Two years of church progress
TWO YEARS OF CHURCH PROGRESS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF
THE CHURCH CAUSE AND THE CHURCH PARTY.
REPRINTED FROM THE "CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER,"
FOR JANUARY, 1862.
LONDON:
J. AND C. MOZLEY, 6, PATERNOSTER ROW;
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1862.
One Shilling.
LONDON :
PRINTED BY R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL.
TWO YEARS OF CHURCH PROGRESS.
It is two years since we gave a sketch of the growth and actual attitude of the Church cause and the Church party. In the interval which has elapsed, various Church questions have, more or less, shifted their ground, so it will not be unprofitable to review their present condition under the additional light of recent events. At that time the S. George's-in-the-East scandal was at its height, and the theatre-preachings had not arisen to stimulate the sated palate of religious emotionists; while 'Essays and Reviews' were still unpublished and unanticipated. The Convocation of York was not yet a deliberative body, and those frequent conglomerate meetings of clergy and laity combining the two sides of Church politics—never acknowledged, but always felt within them—which had grown out of the revival of regular synods and the decay of Church Unions, were new to their equally useful and diplomatic mission. Lord Ebury's raid on the Prayer-Book had not yet got into straits between the solid opposition of the ten thousand clergy and the hardly less damaging burlesque of his own offspring, on his own showing, yawning over the Good-Friday Collects. The House of Commons had not yet acted out that immortal series of Wednesdays which, in scattering right and left the various anti-Church projects of many liberal members, inflicted a grave repulse on the marriage-law amendment intrigue, snubbed the 'Liberation' aggression on churchyards and endowed schools, extinguished Mr. Locke King's attempts to introduce universal disorder, and placed the church-rate controversy in a position which has imposed its equitable compromise as a duty upon Churchmen, and branded the rejection by Dissenters of any fair proposition as an anti-social offence. The Education Commissioners' verdict was still an object of anxious speculation; and the new education minute had not yet exploded like a shell in the middle of our quiet village schools.
The chief vicissitudes in secular affairs which have checkered these twenty-four months, have been the union of Italy, minus Rome and Venice, under one sovereign, with constitutional institutions; in England, the formal abandonment by politicians of simulated zeal for parliamentary reform as an engine of political offence and defence, and the great National Loss; in France, commercial experiments and financial dangers; in America, the bursting of the bubble of democracy—the foundering in the deep seas, by its own unwieldiness, of that tall menacing galleon which had so long hovered round the shores of the Old World.
If we are asked whether we think the account sums up with, profit or loss to the Church, we have no hesitation in replying, with profit. Indeed, of all the items of the balance-sheet which we have recapitulated, the only one which, upon the face of it, seems detrimental, is that of 'Essays and Reviews.' We grant to the fullest the dangerous character of that pernicious volume; we recognise to the utmost the signal run which it has had among sensation readers, cumulating in its reprint in the feuilletons of Australian newspapers; but we reckon on the other side, the valuable shock which it has given to that large class of floating respectability, which nothing but such a revelation of ulterior intentions would have strung up to a more manly confession of a faith which was always implicit with them. Estimating at its right weight the frothiness of that popularity which the book has yet attained, we believe that all its success will, in the long run—and not a very long one either—prove most detrimental to that party, self-named of progress, who thought to set up their Koran in the prosy lucubrations of the 'Seven Champions of un-Christendom.' Two years ago, speaking of the Broad Church (so-called) party, we divided it into two classes, as follows:—
'The High Church cause combines the different sections of its followers in the belief of an apostolic ministry and sacramental grace. Low Churchmen have their Shibboleths. But the definition of a Broad Churchman as such is merely the negative one, that he does not choose to be called either High or Low. There are persons using the name who consider "Church" merely as an expletive, and in whose eyes "Broad" is pretty well synonymous with indistinct and undefined, "Christians unattached," in short, who have not openly left the Establishment. But it is most unjust to impute this character to Broad Churchmen as a class, for we are convinced that under that vocable are included many men really zealous for the Church cause, and for the bene esse of the actual Prayer-Book Church, but to whom the name and idea of party, in connexion with religious affairs, is peculiarly offensive, and who, accordingly, take refuge in an appellation which they consider has come into existence as a protest against the High and the Low Church parties.'
We now appeal with confidence to the divergence of thought evolved in the authorship on one side, and reception on the other, of 'Essays and Reviews' in proof of the justness of our antecedent estimate.
The general result of the two years of Church progress within which we confine our present investigation, has been to confirm that tendency towards conservative consolidation, of which, in our former article, we indicated the beginnings. Bright aspirations of universal peace. Catholic consent really in operation, dissent self-immolated, prelates leading senates, and adjudicating from the heights of the world's tribunals, have faded into the evening twilight. A much humbler, more prosaic line of duty has been opened out, if not to our ambition, at least to our persistent exertions. Keeping things well at home has been acknowledged as an aim not unworthy even of unspotted holiness, high intellect, and practical indefatigability. There are those who will attack this open acceptance of a more confined sphere of activity, this abdication of a lively hope of ever beholding in the flesh any extraordinary manifestation of the long prayed-for salutare Israel in our generation, as a proof of blunted faith, debased motives of action, or even of incipient worldliness. We are prepared for the imputations, which we can only meet by an appeal to the providential order of the world's course, as a standing protest against the lawfulness of expecting extraordinary manifestations; and as a proof that those who do their duty most straightforwardly under ordinary circumstances are the best prepared to grapple effectively with unexpected contingencies. A few years ago we seemed to be playing double or quits; now the preservation of the Church being assured, we may more confidently exert ourselves in strengthening its bulwarks. If there is no great hope of any abnormal amelioration of the Church of England in our time, so there is no great fear of any hopeless deterioration. We are neither likely to hear the call to assemble in universal council, nor yet the warning voice to go hence and abandon our desecrated altars. The battle of Church life is incessant, and it covers a wide field, and so our pickets must be both numerous and vigilant. We are not for the moment discussing the accidents of the ceaseless conflict with the visible powers of evil; we are merely looking to those exertions which are destined to maintain the bene esse of the existing English Church, as a movement towards the most hopeful evangelization of our masses. The sustentation of a learned and well-trained, and therefore influential clergy, is not the least difficult or least needful of these endeavours. The necessity of learning and of training is now theoretically acknowledged. R. H. Froude's crude sally in favour of a 'snob clergy' is no longer appealed to as a prophetical utterance. But the broad fact remains behind, that the heedless subdivision of parishes, and the scant endowment of district churches, has lowered the standard of requirements for the Christian ministry, and rendered reconstructive reformation more difficult than it would have been, had the problem of missionary development in populous places been put before the Church, with the enlarged lights of its actual experience. We place this peril in the front, because we esteem it the most dangerous, because insidious, foe of the Church. It is very closely allied to that delusion of the day, which confounds scenic self-abasement with self-denying Christian humility; which says that Apostles are commissioned to serve tables, and applauds the histrionic enthusiasm which would abandon the study or the cathedral, to harangue cadgers from the steps of an omnibus, as though this were the beginning and end of the Church's work. Theatre preaching is, after all, but the abuse of this way of thinking, and as its abuse, it has its utility in startling worthy persons, who might otherwise have continued bound in the entanglements of the specious delusion.
