in England. Liberality, through God's blessing, is increasing, is becoming less rare, and higher in kind, more self-denying and self-sacrificing. But still there are numbers who have always enough to answer every call except that of charity, the very sound of which ties up their pursestrings, and makes them fancy themselves on the verge of poverty, so that they begin exclaiming in a nervous agitation that it is quite impossi- ble to comply with such continually repeated demands. Not however that such persons do really run much risk of THE MEANS OF UNITY. 33 beggaring themselves : for fear of being inundated with visiters, they take care not to be at home to anybody. Numberless too as have been the bankruptcies of late years, I have not heard of one that has been occasioned by giving over much to God. The expenditure which brings ruin is offered up at very different shrines. The next subject I have to touch on is connected with these last observations. It was resolved, as most of you must be aware, at meetings held during the last twelve- month in several of the principal places in the Arch- deaconry, that greater exertions should be made in support of the Missionary work of the Church, and that Associ- ations in aid of it should be formed in every parish, either severally, or in union with some of the adjacent parishes. The time will not allow me to enter into those con- siderations pertaining to this subject, important as they are, on which I have spoken in the Notes to my last Charge. But, while I express my gratitude for the kindness with which I was received by you, wherever I went, and the satisfaction I felt at the cordial pleasure with which you hailed my invitation, and enforced it by your speeches at our meetings, I would fain ask you here again, as this is a sort of annual account-day, what has been done in consequence of those resolutions ? Have you all made much progress in forming the Associa- tions determined on ? At all events I trust that the speakers at our meetings, who so earnestly urged the duty incumbent on all the members of our Church, to take a lively, active interest in the diffusion of the Gospel, will have strengthened and crowned their words with their example. This is a matter of the deepest and most pressing importance ; and every year the magnitude of the 34f THE MEANS OF UNITY. work increases. We have much past negligence to atone for : our long continued torpour has been a disgrace to our Church, and has been fraught with calamities to it : and so awful is the duty imposed on England, so blessed is the privilege to which she above all other nations is especially called, to labour for the extension of Christ's Kingdom, that it behoves us, my brethren, not to rest until some- thing is effected for the furtherance of this glorious work in every parish, even in the very smallest and poorest, throughout the land. Some of you may fear that you will not be able to do much : but let not this discourage you : set to work heartily ; and difficulties will smoothe themselves before you. The coward's and sluggard's lion dwindles into a mouse before the bold. Among the poor you will ever find many, whose hearts will readily open to sympathy with their brethren in the Colonies, and still more with the heathens. That the middle classes may be awakened to feel a warm interest in such things, is proved by the large sums raised by some of the Missionary Societies among the Dissenters, collections which quite shame our Church by the comparison. Here let me introduce a remark on a point, which some may deem trifling, but which seems to me of no small moral importance. Our Saviour's command is, that, when we do our alms, we are not to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. How scrupulously this command is complied with in the Reports of our Societies, every- body is aware. More than half the volume is often filled with lists of the subscribers, whose names and gifts are thus paraded to the world. Surely this is not a right practice for Societies which aim at such objects as the Pro- motion of Christian Knowledge, and the Propagation of THE MEANS OF UNITY. 35 the Gospel, and the bringing of the heathens into the Kingdom of Christ. Bodies engaged in such works ought to be watchful over the minutest details of their conduct. And why, for what purpose, is this ostentatious peacock's tail to spread itself out at the end of our Reports ? what should withhold us from docking it ? from trying at least to get rid of it ? Why should not each parish send up its annual contribution, in whatever way collected, in one mass, as the offering of the parish toward the Missionary work of the Church, without any mention of individual names ? (G) This would bear witness to our acting as one body, instead of in insulation, and would put an end to a practice which must needs be offensive to every person of right feelings. To this plan I have only heard two objections. It is contended that the present system gains more money, many being induced to give something for the sake of seeing their names in the Reports. Hereto it would be a sufficient reply, that we must not do evil, or entice others to do evil, in order that good may come of it ; if indeed money drawn from such a source can be called good. But I would deny the proposition altogether. Vanity is never liberal, never has been so, never will be so. Whatever vanity does in the way of good works, will be done at the least possible cost: for it is a niggard, barren, tumid, and empty. Meanwhile, by appealing to bad motives and fostering them, we check the growth of better principles, and dwarf, if we do not altogether crush them. The meagre and almost unvaried string of guinea-subscribers in our Reports is itself a proof that such motives are impotent to make men give largely. Call upon a man to give to the glory of God, for the Christian education of his D 2 36 THE MEANS OF UNITY. destitute fellow-countrymen, for the conversion of the heathens ; and he may rejoice to spend and be spent for such a purpose. But if he is merely to see his name in a list of subscribers, a mite will procure him that honour. The second objection has not more force than the first, namely, that the lists are a check against malversation of the sums collected, and that they pre- vent suspicions, to which certain tempers would otherwise be prone. The same end might however be attained within the parish, if a quarterly or annual statement of the sums collected were drawn up by the Treasurer, and laid before the Committee. The Reports of the Societies would afterward shew that the gross amount of the monies raised in the parish for each Society had been transmitted to their destination. After what I have often said on the desirableness of inducing the Laity to take an active part in the works of the Church, it cannot be requisite for me to add here, that I should deem it advisable that the Treasurer of the Parochial Association should be a layman, wherever one qualified and willing to undertake the office can be found. Nor need I again repeat that, for the whole work of these Associations, you will mostly be able, at least after a short time, when the minds of your parishioners have been in some measure awakened on this great Christian duty, to obtain valuable aid among the Laity, es- pecially from the female part of them. And you will be conferring a great and lasting benefit upon them, if you can lead them to take a lively and active interest in promoting the objects of your Association. They who consent to act as collectors are brought thereby into a profitable intercourse with the more religiously disposed THE MEANS OF UNITY. 37 among the poor; and such an intercourse brings down a blessing upon both parties. A powerful reason and motive for greater activity in this work is to be found in the wonderful manner in which God has recently blest our feeble and scanty efforts. The Church herself has taken a great spring forward through the resolution to send out Bishops to all our Colonies. The rich harvest with which the labours of some of our Missionaries have recently been rewarded, almost carries us back to the first ages of the Church, and bears witness that, in the spiritual world also, the increase may be out of all calculable proportion to the seed sown. At the same time God has shewn in the last year, that He still vouchsafes to honour those who endeavour, how- ever imperfectly, to honour Him. For assuredly it has been a singular honour granted to our Church, that the King of Prussia should have been moved to seek her aid, in order that he might execute his godly purpose of sending a Bishop of the Reformed Church to Jerusalem. The time will not allow me to speak as I would on this glorious and blessed event : but having twice already addrest you on occasion of it, I cannot withhold the expression of my pleasure at having found such lively and almost unanimous sympathy with my own feelings among you. To me it appeared to be an event rich in blessed promise. Not to dwell on the joy, which, it seemed to me, every true son of our Church must needs feel at the thought of seeing one of her Bishops seated on the holy hill of Zion, in the city of the Saviour ; not to speak of the practical benefits which may be expected from our having our missionaries and other ministers in Syria and Egypt under episcopal superintendence ; 38 THE MEANS OF UNITY. two boundless prospects seemed at once to open before our eyes, carrying them forward into distant ages. On the one hand it appeared as though we should hereby obtain the most favorable opportunities for enter- ing into communication and connexion with the ancient Churches of the East, and might thus become the means of imparting some of those blessings to them, which have been bestowed so richly on our own Church, in a purer doctrine and ritual and a more spiritual faith. On the other hand, there was a kind of promise, that through the same event, whereby we were thus brought into intimate relations with the Church of Prussia, our Church might be enabled to aid in perfecting the discipline and constitution of the Reformed Churches on the Continent, so that the institutions which they reluctantly lost through the peculiar circumstances of their Refor- mation, should be restored to them by our hands. All these prospects were set before us ; and the rulers of our Church blest God for them, and hailed them with delight. I am not going to enter here into the painful controversy which has since arisen. With surprise and deep regret did I first learn that any members of our Church, professing to love her and her Lord, lookt with repugnance and aversion on a measure, which was assuredly conceived and carried on, as few measures ever have been, in the pure spirit of Christian love (H). Under this conviction, although I should be very un- willing to take any step in my official capacity, which appeared likely to provoke contention, yet, when the great and good King, in whose bosom the whole plan was conceived, and who had all along shewn such exem- plary generosity and disinterestedness, leaving the whole THE MEANS OF UNITY. 39 arrangement of the details of the measure, and the appointment of the first Bishop to the Prelates of our Church, came to England at the invitation of our Queen, and when a considerable number of the Clergy of the Archdeaconry called upon me to prepare an address to him, I readily and gladly acceded to their request.- For I felt sure that there could be very few, if any, amongst you, who partook in the above-mentioned repugnance and aversion. And this confidence was fully justified by the result. Hardly anything connected with my office has given me so much pleasure as the letters which poured in upon me from all quarters, expressing the heartiest concurrence in the proposed Address, and the liveliest joy at the events which occasioned it. A hundred and fifty-five Clergy out of about a hundred and eighty, the whole number in the Archdeaconry, joined in signing it ; and among the few who did not, we may reasonably suppose that a considerable portion were withheld by accidental causes, or by slight scruples about points of form, far short of positive disapprobation. Such of you as had the happiness of accompanying me when our Address was presented to the good King, must assuredly have rejoiced that you had given expression to feelings by which he was so evidently toucht, and which he declared would awaken sympathy and delight throughout all Germany (i). I could have wisht that other portions of our Church had testified their joy and gratitude in a like manner ; but as it is, I feel most thankful that our Archdeaconry, though it stood almost alone, had the privilege of doing so. Doubtless, when the King of Prussia is hereafter pursuing his plans for strengthen- ing and purifying Christ's Church in his own dominions, 40 THE MEANS OF UNITY. should he look to the Church of England for aid in doing so, our Address will be an encouraging assurance that there is at least one portion of the English Church, which will rejoice and give thanks, when all the Reformed Churches can be united together in perfect union and communion. The last year has been so rich in matters interesting to the Church, that I have left myself no time to speak to you, as I fain would have done, about the Meeting of our Convocation, and about the attempt made at that Meeting to prepare the way for a time, which, I trust, is not far distant, when the Convocation will be allowed to sit and discuss ecclesiastical questions (j). Nor can I say anything this year concerning our Rural Chapters. But on this point I forbear more willingly, having spoken at such length about them in the latter part of my last year's Charge, which, in the hope of aiding you in rendering them more efficient, I enlarged con- siderably as it was passing through the press. I will merely exhort you all again, the Rural Deans more especially, to go to these Meetings with the earnest purpose of receiving and conferring good. If you go there idly, thoughtlessly, as a matter of form, you will derive no benefit from them. But if you seek good, you will find it. And the same is the case, as you must often have told your congregations, even with our attendance at divine worship. I have reason to believe that similar institutions are about to be revived in other Dioceses ; and among the benefits which may be expected from them, I trust they will prepare and fit us for the time when our whole Church shall assemble in synod (K). I have had so many topics to speak of t that I must THE MEANS OF UNITY. 41 entreat your forgiveness for the slight, cursory manner in which most of them have been handled. And now, ere I close, I will address a few words to you, my friends, who are come as Churchwardens to this Visitation. You also need advice and exhortation ; and to you also I have given such as I could in my former Charges. Into the question of parochial discipline, for the reason mentioned above, I refrain from entering, until we know the aim and scope of the Bill about to be brought before Parliament. Nor will my scanty legal knowledge allow me to pronounce any opinion concerning the recent judgement, by which the subject of Churchrates has been involved in fresh perplexities. This matter must come again ere long- before a judicial tribunal, if it be not settled by some legislative measure. The only point which I can urge upon you this year, is the same which I urged upon you at our former Visitations, that you should endeavour to do your duty in that which has long been the main and most important branch of your office, the repairing and restor- ing of your churches. It has been a great satisfaction to me to find that the advice and exhortation given in my former Charges was not thrown away. In several churches improvements have been commenced; in some they have been carried on upon a large scale. Here I feel bound to mention what has been done in Eastbourne church. If any person doubts the desirableness of scraping off the whitewash from the pillars and arches and the other stonework in our churches, let him go to Eastbourne church. He who remembers what it was two years ago, will be surprised at the change. I myself was so, though I had been prepared for it by seeing in my own church what a look of grandeur-.and antiquity is thus 42 THE MEANS OF UNITY. given at once to a building. That of Eastbourne, which had never struck me much before, has now acquired something like the majesty of a cathedral. Many other churches, indeed the great majority of them, still need similar improvements ; and I earnestly hope you may all determine not to let the next year pass without doing something in this way. Only be on your guard ; when you have scraped off the whitewash, do not, as I have some- times seen done, substitute a yellow wash or brown wash in its stead. By so doing you would defeat your object. Persons whose taste has never been rightly cultivated, and who have no apprehension of the imaginative associa- tions whereby antiquity is hallowed, but who like every- thing to look new and bright, as though they drew their notion of beauty from a shop, will advise you to do this : but churches, at least old ones, ought to look old, not new, the older the better. It is delightful to think that a score of generations, or more, have gathered to worship within the same walls, within which we are now gathered. In truth you might as well greenwash an old oak, or dress it out in artificial leaves. Let the bare stone, when you have cleared it, stand in its original nakedness : the only additional work requisite will be, when there are any chasms or deficiences through the action of Time, or of other more mischievous destroyers, to fill them up. Again, in many parishes there will be ample work for you in restoring your windows, in getting rid of the paltry wooden bars, which the niggardliness of former years has put up in them, and in substituting stone mullions according to the style of the architecture. Even churches that look mean and wretched, like that in which we are now assembled, might be so improved, that you would THE MEANS OF UNITY. 