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 A CHARGE 
 
 DELIVERED TO THE 
 
 CLERGY AND CHURCHWARDENS OF THE DIOCESE 
 OF PETERBOROUGH 
 
 At his Second Visitation, October, 1875 
 
 By WILLIAM CONNOR MAGEE, D.D. 
 
 BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH 
 
 LONDON 
 DALDY, ISBISTER, & CO. 
 
 56, LUDGATE HILL 
 1875
 
 LONDON: 
 
 PKIXTEI) HY VlRll'E ANIJ CO., LIMITED, 
 
 CITV ROAD,
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Articles of Inquiry at Visitation ........ 2 
 
 Frequency of Church Services 4 
 
 Number of Communicants ......... 4 
 
 Collections for Church Missions 6 
 
 Special Sendees ........... 6 
 
 Church Building and Restoration ........ 7 
 
 Church Education . . ......... 8 
 
 Diocesan Religious Inspection ........ 9 
 
 Religious Teaching in Church Sch jols . . . . . . .11 
 
 Catechising in Church . . . . . . . . . .12 
 
 Confirmations ............ 12 
 
 Efforts for deepening Spiritual Life . . . . . . .12 
 
 Hindrances to the ISIinistry ......... 15 
 
 Dissent . ^ 15 
 
 Labourers' Unions 20 
 
 Intemperance ............ 23 
 
 Pew-renting and Appropriation ........ 25 
 
 Diocesan Organization 26 
 
 Ecclesiastical Legislation 28 
 
 Public Worship Regulation Act 45 
 
 Appendix 71
 
 LHUC 
 
 "'CMp.VJ 
 
 /
 
 A CHARGE. 
 
 &c. 
 
 Reverend and Dear Brethren. 
 
 '"PHE occasion which assembles us here to-day, brings with it 
 -■- for all of us its impressive lessons. To many of you it brings 
 again the long-vanished past, with its strange and yet instructive 
 contrasts with the Church life and work of the present day ; with 
 its memories too of those whose vacant places here speak to us 
 of that final account to which they have passed, and to which we 
 are all so swiftly passing. To all of us, even to the youngest here 
 present, it brings its reproachful record of duties omitted, oppor- 
 tunities wasted, plans unrealised, resolutions unfulfilled. To all 
 of us, let us hope, it also brings its remembrance and its renewal 
 of the obligations we have incurred and the vows we have 
 taken ; its tresh acts of self-dedication to the service of Him 
 whose presence amongst us we have just invoked and recognised, 
 and to whom we have once more solemnly oft'ered ourselves, 
 soul and body, as our holy and reasonable sacrifice. 
 
 To strengthen these feelings and deepen these resolves, and to 
 direct them, if I may, both for you and for myself, into more and 
 more strenuous and enduring effort, into higher and still higher 
 life for God, must be my aim in the words of exhortation which 
 I am now about to address to you. 
 
 If I have to speak, as I shall have to speak, to you of much 
 that relates rather to the machinery of our work than to that work 
 itself; if I have to deal, as I shall have to deal, with much that 
 belongs rather to the ecclesiastical and almost secular side of our 
 Church life as distinguished from its higher and more spiritual 
 aspect, I would do so as not forgetting, as urging you not to 
 forget, that these are, all of them, but means to one great end —
 
 2 A CHARGE. 
 
 the winning and the saving of the souls for which Christ died. If I 
 ask you to consider with me how as fishers of men we may best 
 make or mend our nets, it is but that we may all the more readily 
 and eflectually obey the command which bids us launch out into 
 the deep, and let down our nets for a draught. 
 
 My task on this occasion naturally divides itself into two parts. 
 I have, in the first place, to review for you the Church history 
 of our own diocese during the last three years ; and to tell you 
 how far this has inipressed my own mind with the sense of 
 success or of failure, as judged by the standard of three years ago : 
 I have in the next place to speak to you of some of those larger 
 events in the general life and polity of the Church, which, if they 
 have not perhaps all that direct and immediate influence on our 
 work which some would attribute to them in the way of either 
 help or hindrance, yet must profoundly afl^ect it by the distractions 
 which they cause, or the dispositions they engender amongst the 
 workers. 
 Articles of in- Tumiug then, in the first place, to the review of Church life and 
 tTon^ ^' Visita- ^Qrk amongst ourselves, I have to begin by thanking the clergy 
 and churchwardens of this diocese for the full and explicit replies 
 which they have for the most part given to the inquiries which 
 I have addressed to them with a view to this visitation. These 
 inquiries are made, as I trust you will beheve, in no spirit of 
 espionage or of idle curiosity. I have made them partly in 
 compliance with the rule and custom of the Church ; but mainly 
 in order that I might be enabled to give you what you expect 
 from me at each visitation, a faithful picture of the condition of 
 the Church in this diocese. If I am to do this to any useful 
 purpose, rendering justice not only to the subject, but to you 
 whose work I am to estimate, I must obtain from you before- 
 hand such information as shall make that estimate fair and 
 accurate. This information, previously to the visitation, I can 
 only obtain from the good-will and courtesy of the clergy. These 
 articles of inquiry which I address to you are " articles to be 
 inquired of in visitation," and no one therefore is legally bound 
 to answer them previously. And there are even many of these 
 which can hardly be regarded, which certainly I do not regard, 
 as subjects of legal inquiry at the visitation. There are indeed 
 amongst them certain statutable inquiries to which the cle/gy are 
 required, as most of you are aware, under the provisions of an 
 Act of Parliament, to make answers every year. And as regards 
 these, I do not think that I make an unreasonable 'demand upon 
 the convenience of the clergy, when, once in three years, I ask 
 them to give me information in May or June, which they will 
 have, in any case, to furnish me with in December. The greater 
 part of these visitation queries, however, are not addressed to you 
 as legal or statutable articles of inquiry ; they are rather requests
 
 A CHARGE. 3 
 
 for information as to what may be termed the reHgious statistics 
 of the diocese. They relate, for instance, to such matters as the 
 number of scholars in Sunday or daily schools ; the number of 
 communicants relatively to population ; the amount of money 
 contributed to Church purposes during the preceding years ; the 
 special helps or hindrances in each man's own ministry. The 
 answers to these queries, when collected and analysed, make a 
 most valuable and interesting part of the spiritual history of a 
 diocese, and are a great help to a bishop in the administration of 
 its affairs ; and they have, moreover, a very considerable eccle- 
 siastical and even political value, in times when the unscrupulous 
 misstatements of the enemies of our Church need to be met and 
 refuted by the true and accurate statements of her friends. 
 
 I can therefore hardly imagine any reason, or at least any good 
 reason, why any incumbent should refuse to furnish this kind of 
 information when asked for it by his bishop ; and I should have 
 thought, moreover, that the incumbents who do refuse it w'ould 
 have preferred giving their own accounts of these matters, accom- 
 panied by their own explanations of any of them that might seem 
 to them to need it, to leaving the Bishop to ascertain these from 
 other and less reliable sources, and to conjecture the reason why, 
 unlike the great majority of their brethren, they should wish to 
 keep them so profoundly secret. 
 
 The Visitation Articles addressed to churchwardens stand 
 upon a somewhat different footing from those addressed to the 
 clergy. The churchwarden is an officer of the Bishop ; and his 
 office being one of observation and complaint, he is legally 
 bound to make presentment at the visitation of all matters which 
 require to be brought under the notice of the Bishop. To do 
 this in each case viva voce would obviously cause serious incon- 
 venience to all present, and accordingly these queries, in accord- 
 ance with the directions of the Church (as given in the 119th 
 Canon),* are sent to the churchwardens beforehand, as the simplest 
 and most convenient mode of enabling them to discharge one of 
 the duties of their office ; while, at the same time, they serve as 
 a kind of charge and direction to them, often much needed, as 
 to the manner in which those duties should be performed. 
 
 I trust that this simple explanation of the real meaning and 
 use of Visitation Articles of inquiry may remove the miscon 
 ceptions which I am aware in some cases exist respecting them. 
 And, having now given this explanation once for all, I am quite 
 content to leave this matter to the good sense and the good 
 
 * " The Archbishop and Bishop, when he or they do summon their 
 Visitation, shall deliver, or cause to be delivered, to the Churchwardens, 
 Questmen, and Synodmen of every parish, or to some of them, such book of 
 articles as they, or any of them, shall require for the year following, the said 
 Churchwardens, &c. &:c., to found their presentments upon at such times as 
 they are to exhibit them." Canon cxix. 1603. 
 
 B 2
 
 A CHARGE. 
 
 feeling of the clergy and churchwardens of this diocese. I 
 very little doubt what the result of this appeal in most 
 will be. 
 
 have 
 
 The picture of our work for the last three years which these 
 returns present, is full of encouragement and hope. On almost 
 every point by which we can judge of progress there has been a 
 steady and, in some respects, a large advance. As regards the 
 number and frequency of our Church services, I find a marked in- 
 crease in the observance, by special services of one kind or another, 
 of the seasons and festivals of the Church, especially of Lent and 
 Advent ; and I observe with satisfaction that Ascension Day is kept 
 in 463 of our churches, being an advance of 85 upon the number 
 returned at last visitation. The list of churches having week-day 
 services has risen from 252 to 320, and of those having daily 
 service from 36 to 60. The sad list of churches in which Holy 
 Communion is administered less frequently than once a month 
 has diminished from 187 to 123, and in many of these it is now 
 administered with much greater frequency than before, while the 
 number of churches where its administration is unhappily limited 
 to the minimum of three times in the year, alhnvcd — not directed 
 — by the rubric, is rapidly decreasing. Let me hope that if I 
 am spared to hold another visitation, I may have the happiness 
 of announcing that it has vanished altogether. On the other 
 hand, I find that the number of churches having weekly celebra- ■ 
 tion of the Holy Communion has risen from 33 to 52 ; while in 
 not a few instances I observe that a fortnightly has replaced a 
 monthly celebration. 
 
 The communicants in this diocese, so far as I have been able 
 to calculate, amount to nearly twelve per cent, of our Church 
 population. I cannot, however, speak with certainty on this 
 point, inasmuch as from some of our parishes I have received no 
 returns respecting it, and this, in most cases, because the clergy- 
 man has either not kept any record, or any very accurate record, 
 of his communicants, and has been unwilling to make a precise 
 statement on a matter on which he was not positively certain. 
 NumberofCom. Let me suggest on this point how very desirable it is that every 
 raunicants. clergyman should keep careful note of the number of his com- 
 municants on each occasion (they are easily calculated), and that 
 he should also keep a careful record of those who regularly 
 communicate. Such a record is an invaluable test to each parish 
 priest of the spiritual condition of his parish, and the success of 
 his ministry. A well-restored and well-filled church, good 
 schools, successful parochial organisation, are all of them cheer- 
 ing and gratifying evidences of the energy and zeal, or it may be 
 the deserved popularity, of the clergyman. But if he wants to 
 know how that spiritual work, for which these are but the
 
 A CHARGE. 5 
 
 machinery, is progressing ; if he wants to know how far he has 
 drawn his people closer, not merely to himself, or even to the 
 Church, but to Christ, he must know how many of them are 
 habitual frequenters of the table of their Lord. I am well aware 
 that such a record is often a verydisheiirtening one. I know how 
 often diligent and faithful pastors tell me that, preach and labour 
 as they may, they can hardly increase the number of their 
 communicants ; and yet this very record of their failure has its 
 value if it set the saddened pastor to search if there be aught in 
 his teaching or his life that can have caused it; or, should his 
 heart acquit him of such fault, he may still learn the lesson, so 
 full of chastening and yet of encouragement, that the sufficiency 
 of our ministry is not of us, and that plant and water as we may, 
 it is God alone can give the increase for which we pray and 
 strive. 
 
 Let me add on this subject of more frequent services in our 
 churches, a word of caution which will, I venture to think, be 
 best appreciated by those to whose zeal and self-sacrifice we owe 
 their increasing frequency. Frequent services have their dangerous 
 side, as all work for God done by us sinful men must have, and 
 their danger is, I think, beginning to manifest itself. It is that 
 of substituting services in the church for pastoral work outside it. 
 The minister of the Church of England is pre-eminently a pastor, 
 and the good pastor must " know his sheep, and be known of 
 them ; " and this knowledge must come either from their com- 
 pulsory resort to him as their confessor, or from his diligent 
 visiting of them in their own houses as their pastor. The former 
 of these sources of knowledge is, I thank God, forbidden the 
 English parish priest. He has no right to require a single member 
 of his flock to come to him in confession, and if he had, there 
 are many who would never so come. If he is to win his people, 
 therefore, he must seek them diligently in their own homes, and 
 teach them to know and lo\e him there that he may draw them 
 with him to the house of God. I look with some anxiety, 
 therefore, on a growing tendency in some quarters to depreciate 
 pastoral visiting in favour of more frequent services in church, 
 and even to sneer at the former as mere idle gossiping, the 
 time spent in which might be better employed by the priest 
 in his study, or in " saying his office " in the church. Idle and 
 profitless gossiping, undoubtedly, parochial visiting may be, and 
 too often is, just as the saying of prayers by minister or congre- 
 gation, may become a merely idle formalism. But there need 
 be no formalism in either, and it is a grievous mistake to set 
 these in antagonism to each other, or to think that one of 
 them can ever be the substitute for the other. We have had 
 enough, in times past, of depreciation of the work of the priest in 
 the sanctuary, for the supposed more profitable work of the pastor 
 in the parish ; let us take care how we run into the opposite error
 
 6 A CHARGE. 
 
 of depreciating the work of the pastor in favour of the pubUc 
 ministrations of the priest. 
 Collections for I find that the number of churches having collections for either 
 lions!''' ^^^'^' the foreign or home missions of our Church has increased since 
 last visitation from 391 to 443. Those churches in which collec- 
 tions are still unknown are mostly in very poor or very small 
 parishes, where the incumbent probably thinks that it would be 
 hardly worth his while to have a collection for the sake of the 
 small sum he would obtain ; or where he may be unwiUing to 
 risk, by some new appeal, the diminution of the help he so sorely 
 needs for the keeping up the schools or the charities of his parish. 
 But surely this is a great mistake. The sum that such a congrega- 
 tion might contribute to missions, might do very little good to the 
 mission cause ; but it might do much good to themselves, if it 
 taught them to give for some object not directly tending to their 
 own benefit, and the largeness of heart that comes from such 
 teaching would be seen ere long in larger gifts to their own parish 
 charities. Of nothing is the truth of the inspired saying, " there is 
 that scattereth and yet increaseth/' more true than of Christian 
 almsgiving. 
 
 Let me entreat then each clergyman in this diocese, who has 
 not yet done so, to bring before his people, at least once in the 
 year some one or other of the Church's missions at home or abroad. 
 His parish charities will be none the worse, and he and his people 
 may be all the better for it. An opportunity for doing this is now 
 aftbrded by the recommendation of the Convocation of this pro- 
 vince, that one day in each year, St. Andrew's day, should be set 
 apart as a day of intercession on behalf of the missions of the 
 Church, and by the preparation of a special service to be used on 
 that occasion. I heartily accept this recommendation, and author- 
 Speciai Services, ise the use of this intercessory service in this diocese, and 1 trust 
 that the clergy Avill all of them make it a regular and stated service 
 in their churches. It consists, according to the provisions of the 
 Uniformity Amendment Act, of selections only from the Bible and 
 the Book of Common Prayer. I confess that this has always seemed 
 to me a needless restriction. I cannot see why so large a liberty in 
 this respect should be allowed respecting hymns, and so little 
 allowed respeciing prayers. I cannot see why, if the minister may 
 at his own discretion be allowed to introduce into the order ap- 
 pointed in the Book of Common Prayer, words of praise selected 
 from any collection that he approves of, the Church in her Synods 
 should not be allowed to appoint, for additional services, words of 
 prayer that she may have selected from such collections as she 
 might approve of; or why she should be reduced to the necessity 
 of making abrupt dislocations of her Book of Common Prayer 
 and aAvkward adaptations of words of Scripture in order to 
 do what might be so much better and more simply done, by 
 taking from the old Liturgical treasures ready to her hand such
 
 A CHARGE. 7 
 
 prayers as might seem to her best fitted for the devotions of her 
 children. 
 
 ■ There would, I should think, be very little to fear as to the charac- 
 ter of special services framed by Convocation and sanctioned by 
 the bishop of the diocese. Indeed there would in this case be a 
 stronger guarantee than there now is for the orthodoxy of such ser- 
 vices. For it would not I imagine be a very difficult task to form 
 a highly heterodox service by a moderately ingenious combina- 
 tion of the words of the Prayer Book and of Scripture, the only 
 check in that case being the assent of the Ordinary ; whereas, in the 
 other case, there would be the additional check of the assent of 
 both Houses of Convocation of the province. I cannot but hope 
 therefore that we may ere long obtain this reasonable addition to 
 our liberty. 
 
 The amount contributed for church building and restoration cimnh i.uiiding 
 
 , ....^ i-i - -I •i"<i restoration. 
 
 smce last visitation is ±^1^-,ooo, which at hrst sight seems a great 
 falling off from the amount contributed in the preceding interval 
 between two visitations, namely ^149,000 : the falling off however 
 is only apparent. The difference is accounted for by the fact that 
 the former interval extended over nearly five, and the latter over 
 only three )'ears, and also by the fact that in the former amount 
 was included the greater part of the fund raised for church exten- 
 sion on a large scale in Leicester — a work now brought nearly to 
 a happy conclusion. With the building there of two new churches 
 now in progress, and for the cost of which we have not taken 
 credit in our account of contributions, the spiritual needs of our 
 largest town may be said to have been fairly overtaken, so far as 
 church accommodation is concerned, for the present ; though it is a 
 significant fact that one of the last of these new churches is about 
 to be built in a new parish constituted only three years ago, which 
 when it was first marked out, but two years previously, for separation 
 from its mother parish, hardly numbered its legal quota of 4,000 
 parishioners. The reference to this new church enables me to 
 record the encouraging fact of our having again received, in one 
 largehearted gift, a churcli and its endowment. The example set 
 in the building and endowment of St. Mark's, Leicester, by two 
 devoted lay members of our Church, has been nobly followed, this 
 time by a clerical benefactor the Rev. F. Burnaby, who is building 
 at his own cost and contributing an endowment for the new 
 church of St. Saviour's. 
 
 In the town of Northampton we have commenced this year 
 a large and much-needed eftbrt for church extension, which I 
 trust may yet prove as successful as that made for Leicester. 
 Four new parishes at least, and four new churches, are needed 
 in Northampton, to meet the spiritual wants of its rapidly- 
 increasing population. For this we require a sum of not less than 
 ^33,000, of which I am thankful to say, more than ^14,000 has 
 been already promised ; and one of the four parishes we require,
 
 « A CHARGE. 
 
 already constituted as a Peel district, and a clergyman appointed 
 to it. 
 
 I take this opportunity of thanking the laity and the clergy of 
 the county of Northampton for the manner in which they have so 
 far responded to my call for help in their county town. They 
 have recognised in so doing the fact, which cannot be too often 
 pressed upon churchmen of means and position in our country 
 districts, that the great battle of the Church and of Christianity is 
 now being fought in our great towns ; and that once we lose it 
 there we shall in vain strive to maintain it in our country parishes. 
 If, therefore, these would still continue to enjoy those churches 
 which have cost them so much to restore, and those peaceful 
 pastoral ministrations which they so greatly prize, they must come 
 to the help of their overwrought brethren in the towns, where 
 poor endowments, scanty supply of ministers and great masses of 
 unevangelised and alienated population, make the effort for church 
 extension at once so urgent and so arduous. Be sure that there 
 is no better, and in the end no cheaper church defence than church 
 extension in the great towns of England. Let me at the same time 
 express the hope that the citizens of Northampton will not rely 
 too much on the liberality of the county, but rather justify and 
 incite this by making a really great and strenuous effort to supply 
 the spiritual needs of their own town and neighbourhood. 
 
 C'lurch Eciuca- The work of education is making steady progress amongst us. 
 
 '""■ When last I addressed you respecting it, you will remember, we 
 
 were just passing through the crisis of the new Education Act, 
 
 and were anxious and doubtful as to how we should meet all the 
 
 new conditions it imposed upon us. 
 
 The result has been to justify the expectation I then expressed 
 as to the manner in which the Church in this diocese would pass 
 through this ordeal. After a three years' experience of the Act I 
 think I may say, that whatever may be its defects or its dangers, 
 it has had one good result in the powerful stimulus it has given to 
 Church education, and that not only in the building of schools, 
 but in the tone and character of the education given in them. Since 
 last visitation no less than 144 church schools have been built or en- 
 , larged, at a cost in voluntary contributions of ^59,865 ; while in 
 
 the preceding interval, there had been built or enlarged 105 
 schools, at a cost of ^31,317. At what a cost of effort and of 
 painful self-denial and sacrifice, this great work has been done in 
 this diocese most of you are well aware ; but the result has been 
 that, with but few exceptions, our schools have been enabled to 
 stand the strict, and in some cases perhaps the severe, requirements 
 of the Education Department, and have become, what many of 
 them were certainly not before, efficient and sufficient. 
 
 Another fact we have I think clearly proved is that, with equal 
 efficiency, a Denominational school may be far cheaper than a
 
 A CHARGE. 9 
 
 Board school. We might indeed naturally have expected this, for 
 those who are expending their own money in a cause which they 
 thoroughly understand and for which they care a great deal, are 
 likely to be at once more economical and more successful than 
 those who are spending other j^eople's money on a cause which 
 they do not always understand, and for which they sometimes care 
 very little. When we find in one parish a thoroughly-efficient 
 Church school sustained at a cost to its supporters of not more than 
 three-halfpence in the pound, and in the adjoining parish of equal 
 area a Board school which costs the ratepayers sixpence in the 
 pound on their rating, we can have little doubt that it is possible to 
 buy the right of excluding religion from a school at a price which 
 many would be disposed to regard as rather beyond its proper value. 
 
 We have effectually disposed, too, of the religious difficulty, 
 which once loomed so large upon the platform. The vision of anxious 
 parents, eager to protect their children from the proselytism of the 
 parson, which used so to vex the souls of conscientious secularists 
 and sectarians, has vanished, as everyone in the least acquainted 
 with the real state of the case knew that it would vanish, in the 
 daylight of plain fact and honest report. The testimony both 
 of government and diocesan inspectors, shows, that only in the 
 rarest instances have parents availed themselves of their right under 
 the Conscience Clause to withdraw their children from the 
 religious teaching in our Church schools. I think, too, that it is 
 now beginning to be seen that popular election of school managers 
 does not always secure efficiency in return for increased expendi- 
 ture. School boards elected by a majority of ratepayers, on the 
 principle of representing every "interest" in the parish except 
 that one of education, which alone they were intended to represent, 
 are found sometimes to be not the best machinery for promoting 
 that " interest ; " and I think that it would not be difficult to point 
 out instances in which this mode of conducting the education of a 
 parish has resulted in throwing it into the hands of the most illi- 
 terate and unfit persons in it. I hope therefore that our managers 
 of Church schools will be very slow, even under the increasing 
 pressure of financial difficulty, to surrender any one of their schools 
 to the management of a school board. And if they do find them- 
 selves at last compelled to take this step ; I trust they will re- 
 member that they are in most cases joint trustees for our Church 
 schools with the National Society which represents the interests, in 
 the matter of education, of the Church at large, and that they will 
 in every case, consult with the committee of that Society as to the 
 terms on which the proposed surrender should be made. 
 