Apart from this danger, the Church of England is, just now, as far as we can judge, in that condition of arrested change, which promises permanence, and renders amelioration possible. Recent appointments to the episcopate, made by the ci-devant 'man of God,' indicate the tardily-attained conviction that the function of the Church is not to ape the conventicle; for certainly Wigram, Philpott, and Thomson, are not names which we connect with platform clap-trap. Dr. Vaughan, who was for a few days a 'designate,' would have been a living proof that earnestness does not exclude learning, and that all is not Exeter Hall outside the ranks of professed High Churchmanship. The appointment of Dean Ellicott is also a recognition of the right functions of a cathedral. To be sure, the throne of S. Cuthbert, Cosin, and Butler, has just been mounted by a prelate, who alone among the Episcopate has pronounced himself favourable to an alteration of the Prayer-Book. But it remains to be seen whether this ill-judged charge of Bishop Baring, at Gloucester, is to be accepted as a policy for the future, or the laboured renunciation of an impossible theory. The anti-Prayer-Book agitation may still simmer on, but in the meanwhile its discomfiture is safe so long as its advocacy continues to be the apanage of the amiable but not judicious peer who stands identified with that hopeless cause. The world's politics have grown too serious for people to run gratuitously into any such entanglement as the minute disputations attending a Prayer-Book Reform Bill, or Commission of Revision, would infallibly produce, and Lord Ebury is too compromised to have any great prospect of persuading any influential body to listen to his alternative schemes of petty disturbance. In the meanwhile, the real inconvenience which he blunderingly strove to rectify, is reforming itself, in the ever increasing, and now officially permitted system of dividing services, and of having separate litanies and communions.
Of course a necessary accident of this settling down of Church difficulties is the apparent blurring of the sharp lines of Church party warfare. A Church conservative reaction as much implies that the zeal of ardent Church ameliorators is modified, as that the indefatigability of Church pseudo-reformers is restrained. This condition of things has undoubtedly its disappointing and disappointed side. It involves an acquiescence in a medium level of general moderation which would have seemed intolerable to the ardent spirits of fifteen years ago. But it equally implies what those ardent, because more youthful Churchmen, did not sufficiently appreciate—the superior advantages of a wide area of modified success over a steep and desperately defended vantage ground of limited extent. The Church movement at one moment ran the risk of being an 'ism,' and being guided by 'ites.' It has escaped this danger, and it may now confidently, in spite of multiplying Peel districts, expect to pass on the English Church, to a coming generation, as—if not all, or by a great deal all, that the most moderate yet steadfast Churchman might wish it to be—at all events, a national institution, standing on a higher general level, doctrinal, practical, and national, than it did in our fathers' and grandfathers' days; appealing to nobler natures; more generally and more generously beloved and supported. It will be our children's and our children's children's office to use the opportunity which we bequeath to them to advance their inheritance to some still higher and more secured position.
In our former article, we dwelt at considerable length upon the rise, decay, and downfal, of that system of Church representation—excellently contrived, as we maintain, for a very useful object—the Church Unions; voluntary and elastic bodies, recruited exclusively and avowedly out of the High Church ranks, and intended to sustain not only the Church establishment, but the genuine doctrines of the Church. We may assume that these Unions died out because they had accomplished a successful work. This work was the preservation, through a very anxious period, of that spirit of genuine Churchmanship which has become the habitual nature of so many persons of various stations and differing accomplishments, to which, under Providence, we owe our preservation from calamities which might otherwise have overwhelmed the English Church. We are now, we repeat, living in quieter times. Points that we used to fight about, with a half-unconscious pride in their partizan character, are now the rule of action of persons then most strongly antagonistic to us. In those days, for example, the advocacy of free Churches rested upon a resolute minority; now the apologist for pews has to excuse his own perversity or daring. The use of occasional litanies at unusual periods, and still more of the holy Communion, as sanctifying occasional events, would have been remarked upon as a badge of extreme partizanship. It is now accepted on all sides as a seemly and wholesome thing. Journals to which we used to look with scared anxiety for the attacks which they made upon our exertions, are now half trusted as friends, half listened to as candid monitors.
We do not impute this change of feeling formally to the Church Unions—bodies of a defensive and not a legislative or missionary character. But we have a right of appeal to it as alike giving grounds for asserting that Church Unions have been very useful, and for explaining why they have now fallen into neglect. In their place has grown up a series of organizations, composed on different principles, and termed generally Church Defence Societies. The immediate cause of their rapid success was the notoriety which the blundering effrontery of some of their own leaders gave to a wide conspiracy against the Church in its political and proprietary aspects, under the specious appellation of the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Control and Patronage—more compendiously entitled the Liberation Society. Churchmen were fairly frightened and disgusted by the insolence of this association, and began to form Church Defence Societies, on the principle of uniting Churchmen of all shades of opinion for all such objects as they could combine in promoting, and particularly in antagonism to the assaults of the Liberation Society. The central body which undertakes to control the action of the local societies is that Church Institution of London, to whose first beginnings we alluded in our former article. We need not now recapitulate how this Institution was moulded out of Mr. Hoare's system of lay consultees, or explain its somewhat complex organization, by which an exclusively lay society in town acts as at once the mouthpiece and the adviser of clergy all over the country. It has certainly made its influence directly felt, and it has indirectly screwed up the clergy to better views of combined action, and more appreciation of systematic co-operation.