43 hardly know them again, if the windows were properly restored, if the side-galleries were taken down, if the pews were swept away, if the stone pillars were stript of their white coating. This is the third year that I have felt called upon to condemn these architectural and ecclesi- astical deformities. Little has been changed in most of our churches yet. But let us not be dispirited : I will not despair of seeing the high cumbrous pews, which cram and disfigure so many of our churches, and which seem designed for luxurious ease, rather than for the exercises of prayer, for the worship of self, rather than the worship of God, I will not despair of seeing these unchristian encumbrances removed. So long as I continue in my present office, it will be my endeavour to get rid of such things in every church, where I can exercise any influence or authority ; and as the conviction is spread- ing through the land, that closed pews are repug- nant to the spirit of Christian worship, and that they occasion numberless quarrels and heartburnings, I trust the day will come when they will only be spoken of as among the evils of a bygone, irreligious age. But when an abuse is so inveterate, and is surrounded by so many bad and jealous feelings, like a muddy moat, keeping off the approach of reason and charity, we cannot expect that it will fall at the first assault. This however must not deter us from directing the battering ram a second and a third time against it. Greatly too are we encouraged to do so, if we can perceive the walls shaking in' any place, if we can perceive them giving way, if any breach is made in them. The walls of Jericho did not fall at the first circuit, although of the priests of the Lord, or at the first blast of their trumpets. For God 44 THE MEANS OF UNITY. desires to try our patience and perseverance, when He sets us to perform His work. The priests had to com- pass Jericho day after day, and to blow their trumpets continually ; and it was only on the seventh day, and at the seventh circuit on that day, that the people all lifted up their voices, and shouted with a great shout ; and then the wall fell down flat. We have had many proofs of late years admonishing us that this is still the course which God ordains. Indeed history is full of such proofs. The priests of the Lord are first commanded to compass the walls of evil, and to blow the trumpets of the Lord against them. They are to do so continually, perseveringly, it may be for years, without any responsive voices from the people. But at length the people lift up their voices, and shout with a great shout ; and the abuse falls down flat ; and every one from that time forward tramples upon it. Such, to cite a single example, was the progress of public feeling with regard to the Slavetrade. Holy men moved by God declared His judgements against it : after a while the people lifted up their voices and joined in condemning it ; and then it was abolisht. So too, I trust, will it be with this great moral abuse, the system of pews, against which, with God's help, I shall go on, along with my brethren, blowing the trumpet year after year, until at length the whole mass of them, through the length and breadth of England, will, I doubt not, fall down flat. Earnestly desiring peace and unity in all things, earnestly desiring that all the party- walls of selfishness and vanity and prejudice, which sepa- rate and estrange us from each other, should be knockt down, I likewise especially desire, as pertaining to my peculiar office, to knock down those walls which separate THE MEANS OF UNITY. 45 and estrange us from each other within the house of God. In conclusion I beg to state to you, my reverend brethren, that I have prepared an Address to our gracious Queen from the Clergy of this Archdeaconry, on her providential preservation from this second attack on her life ; and I invite you all to sign your names to it. This is another mercy and blessing vouchsafed to us : and how many mercies and blessings have we to be thankful for ! mercies and blessings without number ! Let us devoutly endeavour to be thankful for them, and pray to God to give us the crowning blessing of thankful hearts, hearts united to Him and to each other in the holy fellowship of peace and love, through Him who came to unite us to His Father and ours. NOTES. NOTE A: p. 12. THE procedure of those historians, who pass over the Church of the middle ages, as though it were a mere blank, under the notion that the continuity of a pure faith was only preserved by the Waldenses, and other like persecuted sects, is pretty generally recognized now to be utterly unhistorical. For a his- torian's business is not to pick and choose out the figures that he likes to bring forward in his picture, omitting the rest, but to represent those whom God has placed in the foremost rank of influence and efficiency, according to the prominence which they actually bore. Nevertheless Milner's work still has a considerable reputation, and is the main, if not the sole, source from which a large portion of our Church derive their notions of ecclesiastical history. How deplorably deficient Milner was in the learning requisite for his undertaking, and how he disguised this want by taking his quotations from other writers, such as Fleury and Dupin, has been shewn by Mr Maitland in his Letters to Rose, with his own peculiar sagacity for ferreting out a plagiarist, and for detecting the jay under its borrowed plumes. Nor is the limited range of Milner's imagination, his inabi- lity to understand or sympathize with any other than one special modification of the Christian character, expressing itself under a particular form of words, less injurious to his history. Owing to this cause, it tends to narrow the minds of those who are already predisposed to be narrow through their Calvinistic exclusiveness, and encourages them in believing that there never 48 NOTE A. was a true Christian upon earth, except such as have made use of their shibboleth. If however there is any force in the argument used by Mr Newman, in the following passage of his Essay on the Develop- ment of Christian Doctrine, it seems to imply that the course taken by Milner is the only possible one for a historian of the Church. Taking the doctrine of papal infallibility as a hy- pothesis, he says (p. 129) that, "even as a hypothesis which has been held by one out of various communions, it may not be lightly put aside. Some hypothesis all parties, all controver- sialists, all historians must adopt, if they would treat of Chris- tianity at all. Gieseler's " Text Book " bears the profession of being a dry analysis of Christian history; yet on inspection it will be found to be written on a positive and definite theory, and to bend facts to meet it. An unbeliever, as Gibbon, assumes one hypothesis ; and an Ultramontane, as Baronius, adopts another. The school of Kurd and Newton consider that Christianity slept for centuries upon centuries, except among those whom historians call heretics. Others speak as if the Oath of supremacy or the conge d'elire could be made the measure of St Ambrose ; and they fit the Thirty-nine Articles on the fervid Tertullian. The question is, which of all these theories is the simplest, the most natural, the most persuasive. Certainly the notion of development under in- fallible authority is not a less grave, a less winning hypothesis, than the chance and coincidence of events, or the Oriental Philosophy, or the working of Antichrist, to account for the rise of Chris- tianity, and the formation of its theology." These sentences are a characteristic sample of the sophistries, of which this ex- traordinary book is made up ; and coming as they do from a writer of such ability, whom so many have revered as their master, it is worth while to spend a few minutes in examining them. Here in the first place let me observe that the pre- sumption in favour of Mr Newman's view is gained in each branch of the argument by the same artifice, by placing it in contrast with hypotheses grossly absurd, as though these were the only alternatives ; which moreover are in neither instance NOTE A. altogether ejusdem generis, and cannot fairly be compared with it. Thus, if there were no more reasonable mode of " accounting for the rise of Christianity and the formation of its theology," than by ascribing it to " the chance and coincidence of events," or to " the Oriental Philosophy," or to " the working of Antichrist," we might be inclined to say that to ascribe it to " development under infallible authority " is less absurd and irrational than such fantastical follies. But what man of sound judgement ever dreamt of " accounting for the rise of Christianity and the for- mation of its theology" by any one of those three solutions? though many may have asserted, with unquestionable truth, that the development of Christianity, and especially of its the- ology, has been more or less modified by the coincidence of out- ward events, and in its earlier centuries by Oriental Philosophy, and in all ages, alas, too powerfully by the working of Anti- christ, whose chief instrument has been the Papacy. When you put a heap of nonsense into your adversary's mouth, it becomes an easy matter to refute him : and this has ever been the course adopted by the advocates of Rome, who have seldom been scru- pulous about any form of truth. Suppose however we say that the Seed which was sown by the Divine Sower has been growing and expanding ever since, that the Leaven has been working and spreading, through its own inherent power, adapted as that power is to the better properties of the soil in which it was sown, of the lump with which it was mixt up. Suppose that this growth and expansion, this working and spreading, have been superintended and directed by Him who orders and overrules the whole course of occurrences in the moral as well as in the physical world, and whose Spirit has especially undertaken the charge and government of the Church of His Son. Suppose that, since the Church was not taken out of the world, so as to be entirely severed from it, but was to flow along through the midst of it, and to penetrate into every part of it, until the whole was fertilized, the circumstances of the world in each age, the specu- lations of human reason, the various feelings and passions of man- kind, were allowed in some measure to shape and turn its course, E 50 NOTE A. though precluded from wholly arresting or diverting it. What is there in such suppositions, which are much more like the views taken by judicious Protestant historians, that should make us look with the slightest favour on the notion of "development under an infallible authority " as " graver" or " more winning ?" Besides, as I said, this alternative is not ejusdem generis. By putting it as he has done, Mr Newman slips in a mere hypo- thesis, or, as we should maintain, a gross fiction, on the same footing with acknowledged indisputable facts. For in all ages of the Church there must needs have been a coincidence of events, reacting more or less upon that which acted upon them : the Oriental Philosophy, we know, did exist, and came into contact with Christianity, and acted upon it in some of the early he- resies : Antichrist too has been continually counterworking and undermining Christianity, and attempting to corrupt it in num- berless ways. But when the development of Christianity under an infallible authority is placed along with these facts, as co- ordinate with them, the very point in question is assumed, namely, the existence of an infallible authority, which, in the sense of its being embodied in any permanent human representative, we peremptorily deny. Nor, even if it did exist, would it preclude the operation of the other influences mentioned, that of coinci- dent events, that of Oriental Philosophy, and that of Antichrist. For no advocate of papal infallibility has asserted that this has been the sole cause of the rise of Christianity, and of the forma- tion of its theology : least of all can Mr Newman do so, who ascribes such moment to heresies in the development of the Church. In like manner Mr Newman's remark on the histories of the Church, which led me to quote the passage, and from which by his peculiar logic he would draw an argument in favour of papal infallibility, is constructed as though for the purpose of throwing dust in one's eyes. He enumerates certain hypothetical views, which he represents as having been assumed by divers ecclesias- tical historians : some of these views he puts in an extravagant, almost in a ludicrous light : hence he would have us infer that all ecclesiastical history is much of the same kind ; and he NOTE A. 51 gravely winds up by saying, " The question is, which of all these theories is the simplest, the most natural, the most persuasive." This is one of the stalest tricks of a shallow scepticism, that, having no aptness for perceiving anything but the negative side of things, confounds every shade and degree of truth with gross glaring falsehood, sets them all on the same level, shews that some of the class are very absurd, and then would make you conclude that all the rest are of a piece. Even in Mr Newman's closing question the same sceptical spirit manifests itself. A person who believed in truth, and in man's being gifted with faculties for discerning truth, would have said, The question is, which of all these theories is the true one. We do not want to know which is " the simplest, the most natural, the most persuasive." Falsehood will often have a look of simplicity. It will often seem very natural, inasmuch as from the consti- tution of our perceptive organs that which is objectively false is often subjectively or phenomenally true. Thus, for instance, the notion of the sun's revolving round the earth is much simpler and more natural, according to the judgement of the unpurged intellect, than that of the earth's revolving round the sun ; al- though, as simplicity is ever an essential character of the highest truths, the latter notion is seen after a time to take its place in a far simpler and more natural theory of the universe. As to per- suasiveness, that it attaches itself to errour and falsehood much more readily than to truth, was the boast of the ancient sophists, and the main stay of their craft : and the whole history of mankind, from the first temptation down to the last secessions to Rome, has proved that the father of lies is indeed the prince of this world. Another cause of entanglement is introduced into Mr Newman's argument by his using the words hypothesis and theory indiscrimi- nately, as if they were synonymous. Mr Newman's want of precision in the use of philosophical terms, and how he is led into fallacies thereby, has already been noticed by others. In the present instance his confusion is indeed sanctioned by vulgar abuse ; but the merest tiro in logic must know how great and E 2 52 NOTE A. important are the differences between a hypothesis and a theory ; and when the whole stress of the argument lies on these words, precision is indispensable. A hypothesis, as such, is a thing alien from history, and which a historian ought carefully to eschew, except in cases where the scantiness of his materials compells him to supply their deficiencies by conjecture. On the other hand all intelligent contemplation, whether of facts or objects, in their connexion with one another, is a theory. To the framing of a theory many hypotheses may minister : for the meaning and causes and relations and concatenations of objects or of facts do not disclose themselves immediately to our perceptions, but often need to be deciphered by a complex process of divination. When a hypothesis however has received the confirmation and verification of experience, when it is proved to be the true key, by unlocking those secret chambers of knowledge from which we were previously excluded, it ceases to be a mere hypothesis, and becomes a theory, or a member of a theory ; just as a prophecy, when it has been fulfilled, ceases to be a mere prophecy : and we have no right to speak contemptuously of such a hypothesis, or of such a prophecy, as though it were 'something vague and pro- blematical. As in organic bodies the whole is ever something very different from a mere aggregate of its parts, for that aggre- gate omits the unifying principle which organizes them into a whole, changing and modifying them all, so is it in the region of ideas. Though a number of hypotheses may have contributed to the making up of a theory, the theory is some- thing very different from a mere chain or concourse of hypo- theses. Even a house is something very different from a heap of bricks, plus a heap of tiles, plus a lump of mortar, plus so many planks of deal. The confounding of theories with hy- potheses, and the speaking of them in a mass, as if they were equivalent or identical, belongs to the essence of scepticism, and is one of the marks of that pernicious spirit which the thought- ful reader has long discerned with pain in Mr Newman's writings. It belongs also to the essence of Romanism, which cannot main- tain its claim to be the one arbiter of right and truth, except by NOTE A. 53 denying the existence of any other power to discern them. For Mr Newman's immediate argument too the confusion is of much importance ; since one cannot speak of the theory of papal infalli- bility, except in that perverse sense in which theory is identified with hypothesis. The notion of papal infallibility is a mere hy- pothesis, a monstrous supposition, or, to use a word of Coleridge's, suffiction, resting on no ground but the most arbitrary fancies, and asserted in open defiance to the evidence of all history, which absolutely rejects and disproves it. As to the historians of the Church, I cannot here enter upon the question, how far any of them have been able to keep clear of arbitrary hypotheses, and to give a faithful objective history. That such a thing is wholly impracticable, is not proved by shew- ing that divers writers have not effected it. At least there are various degrees of approximation; and if this idea stand, as it ought, before the historian, as the end to be aimed at, he who has the true historical mind may approach indefinitely near to it. Nor will I examine how far Mr Newman's criticism on Gieseler's work is wellfounded. His assertion, that it " bears the profession of being a dry analysis of Christian history," is at all events con- trary to the fact : in sooth one cannot well conceive any writer making such a blasting profession about his work. Gieseler does indeed profess that his text is merely designed to serve as a text- book (Lehrbuch] for his Lectures. Thus it is in some measure analogous to Mosheim's Institutes, the true character of which has been well pointed out by Mr Maitland in the Letters already re- ferred to, in reply to the complaints of persons