14V! NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. vn. F™. *>. im. to their judgment to withdraw from active participation in it. The sale of the first three numbers did not exceed the thousand guaranteed, and there was talk of li acknowledging defeat without incurring further liabilities," with a probability of The Ghurdi Times being added to the list of dead journals. A similar crisis, it will be remembered, occurred at the beginning of its career to the now prosperous Guardian. But a sudden turn of the tide came. The approaching marriage of the Prince of Wales, to be celebrated during the season of Lent, was disapproved of by a portion of the Church, and the " Lenten nuptials" formed the subject of "much acrimonious discussion" ; and when the churchwardens of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields erected H stand for viewing the arrival of the Princess Alexandra, and published nn advertisement announcing that " the church would be used as a waiting-room, wliile the organist would execute ' a series of pieces adapted to the occasion,' Mr. Vaux pounced upon them, involving the amiable incumbent, the Rev. W. O. Humphry, in their crime, and beginning a trenchant article with the quotation. ' How now, ambitious Hum- phrey, what means this 5 The;'ew d'esprit " caught the attention of the public, and the reputation of The Church Times was made. It was for some years a rather em- barrassing reputation, but the paper bore the burden gallantly. The Chitrch Times was, to use its own words, "cradled in controversy." 'Essays and Reviews' had been published in the spring of 1860. and it is not possible now to realize the anger roused at the time against the authors. Ten thousand clergy- men presented an address to the Archbishop of Canterbury condemning the book in the strongest terms. Messrs. John William Parker & Son of the West Strand were the first publishers; and although Messrs. Longmans did not take over Messrs. Parkers' business until 1863, the former firm pub- lished the fifth edition of ' Essays and Reviews' in 1861, the reason being that several authors (including Bishop Ellieott, Bishop Harold Browne, and Miss Yonge) whose books were published by Messrs. Parker & Son objected so much to' Essays and Reviews' that Mr. Parker became alarmed, and asked Messrs. Longmans to take over the fifth edition. The sale of ' Essays and Reviews ' was very large, and even second-hand copies fetched a good price; now the volume can be pur- chased for one and sixpence. The essays, it will be remembered, were written by six clergymen and one layman—Prof. Baden Powell. The authors were styled " the Septem contra Christum." On the 15th of December, 1862, the ecclesiastical courts sentenced the Rev. Rowland Williams and the Rev. H. B. Wilson to suspension for one year, with costs; but the Queen in Council, upon appeal, was advised to reverse the judgment, and on the 8th of February, 1864, Lord Chancellor Westbury, " with characteristic flippancy, said that he had 'dismissed hell with costs.' " Morley in his Life of Gladstone records that one of Glad- stone's earliest preferments was that of Dr. Temple, the writer of the first essay, to the Bishopric of Exeter. This created lively excitement, but while Mr. Gladstone " looked with a strong aversion " on some of the papers contained in the volume, he con- sidered that Dr. Temple's responsibility was confined to his own essay. When Pusey made " an attempt to put an end to the intolerable meanness with which the University of Oxford punished Jowett for his supposed heterodoxy by refusing him a decent salary as Professor of Greek," The Church Times at once took up the cudgels, and said: " If this decision is a satisfaction to the Convocation of Oxford, if they think that they have given a vote becoming Christian gentlemen and scholars, we must simply leave them to go in peace to their several parishes to develope their Christianity and ripen their scholarship." Another subject to the front at the time of the starting of The Chwch Times was Colenso's work on the Pentateuch, published in October, 1862. On the 20th of the fol- lowing May the bishops in Convocation declared that the book contained " errors of the gravest and most dangerous cha- racter." The Church Times in this case " expostulated with its own allies " for the " indiscreet language employed by many of Colenso's opponents," and states that " the question about the Bishop of Natal soon became one rather of the authority and independence of the Church than of the truth or falseness of his speculations." By the decision of the Privy Council on the 21st of March, 1865, a curious state of affairs had been brought about, for while on the 16th of the previous April Colenso had been deposed by his Metropolitan, Dr. Gray, Bishop of Capetown, the Council declared Gray's proceedings null and void, since a Colonial bishop can have no authority except what is granted by Parliament. Ten