 Our system of diocesan religious inspection by paid inspectors, Diocesan Re- 
 was, you will remember, inaugurated just before the last visitation. Ji|||'_"^ inspec- 
 It has, I am thankful to say, proved a complete success. Our two 
 inspectors are now heartily welcomed in almost every school in 
 their respective districts ; a fact which, I am sure that the school
 
 10 A CHARGE. 
 
 managers in the diocese will bear me out in saying, is largely 
 owing to the tact as well as the energy and ability with which 
 the Inspectors have carried out their difficult and somewhat 
 delicate task. Their inspection has revealed to us, as it was 
 intended and desired that it should, the weak spots in the religious 
 teaching in our schools ; a result for which none I think should be 
 more grateful than the managers and teachers themselves, for 
 there is nothing that the honest and earnest worker should desire 
 more than that he should be helped in his work by one who can 
 both tell him where it is defective, and how best to amend it. That 
 their inspection has been received in this spirit, is apparent from 
 the fact that they report " marked improvement in many of the 
 schools of which, at first, they were compelled to speak unfavour- 
 ably ; " while " the knowledge that an examination would be held 
 has operated, both on teachers and on children, as a stimulus ; 
 and the adoption of the syllabus issued by our boards of education, 
 has made the work more definite, and caused it to be done more 
 systematically." 
 
 I give in an appendix some of the tabulated results of their 
 inspection,* which seem to me well worthy of the consideration of all 
 who are interested in the work of eilucation in this diocese. There 
 is, however, one circumstance on which they remark, and to which I 
 wish especially to draw attention, because it seems to me to indicate 
 the special danger that besets all school instruction in religion. 
 It is this, that in many cases the candidates for examination, "while 
 showing considerable knowledge of Bible history, seem to have read 
 it as mere history and nothing else, and had apparently failed to 
 grasp the lesson which the narrative was meant to convey." This is 
 exactly what we have to dread and guard against in all religious 
 education; it is the substitution of knowledge of facts relating to 
 religion, for knowledge of religion itself. These are two very 
 different things ; it is quite possible to teach a child a great deal 
 of the letter of the Bible, and )'et to leave him very ignorant of 
 Christian belief, and very little under the influence of the Christian 
 religion. A child may know by heart the history of the kings of 
 Judah, or the geography of Palestine, or even the facts in the life 
 of our blessed Lord himself, without being any the better for 
 this knowledge, either in faith or in morals. Nay, he may even 
 be the worse, if he has learned it all as a school task, in which he 
 has been crammed for successive examinations, and has wearied 
 heartily of in consequence, because he has never been taught to see 
 its true use or bearing on his daily life. And yet it is so much 
 easier to teach religion to children after this fashion, than after 
 the fashion which trains them to be inteUigent Christians and moral 
 and pious men and women, that all our religious teaching is liable 
 to drift in this direction of mere head knowledge of facts and dates 
 and words, and that we too often succeed in turning out from our 
 See Appendix B.
 
 l.ools. 
 
 A CHARGE. II 
 
 schools a few tolerably good Bible scholars, and a great many very 
 indifferent Christians. 
 
 And this danger is the greater from the fact to which one of our RcHsioustcach- 
 inspectors, in his able report, has drawn our attention, namely, " the s^.c'" ^^^'^'^^ 
 great extent to which in this country the religious instruction of the 
 children who attend our elementary schools is left by their parents 
 to the day and Sunday school, wliile in the day school the religious 
 teaching falls chiefly on the teacher in charge ; " that is to say, in 
 other words, that the children of the labouring class learn their 
 religion mainly as a school task. 
 
 I cannot but regard this as a very serious fact, and one that goes 
 far to account for much of that stolid practical ungodliness, that 
 dull repugnance to religion, which we find manifesting itself in so 
 many of our young people, just about the time of their leaving 
 school. The real truth is, in many cases, that they have so 
 entirely identified religion with school work, that they are only too 
 well pleased to take leave of both at the same moment, and to 
 remember both with the same feeling of thankful escape and 
 freedom from task-work and discipline. One of our inspectors 
 expresses the hope that " our teachers will increasingly recognise 
 how dependent their scholars are upon them for their spiritual as 
 well as mental development, and will seek not only to satisfy the 
 requirements of diocesan inspection, but also to discharge to 
 Church and State, a duty which those who are aware of the con- 
 troversies of the day, cannot but regard as most grave." In this 
 counsel to our school teachers I entirely agree, and I trust that 
 they will lay it to heart. I trust that they will never cease to 
 regard themselves as trained and sent forth by the Church to take 
 part in the religious education of the nation, just as much as they 
 are by the State to take their part in its secular education, and 
 that they will do all in their power to raise the tone of religious 
 training in their schools. 
 
 But I am satisfied that more than this is needed if we would 
 escape the very serious danger I have referred to. The clergyman 
 must take his proper place in the religious teaching in our schools. 
 By this I certainly do not mean that he should take it altogether 
 out of the hands of the school teacher. Such a secularising of the 
 office of the teacher would, in my opinion, be one of the worst 
 evils that could befal education in this country. I trust that we 
 shall be content to leave such an exclusion of the laity from the 
 teaching of religion to those who, while they advocate it, denounce 
 the sacerdotalism of our clergy. What I do mean is that the 
 clergyman should never leave this religious teaching entirely to the 
 schoolmaster. I mean that he should aim at giving it in that form 
 in which it is hardest for the schoolmaster to give, however willing 
 he may be to do so — unassociated in the minds of the children with 
 thoughts of school tasks and examinations and prizes for religious 
 knowledge — simply as a lesson in faith and practice for their daily
 
 It A CHARGE. 
 
 life, drawn out for them by their pastor, lovingly and simply, from 
 the facts or the words they may have learned from their teacher, 
 and so giving to fact or word a new meaning and attractiveness 
 that shall fix them, not in their memories only, but in their hearts 
 and consciences for life. 
 
 Only by some such distincdy pastoral element as this in our 
 religious teaching m our schools, can we, I am persuaded, prevent 
 it from degenerating into that hard joyless task for the unsanctified 
 intellect, that mere irksome addition to the drudgery of school 
 work, which I fear it is to too many of the children in our national 
 schools. I confess that I am sometimes afraid to think how many 
 a youth has owed to his so-called religious education in day school 
 or Sunday school his first feelings of hatred to religion. 
 
 The condition of our Sunday schools calls for no special remark, 
 unless it be to note, as I do with pleasure, the formation of unions 
 of Sunday school teachers, for conference and mutual improve- 
 ment. 
 
 Catechising in our parish churches is making its slow but I hope 
 sure progress amongst us. I shall not soon forget the pleasure 
 with wdiich I witnessed, in one of our large town churches, the 
 catechising of twelve hundred chiklren ; nor the hearty, joyous 
 children's service that preceded it ; nor the pleased and interested 
 countenances of the parents and friends who were' present to listen 
 and to profit by it. 
 
 Our confirmations continue to be what they have hitherto been, 
 amongst the brightest spots in the work of the diocese. I see the 
 same care and pains still taken to make them really edifying ; and, 
 if possible, an increasing seriousness and reverence amongst the 
 candidates. I see much less frequently than I did at first the 
 strange spectacle of adult and even aged candidates for confirma- 
 tion. A circumstance from which I infer that the number of 
 unconfirmed adults left in many of your parishes as the fruit of old 
 neglect, is being reached as far as it can be reached by the zeal 
 of the clergy, and that now the ordinance is being restored to its 
 proper subjects, children who have come to years of discretion. 
 Efforts for deep- One Other fact I have to note, and I do so with especial thank- 
 enmg spiritual fu^ngss. It is the efiforts now being made by so many of the 
 clergy for the deepening of their own spiritual life. It has been 
 my happiness to preside at two large gatherings of clergy in 
 this diocese, assembled to arrange for meetings at Embertide, 
 for prayer and meditation and renewal of the vows of which that 
 season should remind us all. More than all other men do we 
 ministers need the help such meetings give against that tempta- 
 tion of formalism and unreality to which our familiarity with 
 holy things so much exposes us. It is good for us, as it was for 
 Christ's ministers at the first, to leave from time to time the doing 
 of work even for Him, and draw with Him and with each other 
 apart to pray, and then to walk once more with Him, with purer
 
 A CHARGE. 13 
 
 hearts and more resolute purpose, the busy paths of our ministry. 
 From such true revival meetings, kept free as I trust they may 
 always be, from their one great danger of a narrow and unloving 
 party spirit, I can anticipate nothing but good to those who take 
 part in them, and to their flocks, and I heartily bid them God 
 speed. 
 
 And now that I have thus passed in review before you the 
 history of our parochial life and work during the past three years, 
 I hope that you will feel with me that we have, on the whole, good 
 reason to thank God and take courage. I know that this picture 
 is not without its shadows of defect and failure and worse than 
 failure. Statistics are we all know sadly deceptive, and are made 
 up of very many and very different items in detail, and I could of 
 course point out many such : nevertheless, knowing these as I do, 
 I can most truly say that these accounts from your parishes are 
 full of hope and encouragement, because they give such abundant 
 evidence of honest, earnest self-denying work on all sides. So long 
 as we see this, we have no need to despair of the future of our 
 Church ; for say what men may about her many and great dangers, 
 and they are many and great enough, her greatest danger is from 
 her drones. The profitless lazy ministry of one unspiritual parish 
 priest can do her more hurt than the excesses of many of her "ex- 
 treme men." The evil that their faults, errors and extravagances 
 may do, is real and serious ; I am far from underrating it, yet it may 
 pass away and leave behind but the good that was mixed with it 
 from the first. But the other is a pure and unmixed evil, and 
 fruitful in all other evils. The schism, the unbelief, the godless- 
 ness to which such a pastorate — if it can be called a pastorate — 
 gives rise may not pass away in many generations. Such a parish 
 creates no disturbance in the Church, it furnishes no subjects for 
 controversy in the religious newspapers, or suits in the ecclesiastical 
 courts ; it only furnishes steadily year by year its fresh recruits to 
 the ranks of the Church's enemies ; it is quietly multiplying dissent, 
 strengthening infidelity, fostering ungodliness and vice. It is not 
 an outward and visible sore upon the body of the Church ; it is 
 only a hidden eating ulcer, which is quietly burrowing its way to 
 her very vitals, and poisoning her life blood as it does so. 
 
 Work then, my dear and reverend brethren, hearty loving work in 
 our parishes is the true secret, I believe, of Church defence and 
 Church extension, and even ultimately of Church reform. 
 Happily it lies within the reach of every one of us. All may not 
 be, all are not called to be, leaders or reformers in the Church ; 
 but all can be Church workers, nor need we pause in our work to 
 wait for those reforms which so many of us desire. These may 
 never come in our day, for it may be, as a great statesman has 
 lately told us, that an institution so old as our Church is has grown 
 "too stark and stift"" for any great organic changes; but within 
 the Church, even as it now is, there is ample room and verge
 
 14 A CHANGE. 
 
 enough for more work than most of us can compass. The old- 
 fashioned machinery of parish church and schools, of Bible and of 
 Prayer-book, of preaching and of parochial visiting, lie ready to 
 our hands still. Let us use these to the utmost, and we may find 
 that more than one of the difficulties and hindrances we suffer 
 from have vanished, and more than one of the reforms we desire 
 are brought nearer as we work; for it is still the upward pressure 
 of parochial work that tends to bring about those changes in the 
 higher sphere of government and administration which the Churcli 
 now specially seems to need. Let us make our parishes then all 
 that they may be made under our existing system, and our 
 reformed and renovated parochial life will give us, if anything 
 can give it, a reformed establishment and a renovated Church. 
 
 It will give us too our best and most available defence against 
 those assaults of unbelief of which in the present day we hear so 
 much. There can, I fear, be no doubt that our peril from these 
 is a real and a growing one. Speculative infidelity is undoubtedly 
 spreading from our universities down through a thousand channels 
 into our remotest country parishes. The country pastor finds 
 himself often confronted with objections against Christianity origi- 
 nally devised by sceptical scholars, but popularised for the use of 
 the most illiterate of his parishioners, who at least understand 
 this much of them, that they are so many new reasons, which 
 learned men have discovered, why they need no longer trouble 
 themselves with denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, and living 
 soberly, godly, and righteously in this present life. 
 
 It is hardly perhaps to be expected that every clergyman in our 
 Church should be able to refute these objections, though it is much 
 to be desired that the study of christian apologetics were more 
 generally pursued by the clergy than it now is. But there is one 
 most powerful objection to Christianity, the most powerful indeed 
 of all, which every clergyman may make sure shall never be a 
 stumblingblock to any of his parishioners : it is the objection, 
 derived from the careless or ungodly life of his pastor, that the 
 teachers of Christianity do not themselves beheve in the doctrines 
 and precepts that they teach. And there is one most powerful evi- 
 dence for Christianity, the most powerful perhaps of all, that every 
 clergyman may place within the reach of every one of his parish- 
 ioners : it is the evidence of that Divine life in the hearts of men 
 which the Son of man declared he came to bestow. 
 
 If we believe His prophecy as to the future of His faith, we 
 know that there is one event and one only, which can prove fatal 
 to its continual existence upon earth, and that is the general 
 ungodliness of those who profess it. The salt that has lost its 
 savour will be cast forth and trodden under foot of men, say what 
 men may to save it ; but until this happen it will live and preserve 
 the world from corruption, say what men may against it. Let us 
 then, my reverend brethren, take each one of us to heart this most
 
 A CHARGE. 15 
 
 certain and awful fact, that we are each one of us powerful evi- 
 dences for or against the gospel committed to our charge, and 
 that as we live, so in great measure will our people believe. May- 
 God give us grace, so to live and work that all men may be com- 
 pelled to own that there is that in our life and work which attests 
 the truth of our teaching. 
 
 This thought of how little after all we are hindered in the doing Hindrances to 
 of our ministerial work for want of reform in the machinery of it, """ '^^'"'^'■'y- 
 has struck me forcibly in reading the answers I have received 
 from the clergy as to the special hindrances they encounter in 
 their ministry. For I find that, with one exception — that of the 
 pew system in our churches — they have reference to certain 
 external circumstances that surround their work, and not to the 
 machinery with which they have to do it. I hear little or nothing 
 of hindrances from the strictness of our rubrics, or the want of 
 power to shorten or vary our services ; but I hear chiefly of 
 hindrances from such causes as dissent, or the imtation caused 
 by the labourers' union, or intemperance ; hindrances all of 
 them that lie in the sphere external to the organisation of the 
 Church, and which would be very little, if at all, touched by any 
 measure of Church reform. A plain proof, I think, that the recent 
 amendments in our Act of Uniformity have given the clergy nearly 
 all they require in the way of elasticity and freedom in their 
 ministry, and that whatever of strictness and stiffness may still 
 remain, is not felt by them to fetter or restrain them so much as to 
 be made a matter ©f serious complaint. 
 
 Let me say, however, a few words of counsel as to some of 
 these hindrances to the ministry. There can be no doubt that 
 they are each and all of them, though, of course, in very different 
 ways, impediments to successful parochial work. 
 
 Dissent is certainly a very great hindrance in this respect to Dissent. 
 the parish clergyman. And in saying this, I say nothing that need 
 offend the most sensitive of Nonconformists. Dissenters fully 
 recognise the fact, and indeed it is one of their strongest grounds 
 of offence with our Church, that she is intolerant of schism, and 
 that her idea of schism differs essentially from theirs. She believes 
 that the Church was designed by Christ to have not only an 
 inward unity of the Spirit, but also an outward and visible unity 
 manifested to the world by the existence of one visible Society, 
 having a divinely-given creed, order, and polity, and that to 
 separate from that society for anything short of its imposing sinful 
 terms of communion, is the sin of schism from which she prays to 
 be delivered. They believe that the Church of Christ was 
 intended by Him to have an inward and invisible unity of the 
 Spirit, not to be manifested by the existence of one visible society, 
 but by the existence of a number of separate and independent
 
 t6 a charge. 
 
 and self-originating societies with widely difiering order, polity, 
 and creed, which nevertheless display the unity of the Spirit 
 by the mutual interchange of good offices, and the exhibition 
 of brotherly kindness and charity towards each other. _ And, 
 so far from regarding the multiplication of such societies as 
 an evil, they regard it as a thing desirable per se, as tending 
 to liberty and as promoting zeal and godly jealousy in good 
 works. This, at least, is the theory of modern Dissent, for_ in 
 its older form it recognised the desirableness of external_ unity, 
 and justified separation only as a necessity; now it denies the 
 desirableness of visible unity, and justifies separation as a gain 
 and a blessing. ' Now it is clear that this is an irreconcileable 
 difference on first principles between Church and Dissent, 
 which no amount of brotherly feeling between individuals can 
 heal over. And it is equally clear that while, on the princi- 
 ples of Dissent, the Church (I am not now speaking of the 
 Estabhshment) should be no hindrance to the Dissenter, for 
 whom it is only one sect amongst the many whose increase he 
 regards as desirable ; yet that on Church principles. Dissent must 
 be a great hindrance to the clergyman whose aim must be, if he 
 is true to his own principles, to draw all his parish within the 
 visible unity of the Church. And even Dissenters themselves 
 would admit — I know they do admit it when looking at this ques- 
 tion from another point of view — that the existence of many sects 
 may be after all a serious hindrance to the work of the ministry. 
 They lament over the waste of power caused by the needless 
 and endless multiplication of small rival communities, where there 
 is really room for not more than one ; and the tveakening of disci- 
 pline, caused by the too-ready acceptance by one rival sect of the 
 exiled or oftended members of another. Such hindrances as these 
 are felt, however, much more keenly by the clergyman, who finds 
 the spiritual energies of his parish, which he feels might effect 
 so much if they were all united, frittered, as he thinks, and 
 wasted in these separate channels of sectarianism, for which he, 
 on his principles, can see neither necessity nor justification. 
 
 I say nothing of the more active hindrances that the clergyman 
 experiences, from the direct and positive hostility of Dissent, from 
 dislike to confirmation, for instance, and endeavours to hinder 
 the young from resorting to it; from the drawing away of children 
 from his Sunday schools, or the most hopeful of his fellow-workers 
 or communicants to the chapel ; or, again, from merely obstruc- 
 tive opposition, as he thinks at least, in the vestry and at 
 the School Board election ; for, although all these things are 
 very trying and irritating, yet I am not sure that this open 
 opposition and hostility may not, by the increased effort that 
 it calls out on the part of Churchmen in his parish and the 
 increased zeal and watchfulness it necessitates on his own part, 
 indirectly help quite as much as it hinders his ministry. I
 
 A CHARGE. 17 
 
 am not so sure that the work, or even the spiritual life, in all 
 our ] arishes would gain by the immediate extinction of all 
 Dissent. Rivalry and criticism are not absolute and unmiti- 
 gated hindrances to work, even when the rivalry is, as we think, 
 unwarrantable, and the criticism unjust. Speaking, however, of 
 Dissent, not in its accidents of hostility or rivahy, political or 
 religious, but in its essence as division and schism, it must, I 
 repeat, be a real hindrance and weakness to the parochial ministry 
 of the Church of England. 
 
 Nevertheless Dissent is a fact, and one which is certainly not 
 in the least likely to cease to be a fact in our day. The question 
 is, how shall we deal with it ? In what wa}' shall a clergyman 
 best meet the hindrances it causes to his ministry ? 
 
 Let me say then, in the first place, how he should not deal with 
 it. Not certainly by denouncing and preaching against it. I doubt 
 if many Dissenters were ever made Churchmen in this way ; and 
 I can quite imagine its being successful in turning some Church- 
 men into Dissenters. Teach your own peoi)le quietly and care- 
 fully the distinctive doctrines of your own Church ; aim at making 
 them loyal, intelligent, attached members of her communion ; 
 bring them to value her services as you perform them, and her 
 doctrines as you preach them in their own parish church ; win 
 their afifections to her, and not to yourselves, and you will have forti- 
 fied them far better against Dissent, than by preaching the most 
 able and elaborate of controversial treatises every Sunday of your 
 lives. Men are won to or from their respective religious systems far 
 more by their affections than by their intellects. Bring your 
 people to love their Church as the home of their souls, and they 
 will not be likely to be drawn away from her to frequent the 
 dwellings of strangers. 
 
 In the next place, let us take care how we imitate the faults 
 that offend us in our Dissenting opponents. Dissent is, many think, 
 becoming more and more political, and less and less religious. 
 So much the worse for it, if it be so ; for it was the spiritual element 
 in Dissent that gave it all its early strength and power, and if this 
 should be lost to it, its power of hindrance will have passed away. 
 A political club cannot long contend successfully with a spiritual 
 society. For that very reason take good heed how you become 
 too political in your Churchmanship ; how you too grow loud and 
 h t on public platforms, and in after-dinner speeches, or identify 
 the Church in your persons with the fortunes of one or other of 
 our great political parties. The Church has no politics ; the 
 Establishment may easily have too much. 
 
 Thirdly, try and do justice to your opponents. I know no 
 better rule for dealing with an opponent, even for the sake of 
 getting the better of him, than this — Put yourself in his place, try 
 and understand your position as it appears to him, and his motives 
 in assailing it, before you proceed to defend it. And certainly we 
 
 c
 
 1 8 A CHARGE. 
 
 Churchmen are specially bound to do this as regards Dissent, for 
 most assuredly the guilt of schism is not all on the side of the 
 Dissenter. The Church has dealt with her non-conforming chil- 
 dren while they were within her pale too often in the very spirit 
 of schism, erecting trifles into essential conditions of communion ; 
 too often, moreover, in the spirit of dull obstinate hindrance to zeal 
 and earnestness ; too often, alas ! in many a parish, in days gone by, 
 in the spirit of cold indifference and neglect ; she has far too often 
 provoked, compelled, justified Nonconformity to allow of her 
 taking so very high a tone in dealing with it as some of her sons, 
 forgetful of the past, would have her take. 
 
 In how many parishes in this diocese for instance, let us honestly 
 ask, may not the rise of the Dissenting chapel be traced to a time 
 not so very far distant when men who cared for their souls must 
 have sought food for them there or starved. Things are altered 
 now, and let us thank God for it \ but the Dissenter may have a 
 better memory for the past than we have. It does not tend to 
 soften his disposition towards what he has learnt to regard as an 
 unscriptural establishment that, as he thinks, overshadows him 
 socially and politically, to remember that it represents what his 
 fathers knew as an intolerant or a careless Church. Try, my 
 Reverend brethren, and realise this view of things as it presents 
 itself to the Dissenting minister of your parish, and you may per- 
 haps bear with more equanimity those anti-church utterances of 
 his which seem to you so unreasonable and unfair ; but which for 
 him are the expression of his deepest beliefs and most cherished 
 traditions. 
 