seeking for something different from what that learned historian designed to give. But a summary is not a " dry analysis," except through a confusion of terms like that which overlooks the difference between a hypothe- sis and a theory : and Gieseler adds, that, " in the selection and arrangement of his historical materials, he has always kept a twofold object in view, to give a general, but clear and full picture of each age, and to bring forward the causal connexion and reciprocal action of the various series of developments every- where in a clear light''' And because " no age can be rightly 54 NOTE A. understood, unless one hears it speak in its own words, and this is especially true of the history of the Church/' he has tried to make each age express itself, by giving a copious body of extracts from the original authors in his notes. According to Mr New- man, he has a " positive and definite theory > and bends facts to meet it." Whether he does the latter, is a question of detail, which, as no instances are cited, cannot well be investigated. Nor is it material to my purpose. It may be that his very freedom from the assumptions and hypotheses which lie at the bottom of the ordinary English notions of ecclesiastical history, may be re- garded by Mr Newman as " a positive and definite theory ;" and his not receiving the ordinary English interpretation of certain historical statements may perhaps be called "bending facts to meet " his theory. But whether he does this or not, his aim at least is different. As it is with the facts of physical science, so is it with those of which history takes cognizance. A sceptic of Mr Newman's school might quote half a dozen interpretations of natural phenomena out of Aristotle, out of the Schoolmen, out of the Alchemists and Mystics, and might then argue that, since all science consists of mere fanciful hypotheses, it is indispensably necessary, in order to man's understanding the outward world, in which he is placed, with which he is bound up by so many ties, on which he depends for the support of his existence, that there should be some infallible authority appointed to expound the laws of nature. But we know that, notwithstanding this proneness to fanciful hypotheses, notwithstanding the various idols by which physical enquirers have perpetually been deluded, still man's in- tellectual eye may be so purged, as to gain a continually increasing insight into the true forms and laws of the outward world : a lumen siccum is granted to those who sincerely and earnestly desire to discern the real nature of things : and thus Physical Science has been enabled to erect a vast fabric of substantial knowledge. Indeed the very notion that it had an infallible authority in Aristotle operated for many ages to mislead and check the researches of naturalists, as ever must be the effect of such delusions, whatever the imaginary authority may be : and it NOTE A. 55 was only when Philosophy got rid of this encumbrance, and adopt- ed a right method in the study and interpretation of nature, that Science came forth from the cloudland of hypothesis, and began to walk in the clear daylight of observant, careful, progressive theory. It is true, the difficulties which stand in the way of an impar- tial objective history, such as shall do justice to all men in a spirit of love, without distinction of persons, are much greater, inasmuch as our feelings are far otherwise affected by human interests and actions and sufferings and struggles, than by anything in inani- mate nature. Nor is the difficulty in any secular history, at least of bygone ages, equal to what it must needs be in that of the Church, where the matters agitated concern and stir the very cen- tre of our being, and controversies are transmitted from century to century with very slight variations in their outward form. Yet that even here the spirit of Christian love can in great measure surmount every obstacle, so as to recognize and appreciate what- ever is akin to it, notwithstanding the diversities of forms and opinions, has been proved in our days by Neander. NOTE B: p. 17. IN his Apology, addrest to William Abbot of St Theoderic, Ber- nard, pleading in behalf of certain diversities of dress and observ- ance between the Cistercian and Cluniac monasteries, says (c. in.): "An forte quia juxta alium Ordinem conversari videor, propterea suspectus hinc habeor ? Sed eadem ratione et vos nostro derogatis, quicumque aliter vivitis. Ergo et continentes et conjuges invicem se damnare putentur, quod suis quique legibus in ecclesia conversentur. Monachi quoque ac regulares Clerici sibi invicem derogare dicantur, quia propriis ab invicem obser- vantiis separantur. Sed et Noe et Danielem et Job in uno se regno pati non posse suspicemur, ad quod utique non eos uno tramite justitiae cognovimus pervenisse. Mariam denique et Martham necesse sit aut utramque, aut altcram Salvatori 56 NOTE B. displicere, cui nimirum tarn dissimili studio devotionis contendunt ambae placere. Et hac ratione in tota Ecclesia, (quae utique tarn pluribus, tamque dissimilibus variatur ordinibus, utpote Regina quae in Psalmo legitur circumamicta varietatibus,~) nulla pax, nulla prorsus concordia esse putabitur. Quae etenim secura quies, quis tutus in ea status invenietur, si unus quilibet homo, unum quem- libet Ordinem eligens, alios aliter viventes aut ipse aspernetur, aut se ab ipsis sperm suspicetur, praesertim cum tenere impossibile sit vel unum hominem omnes Ordines vel unum Ordinem omnes homines ? Non sum tarn hebes, ut non agnoscam tunicam Jo- seph, non illius qui liberavit Aegyptum, sed qui salvavit mun- dum, et hoc non a fame corporis, sed a morte simul animae et corporis. Notissima quippe est, quia polymita, id est pulcherri- ma varietate distincta; sed et sanguine apparet intincta, non quidem hoedi, qui peccatum significat, sed agni, qui designat innocentiam, hoc est, suo ipsius, non alieno. Ipse est profecto Agnus mansuetissimus, qui coram non quidem tondente, sed oc- cidente se obmutuit ; qui peccatum non fecit, sed abstulit peccata mundi. Miserunt autem qui dicerent ad Jacob : Hanc inveni- mus; vide utrum tunica filii tui sit, an non. Vide et Tu Domine, utrum haec sit tunica dilecti Filii Tui. Recognosce, omnipotens Pater, earn quam fecisti Christo Filio Tuo polymitam, dando quidem quosdam Apostolos, quosdam autem Prophetas, alios vero Evangelistas, alios Pastores et Doctores, et caetera quae in ejus ornatu mirifico decenter apposuisti, ad consummationem utique sanctorum occurrentium in virum perfectum, in mensuram aetatis plenitudinis Christi. Relinquat videlicet sponsae suae Ecclesiae pignus haereditatis, ipsam tunicam suam, tunicam scilicet poly- mitam, eamdemque inconsutilem, et desuper contextam per to- tum; sed polymitam ob multorum Ordinum qui in ea sunt multimodam distinctionem ; inconsutilem vero propter indissolu- bilis caritatis individuam unitatem. Quis me, inquit, separabit a caritate Christi ? Audi quomodo polymitam. Divisiones, ait, gratiarum sunt, idem autem Spiritus ; et divisiones opera- tionum sunt, idem vero Dominus. Deinde diversis enumeratis charismatibus, tamquam variis tunicae coloribus, quibus constet NOTE B. 57 earn esse polymitam, ut ostendat etiam esse inconsutilem, et de- super contextam per totum, adjungit : Haec autem operatur unus atque idem Spiritus, dividens singulis prout wilt. Caritas quippe di/usa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum qui datus est nobis. Non ergo dividatur, sed totam et integram haereditario jure sortiatur Ecclesia, quia et de ilia scriptum est: Adstitit Regina, a dextris tuis in vestitu deaurato, circumdata varietate. Itaque diversi diversa accipientes dona, alius quidem sic, alius vero sic, sive Cluniacenses, sive Cistercienses, sive Clerici regulares, sive etiam Laici fideles, omnis denique Ordo, omnis lingua, omnis sexus, omnis aetas, omnis conditio, in omni loco, per omne tempus, a primo homine usque ad novissimum. Et quid mirum si in hoc exsilio, peregrinante adhuc Ecclesia, quaedam hujuscemodi sit pluralis (ut ita dixerim) unitas, unaque pluralitas ; cum in ilia quoque patria, quando jam ipsa regnabit, nihilominus forte talis aliqua dispar quodammodo aequalitas futura sit ? Inde etenim scriptum est : In domo Patris mei mansiones multae sunt. Sicut itaque illic multae mansiones in una domo, ita hie multi Ordines sunt in Ecclesia una ; et quomodo hie divisiones gratiarum sunt, idem autem Spiritus, ita ibi distinctiones quidem gloriarum, sed una domus. Non igitur una tantum semita inceditur, quia nee vina est mansio quo tenditur. Viderit autem quisque quacumque incedat, ne pro diversitate semitarum ab una justitia recedat, quoniam ad quamlibet mansionem sua quisque semita pervenerit, ab una domo Patris exsors non erit." Bernard's immediate purpose in this Treatise is indeed merely to prove the allowableness and fitness and necessity of outward cere- monial differences, and their compatibleness with inward essential unity : hence this passage would have found its appropriate place in Note Th to the Sermon on the Unity of the Church. The scanty collection in that Note should also have been enricht with the excellent letter of Peter the Venerable to Bernard on occasion of the same dissensions between the Cluniac and Cistercian monks. Bernard's arguments and illustrations however go far beyond his direct purpose, and shew that the diversities allowable within the Church do not relate solely to externals. 58 NOTE C. NOTE C: p. 19. THESE offenses against decorum and Christian feeling are by no means confined to either of the two parties by which our Church is at present distracted ; and it would require a far more extensive acquaintance than I possess with the refuse literature of the day to pronounce on which side those offenses have been the most numerous and the most flagrant. In fact this is one of the curses of party-spirit, that people are continually provoking one another to hatred and to evil works, especially to evil words. Nor has the spirit of detraction and slander, the spirit which takes no thought about truth and justice, if it can say anything injurious to an adversary, found vent solely among the anonymous rabble who haunt the allies and purlieus of theology. Only a few even of the leading minds have kept themselves wholly untainted by it. Mr Newman indeed has always shewn a singular forbearance, notwithstanding the harassing assaults he has continually had to endure ; and his conduct in this respect has been the more exem- plary, since, with his powers of logic and of ridicule, he might easily have rode over troop after troop of his assailants. But others, who have not had the same temptations, have been unable to resist their lesser ones. Even in those religious novels, which are another anomalous growth of our ephemeral literature, and which, professing to be the offspring of the religious imagination, are commonly equally destitute of imagination and of religion, we often find the abuse of the opposite party brought in to season what might else have been utterly mawkish. For instance, on opening Bernard Leslie, my eyes fall on the following passage. " I used once to respect the Evangelicals. Notwithstanding the manifest deficiency of their scheme, I have been accustomed to regard them with a certain respect, on account of their zeal, and the partial good which they have doubtless been the instruments of effecting. And there are some for whom I still feel a sincere regard, men whom I see quietly doing the Lord's work according to their judgement. Zeal in a good cause is to be NOTE C. 59 admired, even though it be not according to knowledge. They have also numbered amongst them many revered and excellent men, who have devoted themselves sincerely to the cause of what they considered truth. Indeed it is for their sake mainly that the party to which they belonged has gained its influence and credit. But their popularity has spoiled them, as it has done thousands before them. They have now stood forward in a new light. They are no longer contending for the souls of men, but struggling to maintain a waning popularity. They see growing up around them, perhaps settling in their own parishes or neighbour- hood, a zealous and laborious body of men who have devoted themselves to restore the ancient energy and purity of the Church. These men are gradually gaining an influence over the public mind to the prejudice and annoyance of the Evangelicals. Hence their rage against them ; and because these men blame as defective the effete Evangelicalism of the day. they are accused of being enemies to the Reformation ; and because they endeavour to restore the an- cient usages of the Church, which have been sinfully neglected, they are accused of popery, and held up as departers from the Church's discipline by men who err themselves in a tenfold greater and more dangerous degree. The effrontery with which these men accuse their brethren is marvellous. The daily newspapers and monthly magazines have been filled with false charges and in- jurious reports against those who are endeavouring to raise the tone of religion. Instead of that generous rivalry which ought to influence men engaged in the same great cause of winning souls to Christ, there has sprung up amongst the Evangelicals a bitter hostility and ungenerous jealousy : they bar the kingdom of heaven against men; they neither go in themselves, nor suffer those that are entering to go in :" pp. 283-285. Now there may certainly be a few persons here and there, to whom some portion of the condemnation here pronounced against the main body of those denominated Evangelicals, is not wholly inapplicable ; but if we take it as a sentence against that body, it is iniquitous. Nor can one well display grosser ignorance of what has been going on in our Church during the last 60 NOTE C. do/en years. For so far are the " evangelical" body from having lost their popularity in consequence of the new movement in a different direction, that this movement has been the means of rendering them popular, and of diverting that odium from them with which the world is wont to regard such as bring religion prominently before it. The new party may appeal to this as a note of their superior sanctity ; or it may arise from the obtrusiveness of their outward acts and observances : at all events the fact is such. As the passage just quoted bears the authority of a respecta- ble name, and is taken from a work which has gone through several editions, and consequently must have obtained a wide cir- culation, it seems desirable that statements, which, though wholly contrary to the truth, may easily gain credence, should be met by a flat contradiction. At least my own official experience enables me to state that in this archdeaconry the number of what are called evangelical clergy is every year increasing : and it is with deep thankfulness to God that I record this, the introduction of such a minister being a pledge that the spiritual welfare of the parish will be rightly taken care of, and that the Gospel will be preacht in its life-giving power and fulness. Nor is it long in most cases before the proofs that the popularity of such ministers is not " waning," shew themselves in the increast size and orderliness and devoutness of the congregations. It is not easy to estimate how wide the mischief of such mis- representations must needs be : for minds that have been dieted with writings leavened by such a spirit must become full of narrow prejudices, so as to be almost incapable of recognizing goodness in any one who does not belong to the same party. But still more mischievous is the practice, which unhappily is not uncommon, of introducing the same sort of religious polemics into books for children. Children should be trained to look with reverence on everything connected with religion. Irreverence will come too soon, without our taking pains to sow and foster it. They who teach their children to look with suspicion and to laugh at any professions of religion, or any peculiarities prevalent among its professors, are training them to be sceptics and scoffers : nor can I NOTE D. 61 see what other results are to be anticipated from such books as the Fairy Bower and the Lost Brooch, which are all the more dangerous on account of their cleverness. NOTE D : p. 20. SEE Coleridge's Apologetic Preface to Fire, Famine, and Slaugh- ter. In his Remains (Vol. iv. p. 76), when numbering up several reasons for recommending the study of our older writers he mentions, among other benefits to be derived from them, " The conquest of party and sectarian prejudices, when you have on the same table before you the works of a Hammond and a Baxter, and reflect how many and momentous their points of agreement, how few and almost childish the differences which estranged and irritated these good men. Let us but imagine what their blessed spirits now feel at the retrospect of their earthly frailties ; and can we do other than strive to feel as they now feel, not as they once felt ? So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day ; and if you have no other reason to doubt your opponent's goodness than the point in dispute, think of Baxter and Hammond, of Milton and Taylor, and let it be no reason at all." NOTE E : p. 27. ACCORDING to the returns received from 103 parishes, the aggre- gate population of which amounts by the last census to 116443, the number of illegitimate children baptized in those parishes during the six years, 18291834, was 934; and during the six years, 1835 1840, it was 1133. That this awful increase, an increase far beyond what can have taken place in the population of those parishes during that period, Brighton not being included amongst them, is imputable to the alterations with regard to Bastardy enacted by the New Poorlaw, I would by no means assert, or insinuate. In Sir Edmund Head's valuable paper on the subject, appended to the Sixth Annual Report of the Poorlaw Commissioners, it is justly remarkt with reference to similar statements drawn from ten counties, exhibiting a like increase, that this increase cannot fairly be ascribed to the law, without regard to the various circumstances by which its operation may have been affected ; and he points out one or two of these, in proof that a conclusion deduced from such tables would be fallacious. Not however that these circumstances would all tend to raise the number of such baptisms : in the text I have alluded to some causes which might have been expected to diminish it. Such too must doubtless have