The congress of Rural Deans, assembled in London last spring under its auspices, was an evidence of the sort of influence which the Institution was able to bring to bear upon the country. The office of those who composed that meeting gave it a kind of synodical character; and the persons who were present at it were sufficiently pleased with their day's work to make it probable that the experiment would be repeated. If this were done, the often desiderated infusion of a larger proportion of the parochial clergy into the Church's synodical action would be somewhat irregularly, but still practically effected. Convocation could not fail to attach much weight to the judgment of such a body as a congress of the Rural Deans of England, and that congress would no doubt assemble in concert with the sessions of the constitutional synod. The influence of the Church Institution has, of course, its concomitant disadvantages, as it can only be worked at the expense of a perpetual compromise within the Society's own Committee-room, where many questions of vital interest, in various ways, to different members of the body, are never allowed to be broached. Yet this very compromise has its good side, in tending to bring together persons who, but for such an institution, would have gone on blooding over and exaggerating their points of difference, while now they are driven to seek joint action upon those matters in which they agree, and can co-operate together.
It is somewhat curious that the particular question—to which more than any other the Church institution owes its existence, should be the one on which it has to confine itself to generalities, and to repeated condemnations of Sir J. Trelawny's particular Bill. To be sure, at the recent congress of Church Defence Societies, holden at Cambridge, the same policy was adopted. The reason is obvious, namely, that there is unfortunately a division of opinion among Churchmen as to the best method of taking advantage of that remarkable turn of fortune which has converted the majority of seventy-four for the total abolition of Church-rates, into the Speaker's casting-vote against it. There on one side is a considerable body whom it is, perhaps, rather unfair to describe as the no-surrender men, for they are, most of them, willing to surrender all the constitutional safeguards, which place it in the power of a majority to defeat a rate, but are wholly unwilling to offer any relief to the conscientious objector. The policy, generally speaking, of this section, is to assimilate the levying of the rate to that of the poor-rate, to emancipate districts from the control and Church taxation of the mother Church, and to allow the vestry itself, at its good pleasure, to excuse or else insist on payment from each objector. Another, and we should hope a larger party agrees with this one in the emancipation of districts and in the improvement of the method of levying, but offers in return the quid pro quo of excusing those from payment who object to the rate—some plans insisting on, and others dispensing with the assurance on the part of the objector that his scruples are conscientious or that he is a Dissenter. In compensation, they insist that the man who will not pay shall not have a seat at the Church vestry, but that its concerns be managed by bonâ fide Churchmen, instead of its being the bull-ring where brawling Nonconformists are to bait the Church and its minister. A third party has happily died away, which attempted to compromise the question by abandoning that portion of the rate which related to worship expenses, and only retaining a fabric rate. The evils of this proposal were patent. If the Dissenter were expected to pay the rate cheerfully, because his rate was not meant to pay for surplice or Prayer-Book, but only for walls and roof, he would, if he were a logical man, be very willing to accept the proposition, and rejoin: 'Very well, here is my rate, now give me my share of the walls and roof. You demand the payment from me, because you tell me these churches are national edifices, devoted to the worship of the Almighty by the whole people. I am one of the people; the congregation with which I worship belongs to the nation; make it possible for us conscientiously to worship God, according to the form in which we can join, within that building.' This line of argument would have been perfectly unanswerable when addressed to persons who had purposely converted the Church-rate into a fabric-rate for the sake of netting the Dissenters' quota. There was the example also of the manner in which the Government had usurped the fabrics of the Churches in many continental States, to point a moral against a usurpation, which would have been precisely similar in character, though perpetrated by Demus, and not Tyrannus. Still, some people of great intelligence have been found to urge the scheme, but within the last year circumstances seem to have really startled them, and to have contributed to silence a proposition which had better never have been uttered. The indefensible and uncanonical concession of the Bishop of Calcutta, in permitting to Presbyterian ministers the joint occupation of Churches within his diocese, startled and shocked good Churchmen; and Sir Morton Peto, with that blundering audacity which the Liberation Society mistakes for bold policy, endeavoured to get in the point of the wedge with his Nonconformists' Burials Bill, and only succeeded in pinching his own fingers. He has thus fairly put Churchmen on their guard, and we shall be greatly surprised if any proposition tending towards the system of omnibus Churches can again win any favour in their eyes.
The first authoritative proclamation of the exemption policy synchronised remarkably with the turn of the tide in favour of the retention of the ancient custom of Church-rates, for it was contained in the report of that committee of the Duke of Marlborough, which sat during the sessions of 1859 and 1860, and which elicited those answers of Dr. Foster and Mr. Morley, which finally unmasked the Liberation Society. Bills embodying the principles of the report have been presented to the two Houses by the Duke of Marlborough himself, Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Cross, and it is certainly now the solution which offers the most reasonable hope of an enduring compromise to the minds of statesmen who wish well to the Church. Mr. Disraeli, it will not be forgotten, when he came out at the close of 1860 in the character of defender of the faith, embraced the no-surrender doctrine in its most extreme aspect. A year later, in his parallel speech, he dropped all allusion to it, and only denounced total abolition. The acceptance of it would be the most politic method by which Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell could mend that stupendous error of judgment, which led them at one bound to change from no surrender to total abolition at the instant of a turn of tide in favour of Church-rates; and we should hardly think that ministers, such as the Duke of Newcastle (whose antecedent reputation of good Churchmanship made his similar escapade less pardonable) and Sir George Lewis, would object to the same door of escape, now that recent events have given a fresh lease to the present administration. If they want a hint to guide them as to the irresistible stress of the popular side, they may find it in the significant fact that the Whig candidates for Finsbury and Nottingham, one of them a Cabinet Minister's heir, owe their ignominious defeat to the ostentatious and damaging patronage of that acknowledged champion of the Liberation Society, Sir Morton Peto. Anyhow, it is generally acknowledged that any Church-rate settlement must proceed from the Government of the day, and the impression is every day being strengthened that the Church will go on putting itself more and more in the right, and Dissenters more and more in the wrong, if the former continues to offer a reasonable compromise, involving personal exemption, and Nonconformity persists in rejecting it. The detail of what dissent calls 'ticketing,' is one which, in condescension to their crotchetiness, must be carefully considered, especially since that strange outburst of simulated scrupulosity which led them to defeat the religious census of last year, and thereby reduced Mr. Mann's ponderous volume of religious statistics, with which we have for some seven years been pelted, into waste paper. If the result of the whole transaction would be to lay the whole Church-rate question at rest with a tacit exemption of those who would not pay, there would be little cause for regret except on one ground, that some legislation is needed for district churches, and that if any legislation at all takes place it might as well be final. One thing is certain, that the party which endeavours to establish the perpetual liability of Dissenters to pay on the score that a national Church implies the Church of every body, in defiance of the whole current of legislation since 1688, must, to be consistent, land us in principles which are wholly inconsistent with belief in the Church as a Divine institution independent of the civil polity within which it is situated.