 But I go further, and observe that it may be good for us to do 
 justice not only to the feelings or prejudices of Dissenters; but to 
 the truths and the principles which Dissent in many cases repre- 
 sents and witnesses for. It is but a shallow and an ignorant view 
 of ecclesiastical history which regards each Dissenting sect as 
 having been once merely a foreign element in our Church which 
 the strength of her constitution enabled her to throw oft". I have 
 no more sympathy with the ultra High-church theory which so 
 regards the contest between our Church and Nonconformity than I 
 have with the Ultra-Protestant theory that so regards our Church's 
 struggle with Romanism. I believe that, as regards both, she has 
 in the main best adhered to Catholic order and Apostolic doctrine. 
 But I do not believe that in the contest with each she has always 
 infallibly drawn the line between excess and defect. I believe, on 
 the contrary, that there is hardly an instance of nonconformity or of 
 schism that does not bear its witness to some truth unduly exalted 
 on the one side as a protest against undue depreciation or forget- 
 fulness of it on the other. I believe that in most such cases the 
 error of the Nonconformist has been, not the assertion of the 
 principle contended for, but the creation of a schismatical body 
 simply for the sake of asserting it. I believe that in almost every
 
 A CHARGE. 
 
 ^9 
 
 one of the forms of Dissent as distinguished from heresy, we may 
 discern a protest and a warning against the neglect of some truth, 
 or the undue repression of some principle, on the part of the 
 Church, and that we may deplore the Dissent and yet tai<e to heart 
 the value of the principle for which in its day the sect contended 
 before it separated from us. We may see for instance in Congre- 
 gationalism a witness for the place of the laity in church govern- 
 ment ; in Presbyterianism a witness for the rights of the second 
 order of the ministry ; in Wesleyanism a witness for Church 
 discipline; while in all nonconformity we may read a protest and 
 a warning, never more needed than at this moment, against the 
 unwise enforcement of a harsh and pedantic uniformity ; ihus we 
 may learn from Dissent many a precious lesson, many a half for- 
 gotten truth for our guidance as Churchmen, and so turn this 
 hindrance into a real help to us in our min'stry. 
 
 But when you have thus made fair and full allowance for all 
 that can be said or felt on the side of Nonconformity, never for a 
 a moment seek to conciliate it by any surrender of Church 
 principles. These are not yours to compliment away, and if they 
 were you would gain nothing by their surrender. You will not 
 gain unity, for, as I have said, the Dissenter no longer desires it. 
 He is willing, or may be willing, to have evangelical alliance with 
 you, but the idea of alliance is essentially opposed to that of 
 unity. Alliance is a league between separate and independent 
 states, each under its own government; unity is the fusion of 
 different portions of the same state under one government. There 
 may be alliance between France and England just because 
 there is no unity ; there cannot be alliance between England 
 and Ireland unless you first repeal their union. Nor should we 
 gain peace by giving up our essential principles ; for when we 
 have elaborately and solemnly assured the Dissenter that there 
 really is no essential difference between his system and ours, and 
 that the Church and the sects are all equally churches, each with its 
 own merits and its own defects, but with very little to choose 
 between them after all — then, " in the name of common sense 
 and justice," would not his answer be, " why do you persist 
 in claiming a position of inequality and of superiority over 
 me ? I can understand your claim to be the Church of the 
 nation, if you say that your Church is better fitted to be so than 
 our Churches ; but if we are all equally fitted for this, then your 
 position as the National Church is an unreasonable inequality 
 and a wrong." 
 
 I confess that I do more justice to the good sense and self- 
 respect of Nonconformists than to suppose that they can be won 
 over to surrender their most cherished principles and convictions 
 by the condescension of clergymen who benevolently preach in 
 their pulpits or share in their services ; or if clergymen disclaim 
 all idea of inequality, and come among them o\\ a footing of 
 
 C 2
 
 to A CHARGE. 
 
 perfect ecclesiastical equality, I cannot but give the Dissenter 
 credit for shrewdness enough to press the argument from this 
 equality to its legitimate result. Neither as a Churchman, then, 
 nor as the minister of an Established Church, can I see the right or 
 the expediency of such coquetting with Dissent. As a Churchman 
 I cannot pray against schism one day and promote it the next ; 
 as a minister of an Established Church, founded on the principle 
 of religious inequahty, I cannot make ostentatious proclamation 
 of religious equahty. 
 
 No, let us be true to our own principles ; kindly, consistently, 
 true to these ; while, at the same time, we show all personal 
 respect and brotherly love to those who are, most assuredly, our 
 brethren in Christ, although our estranged and separated brethren, 
 and whom Ave are bound to love and honour for their work's sake, 
 though they walk not with us. I am persuaded that we shall 
 win their respect and regard, and lessen their disposition, where 
 it exists, to hinder our ministry, far more effectually by acting 
 in this manner than by showing a weak and disloyal indiflerence 
 to those essential principles which separate and must separate. 
 Church and Dissent even when they do not socially separate 
 Churchmen and Dissenters. 
 
 Labourers' Another hindrance to the ministry, reported to me, is the 
 
 Unions. alienation of the labouring classes, caused by the Labourers' 
 
 Union. The labourers and their representatives would, I 
 presume, represent this matter differently, and would speak of the 
 alienation caused by the conduct of the clergy with reference to 
 the Labourers' Union. I think it quite possible that the latter 
 view may be the true one, and yet that the clergy may be 
 perfectly blameless in the matter. I set aside for the moment 
 all the studious efforts made by those who, for their own purposes, 
 are using this labourers' movement to inflame the mind of the 
 labouring class against the clergy and the Church. Every 
 political or social dissension will, ot course, be availed of for their 
 own purposes by men whose trade is politics, and it is as 
 unreasonable to be surprised or annoyed at this as to be angry 
 with the fly for breeding maggots in a sore. But, even had no 
 such pains been taken to direct against the clergy the anger of 
 the labouring classes— filled with a sense of wrong, and ready to 
 turn against any one who might be pointed out to them as the 
 cause of it — there is that in the attitude of the clergy in this dispute 
 between the farmer and the labourer that must have in itself 
 surprised and disappointed the latter. The attitude of the clergy 
 in this dispute has in the main been that of strict neutrality. 
 Some have warmly and earnestly championed the cause of the 
 labourer, and some few have shown their sympathy on the other 
 side. But, as a rule, the clergy have been fairly neutral, and 
 such, I maintain, was the attitude which the clergy were bound
 
 A CHARGE. ti 
 
 to maintain ; not because their sympathies and their voice too, 
 ought not to be always on the side of the wronged or the 
 oppressed, but because they have no means of judging, there is 
 nothing in their office tliat makes, or fits them to be, judges, as 
 to which side in this dispute it is on which the wrong lies ; 
 or, even if they could jutlge of this, to decide the far more 
 difficult question who, or what, was really the cause of this wrong. 
 To decide the questions that arise in an old and complex society 
 like ours between capital and labour; to say v»'hich has, in every 
 such question, right on its side ; is a question for statesmen and 
 political economists and not for clergymen. Unions and strikes 
 and lock-outs are the rough, painful processes, by which Labour 
 and Capital attempt to bring their rival claims to an even and 
 perfect balance ; but he would be a bold and a rash man who 
 would step in and try to adjust the weights, and hold the balance; 
 those who have tried with the best intentions and greatest ability 
 to do so in other trade disputes than this, have rarely been success- 
 ful ; and what is there, I ask, in the office of a clergyman that 
 should specially fit him to do this? Why should it be his 
 function, of all other men, to fix the price of labour in the 
 business of agriculture ? No one, that I am aware of, ever 
 expected the clergy of our Church to interfere in this way in the 
 trade disputes of the miner or the collier with their employers; 
 why should they be supposed specially fitted and specially bound 
 to do so in the dispute between the labourer and the farmer ? 
 And if they cannot fix it, if they are, of all men, perhaps the 
 least fitted to fix it, how can they, with any advantage, interfere 
 in the dispute respecting it? Their sympathies may be, and 
 I am fully persuaded for the most part they are, with the 
 labourer. Why should they be otherwise? The Church has 
 nothing to gain by the sufferings of the poor. But this is 
 not a question of sympathy, it is a question of political economy. 
 It is a question, not whether it is not most desirable that the 
 poor man should obtain a higher price for the commodity he 
 has to sell — his labour, but whether that commodity is worth to 
 the buyer what the vendor asks for it. And this, I maintain, 
 is a question which the clergy as such are neither fitted nor 
 called on to decide; and, therefore, it is not only their wisdom 
 but their plain, honest duty, to stand neutral in the contest, for 
 the simple reason that if they engage in it they may be guilty of 
 injustice from their ignorance, and may only succeed in embit- 
 tering a strife which they have really not the means of settling. 
 The altitude of the Church, therefore, or rather of the clergy, in 
 all such disputes is, I maintain, clearly one of strict neutrality. 
 " Man, who made me a judge or a ruler over thee?" should sdll 
 be their answer to him who would have them " speak to his brother, 
 that he divide the inheritance with him." 
 
 Nevertheless, though this seem perfectly clear to our minds, it
 
 22 A CHARGE. 
 
 is not to be expected that it will seem so to the labourer. He has 
 known the clergyman all his life as his friend ; he has been in the 
 habit of coming to him for sympathy in sorrow and help in adver- 
 sity; he never knew him other than kind and helpful; he has 
 had his advocacy with squire cr farmer for many a kindness or 
 indulgence in times past ; and now, when he is engaged in what 
 he regards as a life and death struggle, he finds the clergyman 
 declining to abet or to lead him. Naturally he is surprised and 
 disapi)ointed and angry, and naturally, also, he is only too ready 
 to hsten to those who tell him that the parson is, after all, his 
 natural enemy, and the ally of his enemies the landlord and 
 farmer, and that all his help in times past was only a better sort of 
 bribery to bring him to the parson's Church, or his children to the 
 parson's Sunday school. Such a feeling is, as I have said, natural, 
 and it is in its very strength and bitterness an indirect testimony 
 to the sense which the labouring man really had of the sympathy 
 of his clergyman. Had he expected less of his pastor he would 
 not have been so angry at his seeming desertion of him. The 
 clergy might have avoided this estrangement, and won for them- 
 selves much cheap and dangerous popularity if they had come 
 forward as the champions of the labourer and the assailants of the 
 farmer. In the end they would but have embittered the strife 
 in which they had thus injudiciously meddled. They would have 
 exasperated one side without serving the other, and have destroyed 
 their real influence and usefulness with both. I hold, then, that it 
 is the duty of the parish clergyman to continue neutral in this strife 
 as heretofore. But I also hold that he should take great care to 
 let it be seen that he really is neutral, and why he is so. He must 
 remember that as the friend and social companion of landlord or 
 farmer, as himself also, sometimes a landlord and often an emj)loyer 
 of labour, his judgment may be perhaps more than he is himself 
 aware, enlisted on their side, and, at any rate, that he is specially 
 liable to the accusation that it is so. He should take care, therefore, 
 to make it clear to both parties in this dispute, but especially 
 to the more ignorant and the weaker and more suffering of the 
 two, what his attitude really is and why he has adopted it. He 
 would do well to explain from the pulpit what is the place of the 
 Christian minister in this as in any other dispute, in which it is 
 not absolutely certain who is to blame : that his position is that of 
 a mediator, a peacemaker, and not that of a judge, still less that of 
 an advocate. He is to preach justice, moderation, charity to both 
 of the disputants ; and, above all, he is to take care that no amount 
 of abuse or slander of himself or his order, however irritating it 
 may be, shall alienate him in heart from the poor of his flock. If 
 he does this he will find that at last these will do him justice, and 
 this temporary alienation will pass away. The labouring class 
 are shrewder and fairer than many who speak in their name 
 give them credit for being, and in the end they will not believe
 
 A CHARGE. 23 
 
 on the authority of some unknown editor of some newspaper, that 
 the man who has lived among them, it may be all their lives, and 
 who has never failed to sympathise with and help them in times 
 past, has suddenly become their bitter and tyrannical oppressor, 
 or the cowardly and servile ally of their oppressors. Meanwhile 
 we must only be patient, and certainly we must not attempt to 
 cure this passing evil by turning demagogues and agitators, and by 
 committing the Church in the persons of her ministers to a war of 
 classes. 
 
 Intemperance occupies a prominent place among the hindrances intempemnce. 
 to the ministry, of which the clergy complain. It is, indeed, a 
 hindrance ; the saddest, and alas! I fear the most hopeless of all that 
 we have to encounter. There is no need that I should enlarge 
 upon its evils ; there is not a parish clergyman in this diocese who 
 does not know them only too well, in all their dire extent of sin, 
 and crime, and wretchedness. The question we have to consider 
 is whether we are doing all that we might do, as ministers of 
 Christ's Gospel, to check these evils ; and if not, what more is 
 there that we can and ought to do ? 
 
 Let us ask, in the first place, are we plain and distinct enough in 
 our denunciations of this vice of drunkenness in our pulpits ? Are 
 we indeed plain and distinct enough in our denunciations there of 
 any vice or sin ? I sometimes fear that we are not \ I sometimes 
 fear that one of the defects of modern preaching is its want of plain, 
 direct, homely testimony, not against sin in general, but against 
 sins, and against the sins of those whom the preacher is addressing ; 
 and that the pulpit is losing, in consequence, the great secret of its 
 power, as the expression of the conscience of the Church, the 
 utterance of that prophetic voice that cries aloud and spares not 
 against all iniquity, and transgression, and sin. Let me press on 
 you, my Reverend brethren, that if we would not hand over to the 
 secular press one of the noblest functions of our office, we should 
 be plain, bold, direct and impartial in our rebuking of vice from 
 the pulpit. The most faithful of preaching, however, even if 
 followed up by the sternest personal rebuke, uill not, as I am sure 
 many of you know, reclaim the drunkard. It may, however, help 
 to preserve the sober, by creating in your parishes that tone of 
 feeling respecting drunkenness, that reflection of the piety of the few 
 in the morality of the many, to which in the main we must look for 
 the repression of any national vice. And it is in this direction that 
 I beheve our efforts against intemperance should mainly be aimed. 
 I do not, as you are probably aware, put much faith in legislation 
 for the repression of drunkenness, or of any other kind of vice. 
 My belief is that laws of this nature, to be successful, must be so 
 stringent that the nation which would submit to them, from horror 
 of the vice they restrained, would thereby show itself in little need 
 of such restraint. The remedy for vice must come, not from laws.
 
 24 A CHARGE. 
 
 but from the higher tone of public morals ; whatever we can do to 
 elevate this will tend to repress intemperance far more eftectually 
 than any Liquor law or Permissive Bill. Make it as disgraceful 
 among artisans and labourers for a man to be drunk, as it is now 
 among gentlemen, and you will no more need legislation for the 
 one than you now do for the other. This question, then, of the 
 "reform of intemperance is really not one question, but many. It 
 is, of course, primarily a religious question, but it is also a question 
 of sanitary regulation, of education, of Sunday observance, of 
 Sunday recreation, of cheerful and healthy amusements for the 
 people ; a question of decent houses for them to live in, and pure 
 air to breathe, and fresh water to drink ; a question of reading- 
 rooms, and lending libraries, and popular literature, and working 
 men's clubs and refreshment-rooms; a question, in short, that mixes 
 itself up with all that directly or indirectly helps our labourers and 
 artisans to lead wholesomer, purer, and happier lives. All that you 
 can do therefore, or induce others to do, in this direction in your 
 parishes, will be a real help to the removal of this great hindrance 
 of intemperance from the way of your ministry. And in this way 
 I think it is that temperance associations may be most valuable 
 in your parishes : they will check intemperance if they are wisely 
 worked, not merely, or perhaps mainly, by the vows they exact 
 from their members ; but rather by the public opinion against it 
 they may help to create, and by promoting, so far as they can, those 
 indirect helps against it, of which I have spoken. I should be 
 glad to see a temperance association worked for some such ends as 
 these in every Rural Deanery, at least, in this diocese ; and I think 
 it would be most unfortunate if the clergy of the National Church 
 were to leave the formation or the guidance of such associations 
 entirely to others, and so to lose, as they certainly would, much 
 of their influence 'in their own parishes, by appearing to stand 
 aloof from a question in which so many of their parishioners take 
 so keen an interest. 
 
 As to the vexed question, between vows of temperance and vows 
 of abstinence, let every man "be fully persuaded in his own mind." 
 If any man believes that by total abstinence he aan best help to 
 reclaim an erring brother from sin, let him by all means vow to 
 be al)stinent. If any man believes that he can better attain this end 
 by a vow of temperance, let him by all means vow to be temper- 
 ate. Only let no man impose his rule of lite in th''s respect as a 
 duty upon another. Still less let any one elevate abstinence into 
 an absolute rule of Christian life. To be " temperate in all things " 
 is the duty of every Christian, to be abstinent in some things may 
 become the duty of some Christians. But so long as the story of 
 the miracle of Cana in Galilee remains in our Bibles, or the words 
 *' these thy creatures of bread and wine" in our Prayer-book, let 
 no man, and above all no minister of the Church of England, 
 teach that abstinence is a sacred duty for all, and temperance
 
 A CHARGE. 25 
 
 only one remove from sin. To do this will not in the end 
 promote the cause of temperance, but injure it. You will never 
 succeed in making all men abstinent ; but by setting abstinence 
 before them as their only true rule, you may so degrade and de- 
 preciate temperance as to promote intemperance. Teach men 
 that temperance is little better than drunkenness, and they will 
 soon come to think that drunkenness is no worse than temperance. 
 I am thankful therefore that the Church of E^ngland Temperance 
 Association, which I have commended to your support in this 
 diocese, has not made the mistake of confounding temperance with 
 abstinence; but has left it free to its members to adopts according 
 to their judgment and conscience, either rule. 
 
 That the renting or appropriating of pews in parish churches is Pew-renting 
 a most serious hindrance to the work of the ministry I entertain ^.^'i -^pp''°p"*- 
 no doubt whatever. There is no need that I should point out 
 the mischief arising from this injurious, and in most cases illegal, 
 practice. It is one of the most hopeful signs for the future of our 
 Church that the laity, with whom the reform of this evil through 
 their representatives, the churchwardens, really rests, are begin- 
 ning to understand how great a wrong is done to them by the 
 permanent enclosure for the benefit of a favoured few, of that area 
 of the parish church which is the common right of all. I wish, 
 how-ever, to point out to those laymen who are thus beginning to 
 claim their rights in this matter, that these, like all other rights, 
 involve corresponding duties, and that the lay duty which cor- 
 responds to the lay right of a free church, is the provision of an 
 adequate endowment for " the clergyman. Pew-rents in many 
 churches, and I am sorry to say in many new ones, are the only 
 provision for the clergyman's maintenance, and they are so 
 simply because the laity have in such cases not come forward to 
 provide an endowment. Now, I am aware that it is proposed 
 that this difficulty should be got over by the clergyman " throwing 
 himself," as it is called, " upon the offertory," and 1 know that 
 some of the clergy have done this with a noble trust in the 
 Christian liberality of their flocks which has not been always 
 justified by the result. But I must plainly say that the laity have 
 not the least right to claim any such self-sacrifice at the hands of 
 the clergy. The reason why the parish church is free to all 
 parishioners is just this, that the clergyman is supposed to derive 
 his maintenance from the endowment of his parish ; but a parish 
 which provides no such endowments has no claim whatever to 
 that free use of its parish church for which that endowment is 
 really the consideration. It may be, and it is, most generous and 
 self-sacrificing of the clergyman to waive this consideration, and 
 to make the church free and open to the parishioners at his own 
 cost and risk ; but no society has any right to exist upon the 
 sacrifices of its servants. Nor again, should the offertory, which
 
 izatioa. 
 
 26 A CHARGE. 
 
 is needed for the wants of the poor or the maintenance of the 
 chutch, be unfairly burdened with the support of the minister. 
 Free and open churches therefore, and the proper endowment of 
 the ministry, should, I maintain, go hand in hand ; a fact which I 
 think has been rather too much lost sight of by the advocates of 
 free and open churches, and which, as the clergy may feel a natural 
 reluctance to remind them of it, I take this opportunity of drawing 
 attention to in their behalf. 
 
 So far we have been dealing with Church life and work, as 
 you tell me it exists in your respective parishes. Let me, before 
 I pass to the question of general church polity, say a few words to 
 you regarding our life and work as a diocese. This is, I think, 
 fairly progressive \ though it too has its hindrances and its defects 
 which we have yet to try and amend. 
 Diocesan organ- One change in our diocesan organisation since our last visita- 
 tion, has been the creation of a third archdeaconry — a change 
 which all who know the straggling and unwieldy character of 
 this diocese, with the residence of the bishop at its remotest 
 edge, will know was greatly needed. When the good and 
 lamented Archdeacon Davys passed to his rest this year, I 
 etfected this change by dividing the Archdeaconry of North- 
 ampton into two portions; one retaining the whole of south North- 
 amptonshire and a small portion of the northern division of that 
 county, to be the future Archdeaconry of Northampton ; the other 
 to be called the Archdeaconry of Oakham, consisting of the 
 greater portion of the northern division of the county of North- 
 ampton with the county of Rutland. I have been fortunate in 
 obtaining for these new posts the services of two Archdeacons, 
 one of whom is already well known to the clergy of this diocese 
 as their valued and influential representative in Convocation, and 
 the other of whom, well known in his own neighbourhood as a 
 diligent and successful parish priest, brings to his office large 
 experience formerly gathered as rural dean among the populous 
 parishes of the diocese of Manchester. Both will, I am sure, be 
 ere long appreciated and trusted by the Clergy and Churchwardens 
 of this diocese as they already are by me. 
 
 In one important part of the work of the diocese I have lately 
 introduced what I trust may prove a change for the better. It has 
 long been the desire of bishops to give a deeper tone of devotion to 
 the week that candidates spend with them before their ordination, 
 and to make this less a time for examination, and more a season 
 of preparation for the solemn moment of their entry on the office 
 of the ministry in the Church of Christ. The difficulty, of course, 
 has been to separate such preparation from the half-secular and 
 distracting work of a literary and theological examination. Partly, 
 however, by a system of examining candidate priests by means of
 
 A CHARGE. 27 
 
 papers sent to them at intervals during their diaconate, and partly 
 by the help of a Board of Theological Examiners for candidate 
 deacons, established at Cambridge, whose certificate of proficiency 
 in certain subjects I have in common with others of my 
 episcopal brethren agreed to accept, I have been enabled to 
 reserve the last two days of each ordination week for devotional 
 exercises, and for addresses on pastoral work and cure of souls by 
 Presbyters of standing and experience in the diocese. 
 
 The change has more than realised my anticipation in all its 
 results, and I may add that it has been gladly welcomed by those 
 Presbyters who have so kindly aided me in it by their words of 
 lovmg counsel and encouragement addressed to the candidates, 
 vi'hich I can assure them were gratefully received and appreciated 
 by those to whom they spoke them. 
 
