The meeting of the Society for Promoting Christian Know- ledge
on Tuesday, to which we referred last week, was even more violent than was expected,—rather worse than the scene on the South-West Lancashire hustings,—but it ended in a victory over the Denisonians and the friends of schism in Natal by a majority of 91 ; 765 to 674. The money is not to be given to the Cape- town party in Natal to spend, but is to be expended by the standing committee at home. "It was utterly shocking," writes a friend who attended, " to see grey-headed clergymen, hissing, shouting, bawling ' question' or divide,' the instant a man got up to speak they did not want to hear, or roaring out 4 no' to the assertion of the most simple and incontrovertible facts,—as that Dr. Colenso is still legally Bishop of Natal, or that the office of Metropolitan is of purely civil creation in South Africa. Certainly no assembly of Jews or heathens described in the Acts was ever more utterly devoid of all sense of justice and fair dealing. How one did long for a town clerk of Ephesus to send them abaut their business !" The Dean of Westminster is said to have remarked, for the comfort of the Archbishop of York, who presided, that at the fourth .Council of the Lateran an archbishop was trampled to death. The truth is, the clergy have to be so decorous in general, that they regard a riot as the Irish are said by their historians to do, as a " demonstration of enjoyment." Thus a clergyman who was present writes to us of the row quite apologetically, as if it was rather hard the clergy might not take their pleasure now and then. There is no harm, of course, in a good row occasionally, to let off the animal spirits of the clergy, so long as they stop short of taking life ; but then don't call it argument or debate.
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