The signal check given to the agitation for legalizing marriages which Christianity calls incestuous, must not be passed over, nor must it be forgotten. The cause so rebuffed is a very damaged cause, but those whose selfishness egged it on are still living and still suffering for their own misdeeds. It would be deep ignorance of human nature not to be prepared for attempts on their part to regain their lost ground, if they saw the opportunity, through the negligence of the defenders of the marriage law.
The refitting of Lichfield Cathedral, which was reopened at the close of October, is an event which calls for our grateful commemoration. It is not so much on account of the material beauty of the pile itself and of the fittings which Mr. Scott has created, that we dwell upon this event as one of great importance. For years past cathedrals have been on their trial. They have been overhauled and mutilated, and they seemed ready to perish. How then is it that the reopening of a cathedral in a small midland town presented the unwonted spectacle of an earnest crowd of reverential worshippers, which dispassionate reckoners estimated at five or six thousand? How came the thousand singers and hundreds of communicants? These circumstances point to a great change in public feeling. They do so the more because the rehabilitation of Lichfield cathedral is but one among many instances. Llandaff cathedral had also been reopened very few weeks before. Peterborough is being restored and popularized, and every one knows what is being done at S. Paul's. Dean Peacock's work at Ely is matter almost of history. Dean Goode is stirring up Yorkshire to a restoration of Ripon Cathedral. The thirty thousand pounds which Sussex has found to reinstate Chichester Spire is something more than a merely architectural excitement. In Ireland, too, Tuam and Belfast are going to follow the example of Kilmore, and build cathedrals. Choir gatherings have become a national institution—in one word, cathedral bodies have met the people half way, and the people accept their advances. We do not yet see more than the first glimmerings of what may come from this all-important event. Even in regard to external worship, the spectacle of Lichfield cathedral, so sumptuously and so correctly fitted, is a standing contradiction to the assertions of those who would degrade our churches to the type of the conventicle, on the pretext that dignified ritual is contrary to English feelings. How cathedral restoration is to grow into cathedral extension, is too wide a topic for this place.
The crowded meetings which have taken place in London under the presidency of Lord Brougham, and at Oxford under that of the Vice Chancellor, in favour of Mr. Woodard's third school for the lower middle classes, and the support which the Times has bestowed upon the scheme, are a solid proof that the simple earnest zeal of that good man is now bearing good fruit, and that his scheme of leavening the middle classes of society with sound education in Church principles is no longer an improbable dream. All who have looked into the matter know too well that it is those classes for whom Mr. Woodard is labouring who have hitherto proved the mainstay of Nonconformity; it stands to reason, accordingly, that a plan which tends to make them Churchmen and to give them some of those elevating feelings which the higher strata of society derive from a University education, must tend to advance the cause of the Church in those quarters where hitherto it has confessedly been the weakest.
The year 1861 will, we believe, be distinguished in the annals of our Reformed Communion as that in which that Church emancipated herself from the connexion, which once seemed indissoluble, between the English ritual and the English flag. Up to the first day in 1861 there were, speaking generally, only two nationalities within which the English Church in its completeness could be said to exist. The one was the British empire, with its dependencies, and such adjacent countries as stood in terror of the reprisals of the British right arm. The other was the United States, on which depended missions in Africa and China. To whatever other triumphs the Church revival in our communion could point, that of enlarging the area of the really independent realms in which it was to be found could not be reckoned. The taunt of the Romanist and the Dissenter, that it was merely the Queen's Church, had still to be answered, not rebutted. But the year that has gone by has swelled the list with four additions. Its first week witnessed the consecration in Cape Town cathedral of the simple-hearted devout Mackenzie for the central parts of Africa. Whatever may be thought of the commercial prospects of his mission, of its Christian and civilizing value there can be no two opinions among Churchmen. A little later, Patteson was sent out to the dark islands of the South-Western Pacific, with the mission and the blessing of the apostolic Selwyn; and his honoured father lived long enough to have his last days cheered by the thoughts of his son's life-long self-sacrifice. The mournful third Sunday in Advent saw the consecration at Lambeth of Mr. Staley to the episcopal throne of that remarkable group of islands in the North Pacific, which have, while still governed monarchically under a native dynasty—though in a great measure peopled by English and American settlers—grown up from a nest of heathen cannibals into a civilized, Christian, English-speaking, and constitutional commonwealth. Bishop Staley takes up his mission, not as an experiment, but on the invitation of the king himself, a Hawaiian pur sang, but an educated gentleman, and a Churchman by conviction. Who then can deny that this mission is one for which we may well auspicate good things in store?
The fourth instance of the English communion finding itself, during 1861, in contact with new independent governments differs from the three others. Two of those are missionary aggressions on the realms of darkness; the third the incorporation of the complete Church into a realm where Christianity and civilization had already penetrated. The fourth case is that of a great commonwealth splitting in twain, and the Church of the English communion in the seceding portion having at once the will and the way to recast itself in a Catholic spirit upon a national basis. Hitherto we have been able to look with pride upon the unestablished daughter Church in the United States. Henceforward we may be able to point with similar feelings to that which exists within the Confederate States.
There are, as we shall proceed further on to detail, some very interesting incidents of a strictly ecclesiastical nature which have grown out of the American secession. But, irrespective of these, the whole history of the sudden disruption of that menacing colossus of yesterday, which first came into existence four years after the birth, in the still British Boston, of the living Nestor of Parliament, is so full of teaching of a moral character, bearing upon the Church's mission in the world, that we beg no pardon for a short digression on its aspects. In what we say we shall throw ourselves back into November, and assume for the moment that no San Jacinto and no Trent had ever navigated the ocean. The antecedents either of President Lincoln or of President Davis are not germane to our present inquiry. What, as Churchmen, we are concerned to observe is, the internal condition of the once great republic, mainly peopled by the descendants of British ancestors, which speaks the English language, and which is now rifted by a secession which one side calls a rebellion, and the other a resumption of sovereignty. The comparative statistics hitherto of our communion north and south of the Potomac form not the only or the first consideration which presses on us. The Episcopal Church in the Northern States may hitherto have been numerically and theologically stronger than in the Southern, and yet it may not have leavened the mass of their corruption. We have likewise, dealing as we are with mundane issues, to ask whether the influence which it has exercised on the body politic and body social is proportionately stronger in comparison with its numbers. The air in one place may be so much thicker than in another, that a gaslight in the one may not show the traveller his path half so well as a candle in the other. As in theology there are theological virtues, so in politics and in social life there are political and social virtues, which act upon as they are reacted on by Christ's Church, with all the advantage which the comparative strength of the Church gives to the mutual influence. The Northern States may or may not be the seat of all that spirit of the world which it is the object of religion to counteract. Old Rome was very civilized, but S. Paul did not go there to praise and to admire.