 Closely connected with this subject of ordination, there is, how- 
 ever, one matter which seems to me in urgent need of amend- 
 ment, and to which I must call the special attention of Incumbents 
 in this diocese. I find that in a considerable number of cases 
 clergymen have been introduced amongst us, some on trial 
 as curates, others in charge of parishes during the temporary 
 absence of the incumbent, without my knowledge or sanction. 
 Such a proceeding is, I need not say, entirely irregular. No 
 curate can legally ofticiate in a diocese without the permission 
 of the bishop,''' and the necessity of such a rule has unhappily 
 been only too clearly illustrated by the unfortunate results caused 
 by the neglect of it. I have had, in the last three years, to 
 deal with some very grievous cases of clerical scandal, nearly 
 all of them occurring in the cases of clergymen brought into the 
 diocese in the way I have spoken of. In every one of these cases 
 the proper previous reference to me, and the power it would have 
 given me to require sufiicient testimonials, would have prevented 
 the possibility of such scandals. Indeed, in some cases I could 
 at once have informed the incumbent of the character of the man 
 he was about to engage. The clergy of this diocese will therefore 
 see, I trust, that even for their own sakes — to say nothing of the 
 interests of their parishioners — I must require in future a strict 
 observance in this matter of the rule of the Church. I cannot in 
 future allow any clergyman, not having my license, to officiate in 
 this diocese for more than two Sundays in succession without my 
 consent previously obtained, not necessarily with a view to 
 obtaining my license, nor even with a view to his producing 
 formal testimonials, unless I should require them ; but in order 
 to give me an opportunity of informing myself by proper references 
 as to his character and antecedents. 
 
 Our ruri-decanal and diocesan conferences are, I think, rooting 
 themselves more broadly and deeply in the diocese, and drawing 
 clergy and laity together in counsel on Church matters. I can 
 * See 48th Canon.
 
 28 A CHARGE. 
 
 truly say for myself that I find year by year the increabing aid 
 these conferences give me in the administration of this diocese, 
 and in the part I am called on to take in legislation for the 
 Church. I never felt their value more than I did last year, vv'hen, 
 in the heat and violence of a bitter contest on a question that 
 shook the Church to its centre, we Avere able to meet face to face, 
 bishop, clergy, and representative laity, and discuss that question 
 fairly and temperately together. 
 
 I feel, however, that our conferences still want improvement in 
 the direction of greater freedom in the originating of discussions. 
 I wish very much that individual members of the Conference 
 would initiate subjects for discussion either by sending them to the 
 committee of conference, or by bringing them before their own 
 ruri-decanal conference, to be forwarded, if accepted there, on its 
 behalf. There must be limits as to time, and some very broad ones 
 as to fitness ; but subject to these only, there is no reason why 
 every member of our conference should not thus bring forward 
 any question in which he feels a special interest. Our ruri-decanal 
 chapters have been placed, at the request of our proctors in 
 Convocation, in closer relation with that body by the arrange- 
 ment, made with my hearty consent, that questions submitted by 
 his grace the President for the consideration of the Lower House 
 of Convocation, should be transmitted by our proctors to the 
 chapters, for discussion. Slowly then, as I have said, but I think 
 steadily and surely, our diocesan life is growing. We cannot yet 
 legislate for the Church in our diocesan synods and chaj)ters ; but 
 we can largely influence legislation, and have done so, in more 
 than one important matter. Meanwhile we are preparing our- 
 selves for a time when a larger measure of self-government may 
 be allowed to or forced upon the Church. Much, however, is 
 still needed in the way of this organisation of our diocese. I 
 spoke, for instance, at last visitation of the advisableness of some 
 system of diocesan finance — that is to say, of raising money syste- 
 matically for recognised diocesan objects. This is still unat- 
 tempted. Our diocesan religious inspection is still dependent 
 upon an uncertain subscription list, which, in one archdeaconry, 
 has shown signs of breaking down. We have no diocesan fund 
 for the augmentation of smaller benefices, for spiritual aid in the 
 diocese, for assistance to candidates for the ministry, or for a 
 retiring fund ior aged clergy. I earnestly hope that before our 
 next visitation more than one of these desiderata may be supplied. 
 
 Since last visitation we have had opportunity to test the 
 working of several Acts of ecclesiastical legislation, then recently 
 passed, and I think that, upon the \\hole, we have found these to 
 be improvements on the preceding state of the law. 
 
 The Benefices Resignation Act has not been very largely 
 availed of as yet amongst us, parti}-, I think, owing to what I
 
 A CHARGE. 29 
 
 have alrea ly told jou I regard as its too stringent provisions for 
 the surrender in every case of the house of residence ; partly 
 from the unwillingness of patrons to allow of the reduction in the 
 selling value of their advovvsons by the charge on the benefice for 
 the pension of the retiring incumbent ; but mainly from the fact 
 that a vast number of our livings are too small to allow at once 
 of a retiring pension for tiie incumbent, and a sufficient income for 
 his successor. I expressed last visitation a hope that this diffi- 
 culty might be met by a diocesan superannuation fund. This has 
 not yet been attempted ; but I am glad to find that the committee 
 of the Curates' Augmentation Fund are considering, in the interests 
 of the unbeneficed clergy, this question of increasing the pensions 
 of incumbents who wish to resign. I trust they may be able to 
 carry this idea into effect, for until it is eftected on a large scale we 
 must expect the clerical service to suffer, as any other of the public 
 services would sufter in like r^se from the two evils arising from 
 stagnant promotion, — namely the inefficiency of its older and the 
 discontent of its younger members. 
 
 The Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Act undoubtedly needs some 
 reform in detail, although it is in j^rinciple a great improvement 
 upon the capricious and inetitective system it superseded. It 
 necessarily bears hard however u])on many who entered on their 
 benefices under the old law, and who have vacated them under the 
 new, and it has been my desire to use all the powers given me under 
 the Act to soften its operation in such cases. I find that since it 
 came into operation, the number of benefices inspected under it has 
 amounted to 156, or more than one fourth of the entire number 
 of benefices in the diocese. Of these, 8 only were inspected 
 on complaint, 31 on request, 114 on vacancy, and 3 on sequestra- 
 tion. In 21 cases only were any objections made to the report of 
 the surveyor, and of these 18 were more or less allowed by me; 
 a circumstance which I think testifies to the reasonableness on the 
 whole both of surveyors and clergy, and to the flict that in the main 
 the Act works fairly and reasonably. 
 
 I confess, however, that the Act seems to me to be tainted with 
 the inherent vice of our whole law of dilapidations, namely that it 
 proceeds on the false principle of placing on the incumbent the 
 double responsibility both of landlord and tenant and of mulct- 
 ing him in both capacities, A landlord who builds or repairs a 
 house, receives his return for ouilny of capital in the shape of in- 
 creased rent ; and, on the other h md, the tenant who pays this rent 
 has the right to call on the landlord to keep his house in tenantable 
 repair. An incumbent however is required first to build or repair 
 his house of residence, then to pay a rent for the cost of this in the 
 shape of a charge on his benefice, and then, on his vacation of the 
 benefice, he or his representatives pay again for the cost of ])utting 
 the premises into more than tenantable repair for the benefit of the 
 incoming tenant. This seems to me not only unreasonable in
 
 jO ■ A CHARGE. 
 
 principle, but inexpedient in practice, for it enlists all the feelings 
 and interests of the tenant against the repair of dilapidations, 
 whereas in all other cases of dilapidations it is the tenant's direct 
 interest to ascertain them and demand their repair. I would alter 
 this by simply placing the incumbent (of course not retrospectively) 
 in the position of a tenant only, that is to say, I would have every 
 incumbent pay an ad valorem charge upon his benefice to a 
 diocesan dilapidation board, or to Queen Anne's Bounty Board, 
 which should out of such payments provide for the expenses of insur- 
 ance, periodical survey, and repairs of dilapidations, and so relieve 
 the clergyman from all charg*^ for dilapidation, except for wilful 
 damage such as a surveyor could easily ascertain. The result of 
 this arrangement would be, that it would become at once the 
 interest of the clergyman to demand, instead of as now rather 
 to resist survey of dilapidation, and that his payments for the cost 
 of this would be made annually during his lifetime, while he was 
 enjoying the revenues of his benefice, and would not fall in one large 
 crushing sum, as these often now do, on his widow and orphans. 
 Some such plan as this has actually been adopted I am informed 
 in the disestablished Church of Ireland, and has been found to 
 work well. I throw it out for the consideration of the clergy who 
 may be dissatisfied with the working of the existing Act. 
 
 The present year has certainly not been fertile of ecclesiastical 
 legislation ; almost its only fruit has been the creation of one new 
 bishopric, and the passing of a small measure relating to eccle- 
 siastical fees, which gives promise of a larger, and, I trust, a 
 satisfactory one next year. The Bill for the general increase 
 of the Episcopate introduced in the House of Lords with the 
 assent and support of the bishops who have most strangely 
 been accused of hostility to it, passed without opi)osition, only 
 to fall a victim to the obstructive ingenuity of the enemies of 
 the Church in the Commons. 
 
 A Bill for affording Increased Facility for Public Worship 
 reached and passed through the ordeal of a select committee, 
 but proceeded no farther. And a Bill, introduced by myself, on 
 the subject of Church patronage, the result of the labours of two 
 select committees of the House of Lords, after passing late in 
 the session, did not reach a second reading in the House of 
 Commons. 
 
 The first of these measures has my warm and hearty concur- 
 rence, and I trust that, in common fairness to the Church, which 
 only asks permission to tax itself for an addition to its episcopate 
 which every one admits to be urgently needed, it may ere long 
 be allowed to become law. The second, though containing, as it 
 seems to me, some valuable provisions, may need very careful con- 
 sideration, to secure that, while providing a remedy for obstruct- 
 iveness and sloth in some parishes where this is sorely needed, 
 it does not tend to produce chronic schism and strife in others by
 
 A CHARGE. 31 
 
 an , attempt to gratify, with rival places of worship in the same 
 parish, the doctrinal preferences of different sections of the 
 parishioners. The third of these has, since it passed the House 
 of Lords, been made the subject of criticism and opposition of a 
 kind which calls, I think, for some notice from me ; not merely 
 for my own vindication from much misstatement and misappre- 
 hension, but in the interests of Church reform, for the necessity 
 of which this opposition seems to me to afford some very valuable 
 evidence. In the first place, then, let me, in justice to my critics, 
 set before you the picture of this Bill and of its history as they 
 have lately given it,* It is as follows : — 
 
 The English episcopate, inflamed by " greed of patronage " and 
 "dislike of lay influence" in the Church, as well as by a desire to 
 " impoverish the poorer clergy," and to " prevent," in some mys- 
 terious way, *' High Churchmen from obtaining preferment," con- 
 cocted a measure which should give them an " absolute veto " on 
 all "lay patronage," so as eventually to "transfer it all to themselves 
 by the working of the law of lapse," and thus '' to fill their dioceses 
 with their own creatures," Having done this, they next pro- 
 ceeded, with a happy audacity, to make their attack on property 
 and patronage in an assembly containing the most trained and 
 accomplished legal guardians of property, and the largest owners 
 of patronage in England; and so completely did they succeed in 
 blinding the legal acumen of the one and the self-interest of the 
 other, that they actually persuaded the great lawyers in that 
 assembly to join them in their assault on property, and the great 
 lay patrons to agree by large majorities to hand them over abso- 
 lutely their patronage ! 
 
 So crafty and daring a conspiracy of course deserved exposure, 
 and it has accordingly received it in the shape of a shower of 
 epithets such as — " dishonest," " hypocritical," " infamous," 
 "flagitious," "tyrannous," "cruel," "absurd," "unjust," " mean," 
 " piratical," " confiscating," " revolutionary," and the like, which, 
 if epithets could prove anything, must have effectually exposed the 
 true nature of this measure, the wickedness of its authors, and the 
 imbecility of the assembly that gave its assent to it. 
 
 The real history of the measure is somewhat different from all 
 this. The relorm of the scandals and abuses connected with 
 Church patronage was initiated, I am sorry to confess, not 
 by bishops, but 1 y laymen in the House of Commons, one of 
 whom, now high in office in the State, succeeded in carr3-ing 
 through that House a Bill forbidding the sale of next Presenta- 
 
 • The quotations in this and in the following pages relating to Patronage 
 are taken, partly from speeches delivered in the House of Lords, and at a 
 public meeting of Patrons called for the purpose of organizing opposition 10 
 the Church Patronage Bill, partly from a pamphlet specially commended by 
 the promoters of the aforesaid meeting, and partly from sundry letters from 
 patrons which have appeared in ihe public papers.
 
 32 A CHARGE. 
 
 tions. The question was next taken up by the Lower House of 
 Convocation, which adopted a very able report upon the subject, 
 presented by one of its committees, and accompanied it with the 
 request that " the bishops would introduce into the legislature a 
 Bill embodying the recommendations of the committee." And at 
 last one of the l)ishops, moved thereto by several most distressing 
 and even shocking cases of abuse of Church patronage occurring 
 in his own experience, did proceed to embody these recommenda- 
 tions of Convocation in a Bill which, though shorn of some of its 
 more important provisions, he succeeded in passing through two 
 select committees of the House of Lords, on each of which 
 bishops were in .a small minority, and ultimately through that 
 House itself. 
 
 How far these facts justify the accusations of a crafty con- 
 spiracy against lay patronage on the part of bishops, I leave to 
 others to say. I will only remark upon them that, if bishops have 
 thus conspired against the rights and interests both of the clergy and 
 of the laity, they have been singularly fortunate in finding, as their 
 abettors against the rights of the laity, the House of Commons 
 and the House of Lords, and against the rights of the clergy the 
 Lower House of Convocation. 
 
 As to the contents of this Bill, it may perhaps surprise many 
 who have not read it, and have taken their impression of it 
 from speeches and letters respecting it, to learn that so far from 
 attacking "lay patronage," it has absolutely no special reference 
 whatever to lay patronage. The only distinction that it makes, if 
 it make any, in its dealings with patronage, being not between 
 lay and clerical, but between public and private, or rather, between 
 saleable and unsaleable patronage ; a fact which is apparent 
 enough when it is remembered that a great deal of public patronage 
 is in lay haniis, and that a large portion of private patronage is in 
 the hands of clergymen. Secondly, that it made absolutely no 
 distinction, in the form in which I introduced it, between public 
 and private patronage, as to any of the restrictions that it imposed 
 on the exercise of patronage. It imposed on public patrons, 
 including bishops, the same disqualifications as regarded their 
 presentees, the same declarations against simony, the same penalty 
 for making that declaration falsely, the san^e right of objection on 
 the part of parishioners, that it imposed on private patrons, 
 and which are described by some of the latter as intolerable 
 " indignities," specially inflicted on them alone. And thirdly, that 
 so far from conferring invidious privileges on episcopal patn^ns, 
 or from " being designed to give them," as has been alleged, with 
 an astounding disregard of common truth and decency, " the power 
 to obtain the livings of private patrons by the law of lapse," it 
 actually contained a provision expressly barring the bishop from 
 taking any such advantage of this law of lapse. It also, as 
 I introduced it, gave a power to the parishioners of entering a
 
 A CHARGE. 33 
 
 caveat against any appointment by the Bishop, on precisely the 
 same grounds as those on which a Bishop might object to the 
 presentee of a piibHc or private patron — the same right, in fact, 
 to "refuse" a Bishop's presentee that he has to "refuse" the 
 patron's presentee — namely, no " veto," * as has been alleged, but 
 only a right to make good certain legal grounds of objection in a 
 court of law. I wish to draw especial attention to this last- 
 mentioned feature in the Bill, because it has been made matter of 
 special objection to it, that, while enlarging the area of Bishops' 
 objections to the presentees of all other patrons, it made no 
 provision for objections by any one to the appointments made by 
 Bishops themselves. Now, as T had from the first admitted that 
 there appeared to me to be this defect in our existing system of 
 checks upon improper appointments by patrons, that no such checks 
 existed when the Bishop appointed, I was careful accordingly to 
 provide one, and a very efficient one, by giving to parishioners this 
 right of objecting to the presentees of all patrons — Bishops, of 
 course, included — and by providing them with means of proving 
 their objections in a court of law, and also by imposing on the 
 Bishops, as well as on all other patrons, the stringent declaration 
 against simony which the Bill originally contained. Both these 
 provisions were, however, struck out of the Bill, at the instance, 
 not of Bishops, but of lay members of the House of Lords. The 
 fact, however, stands on record, that I was perfectly willing and 
 still am willing to impose, and that the Bishops were perfectly 
 willing to accept, every restriction on the exercise of our patronage 
 that may be imposed on that of any other patrons, public or 
 private. 
 
 And now as to the real principles and objects of this Bill. Its 
 principle is simply this : that patronage of all kinds whatsoever is 
 a sacred trust ; that a patron is a person charged with a most 
 
 * The impression that the Bill gives to Bishops a veto on the presentations 
 of patrons has probably arisen in some minds from the form in which the power 
 of objecting to presentees is given, in certain clauses of it, to the Bishop, viz., 
 "The Bishop may refuse to institute." These words, however, convey no 
 "veto." They merely entitle the Bishop to refuse institution on certain new 
 grounds, subject to the same condition under which he may now refuse on 
 certain other grounds ; that condition being that he make good at his own 
 risk, in a court of law, the grounds on which he has refused institution ; or, in 
 other words, the Bill in these clauses enlarges the existing area of objections to 
 presentees on the part of the Bishop ; but it gives him only a right of objec- 
 tion qualified by the check of one lawsuit on the part of the patron, and of 
 another on the part of the presentee, involving the certainty, therefore, of 
 heavy costs in the event of the objection having been wrongfully made. 
 Whether these additional grounds of objection are or are not reasonable ones, 
 whether, for instance, it is or is not reasonable to require that a presenter shall 
 be bodily and mentally capable of discharging the duties of his office, or that 
 he should produce sufficient testimonials to character, is, of course, matter of 
 opinion; but that these words, "refuse to institute," give no "veto" to 
 Bishops, is simply a matter of fact. 
 
 L)
 
 34 A CHARGE. 
 
 solemn and responsible duty, that of selecting a fitting person for 
 a most important public ofiice, that office being nothing less than 
 "the cure and government of the souls of the parishioners" for 
 whom he has to make this selection ; and that whatever gain or 
 advantage, direct or indirect, may originally be inherent in, or may 
 have attached itself in course of time to, this trusteeship, must be 
 regarded as subordinate to this primary object of the trust ; and that 
 to neglect this duty of selection, and still more to exercise it with 
 regard only to his own private interests and without regard to 
 those of the parishioners, is nothing less than a deliberate and 
 sinful breach of trust. As such, I am thankful to say, the law 
 both of the Church and of the land has always regarded patronage. 
 It has never treated it simply as a contrivance for enriching 
 patrons, to be used by them simply and solely for that end. It 
 has stamped indelibly, by every one of its enactments respecting 
 it, this character of trusteeship on the ofiice of the patron — by the 
 law of lapse, which provides that if he neglect to perform his duty 
 of selection under the trust, another shall step in and discharge it 
 in his stead ; by the laws against simony, which forbid as a 
 " detestable sin " any corrupt exercise of his trust ; and by the 
 law which aims at preventing an unwise or ignorant exercise of it, 
 by giving to the Bishop the right to test within certain limits the 
 qualifications of his presentee before granting him the institution 
 which he must ask at his hands. Neither Church nor State in 
 this country has, therefore, yet accepted the monstrous theory of 
 patronage which has been recently propounded by certain patrons. 
 That patronage, or rather one particular kind of patronage, namely, 
 that which has been acquired by money, should, merely because it 
 has been so acquired, be regarded as property pure and simple, 
 and should be free from all those restrictions which give it the 
 character of a trust ; that as regards it and it alone it would seem 
 the law of lapse is " cruel," and the laws against simony on a par 
 with those "against witchcraft;" that, as regards the "public 
 merit " of the person selected by the patron, that is a question which 
 " he cannot afford to consider," and that it is " absurd " to require 
 him to do so, inasmuch as this fitness is " amply guaranteed by 
 the fact that all such persons must be in holy orders," and that 
 accordingly his duty as patron " is fully discharged when he 
 submits the name of an ordained clergyman" to the Bishop for 
 institution \ or, in other words, for it comes to this, that any man 
 in England (not being a Roman Cathohc), no matter how immoral, 
 ignorant, or incompetent he may be, who may have purchased in 
 the auction mart a right of patronage, ought, in consideration of 
 the money he has paid for that right, to be allowed to thrust into 
 the unhappy parish over which he has acquired it any man, 
 however immoral, ignorant, or incompetent he may be, provided 
 only that he have, it may be fifty or sixty years before, obtained 
 holy orders ; and further, that for a Bishop to require from the
 
 A CFTARGE. 35 
 
 presentee of such a patron any test of his fitness is absolutely 
 "absurd." 
 
 On the sordid cynicism of this repudiation of the very idea of 
 trust in connection with patronage I make no comment ; I leave 
 it to the conscience of the Church, But I may be allowed to ask, 
 What, on this theory of patronage, is the use of patrons? If any 
 clergyman, simply because he is a clergyman, is fitted for any 
 benefice in the English Church, wh)' should there be any persons, 
 charged with the lucrative duty of selecting clergymen for benefices? 
 The appearance of the patron on the stage is in that case a mere 
 impertinence, and an "indignity" to the clergyman. Why should 
 not the nonimation to every benefice, when vacant, be sold by 
 auction to the highest bidder, who should tnereupon be entitled 
 to enter on the duties of his sacred office unembarrassed by dis- 
 respectful inquiries as to his fitness for it ? 
 
 I cite this very peculiar theory as to patronage, however, not 
 so much for the purpose of seriously discussing it, as for that of 
 drawing public attention to the proof which it affords of the 
 necessity for seeing that due safeguards are provided against 
 the carrying of it out into actual practice in the parishes of our 
 Church. For it is clear that the more completely this office of 
 patron is thrown open to public sale, quite irrespective of the 
 character of those who thus acquire it, and the more openly all 
 idea of trust in the discharge of the office is repudiated by certain 
 of those who do thus acquire it, the more need there is for seeing 
 that the interests of the parishioners, for the sake of which that 
 office exists, are duly cared for by some one ; and tliat whoever is 
 charged with this duty of protecting them should have amply 
 sufficient means for doing so. Nor can I see what " indignity " 
 there is to patrons in this, least of all to those patrons who take 
 that strictly commercial view of their oflfice which I have been 
 describing. For if patronage be, what these men would have it, 
 purely a trade and business, in which the sacred right of the 
 tradesmen is, as alleged, " to buy in the cheapest and sell in the 
 dearest market," why should such dealers in the article of 
 patronage object, on the score of their " dignity," to such restric- 
 tions being appHed to their trade as are applied to so many other 
 trades ? If it be no " injury " to the purveyor of food, or drugs, or 
 liquor, to forbid him, in the interests of public health, to adulterate 
 his goods, and no " indignity " to appoint inspectors to see that he 
 does not do this, why should it be an injury or an indignity to 
 impose the like restrictions and take the like securities in the case 
 of the man who claims to be only a purveyor of clergymen, and 
 who openly declares that he conducts his business on the principle 
 of caveat emptor, and that he " cannot afford " to conduct it other- 
 wise ? I can understand a tradesman standing on his character, 
 and protesting against all inspection of his goods accordingly ; 
 though as a rule it is, I think, the most honest tradesman who 
 
 D 2
 
 36 A CHARGE. 
 
 is most willing to submit to the testing of his goods: or I can 
 understand his saying, As you have appointed inspectors of my 
 goods, the rest is your affair, let the inspector look to it, I will 
 only look after my profits \ though in that case I think there is good 
 need for ample powers of inspection. But I cannot understand his 
 taking, as these particular tradesmen do, both these lines at the same 
 time ; declaring in the same breath that he regards his right of 
 patronage merely as a profitable investment for his money, and 
 that the fitness of the clergyman whom he provides in the way of 
 business is the affair of the Bishop, and none of his ; and, at the 
 same time, standing upon his character, and complaining of the 
 attempt on the part of the Bishop sufficiently to inspect his wares 
 as a grievous wrong and indignity. I maintain, therefore, that 
 not only the nature of the case, as regards the present absolutely 
 unqualified right to buy and sell patronage, but also the not very 
 exalted trade maxims announced by certain patrons as those on 
 which they claim to carry on their trade, make it imperatively 
 necessary to see that this trade is conducted under proper regu- 
 lations, and that due security be taken in the interests of parish- 
 ioners that these trading patrons are not allowed, in order to 
 enhance their profits, to foist damaged articles on those who are 
 compelled to receive them at their hands. 
 