been the effect of the new system of Registration, which was introduced almost contemporaneously with the New Poorlaw. The difficulty which the lower orders often find in obtaining respectable sponsors, induces many to take their children to the Meeting-house ; and this difficulty will of course press most on the mothers of illegitimate children ; who may also be led by shame to choose a civil registration, in preference to a ceremony involving some degree of exposure, and who in most cases are not likely to attach much value to the spiritual benefits of Baptism. These considerations prove that the number of Baptisms of illegitimate children cannot in the present state of things be regarded as tantamount to that of births : how far it may fall short I have no means of determining. But at all events it is clear that the sanguine expectations which were entertained in some quarters, that the New Poorlaw would of itself materially lessen the amount of Bastardy, have not been fulfilled ; and that the encouragement which the Commissioners in their early Reports drew from a few favorable cases, was at all events premature. It was indeed perfectly right, nay, the bounden duty of the Legis- lature, to abolish that pernicious system, through which, under the old law, illegitimate children, in proportion to their number, be- came sources of profit to their mother. But it is a delusion, though one we are very apt to fall into in politics and in morals, to suppose that, when an evil habit has been produced, the removal of the producing cause will check the habit. For the cause, when it NOTE E. 63 is outward, does not really generate the evil, but merely elicits and fosters it ; and when the evil has once sprung up, it has a strong tenacity, and propagates itself. The only efficient mode of counteracting moral evil is by exciting a countervailing moral power ; and to do this is the special office and privilege of the Church, " Commonwealths and good governments (Bacon teaches us in his Essay Of Custom and Education) do nourish virtue grown, but do not much mend the seeds." The State must take care that its laws and institutions shall not thwart the Church in her work, must provide that she be not hindered in it, and that she have facilities for its execution; but her real strength, the means and instruments of her warfare, come from a higher source : and every fresh testimony of the gigantic might of evil in the world should lead us to seek that strength more earnestly, and to exercise it more diligently and perseveringly. Here let me add a remark intimately connected with what has just been said. Whatever may be the effect of those clauses in the New Poorlaw, which bear directly upon Bastardy, whether in their original form, or as they have since been mo- dified, there is one regulation, no way necessary to its enforce- ment, but deemed expedient by the persons who are entrusted with its administration, whereby it certainly does operate most perniciously on the morals of such women as are under the ne- cessity of seeking parochial relief. The ordinary practice in workhouses, I know not whether there are any in which a better system has been adopted, is to put the adult female paupers into one class, so that they all live in the same room, and spend their whole time together. Now everybody who is acquainted with our workhouses, is aware that a great propor- tion of the female inmates ever consists of those who resort to them to bring forth the offspring of their sin. Thus a large part of the most abandoned women within the limits of each Union are herded together; and with these the rest of the female pau- pers have to associate all the day long. Yet, even as a matter of right, surely it is a most unjustifiable insult and wrong to the virtuous maidens and mothers, who at times are compelled by 64 NOTE E. distress to take up their abode in a workhouse, that they should thus be doomed to a constant intercourse with the worst women for ten miles round. It is a crime to punish them for their poverty by condemning them to be thus shockt and dis- gusted. And how terrible must be the demoralizing effect pro- duced on the pure and modest maiden and matron by the con- versation, to which in such company they must perpetually be exposed I Nay, even among the wretched women who seek shelter in the workhouse, there must needs be very dif- ferent degrees of depravity, from the girl whose weakness has just been seduced out of the path of a life hitherto blame- less, down to those who have been hardened by continued prostitution. But the natural result of such intercourse is for the lowest to drag down the rest to their own miserable level. Hence it is a national duty to demand that a strict system of classification shall be laid down for the female paupers in our workhouses. Let the modest women live together ; but let them be preserved from the degradation and pollution of a com- pulsory association with the profligate: and with regard to the latter too care should be taken that the lingering remains of better feelings should not be rudely trampled on and extinguisht, that the workhouse should not be a place for rendering all the women who enter it utterly shameless. The regulations necessary for this purpose should be imposed by the Commissioners ; for it will require some trouble and expense to carry them out, from which some Boards of Guardians might perhaps shrink : but the expense will be as a grain of dust, in comparison with the tre- mendous evil which it is to counteract ; and, like every outlay for a moral purpose, it will bring in an abundant return, even in an economical point of view. Of all sources of national wealth, the best and surest is the moral character of the people. NOTE F. 65 NOTE F : p. 32. HAVING spoken somewhat strongly on this point, I feel bound to add in this Note, that, when our present Bishop, in the autumn of 1843, issued his Pastoral Letter, directing that a general parochial collection should be made in aid of our Diocesan Associa- tion, with especial reference to the works it has undertaken for the improvement of Education, there were only five parishes in this Archdeaconry that did not respond to his call. In some at least of these five the omission must have been owing to acci- dent ; and all, 1 hope, will be anxious to repair the misfor- tune of their previous deficiency by a twofold liberality when another occasion is offered to them. That this must needs occur before long, is evident from the present state of our finances. The inevitable expenses of maintaining our two Training Schools are still considerably beyond our regular income : yet I should shrink with grief and shame from the thought that we can ever be reduced to the necessity of giving up Institutions, which were establisht in the trust that the Christian spirit of the Diocese would readily supply the funds requisite for their support, and which of all institutions are the most needed, nay, are absolutely indispensable, if the Church is to fulfill her duty of training up the hearts and minds of her children for an intelligent reception of the truths committed to her keeping. In our days the question is no longer, whether the lower orders shall have a Christian education, or shall be left in ignorance, to walk in the traditional faith of their fathers. The alternative is, whether they shall have Chris- tian instruction, or only unchristian ; whether they shall be abandoned, without any means of defending themselves, to the restless propagaters of infidelity, or shall be prepared to encounter them by being enabled to give a reason for their faith. But if they are to be so prepared, we need a large body of intelligent Christian teachers, a body scarcely less numerous than that of our parochial Clergy ; and it is to supply this pressing and momentous 66 NOTE F. want that our Training Schools have been establisht. All the re- ports of their progress, and of the conduct of the teachers who have been trained in them, encourage us to hope that, under God's bless- ing, they will prove efficient instruments for the preservation of His people in the faith and knowledge of His Son. Therefore /ir) yeVotro that we should ever be compelled to relinquish them. This thought is not to be entertained for a moment, but only how we may render them fitter for the execution of their great and godly purpose. Nor is it to be regretted that we should have to call upon our parishioners for their support : rather is it desirable that the great body of the inhabitants of every parish in the Diocese should be invited every year to bear part in the good works which the Church is carrying on. One of the best ways of ele- vating their character will be by bringing them to recognise their Christian privilege of caring for the moral and spiritual wants of all to whom they are united by the bonds of Christian brotherhood. NOTE G : p. 85. THE feelings exprest in the text have doubtless been enter- tained by many who have not given voice to them. Indeed I cannot well conceive that any one of a Christian frame of mind can have allowed his thoughts to dwell for a moment on the abuse here reprehended, without being struck by its glaring repug- nance to the principles of the Gospel. It has given me much satisfaction to find that a change somewhat like the one here recommended has been adopted in the Eeports of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for 1 844 and 1 845 ; at the end of which, instead of the old lists of all the subscribers, there is merely a table of the sums received from the various District and Parochial Associations. Even in a financial view the change would be beneficial, as greatly diminishing the labour of making out the lists, and the expense of printing ; only it is still deemed requi- site to give full lists of the subscribers in the special Diocesan NOTE G. 67 Reports. We may hope however that this too will ere long be found to be superfluous. A comparison of the Reports for 1841 and 1845 shews that the efforts which have been made to awaken a livelier interest in the missionary work of the Church, have not been wholly un- availing : for the contributions from this Diocese, which in 1841 were only 535, amounted in 1845 to 1360. I mention this as an encouragement to those who have taken part in these efforts, that they may persevere, and, having done thus much, may strive to do more ; and also as an inducement to those who have hitherto been withheld by the fear that their parishioners could not be led to care for objects so remote from the concerns of their daily life. Let us all resolve that we will at least do some- thing ; and if we act heartily upon this resolution, we shall do more than we dream of. The number of parishes in this Diocese being about three hundred, surely it is not unreasonable to expect that they should raise a sum amounting on an average to ten pounds a parish, for the great work of propagating the Gospel in the vast colonies and dependencies of the English Empire. The sum we raise at present does not amount to five pounds a parish : but let us endeavour to double it ; and doubtless in time we shall do so. And when we have doubled it, why should we not hope to double it again ? Our worldly riches have multiplied prodigiously during the last fifty years : hitherto there has not been a pro- portionate increase in the portion of them given to God : but why should there not be ? NOTE H : p. 38. IT would have been out of place in the Charge itself, to have entered into a discussion of the painful controversy which has arisen out of the institution of the Jerusalem Bishopric. But as the controversy has not subsided even now, though the Bishopric has existed for five years, as the attacks upon it have been carried on with unscrupulous virulence, and often with little F 2 68 NOTE H. regard for truth, as men of high character, not merely for learning, but for holiness, have not shrunk from making use of gross misrepresentations and personalities for the sake of kindling an odium against it, as the plainest, most palpable demonstration of the incorrectness of these misrepresentations has not induced the authors to retract them, while their reputation has gained credence for their mis-statements with those who, knowing little, are ready to think evil, of whatever lies without the pale of our own Church, and has thus excited a prejudice against the Bishopric, which its friends, not suspecting the artifices used by its opponents, are not well able to refute, there is much need that somebody should set forth a brief, simple view of the original scheme, whereby it will be cleared at once from a number of these misrepresentations and misapprehensions. Moreover, as by two several invitations addrest to the Clergy of this Archdeaconry I called upon them to express their approbation of the measure, and as these invitations were hailed with cordial sympathy by a large part of them, I have incurred a sort of obligation to vindicate it ; since, in giving their public sanction to it, many may have been influenced more or less by a reliance on the judgement of their Archdeacon ; so that, if it is really objectionable, either on religious grounds, or as a violation of sound ecclesiastical principles, he has made himself responsible for their errour, as well as for his own. Now in order to arrive at a right understanding on this matter, it is requisite that we should recur to the original idea and pur- pose of the Jerusalem Bishopric ; with regard to which we are happily supplied with an abundance of documentary evidence. The scheme originated, as is well known, in the mind of the great and good King, whom God, for the blessing of his own country and of Christendom, has placed upon the throne of Prussia. Amid the momentous cares which prest upon him from all sides at his accession, within six weeks of it, when he signed the Treaty of the 15th of July 1840 for the preser- vation of the Porte, one main inducement with him to become a party to that Treaty, we are informed in the Official Statement of the Proceedings with regard to the Bishopric, was the hope NOTE H. 69 of effecting something for the protection of Christians in the Turkish Empire. " His first thought was, that such a singular opportunity ought to be used for the good of the Holy Land, and of all Christendom, in the true spirit of the Evangelical Confession, and for the special advantage of its members. It seemed to him possible and eminently desirable that the powers of Christendom should come to an understanding with each other, and with the Porte which called for their protection, on these points, particularly with regard to the Holy Land; and that this would have been a noble, a holy alliance, injurious to none, glorious to the present time, beneficial to the future" (pp. 27, 30). Negotiations were commenced for this end, but without the desired result : some of the contracting parties seem to have been unwilling to enter into any such engagement. Still the King would not give up the hope of carrying his plan into effect, at least for his own Protestant Confession ; and of this he took the widest view, looking at it not merely in his own kingdom of Prussia, but as extending through all Germany, nay, as embracing the whole Protestant body. " Where now (it is askt in the Official Statement) was the point to start from? It was to be one which should preclude all sus- picion of selfish views, which should of itself condemn all exclusiveness, and in which the primary principles of the independence of each member and the union of all should find the clearest possible enunciation." The King desired " to obtain a centre for all the national Churches of the Evangelical Con- fession, that might be willing to join in the scheme either now or hereafter ; an institution which should not be subject to any exclusive rights, still less dependent on the commands of any civil power, or destined solely for one Confession, for one language, for one form of worship. To connect this with some- thing already existing seemed to him the only right course, the only one consistent with the will of God. Now certain English Christians, members of the Society for the Conversion of the Jews, had procured a piece of ground a few years before on Mount Zion to build a church and schools. The building was 70 NOTE H. already begun; and divine service was performed in English, in Hebrew, and also in German, for Christians residing there, and for Jewish converts." Here was the starting-point. " The object however was to transform the small foundation of a private society into an independent Church, and to place this under the protection of the two chief Protestant powers" (p. 31> In the Instructions given to his Minister, a paper evidently drawn up by the King himself, and such as has rarely proceeded from any soverein, after speaking of the necessity that the Protestant Church should shew itself at Jerusalem, like the other branches of the Church, as one distinct body, in order to obtain a recog- nition of the rights of its members, he continues : " But his Majesty's conviction that the Evangelical Church ought to come forward on this occasion, as united in a common faith, rests mainly on higher grounds. The present aspect of Turkish affairs, which manifestly has not been brought about without divine guidance, and especially the political relation of England and Prussia with Turkey, have for the first time afforded a possibility for Evangelical Christendom to demand a position in the birth- place of Christianity, by the side of the ancient Churches of the East, and over against that of Rome, as a coordinate member of the Universal Church of Christ ; so that the Gospel may be preacht freely, and that the members of the Evangelical Con- fession may enjoy liberty and security of worship. This moment is an important one in the history of the world : according as we attend to it and use it, or overlook and neglect it, will the Evangelical Church be judged by History and by God. His Ma- jesty cannot doubt that Evangelical Christendom owes it to her- self and to her Lord, at such a moment, in such a place, not to exhibit the scandal of her disunion and division, but rather the good example of unity in faith, and union in action. She desires to come forward there, along with the other eccle- siastical bodies, and in presence of the Jews and Mahometans, not for the sake of persecuting, of dispossessing, of excluding, not to quarrel, to dissolve: she desires to proclaim her mission to the world, not as a work of