After long deliberation and an attentive study of the bearings of the controversy, we assume the responsibility of saying that the cause on whose side the substantial justice of the struggle preponderates, and that for whose success in the interests of religion, and also of our communion, we ought, as English Churchmen, to wish, is the cause of the Confederate States. We make the assertion with our eyes open to the existence in those States of that monstrous 'institution,' as Southerners are wont to term it, slavery. But we do so with our eyes open to the further facts that slavery is a colonial bequest, not a republican invention, introduced into regions where the white man is often as exotic by birth as the black, and more so by nature; that the South, while as yet blindly refusing to acknowledge its inherent indefensibility, has in many respects mitigated its practical evils, and that it has in the Confederate constitution prohibited the slave-trade as a portion of the constitution itself, instead of leaving the prohibition, as in the United States, to be a merely legislative provision. We do so, recollecting that the violence of the abolitionist section in the North has driven back the South from further measures tending to the gradual extinction of the system; such as the measure which was proposed in the Virginian Legislature in 1833, for gradual emancipation, and which, having then been lost, by only a single vote, has never since been renewed, thanks to the subsequent growth of the party of Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Charles Sumner. As little can we shut our eyes to the fact that, with the exception of this knot of sincere abolitionists, the North is in reality more deeply involved in all the guilt of which slavery may be the fount than South Carolina or Georgia. The North traffics in it, makes it the basis of its own selfish commercial and manuracturing; system, while it maintains an organized persecution of those pariahs of the Northern section, the free blacks, on which the slaveholding South cries shame. As far as the future of the black race is concerned, we are convinced that the longest step ever taken, across the Atlantic, towards its complete though gradual emancipation, was the secession of the South. The political reasons connected with the balance of power in the two Houses of the old Federal Legislature, which induced the South not only to maintain slavery in the older States, but to force it on new States and territories whose climate repudiates the institution, have disappeared with the secession, and so the system is left to find its level, while the free trade, which the Confederacy proclaims, will every year open it more and more to English ways of thought and English influences. The result of these various powers in operation on each other, will, we believe and trust, be to insure labentibus annis, first internal amelioration, then serfdom and villeinage, and ultimately a constitutional system for the black population of the South. This hopeful future could not be predicted for the South, if it were to be cannonaded and ravaged into reunion. Such a contingency would only lead to two results, either the sudden emancipation of millions wholly unfitted for immediate licence, or the riveting more closely and more hopelessly the chains of their servitude. Even now, Mr. Lincoln, in his recent message, has no better consolation to offer the free blacks of the United States than a forced deportation.
In short, if slavery had been the one real grievance, the South need not, and would not, have seceded. The intolerably unjust Navigation Laws and sordid protectionism of the North, which intentionally cut those vast rich provinces off from the remaining world in the Interests of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, was the shoe that really pinched. Their political allies in the Northern States would not, or could not, befriend them in their extremity. The election of a President by a minority of the primary votes of the whole Union, amounting to nearly a million, and against the unanimous voice of the South, was a strong intimation that the day of compromise had passed its eleventh hour. The North called what then took place, rebellion; but in using that ugly word it forgot its own origin as a power of the earth, and it affixed its own interpretation to a document which was, and was meant to be, ambiguous. The constitution of the United States (we call attention to the peculiarity of the very appellation), was emphatically a compromise between States which had recently promoted themselves by 'rebellion' from colonies to sovereignties, and statesmen, who looked to a strong central power. It was drawn up so as to favour either party at a time when the interests of the Union were homogeneous as compared with those of the present day, and when the area and population of the Federation were comparatively insignificant. Since 1787, its growth in extent and numbers, over regions across which Providence has stamped the natural lines of demarcation, has made that impossible which then was barely possible. The South, reading the constitution according to the interpretation held, as it seems, even in 1787, by statesmen whom America calls illustrious, found there the doctrine of State sovereignty as the centre of loyal allegiance; and it found, according to its ideas of policy, that the time had come to give the practical preference to their State sovereignty, and on these principles it made Mr. Davis President of a Confederacy. The North read in the constitution that the Union had absorbed all State sovereignties, and it believed that its material interests favoured the absorption, and so it sustains Mr. Lincoln as President of a Union. But Mr. Davis is really no more a rebel from Mr. Lincoln, than Mr. Lincoln from Mr. Davis; they respectively and legitimately represent different readings of a document not meant to be straightforward by those who framed it, and who carried it with long delays, only in consequence of its ambiguity, through the legislatures of thirteen jealous sovereignties.
Dismissing, then, from our minds the natural and laudable prejudices which the apparent legitimacy of the Northern and rebellion of the Southern Government might have occasioned, we have to ask ourselves whether, as Churchmen, we see anything on either side which ought to bias our wishes. The good estate of the Church in the State of New York, not a little owing to the vast endowment which it possesses there, in consequence of the business district of the city being in a great measure owned by the corporation of Trinity Church, is, of course, a material consideration tending to influence our judgment. So, too, the orthodox complexion of the clergy in the dioceses of Seabury, Doane, and Whittingham, leads us to look at the fate of the commonwealth in those States with no little interest, and not the less so, because the facts are patent which indicate the possibility of the orthodoxy of Maryland being ere long ranged on the side of the Confederacy. But after we have made these admissions, we have said all. We believe it will be better for the orthodox party in the North to be so in a general convention of an exclusively Northern National Church. We shall give proofs that the prospects of Church progress in the 'councils,' general and diocesan, of a Southern National Church have been improved, and are likely still more to improve, by the separation. We believe, irrespective of the special accidents of either Republic, that the characteristics of the overgrown, ill-compacted old Federation were making themselves felt through the Church, which aped the civil organization in its constitution. In the General Convention of 1859, when a proposal for a general Court of Appeal was brought forward, the measure was rejected, not on its intrinsic merits which seem to have been admitted, but because the members of the Convention, both North, and South, foresaw the results which might have endangered the still existing unity of the Church which even then hung on a fragile thread. We are accordingly convinced, that there is better hope for the truth in two homogeneous National Churches, keeping each other in check, and stimulating each other to exertion, than in a body which would, in each successive reunion of the triennial Convention, have had to swallow world-wide differences of social feeling, reflected, whether the Bishops and delegates wished it or not, in its ecclesiastical action, or else be ever standing on the brink of a dissolution in most admired disorder.