 And this is the object of my Bill. It leaves entirely un- 
 touched, I regret to say, the sale of the office of patron, even as 
 regards next presentations. It is not my fault that it does so. I 
 deplore it. I regard it as the weak point of this measure, that it 
 leaves it free to the patron not merely to divest himself altogether 
 of his trust, with all its accompanying lucrative privileges, but, 
 while still retaining these, to invite any one who will pay him 
 for it to take a turn of his office, and to discharge in his place 
 the solemn and awfully responsible duties of his trust. Never- 
 theless, if it does leave these sales of next presentations intact, 
 for that very reason it proceeds to make the safeguards against 
 unfit appointments — so needful under such circumstances — suffi- 
 cient; and the only question, with those, at least, who admit 
 that there should be some safeguards, is, whether those already 
 existing are or are not sufficient. 
 
 My answer to this question shall be the statement of the 
 following facts : — 
 
 First, there are one hundred patrons in England, not presum- 
 ably better or wiser than other patrons, who have the right to 
 keep the parishes in their gift as long as they please without 
 a pastor, who, when he is appointed, need produce no evidence 
 that he is even in holy orders, no testimonial as to his character, 
 and who may buy from one of these patrons the right, without 
 check, hindrance, or so much as question from any human being, 
 to enter upon a cure of souls, and who, moreover, by that 
 purchase, may have been enabled to complete some nefarious
 
 A CHARGE. 37 
 
 transaction respecting some other piece of Church preferment of 
 which he may be the owner. I propose that this mischievous 
 and unreasonable privilege of donatives be abolibhed, and that all 
 owners of donatives be required to submit their presentees to such 
 tests as are required of the presentees of all other patrons. 
 
 Again, it is a fact that a certain number of patrons are in the 
 habit, whenever their livings fall vacant, of selecting the oldest 
 and most decrepit clergymen they can find, after the most careful 
 search and inquiry, and putting them into their livings in order 
 to enhance the selling value of these in the market ; a proceeding 
 which I regard as one of deliberate and enormous wickedness, and 
 yet which, at present, may be, and is, adopted in defiance of 
 parishioners and of Bishop, for there are absolutely no limits in 
 law to the age or decrepitude of a presentee. I ask that a Bishop 
 shall have power to object to a presentee who is thus " bodily 
 or mentally incapable of performing the duties of his office," or to 
 refuse institution to one who is over seventy-five years of age.* 
 
 Again, it is a fact that any parishioner knowing of any immo- 
 rality in the clergyman about to be appointed to his parish dare 
 not represent it to the Bishop, through dread of an action for libel. 
 I ask that he be protected in this respect, as he is protected in 
 objecting to illegal marriages or to the ordination of unfit clergy- 
 men, the Bishop, of course, taking all the responsibility of acting 
 on his report, and of proving it by his evidence in open court. 
 
 Again, it is a fact that immoral and scandalous clerks are 
 sometimes presented, as I personally know, to Bishops for 
 institution by patrons who are well aware of their character. I 
 
 * It has been objected to the clause enacting this limitation on the age of a 
 presentee, that it allows of a Bishop waiving it " if he think fit," and therefore 
 allows him where he is patron to collate a clergyman over seventy-five years of 
 age, "provided he will be his creature." And this isaccordinglyoneof the proofs 
 adduced of the dishonest intention of the Bill. The simple truth of the matier 
 is this : — I originally designed a twofold and absolute restriction as to the age 
 of all presentees of all patrons : one that this should not be under twenty- 
 seven, the other that it should not be over seventy years. The former (and I 
 confess, to my mind, far the more valuable restriction of the two) was rejected 
 by a select committee of the Lords ; the latter, altered to seventy-five ye^ts, 
 was adopted. As it was, however, objected to the absolute character of the 
 clause that there might be cases in which a clergyman over seventy-five years 
 of age might be capable of discharging efficiently the duties of some not very 
 laborious parish, this clause was further qualified by allowing the Bishop a 
 discretion in the matter, and not making the prohibition absolute. This 
 discretion, therefore, was not introduced in favour of Bishops, who, I may 
 remark, are not in the habit of appointing to benefices clergymen over seventy- 
 five years of age, but reaUy in favour of the aged clergyman and the private 
 patron. I should, however, rejoice to see this prohibition made absolute, and 
 the minimum limit of age replaced in the bill, for certainly, of all restrictions 
 upon presentees, that seems to me the most reasonable which requires that 
 before a man undertakes an important public office, he shall have had a 
 reasonable acquaintance with its duties. I may add that the principle of this 
 hmitation has already been recognised in the law regulating cathedral 
 pationage.
 
 38 A CHARGE. 
 
 ask that the Bishop shall have the right to demand of all presentees 
 " sufficient testimony" to character. And these are absolutely all 
 the additional restrictions as to the fitness of presentees imposed 
 in my Bill, and every one of these, be it remembered, I would 
 impose on public and episcopal as well as on private patrons. 
 
 Again, it is a fact that an infant in his cradle may be nominated 
 to the largest and most populous parish in England, that it shall 
 be kept open for him by a resignation bond until he attains the 
 ripe age of twenty-four, when he forthwith enters upon the duties 
 of the parish, the temporary incumbent being turned out to make 
 room for him ; or, if he is not at once removed, remaining the 
 life-tenant of the patron, and liable to ejectment at any moment. 
 I ask that this very modern change in the law in favour of 
 nepotism be abolished, and that patrons be in future required not 
 to nominate infants, but to select fit pastors for the benefices in 
 their gift. 
 
 I ask, too, that the law against simony shall no longer be 
 allowed to be ingeniously evaded by arrangements for the payment 
 of interest on purchase money of advowsons ; and, lastly, that the 
 light of publicity be thrown by registration on sales of preferment 
 which we now see announced as to be effected with that " strictest 
 confidence " and most careful secrecy which are not generally 
 observed in any traffic that can bear the light. 
 
 I see, I confess, no such violent unreasonableness, or tyranny, 
 or robbery, in all this, as some parties profess to see. I see only the 
 most moderate safeguards against scandals and abuses which have 
 long been the shame and the weakness of our Church ; safeguards 
 which, as I have said, are not the invention of Bishops, but which 
 have been urged upon them by those who have most carefully 
 studied this subject, and which have been adopted after most 
 mature inquiry and deliberation by an assembly not generally 
 supposed to favour measures of revolution or confiscation. 
 
 And now let me add to this statement of facts as to the present 
 condition of our laws relating to Church Patronage a statement 
 of facts as to the working of these laws, for which I can 
 personally vouch. Since I have been a Bishop I have been 
 called upon to institute four clerg}^men, of whom one was 
 paralytic ; another so aged and infirm that, on the ground of 
 his age and infirmity, he asked me for leave of perpetual absence 
 from the important parish to which I had just instituted him ; 
 a third was a reclaimed drunkard, who was presented to a 
 benefice situated only a few miles from the scene of his former 
 intemperance, and where the scandal of it was unhappily 
 notorious; the fourth (I can hardly bring myself to say it), had 
 resigned a public office he had formerly held sooner than face an 
 investigation into a charge of the most horrible immorality, the 
 truth of which he did not dare to deny to me. /;/ each of these 
 cases the facts were perfectly well kno7vn to the respective patrons. 
 
 I
 
 A CHARGE. 
 
 39 
 
 As regards every one of these I was advised that I had no 
 legal power to refuse institution ; and, as regards the last, it 
 is simply a fact that the man to whom, at the risk of a law- 
 suit, I refused institution, could, the next day, have bought 
 across a counter in London — with the same ease and with more 
 secrecy than he could have bought a railway ticket — a cure of 
 souls in the shape of a donative, on which he might at once have 
 entered without any human being having the right to ask him so 
 much as a single question. For aught 1 know to the contrary, he 
 may have done this, and that miserable man, stained as he is, 
 by his own confession, with nameless vice, may now be the 
 beneficed and irremovable minister of a parish in the Church of 
 England ! 
 
 Shocked by such facts as these, and knowing that they are 
 by no means solitary ones in our Church, I ask for a committee 
 of the House of Lords to investigate the state of the law which 
 allows of them ; I prove to the satisfaction of that committee 
 that the law is just what I was advised it was, that a Bishop is 
 at present absolutely powerless to prevent such frightful scandals 
 as these and others of which I produce the clearest evidence ; I 
 obtain the unanimous verdict of the committee that the present 
 state of the law is " in great need of revision ; " I embody in a Bill 
 those revisions which this committee declare to be thus urgently 
 necessary ; and I am forthwith greeted with a cry of horror and 
 indignation, as if I had committed sacrilege. I am warned by 
 one defender of the system which permits these shameful ini- 
 quities, that forsooth " the ministry must be a gentlemanly profes- 
 sion," " must not be too ascetic," but must be tempered with a 
 " certam reasonable amount of secularity," gentility, I suppose, 
 being regarded as having a special vested interest in paralysis, 
 decrepitude, intemperance, and immorality ; I am told by a v/hole 
 chorus of its other defenders that this right of patrons to intrude 
 paralytic, incompetent, and scandalous clerks on parishes is of 
 the sacred nature of property, and that to interfere with it is 
 piracy and confiscation ! 
 
 I confess that as I cite the facts that I have now narrated, 
 I hardly know which to be most ashamed of — that evils so scan- 
 dalous, abuses so notorious, as those I have described and 
 proved, should exist in our Church beneath the shelter of its laws, 
 or that there should be clergymen and gentlemen capable of publicly 
 defending them. I hardly know which fact is most discreditable 
 to us as a branch of His Church who once scourged money- 
 changers from His temple — that, by the help of a few pieces of 
 silver, worse men than he who betrayed Him may find or force 
 their way to minister at her altars — or that there should be those 
 amongst us who, for the sake of those pieces of silver, should 
 struggle to keep the doors of the sancttiary wide open for their 
 admittance.
 
 40 A CHARGE. 
 
 But I have yet to consider this plea of property which is set up 
 in opposition to these righteous and most needful reforms. Gross 
 as the abuses I have described are, and are admitted to be, I am 
 told that the right to perpetrate them is a property right ; that 
 money having been invested in the purchase of advowsons under 
 a state of law which allowed of these abuses, to alter the law 
 now would, or might at least, lower the selling value of them, and 
 that we must not, therefore, make these reforms, unless we first com- 
 pensate the owners of advowsons. Now, I might reply to this plea 
 that I do not believe that these reforms would lower the value of 
 advowsons by a single shilling, and that the fear that it would is 
 just one of those panics of property which have heralded nearly 
 every reform of abuses, and which the result has in almost every 
 case proved to be groundless. Or I might point out to the owners 
 of this property what a powerful argument they are furnishing to 
 those who oppose all sale of advowsons, by the proof they are 
 giving that such traffic raises up a formidable barrier to the 
 reform of the grossest abuses. I have, however, another and a 
 simpler answer to this plea for compensation. I deny absolutely 
 that it has the slightest validity. I maintain that the Legislature 
 is not bound to compensate the owners of property, except when 
 it takes that property away from them absolutely; and that it 
 never has recognised a claim for compensation on the ground 
 of the possible indirect depreciation of property which may 
 result from its Acts. Such a claim would make nearly all 
 legislation, and certainly all legislative reforms, impossible. There 
 is not a session of ParHament in which the Legislature does 
 not pass many Acts which indirectly affect many different kinds 
 of property, enhancing the value of some, depreciating that of 
 others, but whicli no one has ever supposed gave, in the latter 
 case, a claim to the owners for compensation, and that for the 
 following good and sufficient reasons : — First, that all property is 
 bought, subject to the incident of fluctuation ia its marketable 
 value, either of rise or fall according to circumstances, and that it 
 forms no part of the duty of the Legislature so to regulate these 
 circumstances as to insure that every man shall obtain for his 
 property in the market no less a price than that he originally 
 paid for it. Secondly, that the alleged depreciation is a purely 
 speculative one, and might, after all, never occur. And thirdly, 
 that it is impossible practically to estimate the amount of 
 such alleged depreciation. Who is to prove in any case of 
 depreciation of value of property, for instance, occurring subse- 
 quently to an Act of the Legislature, how much of this exactly 
 is owing to the change of the law, and how much to quite other 
 and different circumstances ? 
 
 The Legislature therefore, I repeat it, has never admitted 
 such purely speculative and often imaginary claims for compen- 
 sation to operate as a hindrance to its path of reform. When it
 
 A CHARGE. 4« 
 
 directly takes away property it compensates ; when it indirectly 
 depreciates, or when owners of property think that it may indirectly 
 depreciate, their interests, it never does compensate ; and most 
 certainly it never does so when its only interference with property 
 is to prevent the owner from using it to the injury of others. For 
 instance, when the Legislature forbid lodging-house keepers to 
 overcrowd their houses, and required them to make costly im- 
 provements in their premises in the interests of health and decency ; 
 or when it required manufacturers to consume their own smoke, or 
 to refrain from polluting rivers with their refuse, did ever any one 
 hear of the owners of such property making a claim for compensa- 
 tion on the ground that they had invested property in these cases 
 under other'conditions, and that the Legislature, having imposed 
 new restrictions, must compensate them for the injuries to their 
 property ? Or, to take a still more recent instance : — 
 
 The Legislature passed this year an Act, which increased the 
 powers of the Board of Trade for the inspection of merchant ships, 
 enabling them to prevent practices not hitherto illegal, but found 
 dangerous to human life. What would have been said if the ship- 
 ping interest had set up a cry of " confiscation," on the ground that, 
 having bought their ships free from all such restrictions, the im- 
 posing of these upon them by the Legislature would tend to depre- 
 ciate the selling value of their property? If we could imagine such 
 claims as these being set up, would not the answer be. You are 
 asking compensation for the right of putting your property to an 
 evil and injurious use; for the right to make shipwrecks, to breed 
 pestilence, or to poison the air we breathe and the water we drink ? 
 No man has a right to claim compensation on such grounds as 
 these, and you shall have none such at our hands. And what I 
 ask is the difference in principle between such claims as these, and 
 the claims of those who assert that, whereas they now have the 
 right to make shipwreck of souls, to poison the spiritual life 
 of a whole parish, and whereas the State proposes to interfere 
 and to prevent them from doing this wrong, they must be com- 
 pensated for the loss of these sacred privileges ? My answer 
 to such a claim is simply this : — You are asking compensation for 
 the loss of an immoral increment, and your claim is as immoral as 
 the gain which you say will be lost to you. I ask you, if you have 
 the courage to do so, to state plainly the items for which you 
 claim compensation : as, for instance — for the privilege of forcing on 
 a parish a paralytic pastor, so much ; for the right to appoint a 
 clergyman so scandalous that he cannot bring sufficient testi- 
 monials to his character, so much; for the right to appoint an 
 octogenarian clergyman, in order to sell the living over his head, 
 so much ; and for the right generally to hurt the souls of parishioners 
 for the sake of our own private gain, so much — and let us see what 
 the answer of the Legislature will be to such a claim. It might be 
 given in one sentence. Either the higher value of your adowsons is
 
 42 A CHARGE. 
 
 owing to these privileges of doing what is wrong and injurious to 
 public welfare, or it is not; if it is, you are entitled to no compensa- 
 tion ; if it is not, you will have received no injury; in either case your 
 claim for compensation and your cry of robbery are monstrous, and 
 not to be listened to for a moment. 
 
 One argument, however, which is brought forward as a complete 
 and conclusive answer to all I have been saying, I must proceed 
 to notice. It is that derived from the alleged nepotism of public 
 patrons, and especially of Bishops, which I am warned is to be 
 inquired into and fully exposed if I venture to proceed further 
 with this Bill, and the existence of which is asserted to be an ample 
 reason why no such Bill should ever have been introduced. I 
 confess that I feel the force of this argument as little as I do that 
 of the threat which accompanies it. So far as the latter is con- 
 cerned, nothing would please me, or I venture to think my Right 
 Reverend brethren, better than a full and searching inquiry into the 
 manner in which episcopal patronage is at this moment exercised ; 
 it would tend I think to silence a good deal of very reckless 
 slander now existing on the subject, and I shall heartily second 
 every attempt in this direction, even though it be made by those 
 who, while denouncing nepotism in Bishops as a grievous sin, 
 claim it on the part of the private patron as a most sacred privi- 
 lege, of which it is robbery to deprive him. 
 
 Let us see, however, what is the exact value of this accusation 
 of nepotism against public patrons, as an argument against all 
 reform in Church patronage. And first let me ask, What is nepotism? 
 Nepotism is not merely the giving of preferment to a patron's 
 relatives, for I see no reason why these should, if otherwise fitting, 
 be debarred from preferment on that ground : it is the appoint- 
 ment of them in preference to other and better-fitted men, or men 
 who have longer claims of service in the Church. Undoubtedly 
 such nepotism is a very grave breach of trust on the part of any 
 patron ; just as much, however, in my opinion, in a private as in 
 a public patron ; for I cannot see that a breach of trust is less a 
 breach of trust when it is committed by a trustee who has bought 
 his trusteeship than by one who has not. All patrons are equally 
 trustees, and if anything, the fault of nepotism is greater in the 
 trustee who can sell his trusteeship, and so provide for his relation, 
 than in one who cannot do so. It is a very great fault, however, 
 in either; nevertheless, it is a fault which it seems to me almost 
 impossible to touch by legislation. I attempted to reach it in two 
 ways in my Bill ; first by forbidding the appointment to benefices 
 of clergymen who had not served a certain number of years in the 
 Church, and secondly, by imposing a stringent declaration against 
 simony on the patron as well as on the presentee. Both of these 
 reforms were opposed, however, as I have said, not by public, 
 but by private patrons, on the ground that they did interfere with 
 nepotism ; and neither would, I fear, have effectually checked an
 
 A CHARGE. 43 
 
 evil which is inherent in all patronage, and in human nature 
 itself. 
 
 But how, let me ask, is the existence of an evil, which it is, I fear, 
 practically impossible to cure by legislation, a reason for not 
 dealing with certain other evils which the Legislature can easily 
 reach? 'As a mere tu quoque this accusation of nepotism against 
 public patrons might have some force, were it not that the 
 offence is so much more rife amongst private than amongst 
 public patrons ; but we cannot legislate on tu quoques. In any 
 other point of view the argument amounts to this — All patrons, 
 public and private, are tempted unduly to prefer their own 
 relations : therefore., let unbounded facilities be left to all patrons 
 for preferring their relations, when they are scandalous, immoral, 
 and incompetent ; or — All patrons may be guilty of nepotism ; 
 some, in addition to nepotism, are guilty of presenting, for corrupt 
 considerations, scandalous and decrepit clerks who are in no way 
 related to them ; therefore, let these patrons be protected in these 
 practices. I should have thought the argument was the other way, 
 and that if all patrons are disposed unduly to promote their relatives, 
 for that very reason the more care should be taken to see that at least 
 those relatives are proper men; and that if all patrons may be guilty 
 of nepotism, and some of nepotism and simony to boot, that the 
 fact that we could not prevent the nepotism was no good reason 
 why we should not reform the simony. As to the argument that 
 poor curates " have not the least chance of livings from a Bishop 
 unless related to, or having interest with him," and therefore must 
 be allowed to obtain them from those disinterested patrons who 
 never, I presume, give them to their own relatives, I have only to 
 say that, quite apart from its intrinsic falsehood, it comes oddly 
 from those who clamour against the idea of cheapening the 
 market price of advowsons. 
 
 My answer to all this cry against prevalent episcopal nepotism 
 is, in the first place, that it is untrue, and that I invite investigation 
 as to its truth ; secondly, that if true it would be quite beside the 
 question as to the need for preventing the appointment of 
 scandalous and incompetent clergymen to benefices ; and lastly, 
 that so far from wishing to shield nepotism on the part of public 
 patrons, I have shown myself willing, and am still heartily willing, 
 to introduce into any measure I may bring forward for the reform 
 of patronage, any clause that can effectually prevent or check 
 nepotism ; and I venture to prophesy that if I do so the opposition 
 to it will not come, as it hitherto has not come, from Bishops. 
 
 And now that I have dealt thus at length with the opposition to 
 reform from some interested patrons, I wish to say how entirely I 
 acquit the great body of patrons in England of any sympathy with 
 the views I have been describing. I know what a generous and 
 hearty support I have received from many private patrons, both in 
 and out of Parliament, I know how many such there are who
 
 44 A CHARGE. 
 
 would repudiate with indignation the degrading conception of their 
 duties put forth in their name, and who have a true sense of the 
 real dignity as well as the responsibility of their office. It is to 
 such patrons that from the first I have appealed for help in the 
 effort to reform abuses which I know they loathe as much as I do. 
 I do not, I earnestly trust the Church and the Nation may not, 
 confound private patronage with these theories of certain private 
 patrons ; if they should, its days are numbered. Once let the 
 people of this country come to believe that private patronage means 
 the intrusion of unfit men for money upon helpless parishioners, 
 and they will deal with the question in a far rougher and more sweep- 
 ing way than I have done. Let the claimants for mere propertx' in 
 patronage beware of this, or they may one day discover, to their 
 cost, that the truest defence of property is not that which identifies it 
 with, but that which frees it from, abuses. I am no enemy, as I am 
 accused of being, to private patronage ; on the contrary, I highly 
 value it, and I should deplore its abolition as a very serious calamity. 
 I desire to preserve it to our Church. For that very reason I entreat 
 the help of all high-minded and conscientious patrons in cleansing 
 it from those shameful scandals which some of their order would 
 fain perpetuate, and the perpetuation of wliich is its greatest 
 peril. Whether I shall be successful in this effort or not remains 
 yet to be seen. I shall succeed if Churchmen really desire that 
 I should, I shall fail if they do not ; for no individual can fight 
 single-handed and unsupported against abuses so long established 
 and so powerfully supported as those I have assailed. And the 
 measure I have brought forward is, I am well aware, exposed to 
 this danger, that while it goes far enough to provoke opposition, 
 it does not go far enough to excite enthusiasm in its support. Had 
 it really been the sweeping measure it is accused of being, it would 
 have had larger help from without ; its danger lies in its moderation. 
 But its failure, if it should eventually fail, will not be the failure 
 of the cause in which I have brought it forward ; it may be even its 
 best help. The fact that a most moderate measure of reform 
 of a very great evil had failed from interested opposition and 
 languid support, may be just what was wanted to give a fresh impetus 
 to the cause, which may carry even larger reforms than those 
 which I have proposed. In either case I can truly say, Liberavi 
 animam ineavi. Moved by a deep conviction of the sin and the 
 peril of neglecting any longer the reform of one of the greatest "sores 
 and sins " of our Church, I have, in the face of great difficulties and 
 powerful opposition, honestly endeavoured to effect this reform. 
 Come what may of my attempt, I am thankful I have made it ; 
 it will in any case have helped towards the ultimate triumph of the 
 cause for which I have striven. For the time will yet come, I am 
 persuaded, and that ere long, when the voice of the Church will 
 demand in a manner unmistakable and irresistible the removal of 
 all those scandals and abuses in this matter of patronage that are
 
 » 
 
 f 
 
 A CHARGE. 45 
 
 now degrf,ding and weakening her; and when that time does come 
 men will wonder how these evils could have been endured so 
 long, or how at last they could have been so quickly and so com- 
 pletely swept away. 
 