hatred and jealousy, but as NOTE H. 71 a message of love, of peace, and of concord. How then can it be the will of the Lord, that, when appearing for the first time in the Holy Land, for such a purpose, with such words in her mouth, she should unfurl the standard of her internal divisions and dissensions? Are not her missions generally, at once the pulsation of her common life, and the evidence of the difficulty of establishing real Churches, of forming and training Christian nations, while she is thus insulated and separated, and in such want of ecclesiastical superintendence ? And where can this inward evil be more grievous, than in that land, amid that concourse of all opposite forms of Christianity, beside the three Patriarchates, and the Colony of Rabbies, in the presence of the Mosque of Omar, and of the foundations of the Temple of Jerusalem ? Does it not seem then to lie in the counsels of God, that in the missions of the Evangelical Church the feeling of the union and connexion of all her members over the whole globe should be kindled 1 Does it not seem especially at the present moment to be the loving purpose of the Lord of the Church, that in the ancient Land of Promise, on the place of His earthly ministry, not only should Israel be brought to a knowledge of His salvation, but also that the several Evangelical Churches, grounded on the everlasting foundation of the Gospel, and on the rock of faith in the Son of the Living God, should forget their divisions, be reminded of their unity, and stretch out the hand of peace and union to each other over the cradle and grave of the Redeemer ? His Majesty on his part will not hesitate on this occasion to hold out his hand trustfully to the Episcopal Church of England, which combines evangelical prin- ciples with a historical constitution aiming at universality, and with ecclesiastical independence. His Majesty, in the spirit of apostolical Catholicity, and in the expectation of a like spirit on the part of the English Church, feels no scruple to declare his readiness, in all missionary countries where this Church has an Episcopate, to allow the clergy and missionaries of his national Church to attach themselves thereto, and for this end to obtain episcopal ordination, which the English Church requires for 72 NOTE H. admission to the ministry. He will take care that this ordination shall always be recognised in his dominions. More especially his Majesty is resolved to do everything in the Holy Land, that can be expected from a Christian King, to facilitate united action in behalf of the Gospel. The English Church is in possession of an ecclesiastical establishment on Mount Zion ; and his Majesty holds it to be the duty of all Evangelical Princes and communities to unite themselves to this establishment, as the starting and central point of their combined action. For his Majesty looks upon this as a ground of great hope for the future destinies of Evangelical Christendom. In the first place a visible centre and a living lever will manifestly be obtained thereby for all its missions in the whole compass of the Turkish Empire, and in the original seats of Christianity ; and when, this lever is once set in motion, its power will soon become felt from Abyssinia even to Armenia. Moreover another object, which in itself is highly desirable and important, will be attained. A neutral Christian region will thus be gained in the simplest manner, removed beyond the confines of narrowing nationalities, where, through the blessing of God, by the common action of faithful love, a progressive union of Evangelical Christians may be prepared more readily than under any other circumstances. Naturally however it cannot be his Majesty's purpose, in such a union, to sacrifice or endanger the independence of the National Church of his own country. According to his Majesty's view, a true living Evangelical exhibition of Catholicity is only con- ceivable, if the unity is to be grounded on the divinely ordained multiplicity of tongues and nations, with a recognition of the whole individuality and historical development of each nation and country. Every national Church has without doubt, like the people that belongs to it, her own peculiar calling in the great scheme and unfolding of the Kingdom of God. Nay, every narrower, smaller Christian community in a Christian country has no less unquestionably a calling and a duty to seek out a peculiar sphere within the universal Church for those works of love, for which it has received a particular destination and NOTE H. 73 a particular blessing. Especially his Majesty, as a German Prince, and King of his own country, has the liveliest conviction that the Evangelical Christianity of the German people is called to occupy an independent place in every exhibition of such an Evangelical Apostolical Catholicity, so long as the word of God is preacht in the German language, and His praise is sung in the German tongue. His Majesty lives in the hope that, even in this present century, the position of the Evangelical Church of Germany, as soon as she becomes duly aware of this her calling, will be on a level with the whole spiritual and political posi- tion of the people from whom the blessed work of the Reformation issued three hundred years ago. In accordance with these views and convictions, the proposed confidential negotiations with the English Church must be guided by two main principles. The one is the utmost possible unity of action between the two Churches in the Turkish Empire, and especially in the Holy Land: the other must be respect for the independence of the German Evangelical Church, and for the nationality of the German people. The first condition and beginning of this common action, his Majesty conceives, should be, that the English Church should erect a Bishopric of her own at Jerusalem. The foun- dation for this has already been laid, as it were, by a special interposition. The first results of the Mission to Jerusalem justify the fairest hopes ; but its check and present trou- bled condition seem urgently to call for the establishment of such a Bishopric. Episcopal superintendence and decision on the spot will alone be availing : a government exercised from Malta would not seem to his Majesty either a satisfactory or a truly Apostolic institution. The Bishopric to be erected at Jerusalem would therefore connect itself with the institutions and buildings already begun on Mount Zion, and would com- prehend all Evangelical Christians in the Holy Land, who may be willing to take part in it. The generous sentiments which have recently been exprest at a meeting of the friends of the English Church under the presidency of the venerable Arch- bishop of Canterbury, seem to his Majesty a sure pledge that 74 NOTE H. so seasonable and purely Christian a purpose as the establishment of permanent Churches in Missionary countries, will in this instance also be carried out worthily." Such was the proposition which came from the King of Prussia in the summer of 1841, and was laid before the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. One prompted by a purer spirit of Christian love never proceeded from any soverein. Certain of the theological or ecclesiastical views implied in it may indeed be startling to some, whose own views have been drawn from a different aspect of the Church, and who conceive that what is positive must always be fenced in by a thick palisade of negations : such persons are apt to fume, if any one dares to suppose that different ecclesiastical bodies can exist side by side without falling to loggerheads. On the other hand in our own Statement, published by authority, expressions occur, which might indicate that hostility to the Church of Rome was one of the motives of the institution ; and this seems to have alarmed and irritated our hankerers after Popery. But in the King of Prussia's Instructions there is not a word of the sort ; and in the further exposition of his views by his Minister it is said (p. 60), that, "as the Evangelical community at Jeru- salem is to exercise brotherly love and peace toward the Romish Church, which, like ours, is a stranger there, and to confine herself to the repudiation of usurpations, should any arise, it cannot be her calling to take a polemical position over against the other Churches, which do not assert any claims to dominion over forein bodies." Now what feelings must the receit of such a proposition have excited in the two Bishops ? Can any Chris- tian heart do otherwise than rejoice and give thanks to God, for having raised up such a soverein in this perilous crisis of His Church, and admire and love the King, who thus made the glory of God, and the increase of the Church, the first object of his reign? M. Eichhorn indeed, in his official announcement of the measure, spoke also of commercial and scientific advan- tages to be expected from it. Perhaps he may have thought that a political measure dictated solely by religious motives was NOTE H. 75 incongruous with the spirit of the age, and have deemed it expedient to propitiate that spirit by urging other motives more congenial to it : perhaps he himself could not enter fully into the King's pure Christian zeal : at all events in the King's Instructions there is no such allusion, nor room for any; nor, if such ends had been contemplated, could there well have been a more round-about mode of compassing them. How then, I ask, were the two Bishops to treat this proposition ? Ought they to have rejected it ? No one, I believe, has dared to say that. Remorse and shame would have been their portion, had they done so. Yet, be it remembered, this was the state of the ease. The impugners of the measure have talkt in solemn phrases about the duty of waiting for God's own time, of not intruding impatiently to hasten the designs of Providence. But what is meant by waiting for God's own time ? Does it mean that we are to shut our eyes, and open our mouths, and sit quiet till the cherry drops into them ? The King of Prussia saw the purpose of God in the opportunity which was granted to him of acting for the glory of God, and for the good of the Church, and of his own people. Surely this is waiting God's time : we are to wait watching, in order to seize it by the fore- lock as soon as it comes, not to let it pass by. And did not the measure come to the Bishops almost as a sign from God, commanding them to act for His glory, and for the good of the English, and of the German, yea, of the whole Church ? They had not sought it ; but it came to them. What sign can there be that God wills we should act, stronger and clearer than when the opportunity and means are placed before us, without any concert, without the slightest anticipation on our part, by a person having full authority to act, manifestly influenced by the desire of God's glory, and calling upon us to join with him in working for it. Moreover the proposition was brought to them just at the time when their hearts were already full of similar schemes, us it were in fulfilment of the promise that to him who has shall be given : for it was soon after the Meeting at which resolutions were past to raise funds for sending Bishops to all our Colonies : 76 NOTE H. and this determination on our part, which is alluded to in the King's Instructions, may perhaps have helpt in giving shape to his purpose of taking advantage of the state of affairs in the East for the good of the Protestant Churches. The Archbishop too, in the Charge which he had delivered in the previous summer, had exprest his pious longings for the very objects, the opportunity of effecting which was now placed before him. " I would (he there says, p. 32) it were possible to extend this great principle of unity to all the Churches of Christendom. The dissensions which separated the Churches of the East and the West, and the corruptions and intolerance which drove the Protestants from the communion of Rome, have been most in- jurious to the Catholic Church. A reconciliation would indeed be desirable. But reunion with Rome has been rendered im- possible by the sinister policy of the Council of Trent, which, dreading the result of discussion on many disputed points, made no scruple of multiplying articles of faith, which, however erroneous, can never be disclaimed by that Church till she abandons her pretensions to infallibility. Yet I am not without hope that more cordial union may in time be effected among all Protestant Churches , nor do I think it improbable, that the gradual admission of light in the East may improve the condition of those ancient Churches which have groaned so long under the oppression of infidels, may induce them to try their creeds by the standard of Scripture, and dispose them to friendly communications with our own Church." Had the Archbishop been able to look into the King of Prussia's heart, and to discern the purposes which were teeming there, he could scarcely have exprest a more distinct anticipation of the measure in which he was to be invited to cooperate a year after, and which he therefore could hardly fail to regard as a special act of Providence, vouchsafed almost in immediate answer to his prayer. At all events this coincidence between two persons, so differently situated, and yet, from their position, the very two persons on whose concurrent goodwill the accomplishment of the scheme must mainly depend, their contemporaneous aspirations after NOTE H. 77 union among the Protestant Churches, and with the Churches of the East, as something not merely desirable, but which the posture of the world seemed to bring within the sphere of practicability, prove that the measure, which was proposed with such zeal by the one, and accepted with such cordial thankfulness by the other, was in the highest sense seasonable, and in accordance with the signs and with the wants of the times. It is true, though the King's proposition was substantially so pure and godly, so fitted to awaken joy and thankfulness in every Christian heart, there might still be something in the form of the measure, that should have made the Bishops pause before they adopted it ; pause, I say, before they adopted it ; not, reject it. For we cannot well be in a position where it becomes our duty to reject a great good ; though the general structure of existing forms and circumstances may easily be so far repug- nant to that which we are called to incorporate therewith, as to impose the duty of modifying its form to remove or lessen that repugnancy, and to bring it into some sort of harmony with the previous order of things : indeed it is through such a repugnancy that a novelty becomes what is called an innovation. To reject good altogether, because it does not fit at once into the trammels of custom and convention, is the course of a crampt pettifogging formalism, through the noxious influence of which establisht forms so often wane away and stiifen into lifeless skeletons. No great good can come forth, without being at variance with the trammels of custom, without, so to say, breaking the shell. But who would crush the bird, because it breaks its shell ? Forms must yield, must expand, must reshape themselves, when new modes of good are rising into outward manifestation. They ought to be clothes, not chains, to be elastic, in recognition that the clothes are made for the man, not the man for the clothes. The chief objections which have been brought forward against the Jerusalem Bishopric, may be ranged under two heads. One class of them turns upon its alledged incompatibleness with the Canons of our Church ; and this has been urged the most pro- minently by Mr Hope, in a pamphlet written with great ability, 78 NOTE II. powerful both from his logical dexterity and his legal know- ledge, and exemplarily temperate in style. He shews, with a good deal of ingenuity, that our Bishop at Jerusalem cannot perform any act in the way of fulfilling the King of Prussia's purpose, the special purpose for which his office was instituted, without violating some one or other of our Canons. He pinions the poor Bishop down with Canons, and manacles him, and fetters him, and then defies him to move, exclaiming that, if he does move, he will break some Canon, and thereby cut himself off from the Church of England. Yet all this rather reminds us of the puzzle, by which a complicated net of packthread is woven round a child's finger, so that it seems bound inextricably, until the child is bid to pull back its finger, which slips through, and the whole net unravels at once. The main difference is, that Mr Hope shews no sign of any like purpose to let his captive escape. Able however as his pamphlet is, it is altogether the work of an advocate ; and we know how easy it is for a clever advocate to make out a very plausible, and what to us laymen may seem an incontrovertible case. In fact one may feel con- fident that this whole argument about the Canons can never have really convinced any one, not even Mr Hope himself. There must needs have been a foregone conclusion, on the strength of which he set himself to draw up as strong a plea as he could ; and most of those who adopt his arguments, do so under the influence of a like foregone conclusion. For why ? The Canons, on which so much stress is laid, were manifestly never intended for the state of things now in question : they were not framed in the contemplation of any such event as the invitation to establish the Jerusalem Bishopric : consequently, in applying them to it, we must be guided by induction and analogy. They refer entirely to the internal regulation and discipline of our own Church, not to her relations with other Churches. That they were not designed to bear on the latter, is plain, not merely from the absence of all reference thereto in the Canons themselves, but also from the practice of our Church toward forein Protestants during the whole century in the middle of which they were NOTE H. 79 enacted. It would be interesting and useful, if some person verst in the ecclesiastical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would collect the evidence of the relations which then subsisted between our Church and the forein Protestants, as evinced both by the language of our most authoritative writers, and by any ecclesiastical acts of which a record is preserved. I much doubt whether it would be possible to shew that there was at any time a distinct, deliberate purpose of excluding them from our communion ; and there would be an abundance of proofs that practically they were not