It is a fact, however much we may wish to blind our eyes to it, that although the Church may be stronger in New York than in any other city of the ex-Union, all the powers of evil are also preponderatingly more strong in that colluvies gentium. We could fill pages with proofs of the vice, the luxury, the infidelity, the materialism, and the rowdyism of that degraded city, but the painful recital would carry us away too far from our immediate object. It is sufficient to say, in one word, that everything which is disgraceful to the great capitals of the Old World, is found reproduced in a deteriorated form on Manhattan Island. The ill influence of New York spreads over the entire Union, as that of Paris pervades all France. The preternatural mendacity which has come to the surface in all which the North has said and written on the present war, finds its head-quarters in that 'sensation' town of turmoil and cabal. The unblessed attempt of New York to erect itself into the artificial condition of being the commercial capital of all the New, if not of the Old World also, was, as we have indicated, a great motive cause of disruption, and its defeat, we trust for ever, would in itself stamp the secession as a blessing to all civilized nations. Boston, the Northern city next in influence though not in population, differs widely from New York in every respect, and not the least in its far greater outward respectability. How far the real advantage equals the outside show, is a question we had rather not solve. Materialism is the palpable form of evil in New York. The Church there, as we have shown, is powerful comparatively, and yet seems impotent to grapple with the rampant vice about it. In respectable Boston the Church is weak and Puritanised, compulsory secular education has had full swing, and the ground is divided between intellectual infidelity, and all those last, most hopeless, phases of superstition, which are engendered not of blind faith, but of sated scepticism.
We have recently fallen in with an illustration of the popular religion, as we must by courtesy term it, in Boston, so significative that we make no excuse for quoting it, painful as it is to recapitulate such blasphemies. In that refined and intellectual city which, be it always recollected, holds up its head in such lofty contempt at the rowdyism of New York, a magazine is published by a gentleman universally esteemed the most respectable publisher in all the United States, called the Atlantic Monthly, and the November number commences with an article on George Sand in that fast style of moral sensualism, ill-copied from French models, which has invaded so much of our own periodical literature. The article would not have struck us as more particularly offensive than many which we have come across on this side of the Atlantic till we reached the peroration. Here the writer, worked up to enthusiasm by his subject, predicts for Madame Dudevant a future in the Walhalla of great women, not without their faults as he considerately admits, but still worthy of Bostonian canonization: 'For there is a gallery of great women, great with and without sin, where thou must sit between Sappho and Cleopatra, the Magdalen thy neighbour—nor yet removed wholly out of sight the Mother of the Great Forgiveness of God.' Our readers will not require to be told who is intended by the last phrase. We confidently assert that no English periodical which was not published with the express intention of shocking morality, would venture upon such an apposition to Madame Dudevant. Yet the Atlantic Monthly is the organ of the very cream of intellectual American society. We conclude, therefore, that this way of talking is considered religious in the city of Theodore Parker, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and in the State where Andrew rules and Bigelow deals justice. One of the lights of Bostonian literature is Mr. Hildreth, the author of a popular history of the United States, and a prominent abolitionist. The most successful novel of that party, next to those of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, is Hildreth's 'White Slave,' a publication which, we believe, has had considerable vogue among religious circles both in this country and in the United States. Those of our readers who have not had the ill-luck to read it may be surprised when we tell them what is the plot of this eminently moral autobiographical romance. Mr. Mildreth, unlike Mrs. Stowe, starts by marrying his hero, the 'White Slave,' and leaves him, after many adventures, happy and prosperous. The 'White Slave' is, we need hardly say, depicted as the model of a Christian and gentleman; and yet the action on which the whole tale turns, and for which the author holds up his ideal creation to the reader's entire admiration, is that of luring his own half-sister into an incestuous marriage, by concealing the relationship—'unwilling,' to quote the book, 'to harass Cassy with what I esteemed unnecessary scruples.' Mr. Hildreth's object in planning this loathsome plot was of course to create an unproven impression of promiscuous concubinage between masters and slaves.
The fruits testify to the tree. England and all Europe are ringing with the anger, the imbecility, the inconstancy, the greed for empire, the bloodthirsty animosity of the Northern Government. We are every day confronted by fresh instances of its neglect for laws, municipal, constitutional, or international; its determined purpose to win its end, in the words of one of its most popular generals, Butler of Boston, 'by the light of their smoking and rebellious cities.' The Church may be, as we have often been told, and are willing to believe, the most important denomination among the Northern 'upper ten thousand,' the men and women of refinement, wealth, and social culture. But in the Northern States the upper ten thousand are the disfranchised class of the community; and the man who belongs to it, but is ambitious, must forswear his antecedents, if he looks for power.
If we turn to the States which own the sway of Jefferson Davis, those who are living at a distance, and who only appreciate matters across the Atlantic by the lights which the American columns of their favourite newspaper may shed, must have noticed a remarkable intellectual, if not moral phenomenon. Of old, Englishmen used to connect those trains of thought, which the better citizens of the States would designate as 'spreadeagle' and 'bunkum,' and we should term vulgar ostentation and overweening national vanity, with the whole United States. Possibly the rifle-bearing, bowie-knife-wearing Southerner was looked upon as the greatest offender. How is it, then, that the instant the blister has been taken off, the moment that the healing knife has completed the amputation, the South, so far as we can judge of it by its official publications, has apparently cast off bunkum and exaggeration, spreadeagle and mendacity? How comes it that it writes and speaks in accents which would sound natural from English legislators, but which we do not somehow connect with Pogram and Brick, Knickerbocker and Biglow? Every newspaper in England has had, willingly or unwillingly, to certify to the genuine ring of President Davis's Message compared with the spongy, illiterate, carping, and extravagant periods through which Mr. Lincoln floundered. We have reasons for believing that this unwonted moderation of tone is not confined to the productions of the President, but that it pervades the entire system of the Southern government, free as it is at last from the pressure of Northern mobs. If we examine the constitution of the Confederacy, we are confronted with instances of the spirit of conservative moderation which guided those statesmen who met in Montgomery to mould it upon that of the old United States. We have already pointed to the prohibition of the slave-trade which it contains. It also enacts that the tenure of the Presidentship shall be for six instead of four years, but without the premium on intrigue which the possibility of re-election involved. It gives ministers a seat and a voice on the floor of the Legislature, instead of isolating them in their offices, and handing the advocacy of ministerial measures over to private members clandestinely retained. It cuts off the most fruitful sources of corruption in declaring the permanence of all but the highest offices, and in limiting the objects to which Confederate taxes can be applied; thus, at one blow, abolishing that frightful system of universal electoral corruption, which had eaten into the very vitals of the United States. The union of feeling and corporate self-devotion which distinguishes the millions of the Southern States under the heavy privations of their isolated condition, may be laid to war excitement; their singular moderation and modesty cannot be. Ameliorations, like these, of language, and tone, and constitution so suddenly revealed, indicate an under-seam of goodness of which we must hitherto have been ignorant, while New York and Boston had constituted themselves the intermediaries of England and the South, mutually aggravating and misrepresenting the one and the other.