 I have reserved for the last the consideration of the Act for the Public Worship 
 Better Regulation of the Laws of Public Worship, which, after an Regulation Act. 
 almost wasted interval granted for the revision of the laws which 
 it was designed to enforce, has lately come into operation. It is, 
 happily, unnecessary for me to revive the embittered controversies 
 of last year by d'scussing again the principles of this Act, or the 
 reasons which, as I then thought and still think, made its intro- 
 duction an unfortunate but imperative necessity. These questions 
 were fully and freely discussed in our diocesan conference, when 
 the measure was passing through Parliament ; and I have seen no 
 reason to change the opinions respecting them which I then 
 expressed, and which, I am glad to remember, seemed then to 
 meet with considerable acceptance. I wish, however, to take 
 this opportunity of protesting against being held in any way 
 responsible for any opinions which others may have expressed as 
 to what this Act was or was not intended to effect. Nothing of 
 this nature can in any way concern or control me as Bishop of 
 this diocese ; and certainly it can in no way affect the meaning 
 or intent of the Act itself. That is to be gathered, not from the 
 speeches of its supporters or opponents in or out of Parliament, 
 but from its own express words as they stand upon the statute- 
 book. And, judged by these, I cannot but regard it as likely 
 generally to disappoint the expectations both of friends and of foes. 
 
 It is, as I understand it, and certainly as I intend to administer 
 it, simply an Act which provides for the cheaper and speedier 
 interpretation and enforcement of the laws of the Church respect- 
 ing ritual. It neither adds to, nor takes away from, nor interprets 
 any one of these. I cannot see, therefore, how it can possibly 
 have the effect of " putting down " any party or person in the 
 Church that does not persist in wilfully and contemptuously 
 breaking her laws ; and certainly I cannot see why it should be 
 regarded as intended or as likely to result in the enforcement of 
 any particular legal judgment — as, for instance, the Purchas 
 judgment. For, if it provides for anything, it provides for the 
 speedy rehearing of the questions dealt with in that judgment. 
 And if this be, as is now contended with great abihty and 
 learning, an unsound one, and certain to be reversed upon a 
 rehearing, surely those who think so should of all others be the 
 first to hail with satisfaction a measure which enables them quickly 
 and cheaply to obtain a reversal of what they regard as a mis- 
 carriage of justice. 
 
 But be the result of this Act what it may, of one thing I am
 
 46 A CHARGE. 
 
 certain, that it cannot possibly bring us into a worse state than 
 that in which it found us : a state of things whxh was rapidly 
 coming to this — that every clergyman in the Church of England 
 might do what was right in his own eyes ; there being, as regards 
 some of her rubrics, no definite law to guide him if he desired 
 to obey, and, as regards all of them, virtually no power to 
 compel his obedience if he chose to disobey them ; while, 
 at the same time, certain of the clergy were openly declaring that 
 legal compulsion, which they perfectly well knew was practically 
 impossible, was the only form in which they would consent to be 
 governed by their Bishops. A state of things, in short, in which 
 we were suffering from two of the worst evils that can aflect any 
 community — ambiguous and obsolete laws and a Aveak executive; 
 and in which the government of the Church was fast passing, as 
 in such cases government was sure to pass, from the paralyzed 
 hands of legitimate rulers into the hands of powerful, but irre- 
 sponsible, associations of private individuals, formed nominally for 
 the maintenance or enforcement of the law, practically to carry 
 out in the name of the law a bitter and schismatical strife, which 
 was rapidly rending the Church in twain, and making her a scorn 
 and derision to her enemies round about. Even if this Act, then, 
 were, as some allege, only a means of supplying these combatants 
 with sharper weapons — even if it contained no provisions for 
 enabling the natural rulers of the Church to act as mediators and 
 peacemakers between these contending parties — still it may 
 have this effect, that by its cheaper and quicker processes it may 
 bring this unseemly contest to a speedier end. Bitterer, fiercer, 
 more discreditable to our common Christianity than it now 
 is, it can hardly possibly become. It is, at least, some comfort 
 for all who long for peace to think that if it cannot be softened, 
 there is some prospect of its being shortened. I cannot but 
 hope, therefore, that the result of this Act may eventually be 
 peace, even if this be purchased by a preceding interval of sharper 
 warfare. 
 
 Our present concern, however, is neither with the past history 
 nor probable results of this Act, but with its existing provisions, 
 and with the manner in which it is to be administered in this 
 diocese. 
 
 On both of these points, and especially on the latter, you 
 have the right to expect from me the fullest and clearest explana- 
 tion. Before I attempt this, however, let me ask you to consider 
 with me the larger question, What are the principles on which 
 a Bishop of the Church of England should aim at administering 
 her laws of ritual ? For if I can succeed in obtaining your : ssent 
 to my statement of general principles on this subject, I shall, I 
 trust, have little difficulty in showing you that this Act makes, so 
 far as I am concerned, no change in these, but leaves me free to 
 carry out that rule of government respecting ritual, under which
 
 A CHARGE. 47 
 
 we have liiiherto enjoyed a large mea.sure of jjeace, such as, I 
 hope and trust, we may continue to enjoy in years to come. 
 
 How, then, should a Bishop administer the Church's laws of 
 worship? I am aware that there are those to whom this will 
 appear a very idle and superfluous inquiry. The rubrics, such 
 persons are fond of reminding us, are simply "the law" both of 
 Church and State ; as such, the clergy are bound, both as minis- 
 ters of the Church and as citizens of the State., to yield them 
 implicit obedience; and it is the clear thity of Bishops to require 
 them to do this, and to punish them if they do not. What else, 
 we are asked, are Bishops, and Courts Ecclesiastical, and Acts of 
 Uniformity for, if not for this ? And vehement, accordingly, have 
 been the accusations of cowardice or treachery brought against 
 Bishops for failing to do their duty in this matter by " enforcing 
 the law." 
 
 Others there are, again, who from quite another point of view 
 regard this matter as almost equally simple. These declare that 
 Bishops should have nothing to do with enforcing law upon their 
 clergy ; such an act, we are told, is like that of a father who 
 should call in a policeman to keep his household in order. Pater- 
 nal authority and remonstrance are all that a bishop should ever 
 resort to. He should be "a Father in God, and not a Father in 
 law." 
 
 Pausing for a moment to set these denunciations of bishops for 
 treacherous connivance with one party in the Church against the 
 denunciations of Bishops by that very party for tyranny and oppres- 
 sion, and comforting myself with the reflection that although both 
 these contradictory accusations cannot be true, yet that they may 
 both be untrue, I proceed to remark that this question of the 
 " enforcement of the law of the Church by Bishops" is not quite so 
 simple as it appears to either of these parties. 
 
 These words — Rubric, Church and State, Uniformity, Canonical 
 Obedience — are neither in themselves, nor in their history in our 
 Church so very clear that this question can be settled off-hand 
 simply by reciting them. On the contrary, they represent old and 
 yet unsettled controversies ; they involve many diverse and even 
 conflicting interests, duties, and rights, which no one can overlook 
 who aims at being either a wise or an impartial ruler in our Church. 
 And it might, perhaps, help to show each of these parties that there 
 may be a little more of difficulty in the case than they are in the 
 habit of thinking there is, if one of them would consider this 
 question : Should a rigid conformity to the letter of the rubrics 
 and canons be at once imposed upon all the clergy of our Church ; 
 and if not, what latitude should be allowed them, and how, under 
 a system of " law," is this allowance possible ? And if the other 
 were to consider this question : Is a beneficed clergyman of the 
 Church of England, who may despise and resist the paternal 
 authority of his Bishop, really to be allowed to do and say in the
 
 /^8 A CHARGE. 
 
 public service of the Church of England just what he pleases ; and 
 if he is not, how is he to be restrained, and who is to restrain him ? 
 When these two parties have each fairly pondered these respective 
 questions, they might, perhaps, come to see that this question of the 
 administration of the Church's law of ritual is not quite so easy 
 of solution for those who have to administer it as for those whose 
 easier task is merely to revile its administrators. 
 
 Meanwhile, let me say what appears to me to be the source of 
 much misconception as to the duties of Bishops in this matter, 
 and of much, too, of the practical difficulty involved in it. It lies, 
 as I believe, in this — that a Bishop stands towards the laws of the 
 Church in a twofold relation. He unites in his own person two 
 quite distinct and different offices, that of ruler and that of judge. 
 As a ruler he has authority ; as a judge he has jurisdiction. As a 
 ruler he has to require obedience ; as a judge he has to punish 
 disobedience. Both of these functions are inherent in his office 
 of Bishop, nor can he ever divest himself of either ; because they 
 have been given him, not only by the " ordinance of this realm," 
 but "by God's word." There cannot be a greater mistake than to 
 speak of the former of these as given him by the Church, and the 
 latter as given him by the State. It w^as not to the prelate of an 
 establishment, but to the Bishop of a primitive Church that an 
 Apostle gave directions as to the manner in which he should hear 
 accusations against a presbyter. It is not, then, as a Father in law, 
 as it has been flippantly expressed, but as a Father in God, and 
 therefore as having the corrective rights and duties of a Father, 
 that a Bishop claims to sit in judgment upon a presbyter. 
 
 But in this, as in any other case of double functions vesting in 
 the same person, there is great difficulty both for the individual 
 exercising these functions, and for those who judge the manner in 
 which he exercises them, in keeping them carefully distinct, and 
 in not importing into his conduct, or the estimate of it, in one 
 capacity, rules that should regulate it in the other; and I cannot 
 help thinking that much of the harsh criticism bestowed of late 
 upon Bishops comes from overlooking this distinction. 
 
 Of the duties and difficulties of a Bishop respecting laws of 
 ritual, when acting as a judge, I shall have to speak presently. 
 Let me now say what appear to me to be his duties and difficulties 
 respecting these when acting as a ruler. 
 
 As such, then, he has, in the first place, authority to require 
 obedience to the rubrics. Whatever else the vow of canonical 
 obedience may mean for the clergy, it means, at least, this much, 
 that they are bound, /;/ foro conscientice, to obey their Ordinary 
 when he calls upon them to obey the laws of the Church. But 
 this authority on his part, and this obedience on theirs, are strictly 
 limited by the letter of these laws. No Bishop can require any 
 clergyman in his diocese to do, in the public service of the 
 Church, anything she has not commanded, or to refrain from
 
 A CHARGE. 49 
 
 doing anylhing that she has commanded. If he should ever do 
 this, it would be the undoubted right, and it might be the clear 
 duty, of the clergy to resist him, and to invoke against him just 
 that supreme audiority of law in the name of which he would 
 have been attempting to enforce upon them his individual opinion 
 and will ; for rubrics, like subscriptions to Articles and Creeds, if 
 they are in one sense restrictions, are in another sense most 
 important safeguards of liberty. If the clergy must keep within 
 these limits, yet within them they are free ; a fact which they 
 would do well to ponder on who are clamorous for Bishops to rule 
 them, not according to the written law of our Church, but according 
 to some unwritten and indefinite rule of Catholic tradition. 
 
 But if it be the right of the Ordinary to require obedience to 
 the rubrics, it may become his duty to do so, and that, too, of 
 his own proper motion. I have never been able to adopt that 
 merely magisterial theory of a Bishop's duty, fertile as I believe it 
 to be in strife and litigation, which limits it to interfering only 
 when complaint is made to him, and even then to doing no more 
 than open his court to the complainait, and telling him to right 
 himself if he can. To act on this principle seems to me to be 
 nothing less than an abdication of the office of a Father in God 
 in the Church of Christ, and a sinking down to the level of a 
 mere ecclesiastical magistrate. I cannot consent thus to divest 
 myself of duties and responsibilities which I believe to be essen- 
 tially inherent in my office. I hold that, although it may be the 
 height of unwisdom to seek for such occasions, nevertheless, 
 occasions may arise when a Bishop, instead of waiting for com- 
 plaints which may never come, or inviting complainants to law- 
 suits on which they may not be disposed to enter, should himself 
 point out transgressions of the rubrics, and require amendment. 
 For this reason I have never been able to accept the plea 
 which has of late been so frequently advanced on behalf of 
 clergymen who are accused of violating the rubrics, that whether 
 they are or are not doing this, at any rate their congregations or 
 their parishioners approve of all that they are doing, and that so 
 long as this is the case no clergyman should be " molested " by 
 the interference of his Bishop. The Church's laws of ritual are, 
 1 maintain, binding on parishioners and on minister alike, and the 
 fact that these may have agreed together to neglect or to defy 
 those laws, so far from diminishing, may actually enhance the duty 
 of interference on the part of the Bishop. Rebellion is not the 
 less rebellion, nor is it the less dangerous, because it is the act, 
 not of one, but of many ; and the duty of a ruler to suppress such 
 rebellion is one that he owes to the society in which he bears 
 rule, whose laws and whose authority he must not suffer to be 
 weakened or made contemptible in his person. It may, there- 
 fore, be the duty of a Bishop to vindicate the authority of the 
 Church, so far as he has the power to do so, against a clergyman, 
 
 £
 
 50 A CHARGE. 
 
 even though he be abetted in his disobedience by the entire of 
 his parish. 
 
 Nor is this theory of a Bishop's duty in this respect at all a 
 harsh or a litigious one ; on the contrary, it is, I believe, eminently 
 calculated to prevent litigation. For I imagine that there are few 
 clergymen who would not be more ready to correct their rubrical 
 defects or excesses when required to do so by their Bishop, than 
 if this demand were made by some prosecuting association, with 
 the Ecclesiastical Court in the background held open for it by 
 the Bishop, who, though too fatherly himself ever to prosecute his 
 clergy, is not too fatherly to afford every facility for their prosecu- 
 tion by others. 
 
 But if the office of a Bishop thus confers upon him the authority 
 at all times, and imposes on him the duty on some occasions, of 
 requiring obedience to the rubrics, has he any discretion given 
 him as to relaxing this obedience ? If he may never command 
 more than the Church commands, may he never allow of less ? 
 In other words, has a Bishop any dispensing power as regards 
 the strict and literal compliance with the rubrics of our Church ? 
 
 I maintain that he has, and that he has it both by the nature 
 of his office and by the express gift of the Church herself. Such 
 a discretionary power is vested, more or less, in every ruler, and 
 is essential to the very idea of the government of men by men. 
 No system of human law can ever be carried out with the 
 terrible uniformity of the laws of nature, which overlook no 
 failure, and pardon no transgressor. Such a system of adminis- 
 tration of human law would not only often prove cruelly harsh 
 and unjust, but stupidly impohtic. Every system of human 
 government must be administered on the principle, " Legem 
 surdum et inexorabilem ; Regem hominem esse ; " that is to say, 
 its administration must be tempered by those considerations of 
 equity, charity, and even of expediency, which teach all wise rulers 
 that it is not always the highest wisdom to seek out all that is 
 punishable, but rather to imitate that Divine wisdom which is not 
 " extreme to mark what is done amiss." 
 
 And this discretion as regards the strict enforcement of law 
 seems to me, as I have said, to be conferred upon the Bishop by 
 the Church. In the solemn service in which she invests him with 
 all the authority of his office, and bids him vow to exercise it for 
 the restraint of" unquiet and disobedient persons," she also exhorts 
 him, in words that should be graven on the heart of every Bishop, 
 to use this authority, " not to hurt, but to help ; " " so to minister 
 discipline that he forget not mercy;" "to be so merciful that he 
 be not too remiss." If these words have any meaning, they must 
 be meant to convey just that discretionary or dispensing power in 
 the enforcing of discipline which some are so shocked at the 
 idea of a Bishop being intrusted with. Nor is it any valid
 
 A CHARGE. 51 
 
 objection to intrusting such discretion to Bishops, that they may 
 use it partially, capriciously, unwisely. Undoubtedly they may. 
 It is in the nature of all discretion that it is liable to misuse. 
 But the real question is not whether individuals may not occa- 
 sionally misuse the discretion vesting in them by right of their 
 office, but whether the advantages of allowing such discretion do 
 not outweigh the obvious disadvantage of the possibility of its 
 occasional abuse. If they do, instances of such abuse may be 
 excellent reasons for depriving the individual of the office he 
 abuses, but not for divesting the office itself of functions essential 
 for the proper discharge of its duties. 
 
 While, therefore, I admit, and even maintain, that it may be 
 the duty of a Bishop, when circumstances may demand it of him, 
 to require, and, so far as he may have the power, to enforce 
 obedience to the Church's laws, I also maintain that not only is 
 authority given him, but that obligation is laid upon him, to 
 exercise discretion in deciding in each case how far its circum- 
 stances do require such action on his part, and that neither by 
 the nature of his office, nor by any vow or obligation that he has 
 taken, is he bound always and in every case to enforce a rigid 
 and exact compliance with the letter of the rubrics of our 
 Church. 
 
 Nor is this discretion in the least impaired by the fact that the 
 laws of the Church have been accepted by the State, and that the 
 latter lends its temporal authority to strengthen the coercive 
 jurisdiction of the Church. For whatever additional sanction or 
 vigour these laws may have acquired by the fact of their joint 
 recejjtion by " this Church and realm," this fact cannot possibly 
 diminish the amount of discretion, as to their enforcement, which 
 by those very laws, or by the nature of law itself, vests in the rulers 
 of the Church ; that remains precisely what it was before this 
 joint reception, and what, it would be after this had ceased to 
 exist. 
 
 And so, I must add, remains the obligation to enforce any 
 interpretation that may be given to any particular rubric in any 
 court of law, whether spiritual or temporal. We have of late years 
 been so unhappily given to litigation, we have become so infected 
 with the atmosphere of the law courts, that many have come to think 
 of judicial decisions as imparting some new and binding authority 
 to rubrics, and to expect that whatever Bishops may do as regards 
 other rubrics, these, in their last interpretation, must at any rate 
 and at all hazard be at once and universally enforced. But surely 
 a legal decision as to the meaning of a rubric adds nothing to its 
 authority, or even to its relative importance, and decides nothing, 
 therefore, as to the expediency or otherwise of enforcing it in any 
 particular case. It simply brings into accidental, and it may be 
 most unfortunate, prominence the particular rubric which certain 
 
 E 2
 
 52 A CHARGE. 
 
 parties, discreetly or indiscreetly, may have chosen as a subject 
 for litigation. It defines, or perhaps I should rather say, it aims 
 at defining, the exact meaning of that rubric ; but it does not thereby 
 make it one whit the more or one whit the less binding than it was 
 before ; nor, except for the extraneous considerations which may 
 have been imported into the history of the case, does it in any way 
 make it more expedient to enforce it than to enforce any other 
 rubric in the Prayer-book. To say that it does is really to assert 
 that we are less bound to obey rubrics which are plain and undis- 
 puted than we are to obey those which are doubtful, and which, 
 just because they are doubtful, have been made the subject of 
 litigation. One example will suffice, if one be needed, to show how 
 utterly untenable is such a principle of rubrical observance as this. 
 There are, in the same office of our Church, and nearly side by side, 
 two rubrics ; one of which is plain, definite, and unmistakable ; it 
 has never been the subject of litigation, simply because no human 
 ingenuity could find in it any room for litigation. It is as follows : — 
 " The priest shall then place upon the table so much bread and 
 ■wine as he shall think sufficient." This rubric is, as you know, 
 systematically violated in hundreds of our churches. The second 
 of these rubrics is confessedly doubtful and of difficult interpreta- 
 tion ; it has been the subject of legal decisions which the acutest 
 legal intellects find it difficult to reconcile with each other. It is 
 as follows : — " When the priest, standing before the table, hath so 
 ordered the bread and wine," &c. ; and this too, as interpreted by 
 • the courts, is disobeyed in hundreds of our churches. Now I ask, 
 Why is a Bishop bound to enforce the doubtful rubric, which has 
 been litigated, any more than the plain and precise one, which has 
 never been litigated? And yet to enforce the one would, as you 
 / well know, be regarded by a large party in the Church as most 
 
 I i unnecessary strictness ; while not to enforce the other is regarded, 
 by the same party, as most culpable connivance. Of course it may 
 be alleged that the latter has a special doctrinal significance, and 
 is therefore a dangerous, while the other is only a harmless and 
 insignificant, deviation ; or that the latter is a novelty, while the 
 former has long usage in its favour, though it be only the usage of 
 neglect. Let us grant this, and what does it prove ? Why, simply 
 that it is this novelty, or this alleged danger in this practice, and 
 not the fact of the judicial decision respecting it, which is the 
 reason for restraining it ; or, in other words, that the duty of en- 
 forcing the rubric depends on quite other considerations than 
 the fact that it has been made the subject of a judicial decision. 
 
 We may learn, however, something more, both as to the need 
 for this dispensing power on the part of those in authority in the 
 Church, and also as regards the manner in which she would have 
 that discretion exercised, by a consideration of those laws them- 
 selves.
 
 I 
 
 A CHARGE. 53 
 
 In the first place, these laws are laws of worship. As such they 
 set before us the Church's highest standard for the pubHc service 
 of the sanctuary. She has not left it to her children to teach her, 
 as she leads them to the throne of their Heavenly Father, the fittest 
 way of rendering to Him the honour due unto His name. Her 
 Book of Common Prayer is not set forth by her as a set of hints 
 for devotion to be improved upon by their wiser and devouter 
 minds. It is for them the highest level of public worship to which 
 she thinks they may attain without risk of extravagance or super- 
 stition. To reach this standard should be the loyal and honest 
 aim of every one of her ministers. Nevertheless, as she herself 
 admits, there may be " reasonable hindrances " in the way of their 
 completely reaching it : hindrances caused by the infirmity of the 
 minister, or by the varying needs and emergencies of many wor- 
 shippers. All cannot at all times attain to this standard; and if, 
 nevertheless, a rigid and unbending conf )rmity to it is at all times 
 to be required of all, then the standard must in equity and chanty 
 be lowered to meet the capacity of the very weakest of her members. 
 What every one is absolutely bound under heavy penalties to do 
 at all times, must in fairness be no more than every one is at all 
 times able to do ; and thus, if uniformity is to be rigidly enforced 
 always and upon all, a minimum and not a maximum of ritual 
 must be the result ; just as on a march, if no straggling be allowed, 
 the pace must be slackened to meet the strength of the weakest 
 soldier in the force. 
 