excluded. Even the Romanists, though we regarded them, and not without ample cause, as the enemies of our Church, were not excommunicated by us, but by their own act and deed ; and surely we did not use a harsher measure toward those whom we lookt upon as our friends, united to us in the same great cause of upholding the truth of the Gospel and the pure worship of God. The fact, to which Mr Hope alludes, that the Lutherans had a separate place of worship even in the reign of Elizabeth, did not arise from their being precluded from joining in our worship : it was a privilege granted to them, in that they were allowed to celebrate divine worship in their own language, and in the form to which they had been accustomed; just as our refugees were at Frankfort in the reign of Mary. Nor is there more force in the argument which Mr Hope (p. 15) founds on the clause in the Act of the 12th and 13th of William the 3d for the Limitation of ike Croum, that " whosoever shall come to the possession of this crown shall join in communion with the Church of England." On the strength of these words Mr Hope maintains, that " Protestantism, which qualifies for the succession to the English Crown (such as Lu- theranism), does not imply communion with the English Church ; for this is to be obtained by a separate act ; and this act, let me add, must be according to the laws of the Church of Eng- land." Now surely these conclusions shoot far beyond the mark. The first legitimate inference from this provision con- cerning the succession is, that the Church of England was re- garded by the Legislature and by the Nation as a Protestant 80 NOTE H. Church, and the Reformed Churches on the Continent as sister Churches, not indeed as identically the same with our National Church, this is inconsistent with the very idea of a National Church, but as sister branches of the Universal Church. Next, as the specific proviso was manifestly introduced in anticipation of the Hanoverian succession, it does indeed imply that the Electors of Hanover were not in actual communion with the Church of England ; which, having spent all their lives in Ger- many, they could not be. But it no way implies that they were not regarded as admissible to the communion of our Church ; rather does it imply the very contrary : for the act whereby they were to join in that communion was assuredly nothing more than coming to the Lord's Table to receive it. Mr Hope indeed, after saying that they were to "obtain this communion by a separate act, and that this act was to be according to the laws of the Church of England," explains his meaning by applying the injunctions of the Rubrics and Canons to all foreiners, in- sisting that, they must " be instructed in the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Church Catechism, and are then to be brought to the Bishop to be confirmed ; after which, and upon conformity to the Liturgy, they may be admitted to the Holy Communion." Yet it is hard to believe that so intelligent a person could gravely intend to assert, it was the intention of our Legislature to require that the Elector of Hanover, on coming over to England, should say the Catechism to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and should then seek confir- mation at his hands, thereby repudiating and stigmatizing all the ordinances of his own Church as invalid, his baptism perhaps excepted, the validity of which Mr Hope seems to recognise, in p. 20. Still less can we believe him to suppose that our first two Georges did actually go through this pro- cess ; though, unless this was his meaning, his fact contradicts his argument. At all events, however strong his own persuasion may be that such was the case, he will scarcely induce any sober- minded person to adopt that persuasion, unless he can cite some historical evidence of this most apocryphal fact. Till such NOTE H. 81 evidence is laid before us, the reasonable part of the world will rather assume that, as I said above, the act whereby the Electors of Hanover joined in the communion of our Church, was by presenting themselves at the Lord's Table. Nay, although, when the King of Prussia came over to England as Sponsor to the Prince of Wales, a person was found simple- hearted enough to exhort him to qualify himself for that office by submitting to be confirmed anew by one of our Bishops, without bethinking himself of the ferment and indignation which such an act must have caused in every Protestant con- gregation in his dominions, I can hardly believe that, even from among the Nonjurors, any person can have come with such a proposition to George the First. But further, can any single instance be adduced, in which an adult member of the Lutheran Church has been required to be confirmed anew, before he could be admitted to the Lord's Table ? We may presume that there can hardly be such an instance ; for, had one been discoverable, Mr Hope would have cited it, and his party would have dinned it in our ears. On the other hand numberless instances must have occurred, during the three centuries since the Reformation, of forein Protestants admitted to commu- nion in our Church without any such requirement ; and this has been done repeatedly by the first dignitaries of our Church. Besides a great number of forein Protestants have been ordained to our Ministry, especially as missionaries ; and even on these solemn occasions they have not had to go through those preparatory steps, which Mr Hope pronounces to be indispensable before they can be admitted to our communion ? Mr Hope indeed would fain evade this difficulty by asserting, in p. 14, that this has never been done, "except through the irregular conduct of individuals :" but when that which he calls " the irregular conduct of individuals," has been the uniform practice in our Church for three centuries, sanctioned over and over again by Primate after Primate, we shall hardly feel warranted in condemning that practice, because it is at variance with a most questionable interpretation of Rubrics and Canons drawn up 82 NOTE H. two or three centuries ago, an interpretation directly repugnant to the principles of our 34th Article, which recognises the au- thority of " every particular or national Church to ordain, change, and abolish ceremonies or rites." For surely this recognition admits that, notwithstanding the diversity of ceremonies and rites, Churches may be in communion with each other ; whereas Mr Hope's argument is, that no Church can be in communion with ours, unless it adopts the same rites and ceremonies. Every lawyer knows what great weight is attacht to the decisions of our Judges in the interpretation of our Common and Statute Law: and somewhat similar to this must be the authority of the uniform unreproved practice of our Bishops in the in- terpretation of our Ecclesiastical Law ; the need of which authority for such a purpose must be the greater, because our Canons were enacted so long since, under a very different state of things, as Mr Hope himself urges with much force in p. 60 ; and there has been no legitimate authority to modify and adapt them to the different wants of our age. Hence we may judge what importance is due to Mr Hope's elaborate attempt to make out, that, if our Bishop at Jerusalem does not strictly enforce these Canons in his dealings with the foreiners who may wish to place themselves under his spiritual jurisdiction, in other words, if he does not wholly nullify the very design for which the Bishopric was primarily establisht, he will be guilty of perjury. Were it not deemed the business of an advocate to bring forward every argument by which he can gain the slightest shadow of support for his cause. Mr Hope would hardly have thought of devising a grave charge of perjury against a person in the very peculiar position of our Bishop at Jerusalem, if he should not conform to our Canons, a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear, Canons which are con- tinually violated in divers ways by every minister of our Church from the Primate down to the Deacons ordained in the last Ember-week, and which have been repeatedly violated, one need not hesitate to say, by every minister of our Church during the last hundred years. In a Court of Conscience assuredly the NOTE H. 83 Bishop might reply to any clergyman who dared to insinuate such a charge, He that is without, sin amongst you, let Mm cast the first stone at me : and when considering the matter before the more solemn tribunal within his own breast, he will probably come to the conclusion, that, if he observes our Canons as they have been observed by the body of our Bishops for the last two centuries, having respect at the same time to his peculiar circumstances, and the distinctive purpose of his mission, he will do what is right before God. In conformity to the common practice of the most conscientious persons with regard to disciplinary rules and statutes, transmitted, without adaptation to existing circumstances, from a bygone age, he will interpret his obligation by the help of usage, and, should any novel case arise, by the judgement of those who, even if they have not the power of dispensing with the rules, or remodeling them, must be taken, in the present state of things, as their authoritative expounders. In fact Mr Hope himself is well aware of this. What he says about perjury is manifestly little else than a brutum fulmen. He feels that the stress of the question lies elsewhere. Therefore he taxes all his ingenuity to prove that our Bishopric at Jerusalem is in all material respects exactly similar to any other See of our Church, and that it does not involve any peculiar relations with forein Protestants. Now this was no easy matter, seeing that the new Bishopric was no spontaneous creation of the English Church, but was originally suggested and prompted by the King of Prussia, and was avowedly erected by our Church in some sort of coopera- tion with him; seeing too that the essential feature in his plan was the establishment of a peculiar relation between our Church and his in the East. But Mr Hope, rightly laying down that Prussian Statepapers can have no authority with our Church, proceeds somewhat hastily to push aside the Prussian official documents altogether, which, at the time when he wrote, alone gave anything like a full account of the objects of the new measure ; and, in determining the character of that measure, he confines himself wholly to the very scanty information which had then been supplied by our Government civil and spiritual. Of G 2 84 NOTE H. this far the most important part at that time was the Act of Parliament, which gave authority for the consecration of the New Bishop, and which, in speaking of his jurisdiction, enacts, that he may exercise " spiritual jurisdiction over the ministers of British congregations, and over such other Protestant congregations as may be desirous of placing themselves under his authority." To evade the force of these words, Mr Hope asks (p. 22), " whether every English Bishop has not the same power over every Pro- testant congregation which is willing to place itself under him," by adopting our Liturgy, and being incorporated into our Church- Hence he contends that this is the only way in which forein Protestants can place themselves under the spiritual jurisdiction of our Bishop at Jerusalem : they must be received into our Church one by one, and they must adopt our Liturgy. This interpretation he tries to confirm by the Report of what the Archbishop of Can- terbury said, on moving the third reading of the Bill, a Report which occupies just ten lines of his pamphlet, and by divers processes of logical induction. Now, had it so happened that Mr Hope had come forward to maintain the opposite side, it would have been pleasant to see how ingeniously he would have exposed the fallacies in his own argument. He would of course have remarkt that the speeches on Bills, which do not excite any lively interest in Parliament, are hardly ever reported so as to convey any notion of their contents, and that, unless the Archbishop had invented some new machine for the condensation of thought, he could never have explained the purpose and bearings of such a complicated measure as the Jerusalem Bishopric in the space of ten lines, which in fact state little else than that the Bill had received the sanction of the civil Government. Surely too Mi- Hope would have urged that, if there are two ways of inter- preting the same words, one, and that the most palpable, which gives them a definite meaning, and another according to which they are mere surplusage, the former is to be preferred, even in the construction of an Act of Parliament, at least of those parts of it which set forth the specific purposes of the Act. Again, if Mr Hope's vigilance had not been exhausted in his exertions to NOTE H. 85 make out a plausible case from such scanty and reluctant materials, he could not have failed to perceive that, while he maintains (in p. 20) that the German Protestants who " desire to be ad- mitted to communion, must come, not as a body, but as in- dividuals, not asserting an independent collective existence, but desiring to be adopted by and incorporated into the Church," the words of the Act, empowering the Bishop to exercise spiritual jurisdiction " over such Protestant Congregations as may be desirous of placing themselves under his authority," manifestly imply the reverse, that the Protestants are to come, not as in- dividuals, but as a body, and to continue as a body under the Bishop's spiritual jurisdiction. For the spiritual jurisdiction exer- cised over the Protestant congregations is plainly not to be a mo- mentary act, confined to the transfer of them from their own Church into ours, but a continuous course of action : and Mr Hope, after putting the alternative, that this spiritual jurisdiction must either be exercised by admitting them to communion, or else, if they are not in communion, " by declaring them formally excom- municate" (p. 23),'himself rejects the latter supposition, and adopts the former, on account of certain expressions used in the first public notice which was given to our Church of the intention to erect a Bishopric at Jerusalem. Moreover, if there had been no special prepossessions to obscure Mr Hope's view, he would doubtless have discerned, that, though the Prussian official docu- ments are not the proper source from which our Church is to draw her knowledge of the character and objects of the new institution, yet, seeing that it is acknowledged on all hands to be the result of a negociation and compact with the King of Prussia, the interpre- tation put upon the measure by the Prussian Government must needs be a material element for determining its real nature; so long at least as we are left without some authoritative declaration to the contrary. In truth, if the Bishopric which the English Government and the two Prelates of our Church intended to establish at Jerusalem, was designed by them to be nothing else than what Mr Hope asserts the Jerusalem Bishopric to be, I know not how it would be possible to acquit them of having 86 NOTE H. practist a scandalous fraud on the King of Prussia, who, it is clear, had acted throughout in godly simplicity and good faith ; a fraud which, in ordinary life, would be termed a shameful piece of swindling, and might probably be punisht by transportation ; and which, " considering (as Mr. Hope says in p. 27) the special responsibility of a Bishop, I, for my own part, do not know how to qualify by any lighter name." Thus the conclusion to which Mi- Hope gets at the end of his pamphlet, and which he proclaims with a sort of triumph, that his arguments " go to the entire de- struction of the theory propounded in the Prussian document " (p. 36), and " exclude Prussian Protestants as a formal collective body from our Bishop's communion at Jerusalem " (p. 38), would at all events, if tenable, place our Prelates in this happy dilemma, that either they had wittingly been guilty of gross swindling in their deal- ings with the King of Prussia, or else that their conduct had been markt with such imbecillity, that, while intending to effect a cer- tain measure in conformity to a solemn engagement, they had so contrived the measure as wholly to violate that engagement. Were it not that common honesty is so often left out of account by zealots in ecclesiastical and religious controversies, as a vulgar thing unworthy of notice by those who are contesting about Canons and Rubrics, one should be surprised that an able and honorable man should acquiesce self-complacently in having brought his argument to an issue, by which at all events the King of Prussia was to be defrauded, whether our Bishops did it willingly, or through blundering stupidity. In his original pamphlet Mr Hope seems rather to propend to the former of these alternatives. At least the main object of that pamphlet was to shew that nothing had been done in the establish- ment of the new Bishopric to fulfill the expectation excited in the Prussian Government by the negociation with our Prelates ; though their first brief announcement of the scheme had distinctly declared their intention of fulfilling it. In the Postscript to his second edition however Mr Hope is forced to admit (p. 48), that " the Prussian Document is supported and confirmed in all ma- terial points " by the authoritative Statement which our Prelates NOTE H. 87 had then put forth. Hereupon one might have thought he would have abandoned his position. But no : arguments and facts are equally unavailing to shake a resolute man's conviction. Even when you fancy you have not left him a leg to stand on, he will fight, like Witherington, on his stumps. In the Statement it is naturally laid down that the new Bishop's jurisdiction is to be " exercised, as nearly as may be, according to the laws, canons, and customs of the Church of England." The rest of the Statement confirms the Prussian view of the case, and contradicts Mr Hope's : at the sight of this clause however he revives. Our Bishop at Jerusalem seemed to have got free from the ties which had been fashioned so dexterously to keep him motionless : but here is a prospect of slipping the strait waistcoat upon him again, with fresh unlookt for bandages. The statement not only subjects the new Bishop to the " canons" but also to the " laws and customs " of the Church of England ; which words, Mr. Hope presumes, " include the Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy, Cawdry's