We have before us some remarkable American evidence on this head in a sermon which a clergyman of the diocese of Maryland, the Rev. E. J. Stearns, had the courage to deliver in the city of Newark in New Jersey (an almost suburb of New York) on the Fast Day, which President Lincoln appointed on the 26th of September, and for which he seems to have been all but prosecuted by the United States' district attorney. This preacher, speaking for himself, says, 'To me who know both parts of the country thoroughly, who know that while each has its virtues, each its faults, nine-tenths of all the divorces, nine-tenths of all the bribery of electors and legislators is at the North,' etc. The South, κατὰ κώμας οίκουμένη, may be dull beside Boston, sluggish beside New York, authority, the infidelity of those cities in abhorrence, and it is not, as Mr. Stearns testifies, to be taxed with that proclivity to divorce which has eaten into the purity and security of domestic life in those cities. Its system, no doubt, is very faulty, but the faults are on the surface.
If, as a recent writer, who uses five years' residence in New York as the foundation of an appeal to High Churchmen to side with the North, alleges, there are only 400 Episcopal clergymen in the South to 1,600 in the North, with only twice as large a population, then all we can say is, that the Southern clergy seem to have been beyond proportion successful in the way in which they have leavened their population. Of course it must not be forgotten that in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South, our Church has had to contend with the antecedent establishment of the Roman communion. But we are not pushed to inferential and secondary evidences as to the upward tendency of Churchmanship in the Confederate States.
The New York Church Journal, a paper honourably conspicuous for the silence on politics which it has, under the grievous difficulties of the last few months, continued with few exceptions to maintain, has lately furnished some valuable particulars of the action of the Church in the Confederacy, since it has been left to its own counsels, from which we venture to augur that any changes which may take place in its condition are likely to be in an upward direction. The Church in the Southern States, following the action of the Commonwealth, has naturally detached itself from the union of the Northern dioceses, and has, during the latter part of October, been holding a convention at Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, to settle a future constitution, at which, besides clerical and lay delegates, nine bishops attended; Bishop (and General) Polk, of Louisiana, not being among the number. The convention seems to have debated together while voting by orders. Among the subjects under debate was the future style of the Church. Bishop Elliott, of Georgia, advocated the retention of the original appellation—Protestant Episcopal; founding his arguments on the inexpediency of making changes unless absolutely required, and fearing lest the identity of the Church might be called into question. Judge Phelan, of Alabama, contended that if the corporation remained the same, so would its rights and liabilities; and Mr. Trapier, a clergyman, took the same view. Bishop Green, of Mississippi, considered the name Protestant, unmeaning from its generality; and that it involved the Church in the odium of the follies and heresies of the various sects. He preferred 'The American Catholic Church.' Mr. Williams, of Virginia, gloried in the term Protestant. Mr. Hines, a clergyman of Tennessee, inquired if there were no errors to protest against but those of the Romanists; referred to the use of the term Catholic Church in the Creed, and wanted a name that would take them back to the days of the Saviour and Apostles. Mr. Fairbanks, of Florida, considered Protestant as superfluous, and argued against expediency, as the lowest ground of action. Dr. Mason, of North Carolina, had never liked the title Protestant Episcopal. It had always seemed to him to be sectarian, but it was hard to get rid of. Bishop Elliott spoke again in favour of the old name. Bishop Atkinson, of North Carolina, urged that names should conform to things. He thought Reformed more expressive than Protestant; referred to the Jansenists, and preferred 'Reformed Catholic Church.' Bishop Davis, of South Carolina, dwelt on the inconvenience of change. Bishop Otey, of Tennessee, contended that Protestant was a term derived from Germany, and not originally directed against the errors of Rome. He considered the present disruption was the result of Ultra-Protestantism or Puritanism. The Rev. Dr. Crane, of Mississippi, also spoke in favour of Reformed Catholic; while Bishop Lay, of Arkansas, adhered to the present name; and Mr. Pearce, of Alabama, said that the term Protestant Episcopal, arose in Maryland by a mere accident. Ultimately the debate was adjourned, after an appeal from Bishop Meade, of Virginia, who desired to keep things as they were. On the next day the debate was again animated: Judge Phelan, of Alabama, said it was as well to talk of reformed sun and moon, as of reformed Catholic, and was content with "Episcopal Church." Bishop Elliott again pleaded for Protestant, while the Rev. Mr. Pinckney found fault both with that and with Catholic. Bishop Johns, Assistant of Virginia, was sure Virginia would not have sent delegates if she had thought this subject was to be discussed, and went on to assert that Protestant indicated a positive faith and worship. Bishop Atkinson considered the choice to be between Protestant and Reformed. Reformed expressed a fact, Protestant a spirit, and one that he could not approve of. Emerson, Beecher, Parker, Strauss, were all Protestants, yet Emerson believed the leaves of the forest were God. He then gave further reasons in favour of Catholic. Bishop Gregg, of Texas, agreed with him entirely as to the facts, but thought it wholly inexpedient to make any change. Ultimately 'Protestant Episcopal' was carried by six bishops to three, and a large majority of clergy and laity. But, as it will have been seen, the Catholicity of our communion was boldly brought forward, and the very fact of the question having been raised and discussed as it was, is very hopeful of the spirit of the Confederate dioceses. A later number of the Church Journal contains the constitution of the 'Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America,' as proposed in this convention, and sent down for approval to the various diocesan conventions. The first thing that strikes the reader accustomed to the proceedings of the Church in the United States is, that the ugly term Convention, heretofore used for the synodical gatherings of the Church, is struck out, and the far more ecclesiastical word Council substituted. So there is to be a triennial General Council, which is first to meet in November, 1862, at Augusta, Georgia, and also Diocesan Councils. The lay representatives to this General Council are, we are glad to see, ordered to be communicants; an amelioration which is, of course, of great importance. There is also a somewhat ambiguous provision for erecting any State which shall divide itself into more than one diocese into an ecclesiastical province, and for creating a triennial Provincial Council. What, however, the relations of this Council are to be to the General Council are not defined, and cannot fail, we should think, to be embarrassing. In one of the latter clauses, they talk of the establishment of a Book of Common Prayer, &c., which, we trust, implies that the Southern Church intends to restore some of the omissions which the bad taste and worse theology of the closing eighteenth century made in the English Prayer-Book, as edited for the United States. If the book is taken in hand at all, it must, we believe, be altered for the better. Altogether, the details which we have given appear to establish that the prospects of the Church are more hopeful in the Confederate States than they were before the great disruption had thrown the Southerners on their own resources.