 On the other hand, the amount of deflection from the rubrics 
 cannot be left to the uncontrolled judgment or caprice of each 
 individual minister, any more than the pace of an army on the 
 march could be left to the discretion of each individual soldier. 
 In the one case the soldiery, in the other case the ministry^ would 
 become a mob. If, therefore, a high standard of public worship is 
 to be combined with reasonable allowance for the varying needs 
 and capacities of minister and congregation ; if ritual, in the effort 
 for uniformity, is not to be brought down to its very lowest level, 
 or, in the effort for liberty, is not to degenerate into mere license 
 and will-worship ; we must have a maximum standard of ritual to 
 which all should be legally bound to conform, and at the same 
 time a power of relaxing this obedience, for good and sufficient 
 reason, vested in the hands of some living authorit}'-. 
 
 There is, however, another characteristic of our laws of ritual, 
 which, in the judgment of our Church, requires another and 
 further discretion on the part of those who have to administer 
 them. It is that these laws are, more or less, of doubtful inter- 
 pretation. Our Church not only admits this fact, but regards it 
 as inevitable. "Nothing," she tells us, " can be so plainly set forth 
 but that doubts may arise respecting the use and practice 'of the 
 same;" and for this, if for no other reason, that while the letter of the 
 law of ritual remauis the same, the circumstances in reference to
 
 54 A CHARGE. 
 
 '(vhich it was originally framed may have so considerably altered as 
 to render its interpretation a matter of great doubt and difficulty. 
 For instance, a law which regulates the position of the minister 
 before a table which stood at the time of the passing of the law 
 in one place in the church, and which afterwards came to stand 
 in quite another place, may be very difficult to interpret consist- 
 ently with such altered circumstances. Whatever may be the 
 causes, however, of doubtfulness in any of our rubrics, our Church 
 leaves us in no doubt as to the manner in which she would wish 
 such rubrics to be dealt with. She does not direct that these 
 shall be always referred to courts of law for a judicial decision, a 
 mode of disposing of rubrical difficulties which does not seem to 
 have found so much favour with the framers of our Prayer-book 
 as it has of late years with us : possibly for the reason which we 
 may yet more fully appreciate, that they had a very shrewd idea 
 what the result of such a process would be as regards rubrics with 
 such a history as ours. What they do direct is something very 
 different ; it is that those who doubt or diversely take anything in 
 the rubric shall "always resort to the Ordinary, who by his 
 discretion shall take order for the quieting and appeasing of the 
 same," provided that his order " be not contrary to anything in 
 the Book" of Common Prayer. 
 
 The wording of this direction seems to me very remarkable. 
 It clearly does not, as I understand it, require the Bishop to give 
 a judicial interpretation of the disputed rubric. A judge could 
 have no "discretion" as to the interpretation of the law, and it 
 would be a mere impertinence to caution one who is bound to 
 decide according to law^ not to give any decision contrary to it. But 
 such a direction is quite intelligible if addressed, not to a judge, 
 but to a ruler who is called upon, in a case where the law has not 
 decidedly and finally spoken, to give, in his discretion, such an ad 
 iiiteriin order as may in his opinion tend to quieting and ap- 
 peasing of doubt and diversity. Such an order must not, of course, 
 contradict any express enactment in the law applying to the case. 
 The Ordinary may not, for instance, if there be a doubt as to the 
 place "before the table" where the priest is to stand, direct that 
 he shall not stand, but kneel or sit ; or, in the question at what 
 time during divine service banns shall be read, direct that they 
 shall not be read at all ; but short of any such direct and literal 
 contradiction of the express words of any rubric, there is given 
 him a very large discretion as to the order he shall make — a 
 discretion which I maintain has no meaning if it do not relate to 
 the circumstances of the case as well as to the words of the law, 
 and which, therefore, allows of the varying of the direction 
 according to what, under the circumstances, may seem best to tend 
 to appeasing of strife. At the same time, the proviso, that this 
 order shall not be contrary to law, secures that it shall not have 
 any binding effect in law. It leaves it open to those who obtain
 
 A CHARGE. 55 
 
 it to impugn it if they think fit, on the ground of illegality, and 
 to press for a formal and final legal decision on the point in a 
 court of law ; while, on the other hand, the Bishop himself may, 
 upon better information, amend his direction, which meanwhile is 
 binding only on those who have mutually agreed to submit to it. 
 
 I confess that I can imagine no mode of dealing with disputed 
 rubrics better calculated for quieting and appeasing of strife than 
 this. It admits of diversity of use in different dioceses, or even 
 in different parishes in the same diocese, while it prevents this 
 diversity from running into mere self-will and license by subjecting 
 it to the action of authority. It leaves the area of ''arguable 
 ground " in the doubtful rubrics untouched by new and narrowing 
 legal interpretations, while yet it leaves it free to all to seek 
 these interpretations if they are so minded. It checks litigation, 
 it allows of reasonable liberty, and yet secures a reasonable 
 conformity. Whether we have found a more excellent way of 
 late years in promoting litigation, narrowing liberty, and substi- 
 tuting for reasonable conlormity hard and narrow uniformity, is 
 yet to be seen. Ce this as it may, it is at least clear that our 
 Church, whether wisely or unwibely, did give to her Bishops a 
 discretion of direction in the case of doubtful rubrics. 
 
 But the voice of living authority is to be invoked in the ad- 
 ministration of the rubrics for yet another reason, namely, that 
 the rubrics are not, and cannot be, exhaustive directions for public 
 service. It is impossible that they should be so. A book of 
 ritual which should prescribe with exact minuteness, not only all 
 the rites and ceremonies to be performed by the minister, but also 
 all the subsidiary acts and gestures necessary to the performance 
 of them, would, if it were possible to frame it, be an utterly 
 intolerable burden on the clergy. Much in this matter must be 
 left, in the first instance, to the discretion of the minister, who is 
 presumed to have the ordinary common sense and right feeling 
 required to guide him in exercising that discredon. Nevertheless, 
 this cannot be left to his altogether uncontrolled and irresponsible 
 discretion. A clergyman in our Church is certainly not at liberty 
 to supply every hiatus, or everything that he chooses to regard as 
 a hiatus, in her public service with any rite or ceremony that he 
 pleases to adopt. If omission be not prohibition in all cases, it 
 most certainly is not in all cases permission. The clergyman 
 who has promised to use the form prescribed in the Book of 
 Common Prayer, and " none other," is surely not therefore en- 
 titled to say or do anything in the service that he chooses, simply 
 because it is not prescribed. Some discretion, therefore, there 
 must be to control his ; and whose should this be if not his whose 
 godly admonitions he has solemnly promised to obey ? Certainly 
 the claun on the part, of Bishops to exercise this control is no 
 new one. It is no modern maxim of Church law that " no new
 
 56 A CHARGE. 
 
 ceremonies be received into the Church without the assent of 
 the Bishop."* 
 
 In three important respects, then, as regards the observance of 
 rubrics, a discretion, as I conceive, is given to a Bishop of the 
 Church of England. He is given a discretion as to enforcing 
 the law when it is clear, as to directing when it is doubtful, and 
 as to regulating subsidiary practices and usages in cases where 
 it is silent. 
 
 But if this discretion on his part is not to become mere caprice; 
 if it is to be what the law contemplates by this word, a reasonable 
 discretion, it too must be regulated by some broad and fixed 
 rules for its proper and prudent exercise. Two such rules our 
 Church has laid down ; broad enough, as it seems to me, to 
 govern all the discretion she allows to any of us, whether in the 
 observance or in the enforcement of her rubrics. They are order 
 and EDIFICATION. These are the two objects at which, she informs 
 us, she has aimed in all that she herself has done in retaining or 
 abolishing of ceremonies. Those which she has retained are, as she 
 states, designed "as well for a decent order in the Church for 
 which they were first devised, as because they pertain to edifica- 
 tion, whereunto all things done in the Church ought to be 
 referred." As regards the first of these objects — the maintenance 
 of " order and quiet discipline " — she evidently considers it as a 
 thing which may be far more important than the exact observance 
 of those ceremonies which she has retained with a view to 
 it. " The keeping or omitting of a ceremony, considered in 
 itself, is," she tells us, "a small thing;" but "the wilful and 
 contemptuous transgression of a common order and ditcipline is 
 no small offence before God." The evil and danger, then, in her 
 eyes, of a breach of the rubrics, lie far more in the spirit in which 
 it is committed than in the act itself. Those who have to deal 
 with deflections from her rubrics are therefore bound, I think, to 
 ask, not merely is this particular act a breach of the letter of the 
 Church's law, but is it done in such a manner and spirit as to be 
 perilous to the common order and discipline? Is it done, for 
 instance, in the merest wilfulness of sloth, or in deliberate breach 
 of some plain rubric, which the clergyman declares " nothing 
 shall ever induce him to obey," or in defiance of the authority of 
 
 * The words in the text are' taken from a passage in Van Espen's "Jus 
 Ecclesiasticiim," which, fiom its bearing upon the claim for uncontroilcd 
 license in the name of Catholic practices set up by some of our clergy, might 
 have been written yesterday. It is as follows: — "Itaque singularium 
 ecclesiarum ritus atque cseremonialia sive ritualia servanda sunt ; neque 
 Presbyteiis aliisque ministris privata auctoritate ritum praescriptum immiitaie 
 licet; eo etiam prsetextu, ciuod contrarius ritus pristinse ecclesias discipliras 
 esset coriformior ; videreturque magis ad excitandum populi devotionem nee 
 non explicanda mysteria aptior et convenientior. Novae cseremonise nullae in 
 ecclesiib recipiantur sine epibcopi judicio." — Van Espen, Jus Ecclesiasticuvi, 
 pais ii. sec. i. tit. 5.
 
 A CHARGE. 57 
 
 the Church herself to make any laws which, in the opinion of th.e 
 clergyman, contravene some higher law than hers ? If so, it 
 becomes an act in the last degree perilous to order and disci- 
 pline. It is the setting up of the will or opinion of the individual 
 against the law of the society of which he is a member, and must 
 be dealt with accordingly. Is it, on the other hand, a deviation for 
 which the clerg3man, while loyally desirous to obey the law^, can 
 honestly plead some special cause, some reasonable hindrance in 
 himself, or some exceptional peculiarity in the conditions of his 
 work, which has in a nianner compelled him to this change ? 
 Then such a deviation from the rubric, though in the letter 
 precisely the same with that which, in another case, needed 
 instant correction as "no small offence, " may in his case be safely 
 treated as a "small thing." And, in so treating it, the godly 
 order and discipline would not be weakened, but preserved, 
 by avoiding that overstrained enforcement of law w^hich leads, 
 more than anything else, to the breaking of it. 
 
 In hke manner is the Bishop, as I conceive, bound in his 
 discretion to consider the question of edification. And, in saying 
 this, I certainly do not mean that either Bishop or clergyman is 
 to claim "to appointor change ceremonies of the Church" on 
 the ground that others more edifying are adopted in their place. 
 We are bound to assume that her rule is in all cases the most 
 edifying. But the real question is, not whether we may alter 
 for edification any of her ceremonies, but whether, in cases where 
 any of these harve for special necessity been altered or omitted, 
 any discretion on the ground of edification should be allowed as 
 to enforcing them? I think there should: I think, for instance, 
 that where there has prevailed in any parish some one of those 
 long-established usages which, from one cause or another, are 
 almost sure to spring up alongside of law, and which come often 
 to be held in greater reverence than law itself, and which never- 
 theless are not in strict accordance with the rubrics, it may be a 
 serious question how far the admitted end of the rubrics — edifica- 
 tion — may be attained or hindered by immediately and peremptorily 
 requiring their correction. 
 
 I can imagine cases in which most grievous damage to the 
 interests of the Church, and even of religion, might be occasioned 
 in a parish by a sudden and violent reform of unrubrical usages. 
 Again, I can imagine other cases in which these very same 
 usages might be so unedifying or hurtful as to need the promptest 
 reform. Let us suppose the case of two parishes, in one of which 
 a lo3^al and zealous parish priest has found, on coming into it, 
 the services of the Church far below their proper level. He 
 endeavours to reform this state of things ; but, if he be wise, if 
 he does not wish to startle and alienate his flock, he will do so 
 gradually ; he will correct first one delect, then another, as he 
 finds his people will bear it ; gently, but steadily, raising them to
 
 58 A CHARGE. 
 
 the true standard of the Church's worship. All this time, how- 
 ever, he is technically a law-breaker — he is omitting, or imperfectly 
 ])erforming, every Sunday of his life, something which the Church 
 has enjoined, and yet all this time he is loyally aiming at perfect 
 obedience to her laws. In the next parish to this there may be 
 an incumbent, neither loyal nor zealous, who is quietly and 
 steadily lowering, for his own convenience and ease, or to suit 
 his particular doctrinal prejudices, the standard of public ser- 
 vice, omitting all he can or dare omit from his public duties, 
 and doing much of what he does perform imperfectly. Now, it 
 is quite conceivable that at a given moment each of these two 
 clergymen might be omitting the very same ceremony or service, 
 or performing it with the very same deficiencies of rite; but would 
 any one say that they should be dealt with alike by their Bishop 
 ■ — that he should hurry and spoil the work of the wise and 
 diligent pastor by requiring immediate conformity with all the 
 still unfulfilled rubrics, in order that he might, with a semblance of 
 justice, correct the neglects of his slothful neighbour ; or pass over 
 entirely the faults or omissions of the latter, in order that he 
 might consistently do the same with the former? Is he, then, 
 having regard to edification, to forbear to use his authority in the 
 one case, and to exert it in the other? Distinctly I say, he is to 
 take this latter course, if he is to use his authority, "not to hurt, but 
 to help ; " if he is to exercise just that discretion which I believe 
 was given him, that it might be used in just such a case as this. 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that the application of this twofold rule 
 of order and edification must vary, as all discretion must ami 
 ought to vary, with circumstances, and that the same rubrical 
 defects which are harmless, or even ediiying, under one set of 
 circumstances, might be unedifying and perilous under other 
 circumstances. And it is this fact which makes the exercise of 
 any discretion in these matters on the part of the Bishop at once 
 so difficult and so invidious, exposing him always to plausible 
 imputations of injustice and caprice ; imputations which he must 
 bear, if he will do his duty in that state of life to which it has 
 pleased God to call him, and which he can only escape by 
 waiving all discretion inherent in his office, and dealing out with 
 apparent impartiahty, but real injustice, equal measure to unequal 
 faults : a mode of proceeding which must end either in a vain 
 and irritating attempt at enforcing all the rubrics equally all 
 round, or in quietly refraining from enforcing them in any case, 
 and leaving their enforcement entirely to the desultory and capri- 
 cious action of individual zeal or party spirit. Which of these two 
 latter courses is likely to prove in the end the more hurtful to 
 the order and peace of the Church it is very hard to say. 
 
 So far we have been considering this (piestion in its simplest 
 form, as one between the Bishop and the clergy only, and we
 
 A CHARGE. 59 
 
 have seen that even in this form it has its difficulties. There is, 
 however, another aspect of it to be considered. Bishops and 
 clergy cannot be allowed to settle this matter of rubrical observ- 
 ance, however pleasantly or discreetly, between themselves. It 
 involves the rights of a third and a very important party, whose 
 voice in the decision of it must always be a potent one. I mean 
 the parishioner. And it is when we come to consider what his 
 rights really are that we encounter the real and most serious 
 difficulty in the case. Every parishioner has unquestionably the 
 right to claim the performance of divine service in his parish 
 church according to the form prescribed in the Book of Comfnon 
 Prayer. It is on the faith of an undertaking to use that form, 
 " and none other," in his public ministrations that the incumbent 
 obtains his right to the emoluments of his benefice, which consti- 
 tute the spiritual trust-fund of the parish, the enjoyment of which 
 he is entitled to only on the condition that he comply with the 
 provisions of the trust-deed. When a parishioner, therefore, 
 demands of his clergyman strict compliance with these provisions, 
 he is demanding nothing more than his strict right ; and when 
 he appeals to the Bishop to enforce this right, he is appealing to 
 him not in his capacity of a ruler, but in that of a judge eccle- 
 siastical, called on to do justice between two contending parties. 
 
 Now, it is a very serious matter for a judge to close the door 
 of his court against any suitor who brings there a wrong to be 
 redressed, and I have never, therefore, been able to see the sense 
 or the charity of the sneer so often indulged in against the 
 " aggrieved parishioner." Every parishioner, whose clergyman 
 breaks the rubrics, has, in strictness and in law, a grievance of 
 which to complain, and there may be cases in which this is 
 not merely a technical and legal, but a very real and substantial, 
 grievance. 
 
 The parishioner who finds himself, by what he believes to be the 
 illegal action of a pastor in whose appointment he has had no 
 voice, and whom he has no power to displace, compelled to wit- 
 ness or participate in ceremonies which he abhors, or deprived of 
 those which he values, is undoubtedly an " aggrieved parishioner," 
 and I do not hesitate to say he is in danger of becoming an offended 
 and alienated parishioner. He may be, he sometimes is, very un- 
 reasonable, very strongly prejudiced both as to what he likes and 
 dislikes in the performance of divine service. The rubrical defect 
 or excess of which he complains may be a very small matter, and 
 a wider charity or better knowledge would probably lead him to 
 see that it was so, and to waive his strict legal right for the sake of 
 peace. Nevertheless, what he is claiming is his right. Ignorant 
 and prejudiced as he may be, he knows at least this much — that it 
 is his right ; and it is hard to make him understand why his clergy- 
 man should be allowed, for any reason whatever, to deprive hun 
 of it.
 
 bo A CHARGE. 
 
 Now, as I have said, here has always seemed to me the real 
 strain of this whole question. How far am I, as a ruler, justified, 
 for any of those considerations of prudence, charity, or edification 
 of which I have spoken, in refusing to a parishioner that enforce- 
 ment of his strict rights which he claims at my hands as a judge ? 
 May I, to do so "great a right" to the clergyman, do this " little 
 wrong " to the parishioner ; and if I may not, what then becomes of 
 that dispensing power which we have seen to be absolutely essen- 
 tial to the wise administration of the rubrics, as between Bishops 
 and clergy ? I may, of course, reason with such a complainant ; I 
 may endeavour to show him how small the matter is ot which he 
 is complaining ; I may try to induce him to yield it for peace' sake ; 
 I may even say, in many cases I should say, This is a matter in 
 which certainly I do not feel myself called on to institute pro- 
 ceedings against your clergyman ; there are such and such reasons 
 why it would seem to me very inexpedient in this case to enforce 
 the law. But if he reply to me — Still, such is the law, you have 
 admitted it to be so, and — wisely or unwisely — I am only claiming 
 my legal rights at your hands : how am I, in justice, to refrain 
 from directing the clergyman to give this nran his legal rights, or 
 how, at least, am I to refrain from giving him facility tor enlorcing 
 his rights in my court ? 
 
 I have always felt this difficulty so strongly that, as the clergy 
 of this diocese are by this time well aware, I have been in the 
 habit of telling them that while I will certainly never harass them 
 by a fussy enforcement of the letter of all the rubrics, yet that it is 
 quite another matter when complaint is made to me, even by a 
 single parishioner, for a breach of the rubrics ; that I feel in such a 
 case my discretion as a ruler to be very seriously limited by this claim 
 of right made to me as a judge; and that 1 may be compelled, 
 whatever my own opinion may be as to the importance or expe- 
 diency of enforcing any particular rubric, to say to the clergyman — 
 After all, such is the law ; this man is asking, however litigiously 
 or unreasonably, only his strict right and no more, and I counsel 
 you to yield it to him. And yet, on the other hand, when I do this 
 I may be enforcing the strict letter of the law of the Church in a 
 case in which considerations of prudence or of charity would lead 
 me, if left to the exercise of my own discretion, to refrain from 
 enforcing it. 
 
 This question, then, of the administration of the rubrics of our 
 Church is, as I think I have shown you, not such a very simple 
 and easy one as it appears at first. On the contrary, the more we 
 consider it, the more it seems to be a complex and difficult one. 
 And its difficulty, broadly stated, really lies in this — that while as 
 rulers in the Church we are called on to administer a code of laws 
 not in all respects perfectly clear, in some respects obsolete, not 
 intended by its (ramers to be rigiilly and literally enforced on all 
 occasions, never, in fact, rigidly enforced in the history of our
 
 A CHARGE. 6 1 
 
 Church, and needing, therefore, much caution and forbearance in 
 its administration ; yet, on the other hand, as judges we may be 
 called upon at any moment, and under the most undesirable con- 
 ditions, at the demand, it may be, of the least discreet persons in our 
 dioceses, to enforce some one or other of its provisions ; and our 
 delicate task is to decide in such a case whether we may act as 
 rulers only, and exercise that discretion which is inherent in our 
 oi^ce as such, or whether we must act as judges, and consider 
 simply what is the law, that we may mete it out justly as between 
 man and man. And further, it is to be remembered that this choice 
 is just now to be exercised at a time when party spirit has elevated 
 precisely the most doubtful of the laws we have to administer into 
 sacred symbols wliose integrity must be guarded with most jealous 
 watchfulness ; while at the same time the Church, in consequence 
 of the violence of party strife, has found it impossible to relieve us 
 of any of our difficulties in the only way in which these could efifec- 
 tuall)' be removed, namely, by a wise and tolerant revision of these 
 rubrics, and only prays us in her synods to enhance the already 
 sufficient difficulty of our position, by adding to our present discre- 
 tion of allowing what is illegal the amazing and hitherto unknown 
 discretion of forbidding what is assumed to be legal. 
 
 But, whatever may be the difficulties in the way of exercising 
 these two different and somewhat opposite functions intrusted to us, 
 there can be no question which a Bishop should most affect. His 
 broad rule of administration should surely be — Authority where I 
 may, jurisdiction where I must. Authority, pastoral authority, exer- 
 cised in foro conscientice, always according to law, but not always 
 by law, will suffice, I believe, in the great majority of cases, for the 
 government of reasonable and loyal men ; and I believe, further, 
 that it is the wisdom of those who are called to rule to assume the 
 loyalty of those they rule over. I have, I think I may say, ever 
 done so amongst you. I give the clergy of this diocese credit for 
 loyally desiring to carry out the law of their Church so far as 
 they know it, and for willingness to listen to the voice of their 
 Bishop, when he may have occasion to call them to a stricter 
 obedience to that law. I give them credit too as pastors, to whom 
 have been intrusted cure and government of souls, for a wise and 
 charitable discretion in their carrying out of the laws of our Church 
 in their parishes ; and therefore I am slow, very slow, to interfere 
 with that discretion. Nevertheless, I do not fear to remind 
 tliem that they and I are alike legally bound to strict and even 
 literal obedience to her laws, and that the highest duty she 
 may exact from us m.ay be the sacrifice of our own most 
 cherished wishes and preferences to the voice of authority 
 speaking in the name of law. I do not hesitate, therefore, 
 to tell them that I may at any moment find myself constrained 
 to demand from them this sacrifice, even under circumstances
 
 62 A CHARGE. 
 
 that may not only seem to be, but really be, trying, and I ask 
 them to believe that when I do so it is because 1 am honestly 
 persuaded that I am not free, in such a case, to use the discretion 
 1 have hitherto exercised, but must act with the colourless and 
 strict impartiality of a judge, and that I rely, and confidently 
 rely, in this case on their compliance, unless they honestly believe 
 that I have mistaken the law, in which case, of course, I cannot 
 complain if they claim the arbitration of a higher jurisdiction than 
 mine. I only ask that when they do claim this, they will submit 
 to its arbitrament. On the other hand, 1 give the laity credit for 
 reasonableness in their assertion of their strict legal rights ; for an 
 unwillingness to press these in every point to their utmost letter; 
 for a generous and kindly respect for the feelings and wishes 
 ot their pastors, or it may be for those of their fellow-parishioners ; 
 for a regard for the peace and charity which are above rubrics, 
 but which soon vanish, never perhaps to return, in any parish 
 where men once begin to exalt every trifling point of the rubrics 
 first into a party symbol, and then into a claim of legal right 
 to be fought out to the bitter end in the law courts. 
 