Case, Viner's Abridgement, tit. Prohibition, Comyns's Digest, tit. Prerogative, et hoc genus omne" What is the poor Bishop to do ? Must he not resign himself to his fate ? What would even Boniface have done, had he gone to Germany thus gagged and handcuft ? or Augustin, had he come thus to England ? Happily however there is still an escape. That little clause, as -nearly as may be, enables him to slip out of this strait waistcoat, as he had out of the pre- vious net. These words shew, that, in carrying out the great objects of his mission, as set forth in the rest of the Statement, he is to be guided, as far as may be consistent with their due execution, by the Canons, laws, and customs of our Church, not however to let the observance of those Canons and laws defeat the very work for which he was especially appointed. A short time after the publication of Mr Hope's second Edition, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Letter to the King of Prussia explicitly stated that the congregations of German Protestants under our Bishop at Jerusalem are to use a German Liturgy, taken from Liturgies used in Prussia, and that the candidates for holy orders, after having satisfied the Bishop as to their competency 88 NOTE H. and their soundness in the faith, are to be ordained on signing the three Creeds. I know not whether Mr Hope has ever drawn up a proof how this Letter still further confirms his whole view of the character of the Bishopric : but even Witherington, even Cynegirus, at last could not hold out longer. The rule with regard to ordination may indeed be termed a bold step : and so it certainly is in_days when a stiff and narrow formalism has been lifting up its head again : but it is all the more honorable on this account to those who had the courage to take it: and, while it is the legitimate consequence of the whole previous proceedings, it lays down, for the first time in these modern ages, what is the true ground of Christian Communion. I have engaged in this long examination of Mr Hope's pamphlet, because, while it certainly is very able and plausible, it is held up by the opponents of the Jerusalem Bishopric as unanswered and unanswerable. Yet answered it was at the time, and refuted in its main positions, most completely and triumphantly, as were also the other chief objections to the Bishopric, by the dear friend, who has since become my brother, in his Letters to the Bev. W. Palmer, and the Appendixes subjoined to them. In going over the same ground, I have had to use many of the same arguments ; and I have thought it advisable to enter more into details, because many persons are readily imposed upon by a show of technical precision, as though, when a lawyer fortifies himself with cases and Canons, his position must needs be impregnable. Thus much Mr Hope has certainly establisht, that, if the whole body of our Canons and Rubrics are to be set up as our terms of communion with forein Churches, no member of any Church, except our own, can ever be admitted to our communion : and we may wish this distinguisht champion of Catholic truth joy of such a discovery : we here see what the most enlarged mind may become under the bondage of ordinances ; we see to what slavery the Canonists, if they were allowed to have their way, would bring us. But he has not shew T n, on the contrary he has entirely past over the previous question, whether the whole body of our Canons and Rubrics were ever designed by our Church NOTE H. 89 to be her terms of communion with forein Churches ; and our un- varying practice since the Reformation, it seems to me, supported by the express declaration of our 34th Article, constrains us to conclude that they were not. On certain other technical difficulties, which were mooted against the institution of the new Bishopric, such as the sending of a Bishop into the see of another, and the establishment of a Bishopric of our Church on territory not subject to the English Crown, Mr Hope's decision is very satisfactory. In the present condition of the world and of the Church, divided as nations and Churches are, by languages, institutions, habits, modes of thought and feeling, the growth of many centuries, during which each nation and Church has been unfolding itself after its kind, it is plain that a rule, which belonged to and pre- supposed a wholly different state of things, is become inapplicable. It is neither practicable, nor desirable, that the members of our Church, who are residing in the south of Europe, or in Asia Minor and Syria and Egypt, should conform to the dominant Churches in those parts : and as the numbers of English living abroad are continually increasing through the ever in- creasing facilities of traveling, it becomes more and more the duty of our Church to provide pastoral care for her children in forein lands: nor should her pastors abroad be left with- out episcopal superintendence. It is also satisfactory to read Mi- Hope's recognition (p. 34), that, as " the Crown alone, or the Crown empowered by Parliament, has since the Reformation exer- cised the prerogative (of erecting new sees) within the British do- minions," as " it is by the Crown alone that many of our Colo- nial Bishoprics have been erected," and as, " in the erection of Bishop Alexander's see, the act of the Crown has been sanctioned by Parliament," and, " the Primate of the Church of England also concurred in the measure," " it may safely be asserted, that in all formal respects the Anglican See of Jerusalem has been as solemnly erected as any of our modern Bishoprics." Whether the opponents of the Bishopric will be equally satisfied with the quandary in which he leaves them, I know not. He suggests the means whereby they may attempt to repudiate what they may 90 NOTE H. deem irregular acts committed by the Bishop in his dealings with the forein Protestants under his spiritual jurisdiction ; " by raising the question formally in the Ecclesiastical Court of Canterbury, or before the Archbishop in person (p. 36)." On the questions of principle, which have been the real ground of the vehement opposition to the Jerusalem Bishopric, Mr Hope scarcely touches ; nor need I dwell long upon them. For they are continually coming forward in one shape or other in the ecclesiastical controversies of the day. As is mostly the case indeed, when parties grow heated, sundry misapprehensions arose, and added fresh fuel to the hostility : and the true source of the opposition was so palpably adverse to the spirit which has uni- formly prevailed in our Church, from the Reformation down to our days, that whatever might furnish a plea for caviling was sedu- lously scraped together. The measure was supposed by some to have been dictated by a spirit of hostility to Rome ; but for this notion, as we have seen above, there was not the slightest warrant. Others complained that we were going to disturb the tranquillity of the Greek Church. But the desire and purpose of the King of Prussia, we have seen, as well as of our own Prelates, was to make the new Bishopric the medium of a friendly intercourse with the Eastern Churches, especially with the Greek ; not indeed without a hope of helping thereby to promote the spiritual welfare of the Greek Church: such a wish however, if it do not vent itself insolently or indiscreetly, is not very reprehensible. Surely too, if, as is alledged, our ministers and missionaries in Syria and Asia Minor are often apt to make predatory incursions into the territory of the Greek Church, the proper way of checking this ten- dency, and of restoring the spirit which ought to prevail between sister Churches, must be by setting a Bishop over our mis- sionaries, specially charged to maintain amicable relations with the ancient Christians of the East. Doubtless in so doing he will have various difficulties to encounter : this however merely proves the need of the office, and of a man gifted with spiritual wisdom to fill it. Another alarm has been got up about our relations with the other Eastern Churches. Mr Hope here comes forward with NOTE H. 91 his law, and pronounces (p. 6) that " bodies holding any doctrine condemned by the first four general Councils are, in our law, heretical ; and an English Bishop will of course take care that he does not involve himself in their guilt." Of course he will. On this legal axiom, though the discussion is not suited to this place, I cannot, with all deference to Mr Hope's superior knowledge, refrain from expressing a doubt. For, though the Act of Elizabeth, in nar- rowing the bounds of heresy, as an offense cognisable by our courts, enacts that nothing shall be adjudged to be heresy, unless it had been adjudged to be heresy by the authority of the Canonical Scriptures, or by some of the first four General Councils, the proposition, that nothing else shall be adjudged to be heresy, is not convertible into this, that whatever those Councils condemned shall be adjudged to be heresy. As to the dread lest our Bishop should be implicated in the guilt of these heresies, it is almost amusing. Surely, if there be any place where the members of our Church are likely to be led astray by insidious heresies, this is the very place to which we ought to send a wise Bishop to watch over them. Or do those who are so fond of magnifying the episcopal office, mean that our Bishops are to lie in lavender, and that they must not venture into any spot where their lawn sleeves may run the risk of being soiled ? This is not their meaning, I know ; but they take up any argument to serve their turn. Even Dr. Pusey, in his Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (p. 121), ejaculates, " Your Grace will readily feel how shocking it would be to be thus brought close within the touch of heresy." Alas ! there are still remnants of that spirit which made it a matter of wonder that a Jew should ask water of a woman of Samaria ; of that pharisaical pride which cries Stand of, thou heretic ! and dare not come near to an or- thodox believer. Here I will insert an extract from the Prus- sian Minister's Exposition of his Royal Master's views ; and the reader may judge on which side the spirit of Christ is to be found, whether among the enemies or among the establishers of the Jerusalem Bishopric. " As the true Church of the East, the Bishop is to regard the Greek Church, which agrees with the 92 NOTE H. West in receiving the decrees of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and consequently in the dogmatical development of the doctrine concerning the person of Christ, From her the Nestorian and Monophysite Churches, one might say, the whole countries in which these views have grown up, have cut themselves off. The Nestorian view was rejected by the Church, because in the too distinct separation of the Divine and Human nature in Christ lay the danger of losing the living unity of His Person. On the other hand the Monophysites, by confounding the two, and looking not merely for the unity of Person, but for a unity of Nature in Christ, were exposed to the risk of rejecting the reality of His Divinity and Humanity. Now indistinct as may be the persuasion which the present members of these sects may possess with regard to the deeper grounds of this controversy, and to the true meaning of the contested expressions and formulas, which do not properly belong to the province of Christian faith, but of Christian philosophy ; yet we cannot relinquish our persuasion, or give up the grounds which the Church gained in that controversy for the doctrine of the Person of Christ ; nor can we pronounce the development of that doctrine from those grounds in the whole Western Church to be a matter of indifference. Still we need not on this account attach an inordinate value to abstract philosophico-theological defi- nitions, or allow ourselves to be hindered in the least thereby from a friendly intercourse with those Churches. We do not condemn them; but hitherto the Monophysites at least condemn us and our doctrine, though the Armenians at Constantinople are recently said to have made a cheering exception thereto. By a friendly intercourse, without controversy, we may hope in time to bring about an understanding on these most important dogmatical ques- tions. Then at length may the nations, which are at present Monophysite or Nestorian, occupy their right position, namely that of particular national Churches, with important national peculiarities, and perhaps with certain divergences in minuter points of dogmatical theology, but still with the consciousness of an essential unity in faith, and in the leading articles of doctrine." The real cause however why the Jerusalem Bishopric has been NOTE H. y3 attackt so violently and pertinaciously, is, that by it we were to be brought into closer connexion with the German Protestants. Now the prospect of such a connexion would in any previous age have been hailed with delight and thankfulness, not merely by one party in our Church, but by all. For to all the members of our Church the name of Protestant was for centuries a matter of glory ; and we felt that we were bound by sacred ties to all who bore it. Both politically and ecclesiastically the English nation and Church regarded themselves as intimately united to every Protestant body, and as the appointed champions of the Protestant cause. Elizabeth and Cromwell and William the Third were so indeed more energetically and heartily, according to the vigour and great- ness of their characters ; but the first two Stuarts also, after the measure of their feebleness, recognised that this is the duty of England. Only in the disgraceful reigns of the latter Stuarts were any doubts on the subject entertained at Court ; and the doubts of the Court were not shared by the nation, but stirred up the nation against the Court, until at length it shook off the ignomi- nious yoke of treachery and falsehood. In the Notes on the Sermons subjoined to the Mission of the Comforter (pp. 100G, 1007), I have cited a few passages in proof that our brotherhood with the Protestant Churches on the Continent was affectionately recognized, not by Low-Churchmen and Puritans, but by the very persons whom our modern Romanizers used to hold up as the exemplars of English Churchmen, by Archbishop Sancroft, and by the Lower House of Convocation in 1689 and in 1705. In the latter year the Lower House, speaking on a project closely akin to that which we are discussing, the plan of introducing the English Liturgy, and Episcopacy by means of English Ordinations, into Prussia, say that they cannot " omit taking notice of the pre- sent endeavours of several Reformed Churches to accommodate them- selves to our Liturgy and Constitution. They are very desirous of knowing in what manner it may be proper for this Convocation, to express their great satisfaction to find in them such good dispo- sitions, and their readiness to maintain and cherish such a fraternal lence with them, as may strengthen the interest of the 94 NOTE II. Reformed Religion against the common enemy" (See Cardwell's Synodalia, p. 722.) The evidence which I have adduced of this state of feeling might easily be decupled or centupled, were there need. In fact the difficulty would be to bring forward any evidence of opposite views and feelings, as entertained by any of our divines of the slightest eminence, previous to the recent insur- rection of Romish principles in the heart of our Church. That a like spirit still prevailed among the most soberminded and judi- cious down to our days, is proved by the loving wish for " a more cordial union among all Protestant Churches" exprest in the Charge quoted above, in p. 76. Nay, surely heinous guilt would be incurred by those, who, asserting that Episcopacy is indispensable to the existence of a Church, and to the ministration of sacra- mental grace, and that they who are without it have no share in Christ's redemption, would yet wantonly withhold that ordinance, where they have the means of bestowing it : only they do not really believe what they say : their opinions do not form part of a coherent system, but are pickt up as they are driven and tost about by the impulses of party-spirit. Thus the measure proposed by the King of Prussia, so far as it was designed to lead to a closer union of the Protestant Churches, was no way repugnant to the traditional feelings and notions of the English Church, but was such as would in all ages have been welcomed with joy by the lovers -of our Church, more especially by those who most prized her distinctive form of government and discipline. The Charge too, which I quoted above, further proves, that those who from their position may be expected to speak the mind of the English Church in our own days, as throughout her history since the Reformation, regard her as a Protestant Church, and regard the other communities of Christians, who were severed from the Romish Church at the Reformation, as Protestant Churches. For in expressing his wish " for a more cordial union among all Protestant Churches," which title evidently includes our own, it is plain that the Archbishop was not using any novel language, or asserting anything which he supposed to be questionable, but merely speaking as he conceived all his predecessors would have NOTE H. 95 spoken, from Archbishop Parker downwards. So alien is the mind of the English Church from that newfangled upstart heresy which disclaims the name of Protestant, and audaciously denies the name of Church to the German Lutherans. In fact, even among the victims of that heresy, among its chief promulgators, are persons, who, not twenty years ago, joined in expelling Sir Robert Peel from the representation of Oxford, because, as they asserted, he had betrayed the Protestant cause. So late too as 1837, Mr Newman, in the Advertisement prefixt to his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, said : " Viewed politically, Protestantism is at this day the rallying point of all that is loyal and highminded in the nation." A few years ago it would have been a waste of words to cite evidence for the sake of proving what everybody then well knew to be the fact. But in the giddy whirl of our age, when opinions too are traveling at railway speed, people are apt to forget to-day what they themselves and all the world thought yesterday : and sometimes they will kick away their cast off opinions, and trample upon them, and protest that no rational being can ever have held anything so absurd. A year or two after Mr Newman had spoken thus of Protestantism, a cry was set