The Church Journal for December 4, which we have received since writing the above paragraph, extracts an article on this Convention, from the, Richmond Enquirer, the chief paper of the Confederate Capital, It says, 'In taking the necessary steps to form an independent Church organization for the Confederate States, everything was done with harmony and good feeling. The Missionary fund and work of the Church in the South, it was found, had suffered no decline since the separation from the North, but both were on the increase even under a provisional arrangement.'
America has, for the present, almost driven Italy out of the minds of stay-at-home politicians. What will come of the consolidation of the Peninsula—an event which, by the way, seems to us just as much to be accepted as the bi-section of the United States—cannot yet be predicated. One thing is certain, that it is a providentially-ordered mutation, and we may add, that we cannot see how any one holding the Anglican view of the Papal usurpations can fail to look for good arising out of it; but we should be very cautious not to mar this good by meddling. For instance, the more books of sound English theology we print and throw upon the Italian markets the better, but the less we attempt direct influence, especially if it comes in the person of one who can be taxed with change of side, the wiser it will be. The Italian reformation, when it comes, must be the work of Italy, wrought out at home by Italians, and shaped in an Italian mould.
Of the Colonial Church, properly speaking, we have not much to say. It seems, for the two last years, to have been quietly going on, holding its stated synods, and making a progress which may be all the surer because the less noisy. The chief notes of onwardness are in Canada, in which the Bishop of Montreal, after completing his cathedral, has, as first metropolitan, held the first Provincial Council, and where the new diocese of Ottawa has been constituted with, we understand, a very satisfactory choice of diocesan. Bishop Chapman has resigned Colombo, and has been succeeded by Bishop Claughton; and the Bahamas have been constituted an independent diocese. The desirable separation of Singapore from Calcutta, and its incorporation with the diocese of Borneo, is still pigeonholed in Downing-street. But we trust that it may not be long before this needful step will have been completed to cheer the good Bishop, returned to his sphere of earnest, loving duty. The admirable sense which Bishop Macdougal adds to ability and self-devotion makes us peculiarly hopeful of his mission. There is also a movement in progress to create a new see at Goulburn, in New South Wales, adjacent to which, the new Colony of Queensland has received its independent organization as the see of Brisbane. How far the miserable war in New Zealand may have affected the evangelization of that land, living, as we do, at a distance, we have no means of judging; but the results cannot fail to be disastrous. Whether the Church will see its way to seizing the opportunity opened out in Madagascar remains to be proved. The importance of its doing so cannot be questioned.
Altogether, the Church at home and in the Colonies appears for the present to be safe. Present safety would a few years since have seemed a very slight object of congratulation; but, in the whirl and crash of mundane things, in this age of revolutions, stability is progress. Yet it is a safeness which must be guaranteed by the labourer going to his work with his weapon in his girdle. In the parish and in the provincial Convocation the same grounds of hope exist, and the same necessity of vigilance. The old Church of England enjoys advantages which may not be at first sight evident, but which are most real and powerful, in the manner in which its formularies, its ancient Catholic prayers and canticles, its forcible versions, its baptismal, marriage, and burial services, have sunk into the hearts of the general people, and moulded their tone of thought, even at second hand with those who voluntarily hold off from public communion with the Church. In the long run, its appeal to popular instincts against popular passions would, we believe, be successful; for, with the exception of Mr. Bright and the bigoted backers of the Liberation Society, Englishmen in general acquiesce in the Church of England, along with Queen, Lords, and Commons, and the judges in their scarlet gowns, as an institution of which it is the right thing to be proud. They may not, many of them, be very expert in the doctrines of that Church, but as long as the Church is there with its doctrines under its own keeping, it occupies the vantage ground. With all the discouragements and disappointments which we may have been suffering from of late years, we cannot honestly refuse to say that we have gained enormously. Convocation revived, a Colonial Church well-nigh created, religious institutions of all kinds set up, communions multiplied, occasions of worship infinitely increased, churches and the services in them beautified and rectified, in every district of the land, are some of the most salient items of the acknowledged gain.
Let us live to assure these blessings to our successors. Let us live to do so, not only as Churchmen but as Englishmen. In England, happily, the divorce between the Church feeling and the national feeling, if ever it were likely to have taken place, is now suspended, and will, we hope, by the continuance of quiet, be rendered impossible. At this moment we more particularly feel that we are Englishmen, partaking as we do in that immense grief which radiates from the most exalted of English homes, and penetrates the humblest. That grief will, in a few hours from the moment we are writing, be collected and sanctified in that solemn message of God's mercy which the Church claims as its own. The roof of Windsor Chapel will then resound with the aspiration, most rightly used over one who, among no common temptations, was ever faithful, virtuous, true, and pious, 'earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.' These words have accompanied the highest of our race and our language, and the most forlorn and buffeted, to their last home: these words are the authentic voice of the English Church. To them, and to those which go before and which follow after, we commend the cause of the Church among a people of whom the preponderating majority has been accustomed to the burial of Christians, and who would not willingly, if the choice were offered, take in exchange the chance effusions of the fanatic or the godless indifference of a silent funeral.
PRINTED BY R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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