 I have not hitherto found this system of government to fail. I 
 have not hitherto found the clergy or the laity of this diocese 
 so unreasonable as to prevent my disposing, without lawsuits, of 
 such questions of ritual as have yet come before me, and I see 
 no reason why this should not be the case hereafter, notwith- 
 standing the passing of this much-dreaded Act. 
 
 On the contrary, I cannot but hope and believe that we shall 
 go on much as we have done before, with, perhaps, a quiet and 
 gradual approach on all sides to a closer conformity to the 
 Church's law, by correcting errors on either side, of excess or of 
 delect ; and I should hope, too, with a growing appreciation of the 
 fact that, htigate and multiply legal decisions as we may, there will 
 still be ample room within our rubrics for ritual which some of 
 us may dislike, but which others may enjoy \ and that our wistlom 
 will be to try and find out, not how much we can repress, but how 
 much we can safely tolerate. Some measure and limits there must 
 be, and this Act will help, I think, ere long, to define these ; but 
 within these limits there must be large-hearted toleration, if we 
 are to live together much longer in one Church. The time may 
 come, perhaps, when this toleration shall be defined and secured 
 by clear and definite law ; meanwhile, it must be aimed at by the 
 discretion of those who administer the law, and still more by the 
 charity and moderation of those who have to obey it. To that 
 charity and moderation I make my appeal for aid in carrying out 
 this Act for regulating our laws of worship in that spirit in which 
 our Church would have those laws administered. And, judging 
 Irom the past, I do not think that I shall make this appeal in vain. 
 
 And now let us see how far this Act is capable of being ad-
 
 A CHARGE. 63 
 
 ministered in the spirit and on the principles which I have thus 
 endeavoured to describe. 
 
 In the first place, then, I observe that the Act recognises 
 the right which parishioners have always possessed of proceeding, 
 with the consent of the Bishop, against anything they may regard 
 as a breach of the law of the Church in matters relating to public 
 worship on the part of their clergyman. It does not, as is some- 
 times alleged, give them any new powers in this respect ; on the 
 contrary, it very considerably limits the powers they formerly 
 possessed. In the first place, it narrows the definition of parish- 
 ioner, which in law has a much wider signification, to persons who 
 shall have resided in the parish for one year previous to proceed- 
 ing under this Act, and who shall have signed a declaration that 
 they are bona fide members of the Church of England. In the 
 next place, it requires that instead of one parishioner, as formerly, 
 having the right to institute proceedings, there must now be three 
 to join in them. And, lastly, it imposes upon all such proceed- 
 ings the wholesome check of security for costs. 
 
 Let us suppose, however, that three parishioners, thus duly 
 qualified, make a complaint to me of any clergyman in this 
 diocese. I observe, in the next place, that the Act gives me a 
 period of twenty-one daysjDefore I am called upon to take any 
 legal step whatever respecting this complaint. Here the Act gives 
 me the opportunity, which I shall certainly not fail to use, for 
 persuading the parties, if I can, to accept the older and better 
 way ai)pointed by tlie Church for the settlement of rubrical 
 disputes. I will try if they can be induced to resort to me as 
 Ordinary, and to accept from me that extra-judicial and informal 
 direction that the Church allows me, in any dispute, to give for 
 the quieting and appeasing of strife and diversity. If they will 
 do this, the case will, of course, be entirely withdrawn from the 
 operation of this Act, and there will be peace. If, however, 
 either of these parties refuse to do this, I am then to decide, " on 
 considering all the circumstances of the case," whether any further 
 proceedings shall be taken ; and if I decide that they shall not, 
 I have the power to stop them, and from that decision there is 
 no appeal. This is a very large discretion indeed. Subject only 
 to the check that I must state in writing, and place on public 
 record, my reason for it, it is absolute and uncontrolled. It gives 
 to the Bishop all, and even more than all, of that dispensing 
 power which I have claimed for him, for it allows him not only 
 a discretion as to proceedings on his own part, but as to all 
 proceedings on the part of those who seek to promote his office 
 as a judge. And it allows him, further, in the exercise of this 
 discretion, to take into account a much larger range of circum- 
 stances than I confess I should have thought myself free to 
 consider, in deciding whether to permit a suit by a parishioner, 
 before the passing of this Act. All the circumstances of the case,
 
 64 A CHARGE. 
 
 in their fullest extent of prudence, charity, and expediency, are 
 open to me by this provision, and I am not only entitled, but 
 bound to consider them all. 
 
 Naturally, therefore, clergy and parishioners will wish to know 
 what are those circumstances which I hold would warrant me in 
 refusing to allow of suits under this Act ; and, although I should 
 not think it wise or safe to fetter the discretion which this Act 
 gives me by laying down minute rules for its exercise, which 
 must vary greatly in different cases, yet I think I may venture to 
 lay down two or three broad rules which I will certainly apjily 
 to every case. And, in the first place, I shall certainly require 
 that this Act shall be the last, and not the first, resort of com- 
 ])lainants. I have no idea of any parishioner attempting suddenly 
 to drag his clerg\man into a lawsuit without previous warning or 
 remonstrance. My first question, then, of every complainant 
 under this Act will be. Have you spoken with your clergyman 
 on this matter, and asked him to alter what you object to in his 
 mode of conducting divine service ? If you have not, I shall 
 conclude that what you want is not justice, but litigation, and I 
 shall certainly not allow your suit to proceed. 
 
 In the second place, I will allow of no suits for the "purpose 
 of ascertaining the lasv," as it is called. We have had, in my 
 opinion, quite enough of these already. The cases which I shall 
 allow to go to a hearing shall be those in which a complainant 
 has, or at least believes he has, a clear and bona fide grievance to 
 be redressed, and not a rubrical investigation to be pursued, at 
 the cost of the peace of the parish and the Church. 
 
 Thirdly, I will allow of no merely frivolous and vexatious suits ; 
 no suits in which it may be clear to me that a parishioner, merely 
 to gratify some petty parochial grudge, is raising against his 
 pastor some small point of rubrical law, respecting Avhich no one 
 has ever complained but himself, nor he before he quarrelled with 
 his incumbent. 
 
 Fourthly, I will allow of no proceedings respecting rubrics now 
 before the superior courts for interpretation, pending their decision. 
 Such proceedings would be, in my opinion, merely gratuitous and 
 mischievous litigation; nothing can be gained either for peace or 
 discipline by fresh suits running parallel with those already 
 proceeding in the same matter. When the decision of the court 
 of final appeal shall have tinally, on a full rehearing and argument, 
 been given on these vexed questions, that decision must be 
 regarded as fixed and settled law ; at least, it will so be regarded 
 and treated by me. Meanwhile, it seems to me reasonable 
 that we should wait for this decision, and I mean to do so, 
 with one distinct condition, however, that meanwhile none of 
 the practices now being litigated in these courts shall be intro- 
 duced into any of the parish churches in this diocese. For if- it 
 be reasonable that a clergyman should not be harassed by a
 
 I 
 
 A CHARGE. 6s 
 
 prosecution now for some practice which possibly, six months 
 hence, may be declared legal ; on the other hand, it seems to 
 me equally reasonable that he should refrain from disturbing the 
 peace of his parish by introducing some practice which, six 
 months hence, may be finally declared illegal. I should regard 
 the clergyman who did this at this moment as wantonly disturb- 
 ing the peace of the Church, and I should certainly not interfere 
 to save him from the penalty of a lawsuit. With this exception, 
 and, of course, with the obvious proviso that these suits in the 
 superior courts are being bona fide pressed on to a reasonably 
 speedy decision, I mean to proclaim in this diocese a truce 
 between the combatants on these disputed points while the battle 
 is being fought out by their respective champions elsewhere. It 
 may be that the result of this combat may be greatly to damp 
 the ardour for prosecution, when those who are now eager to 
 engage in it may have discovered that they have changed places 
 with their adversaries, and that, if the law is to be enforced, it will 
 be enforced, not against these, but against themselves. 
 
 Lastly, among the circumstances of the case which I shall think 
 myself free to consider, will be the question whether the particular 
 practice complained of has been of recent introduction, or has long- 
 standing usage in its favour ; whether it has ever been objected to 
 before in that parish ; whether the majority, or any considerable 
 number, of the parishioners, and especially of the communicants, 
 share the dislike to it of the objectors; or whether these are 
 singular, or nearly so, in their complaint of it. I do not say that 
 any one of these circumstances in the case will be decisive as to 
 my action ; but certainly I shall hold myself bound to include them 
 amongst those I take into consideration. On the other hand, I 
 must plainly and distinctly say, that whenever I have to deal with 
 a clear and plain case of rubrical transgression, whether of excess 
 or of defect, which shall seem to me to give reasonable ground 
 of offence to a reasonable number of parishioners, I shall certainly 
 require the clergyman to amend what is complained of; and 
 should he refuse to do so, I will give the complainants redress at 
 my hands under this Act. 
 
 But let us suppose, in the next place, that in a case which 
 satisfies these conditions I decide that proceedings must go forward. 
 The next duty that devolves on me is to require each party to state 
 whether they will submit to my direction. If they, or either of 
 them, will not, I must send the case to the Archbishop, who must 
 remit it to the judge of the supreme court. If they will, I am to 
 proceed to hear the matter of the representation " in such manner 
 as I think fit ; " but in whatever manner I may hear it, whether 
 in camera or in curia, whether with or without a legal assessor, it 
 seems to me clear that I must hear and decide it as a judge ; for 
 I am required to issue thereupon a judgment, or, if necessary, a 
 monition, which may be enforced by legal process ; a thing which 
 
 F
 
 66 A CHARGE. 
 
 I cannot possibly do, as it seems to me, save on strictly and 
 purely legal grounds. All my discretion, therefore, as a chief 
 pastor and ruler, ends, as it seems to me, at this point. I may 
 decide afterwards as an umpire, or rather as a judge having 
 consensual jurisdiction ; but I must decide in exact accordance 
 with the strict letter of the law. To decide at this stage of 
 the case on any other principle would, in my opinion, be the 
 worst kind of lawlessness — the lawlessness of a judge who should 
 allow questions of polity, or even of charity, to influence his 
 legal judgment. 
 
 All the discretion given me by this Act must, therefore, be exerted 
 prior to the moment when I decide that proceedings must go on ; 
 from that moment the case must proceed in due course of law to 
 its final decision, either by the judgment of the higher courts, if 
 the parties prefer to seek this, or by mine, if they agree to accept 
 it ; but in either case it must be a judicial decision on the mere 
 letter of the law, and on nothing else. 
 
 As to what may follow upon such decisions in the way of legal 
 penalty for their enforcement, I have no wish, and there is, I fully 
 believe, no need for me to dwell ; for these penalties can only come 
 upon such as may have made up their minds to refuse submission to 
 the law of the Church, when finally interpreted, after a fair hearing 
 in the supreme courts. No penalty named in this Act can touch any 
 clergyman who is willing to obey the law, once it has been fairly 
 argued and decided ; for no one under this Act is to be punished 
 for having broken the law ; he is only required to obey it, or rather, 
 to promise obedience to it in the future ; and ample time — no less 
 than three years — is given him before the last penalty of depriva- 
 tion is inflicted for continued disobedience. But in the end, and 
 at the last, the law must prevail, and the clergyman submit or be 
 deprived ; and I confess I see no injustice or hardship in this. A 
 benefice obtained on condition of obeying the law cannot continue 
 to be held by one who refuses to obey the law, or — what comes to 
 the same thing — who refuses to obey any interpretation of it, save 
 his own. Whether such conduct is or is not lawlessness is a 
 question on which it seems men entertain different opinions, but 
 there can be no question that it must be dealt with as lawlessness. 
 It is impossible, in any community governed by law, that any 
 individual should be allowed to exempt himself from any law, or 
 any legal interpretation of law, by merely saying, I deny this to be 
 law. Such a state of things would be simply chaos. He may say, 
 if he pleases, I think this bad law, I disobey it, and I take the con- 
 sequences ; and the event must prove whether he be in that case 
 a rebel against, or, as he claims to be, a rebel /or the law. But it 
 is unreasonable to say, I think this bad law, 1 disobey it, and I 
 deprecate the consequences ; and still more unreasonable is it to 
 blame the ruler who accepts, as he must accept, the issue thus 
 raised, and enforces, as he must in that case enforce, the law, were
 
 A CHARGE. 67 
 
 it only in the interests of the liberty of the objector, who hopes by 
 his resistance to bring about the reversal of his sentence. 
 
 I need not, however, dwell upon a contingency which I have no 
 reason to suppose will ever arise in this diocese. What we are now 
 concerned with is my administration of an Act forced upon the 
 Church by those of her extreme parties who refused to listen to the 
 voice of authority, and demanded to be governed by legal com- 
 pulsion only. Happily the nation has not yet taken them at their 
 word ; and a large measure of the discretion which they would 
 have rejected is left, by this new Act, to that authority which they 
 despised and denounced. You have now heard from me the manner 
 in which I mean to exercise this discretion. 
 
 To sum up once and for all, in one sentence, my rule of govern- 
 ment in this matter, it will be plainly and broadly this. For 
 nothing short of deliberate refusal when called on by me, in virtue 
 of his vow of canonical obedience, to obey a plain and undisputed 
 rubric, or the final interpretation of a disputed rubric in a fairly- 
 argued cause, shall any clergyman in this diocese be subjected 
 with my consent to the pains and penalties of a suit at law ; but 
 for such disobedience he must not expect, and I do not think 
 that any one of the clergy of this diocese does expect, protection 
 at my hands. 
 
 And now, to pass away from this ungracious theme of law, and 
 legal penalties, and Acts of Parliament. Let me say on this gene- 
 ral question of our rubrical disputes a few words which may, I 
 hope, help us to estimate a little more patiently our present position, 
 and calculate, if not more hopefully, at least more clearly and 
 reasonably, our future prospects. 
 
 What, let me ask, is the real meaning of this strife about two or 
 three rubrics not in themselves of any great apparent importance, 
 and to which our Church has never assigned any doctrinal signifi- 
 cance ? Why is it that men not presumably more unreasonable 
 than their fellows are throwing into this controversy, on either side, 
 such passionate energ}^ and keenness of strife ? Must it not 
 be because the sources of this strife lie deeper than these rubrics, 
 and would have produced it in some other form, had these mbrics 
 never existed, or this Act for enforcing them never been passed ? 
 
 Petty and unimportant as these rubrics may seem in themselves, 
 the strife respecting them is deeply affected by the influence of the 
 two great controversies of our day — the question oi the relations 
 between Church and State, and the question between religion and 
 infidelity. The first is obviously involved in the debates as to 
 ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the right of civil courts to adjudicate 
 in questions of Church law, which this controversy has raided. 
 One cannot but see that these are the reflex current of that deep 
 tide of events which in other countries has snapped, and in ours
 
 68 A CHARGE. 
 
 is straining and stretching, the tie that binds together the State 
 and the Church; the result of which, in more than one country 
 in Christendom, is aheady becoming, not the reahsation of a 
 great statesman's dream of a Free Church in a Free State, but the 
 deadly struggle of a fanatical Church with an infidel Government. 
 The beginnings of this state of things may be seen amongst our- 
 selves ; and men Avho feel already the strain of this conflict may 
 be expected, under its influence, to throw into their debates, even 
 about the smallest matters w4iich involve it, a passionate earnest- 
 ness that may seem altogether out of proportion to their intrinsic 
 importance. 
 
 The other cause is not quite so near the surface, and yet it is 
 not far to seek. The profoundly materialistic philosophy of our 
 day, with its abhorrence of the very idea of the spiritual and the 
 supernatural, naturally opposes itself to a spiritual and super- 
 natural religion, and especially to those parts of it in which its 
 claim to the supernatural is most distinctly asserted. Necessarily, 
 therefore, it denounces with the bitterest scorn and hatred the 
 sacramental teaching of Christianity, as savouring, above all the 
 rest, of superstition and sacerdotalism. The very idea of those 
 material elements in the sacraments which natural philosophers 
 can weigh and analyze being made the channels of a supernatural 
 efficacy by the action of a man like themselves, is to them intole- 
 rable. The sacraments are, therefore, the standing and irritating pro- 
 test of the Church against materialism, and they hate and denounce 
 these accordingly with a fierceness that provokes a reaction almost 
 as perilous on the other side. If the Church must ever maintain 
 her protest against materialism, how can she better do so, it is 
 asked, than by insisting more and more strongly upon the mira- 
 culous and supernatural character of all her rites, and especially 
 of that one which is most material in its outward aspect, and 
 which therefore gives her the best occasion for defying mate- 
 rialism by the assertion of miracle? And thus the assertion of 
 sacerdotalism and sacramentalism in their extremest form comes 
 to be regarded as the best defence against the blank denials of 
 infidelity, and men come to persuade themselves that excess of 
 belief on these points is not only pious, but prudent ; that, in an 
 age which believes too little, it is but an error on the safe side to 
 believe too much ; and every such excess in dogma or in 
 ritual is looked upon as a fresh outwork thrown up around the 
 central citadel of the Incarnation, where lies enshrined the miracu- 
 lous life of the Church. 
 
 And yet this is a perilous mistake. You will never succeed in 
 curing believing too little by believing too much ; on the con- 
 trary, every such addition to the strict and exact letter of super- 
 natural dogma weakens it ultimately by the reaction it provokes. 
 Force on men's minds the incredible as the highest form of the 
 supernatural, and )'0U force them to regard the supernatural as 
 
 1
 
 A CHARGE. 69 
 
 altogether incredible. The experiment has been tried, is being 
 tried, on the large scale before our eyes. What is the history of 
 modern Romanism but the attempt to fight materialism by exag- 
 gerations of the miraculous ? And what has been the result ? A 
 deeper and still deeper divorce between intellect and faith ; a 
 wider and still wider alienation 'between the laity and the priest- 
 hood, between modern civihsation and Christianity. 
 
 These additional dogmas, then, these pious opinions, are not 
 the safeguards and outworks of the citadel ; they are rather the 
 suburbs which, in times of peace, men build around the fortifica- 
 tions of their cities, but which, in times of war, afford a shelter 
 and a vantage-ground to the enemy. 
 
 And yet it is impossible not to sympathize with those who 
 build them. Even while we wish that their faith in the security 
 of the fortress were stronger, we honour the zeal that seeks, 
 however erroneously, to defend it. And even while we may be 
 constrained, for the sake of the very fortress i-tself, to check such 
 unwise building, we long to see the builders find for their zeal 
 and energy other and better use. At any rate, regarding as I do 
 this outburst of what is called Ritualism, or rather, of those 
 doctrinal tendencies of which it is the expression, as the reaction 
 in great measure against the infidelity of the age, I do not 
 anticipate its repression from any mere enforcement or revision 
 of rubrics, however necessary on other grounds such enforcement 
 or revision may be. It will have its course, and will wax or 
 wane with the infidelity that provokes and strengthens it. For 
 this reason, however, I dread, far more than the excesses 
 it indulges in, the reaction it will certainly provoke. I fear to 
 see — I think I already see — this reaction beginning amongst us 
 in our universities, in our popular literature, and in the ministry 
 itself. I expect to see a Broad, a very Broad, Church school 
 indeed, largely replacing, by its sceptical negations, the passionate 
 dogmatical fervour of the extreme High Church school, and yet 
 provoking that, meanwhile, into more and more violent extremes. 
 I am not, therefore, so sanguine as some amongst us are of the 
 immediate future of our Church. If she is to be saved from her 
 present perils from unbelief, her deliverance will not come from 
 vestments, and hghts, and incense, or from the erroneous doctrines 
 which these are sometimes made to symbolize, for we shall never 
 conquer materialism in philosophy by importing it into theology. 
 It will come by the uprising of some school of Christian apology 
 which shall confute the adversaries of the supernatural, and give 
 its friends breathing-space in which to grow calm and wise and 
 moderate again. 
 
 Just now there seems no very immediate prospect of this : not 
 the less, however, must we meanwhile do our part to preserve the 
 purity of our Faith and worship, imperilled as I believe these to be 
 by this recoil from infidelity towards superstition. But we must
 
 70 A CHARGE. 
 
 do this with very patient hearts and not unkindly hands; not 
 looking for any very great results on the deeper movements of our 
 times from such outward action as we may bring to bear upon 
 the merely outward symbols of these movements ; and even 
 when we deal with these, as we must deal with them, thinking 
 kindly, whatever be our provocation to think otherwise, of those 
 who cherish these symbols because they have learned, however 
 erroneously as we may think, to identify them with truths that 
 are as dear to ourselves as to them. 
 
 In this spirit, not certainly of sanguine hopefulness, but rather 
 of anxiety, and yet of trust in Him who has brought us 
 in times past through worse perils than these, should we con- 
 template, as it seems to me, the nearer future of our Church, 
 Let us ask Him to give us, against the perils that threaten us 
 from within and without, the wisdom that comes of a pure heart, 
 the courage that comes from faith, and the patience and forbear- 
 ance that come of brotherly kindness and charity. May it be so 
 for His name sake ! Amen. 
 
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 APPENDIX B. 
 
 Analysis of Reports of Diocesan Religious Inspectors, 1874, 
 
 
 Leicester. 
 
 Northampt 
 
 TotaL 
 
 Number of Church schools . 
 
 288 
 
 251 
 
 539 
 
 Number of schools inspected 
 
 255 
 
 212 
 
 
 Number permanently declining in- \ 
 spection / 
 
 17 
 
 12 
 
 29 
 
 
 
 Schools reported as excellent or ^ 
 good ) 
 
 68 
 
 123* 
 
 
 
 
 Schools reported as fair 
 
 103 
 
 127 
 
 
 Schools reported as indifferent \ 
 or bad / 
 
 84 
 
 36 
 
 
 Number of children present at i 
 examination . . . * ) 
 
 19,502 
 
 19,241 
 
 38.743 
 
 Number present in 1873 
 
 17,141 
 
 16,975 
 
 34.116 
 
 * The figures under this and the two following heads in the Archdeaconry of 
 Northampton represent Departments of Schools, i.e. Male, Female, Infant. 
 
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