up against Protestantism by persons so learned in the history of the Church, that they drew their notion of Protestantism from the orators in Exeter Hall. At first indeed the object of attack was what was called Ultra-Protes- tantism : but ere long it was assumed that Ultra-Protestantism and Protestantism are identical ; though the very difference in the names is a mark that there must be an essential difference in the things designated by them ; and though it is notorious that the evils which are found to result from a principle carried to excess, no way prove that the principle in itself is evil, but often bear witness of its power for good. Under the influence of this delusion, when it was known that the proposition for the establishment of the Jerusalem Bishopric had been laid before our Prelates, and had been favorably entertained by them, the measure was denounced as alien to the principles of the Anglican Church, involving her in a connexion with Protestantism, and branding her with the stigma 96 NOTE H. of being a Protestant body. Of the most virulent of these railers, who condemned the Prussian Church on the score of what he had seen and heard among the Protestants in France, and the Evan- gelical dissidents at Geneva, and of other evidence equally rele- vant, scarcely a particle of it bearing in any way even on the state of religion in Prussia, and who poured out vollies of anathemas with a spirit like that of an angry boy throwing stones, there is no need to speak. He received his quietus, and will only be remembered through the Reply which he called forth. But there was another opponent, whose name and previous life rendered him far more formidable, and whose first theological work had been an Apology for the German Church, remarkable, among the writings of English divines, for its laborious learning and thoughtful candour. Dr Pusey has indeed recently retracted a large part of the opinions exprest in his Answers to Mr Rose : he does not inform us how- ever by what force of reasoning he felt himself constrained to abandon conclusions, at which he had arrived by a long and elaborate research carried on with conscientious diligence for a series of years. He pleads that on certain points he wrote in ignorance : yet his earlier writings on German theology evince a large amount of learning, and of accurate discriminating inves- tigation ; whereas the judgements which he has recently pro- nounced on the same subject, have mostly been unsupported asser- tions. Instead of being anxious, as formerly, that English readers should understand the growth and real purport of that which they are called upon to condemn, he has appealed to their blind prejudices for the sake of obtaining a verdict. A full ex- posure of the misrepresentations contained in his Letter to the A rchbishop of Canterbury, where he introduces a long attack on the Prussian Church, for the sake of averting the establishment of the Jerusalem Bishopric, would require a much longer discussion than I can allow myself to insert in this Note. Nor ought such a refutation to be wanted, inasmuch as the work has already been performed thoroughly, in a pamphlet written with admirable mild- ness and candour, by a person possessing every requisite for such a task, M. Abeken. Still, as the reply of an unknown foreiner NOTE H. 97 has a poor chance of weighing in England, or at least with a very large body of our Church, against the statements of the head of a party, like Dr Pusey, the graces of whose character in other respects obtain a credit for him, such as neither his arguments nor his assertions deserve, and as Dr Pusey him- self has not scrupled to republish his statements with scarcely a correction, notwithstanding the full exhibition of their erro- neousness by M. Abeken, so that his picture of the Prussian Church is doubtless still regarded by numbers as correct and faithful, I feel bound to shew again how perverted and false it is. The principal points in Dr Pusey 's invective against the Ger- man Church are summed up in an elaborate cumulative sentence, constructed with a good deal of rhetorical skill, where, contending against the hope entertained that a beneficial effect might be produced upon the Churches of the East by the spectacle of a united Church, pure in doctrine and practice, he says that he cannot see " how the picture of a united Church could be pre- sented by an English and Lutheran congregation, of which the one holds ' One Holy Catholic Church, throughout all the world,' knit together by its Bishops, as 'joints and bands,' under its One Head, Christ, and joined on by unbroken succession to the Apostles ; the other, an indefinite number of Churches, hanging together by an agreement in a scheme of doctrine framed by themselves, and modified by the civil power : of which the one holds Confirmation to be the act of the Bishop, the other deems such unnecessary, but accepts it for its younger members : the one holds Ordination to be derived from the Apostles ; the other, that Presbyters, uncommissioned, may confer it, and that those on whom it has been so conferred, may consecrate the Holy Eucharist : the one recites the Creed of Nicaea, the other has laid it aside : in the one, ancient prayer, the inspired Psalms, and hearing God's Word, are the chief part of their weekly service ; in the other, uninspired hymns and preaching with prayer extempore ; the one kneel in prayer, the other not even at the Holy Eucharist : with the one, the Lord's Day 98 NOTE H. is a Holy Day, with the other a holyday : the one receives ' the. Faith' as ' once for all delivered to the saints ;' the other, as susceptible of subsequent correction and development : the one rests her authority and the very titles of her existence on being an Ancient Church, the other boasts itself Modern: the one, not founded by man, but descended of that founded on the day of Pentecost ; the other dating itself truly from Luther, and claiming to be the parent of all, not in outward communion with the Great Eastern and Western Branches, and so of our own Church by whom it was originally converted : the one recognises and has been recognised by the Ancient Church of the East, the other rejects her and is anathematized by her." On reading over this extraordinary sentence, one cannot but be struck by the enormous importance attacht in it to things secondary and no way essential. A number of ritual and cere- monial differences are strung together for the sake of averting a measure designed to promote Unity in the Church, under the notion that these differences are inimical to, and almost incompatible with Unity. Now which body of practices may in itself be the more appropriate manifestation of a Christian spirit, is another question: the members of each Church will doubtless prefer those they are familiar with, the power of habit in such things being almost absolute. But to lay great stress on these matters as obstacles to a union between different Churches, is a fresh proof how the minds of our English divines have been narrowed and crampt by the miserable hankering after Uniformity. Although our Reformers had so wisely laid down in the 34th Article, that "it is not necessary that traditions and ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been diverse, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men's man- ners, so that nothing be ordained against God's word," and although it is equally clear upon historical and upon philoso- phical grounds that this is the only tenable principle, demon- strated likewise to be so by the voice of Christian love, and by the express precepts of the New Testament, that stiff NOTE H. 99 imperious self-will, which is one of the chief diseases of the Eng- lish character, is prone to demand that all mankind shall dress themselves after our pattern. A few years back we used to fancy that the forms of our Constitution were the panacea for all political evils ; and we imposed them upon countries wholly unfit to receive them. Experience of the results of this folly has latterly somewhat abated it ; but a still more mis- chievous one has been thrusting itself forward, insisting that the adoption of our ecclesiastical forms is essential to Chris- tianity. Now certainly Dr Pusey is so far right, that, where such a spirit is prevalent, it would be impossible to exhibit a spectacle of Unity, along with diversities of practice. But is it quite unwarrantable to hope that Christian love may be sufficiently powerful to preserve Unity, amid, and notwithstand- ing such diversities ? Surely we may be one in our One Lord, although some of us pray to the Father through Him on their knees, others standing. Yea, we may be one, through the Com- munion of His Holy Body, even with those who may receive that Body standing : else how can we be one with the company of the A postles, who doubtless were sitting, or rather lying round the table, when they received it at its first divine institution ? Assuredly too it would be a truly edifying picture of a united Church, if we were to present ourselves as one, notwithstanding all such varieties of form and usage; a picture such as the Church has rarely exhibited in the course of eighteen centuries : so mighty has that carnal spirit been within her, which, the Apostle tells us, is the source of strife and divisions. This would not be agreeing to differ as the phrase is, an expression which, in a certain sense, implies a reprehensible carelessness about the truth, but agreeing in spite of differences. We may agree, and be conscious of our agreement, of our unity, in that which is essential and fundamental, and may resolve that this inward consciousness and the outward manifestation of our essential agreement and unity shall not be destroyed or shaken, even though there be a number of differences amongst us with regard to secondary matters : we may resolve that the sense of these H 2 100 NOTE H. differences shall not separate us, or set us at variance. We may do this under the conviction of our mutual fallibility, and of the infirmity of our nature, even though the differences relate to truths with regard to which the right view must needs be one. For in such cases differences, when the result of sincere convictions, even among individuals, much more if held by bodies of men through generations, are oftener apparent repugnances between partial apprehensions of the truth, which we perceive from different aspects, and approach from different sides, than anything like an absolute opposition between truth and false- hood : and we may humbly trust that, if we walk according to what we have received, in the spirit of love, exhorting one another, and at the same time forbearing one another, God will reveal that to us, which we may not as yet have discerned. On the other hand, when the differences are outward, and pertain to that which is ritual and ceremonial, it behoves us to bear in mind, that, of outward things, hardly any is in itself right or wrong, or imperatively binding upon all men; none in fact, unless there be an express divine command bear- ing immediately and unequivocally upon it. Custom indeed will often stamp a moral character on that, which in itself has none; and in so doing its procedure will be very variable, and may not seldom seem arbitrary and capricious : yet, when such associations have long been establisht, the unreflecting, who have grown up under their influence, are apt to regard them as a necessary part of the order of nature. Thus to us it appears an indispensable mark of reverence to uncover our heads on entering a holy place; and we should be shockt to see a man keep his head covered, and begin pulling off his boots or shoes. In Eastern nations on the other hand the practice for more than three thousand years has been that which we should con- demn ; and to them our behaviour seems strangely indecorous. Each thinks himself right ; and so he is, if the outward act is not a mere empty form, but the symbol of a living feeling. Yet it no way follows from our being right, that they who differ from us are not just as right ; though our proneness to confound NOTE H. 101 the form with the substance is ever leading us to pronounce that they cannot be so. These prejudices no wise man will wantonly defy or irritate, though he will desire to moderate them, and to place them on their right footing ; even as St Paul did, readily conforming to every lawful institution, yet continually teaching that no such can have any absolute inherent value. Now among the consequences of that fusion of nations, which is every year increasing, and seems likely to increase without limit, from the operation of sundry causes connected with a high state of civi- lization, one is, that diverse customs are perpetually brought into juxtaposition, and set to confront one another. Hence it is a lesson, which we have a special call to learn in these days, that we have no more warrant to take offense at customs, however different from our own, unless indeed there be a positive taint of moral evil in them, than we have to quarrel with the inhabitants of other countries for not speaking our language. Their customs are, like their language, the symbols of their traditionary thoughts and feelings, and, if worse than ours in some respects, will probably in others be better, that is, fitter for expressing their meaning: at all events they will be better for the people who have been nurtured under them. Hence, seeing that God has been pleased to glorify His infinite power and wisdom by the infinite variety of His Creation, and vouchsafes to receive glory from the diversities of gifts in His creatures, every people, every Church, every community is to honour Him after its kind, by the full and free exercise of all those faculties, intellectual and moral, which He has assigned to them, in con- formity to those hereditary notions, which are themselves a portion of their intellectual and moral inheritance. The unity of light is not broken up and dissolved, but rather shines out with more resplendent beauty, in the varied hues of the rain- bow. Why then should men split into hostile parties, nay, why should they not live in fellowship and amity, and unite in the worship of God, though one portion of them think it right to wear a red turban, another a green ? He who lets the light shine upon the red, lets it shine no less complacently upon the 102 NOTE H. green. This will readily be acknowledged; for, when we see a prejudice in others, we are quick in seizing its absurdity, how- ever blind we may be to its counterpart in ourselves. It may indeed be a reprehensible wilfulness not to give up our own will for the sake of peace ; but it is a far more reprehensible wilfulness to impose our will on others, though at the risk of war : and this is the primary evil, of which the other is the natural effect and reaction. And when the practice, the abandonment of which is required of a man, is that of all his friends, of his countrymen, of his fathers and forefathers for generations, mani- fold motives of honour and reverence and tender affection con- strain him to cling to it ; and he will almost deem that he should be a traitor to the memory of his ancestors, if he were to cast it off at the dictate of those who treat it with contemptuous reproach. At all events, if there be any essential spiritual advantage in the posture of kneeling in prayer, we are much likelier to win bur brethren to follow our example, if we kneel lovingly by their sides, than if we try to thrust or drag them down perforce, or cast them out because they will not do as we do. This would be the best way, even if they formed part of the same congregation : provided that each prays and receives in faith and reverently, the posture matters little. But when the congregations are to be distinct, like the English and German under our Bishop at Jerusalem, what sort of a spirit must that be, which would prohibit their union as members of the same Church, because in the one congregation it is the custom to pray kneeling, in the other, standing? Even in an army, in which uniformity is of greater moment than in any other body, the stiffest martinet that ever lived would allow regiments of cavalry and infantry to stand together in the same battle-array. Nor would any one but a madman maintain that the Centaurs and Lapithae must continue for ever in unmitigated, irreconcilable hostility. By Dr Pusey indeed the question of postures is regarded as of such primary importance, that, in a Note added to the third Edition of his Pamphlet, he has taken upon him to read a NOTE H. 103 grave lecture to the Lutherans for their irreverence in not kneeling at the reception of the Eucharist. In the course of it he says, in p. 147: "The Lutheran attitude of receiving it, (for it is Lutheran ) the Lutheran attitude of standing, as it is unex- ampled (the writer believes) elsewhere, so it has not the sem- blance of plea, which the Calvinist put forth for his position of sitting. Both are inventions of men; but the Calvinist, claiming to adhere to what he found on the surface of the Bible (for the attitude of kneeling is in a deeper sense involved in the words, 'they have eaten and worshipped') is at the least consistent." It is quite distressing to see a good and learned man flounder about thus, dashing at one rash assertion after another, for the sake of throwing shame on one of the best branches of the Church, without taking the trouble to ascertain the correctness of anything he says. The attitude of standing in prayer, for which the Lutherans are so severely reprehended, is shewn by M. Abeken to be expressly enjoined by the 20th Canon of the Nicene Council : imt^rj rives eiaiv iv rfj KvpiaKrj yovv K\ivovrfQ Kdl iv rate r^c irEVTrjKOGrrjs tyue'pcue' VTTE/O rov irdyra iv Tratrrj TrapoiKiq. 0v\a'rr<70ai, eorwrac k'^ofc rtj ayi Qey. Whereas there are some persons who kneel on the Lord's day, and during the days of Pentecost, it seems good to the holy Synod, for the sake of hav- ing all things observed in every parish, that people should pray to God standing. The desire of establishing uniformity in such matters had already crept into the Church ; and the Council orders that on those days, on which the Resurrection is especially commemorated, all should stand in prayer, not kneel. For this, we learn from Basil, in his Treatise on the Holy Spirit (c. xxvii), was the ground of the order : aVayKcu'wg ovv rets ev aurjf (rjj KvpiaKrj~) -jrpoffv^(ds lorwrae diroTrXrjpovv rove lavr?/s eKK\r)ffia Trat^futi, 'tva rjj