LORD BEAUCHAMP'S BILL.
W.N., have the heartiest wish to see Mr. Green released from prison. This seemingly superfluous statement is rendered necessary, by the circumstance that the Bill for getting him out of prison which Lord Beauchamp has induced the Lords to read a second time, in our view attains a good end by very inappropriate means. The real grievance arising out of this and similar eases is not that a particular clergyman has been sent to gaol ; for, inasmuch as he might have avoided this, either by obeying the law, or by retiring from a position in which obedience to the law is required of him, this is hardly a hardship. What is a hardship is, that in a professedly comprehensive Church, the kind of worship which a considerable number of Churchmen believe to be allowed, if not ordered, by the ecclesiastical law, can only be practised under peril of imprisonment. We ac- knowledge the absurdity of the contention by which every clergyman becomes his own interpreter of the Rubrics, and a decision of the Court of Final Appeal goes for nothing, unless the defendant in the suit happens to think it sound. We do not wish to see the authority of the Ecclesiastical Courts infringed, or ostentatious acts of defiance to the law condoned or winked at. What is needed is not interference with the principle that the law ought to be enforced, but a modification of the law which it is the business of the Courts to enforce. Such a Bill as Lord Beauchamp's only postpones the time when such a modification of the law may be looked for. If the release from prison at the end of six months, which it proposes to secure to Mr. Green and others who shall follow in his footsteps, is accompanied by a provision that the next similar offence shall be punished by deprivation—and we must candidly say that we do not see how some such provision can be kept out of the Bill—the Church Association will have won a substantial triumph. It will have obtained, by a side-wind, that amendment of the Public Worship Regu- lation Act which it has been afraid, or has thought it useless, to ask for openly. The Public Worship Regulation Act provides that at the end of three years a suspended clergyman shall be deprived of his benefice, unless he is willing to promise amend- ment and conformity to the law. The Church Association now sees that it ought to have made deprivation follow much more closely on the heels of suspension. The natural result of this discovery would have been the introduction of a Bill to - amend the Public Worship Regulation Act. But if this had been done, it would have been impossible to prevent the whole policy and scope of the Act from being brought under review, and this the Association is wisely averse from permitting. If Lord Beauchamp's Bill passes with the amendment suggested by the Lord Chancellor, the Public Worship Regulation Act will, in effect, have been amended in this precise particular, without any opportunity having been afforded for raising the wider question involved. This is precisely what the Church Association wishes, but it can hardly be what Lord. Beauchamp wishes.
In the abstract, indeed, there is everything to be said in favour of abolishing imprisonment as a means of enforcing conformity in matters of Ritual. It is altogether unsuited to the nature of the offence against which it is directed, and to the hind of reformation which it is designed to effect. If a clergyman repeats, after suspension, the offence for which he has been suspended, the proper course is, either to suspend him for a longer period, or to deprive him of his benefice. If he refuses to obey the decree of suspension, then also depriva- tion should be inflicted, and in very flagrant cases the sentence might properly carry with it inability to hold ecclesiastical preferment for a longer or shorter period. Supposing that it were expedient to enforce the judgments of the Judicial Com- mittee of the Privy Council in the Purchas and Ridsdale cases, it would be foolish to deprive a clergyman for disobeying them, and then to allow him to be at once presented to another benefice, in which he might again set the law at defiance. The sole reason that makes deprivation an inappropriate punishment in the case of Mr. Green and others is, that the object of inflicting it is to enforce a one-sided uniformity, which the people most con- cerned do not really care to see established. Mr. Green's is not a case in which the congregation has been sacrificed to the whim of the incumbent. It is not a case in which the majority of the congregation has been sacrificed to a minority. It is not even a case in which a minority of the congregation has been sacrificed to the majority. It is a case in which clergyman and congregation have been alike sacrificed to the Church Association, or rather to the law which the Church Association has undertaken to call into action. The Public Worship Regulation Act is not exacting as regards the amount of complaint it requires as a foundation for proceedings. Three aggrieved parishioners are enough, but here even three aggrieved parishioners were not, in the first instance, forthcoming; Lord Beauchamp says that in the bill of costs presented to Mr. Green, there was a charge made by the solicitors for the prose- cution for the correction of a mistake,—that mistake being that one of the three complainants had not completed the term of residence in the parish which the law requires. It cannot be contended that this gentleman was really aggrieved by Mr. Green's proceedings. He had full warning of the ceremonial in use in the church before he moved into the parish,—if, indeed, the desire of being an instrument of Providence for putting a stop to this ceremonial was not his motive for chang- ing his place of residence. There is no evidence that Mr. Green's proceedings were disliked by his congregation ; indeed, as 940 householders out of a total number of 1,140 have signed. a petition for his release, it seems not unfair to assume that the congregation approved of the ritual introduced by him. Mr. Green will be deprived when his time comes—some two years hence, if the law remains as it is, sooner, perhaps, if Lord Beauchamp's Bill, as amended by the Lord Chancellor, is passed this Session—just as he has already been imprisoned, because he has given his congregation the ceremonial which they de- sire. If Mr. Green were a solitary eccentric who had happened to fall in with a congregation as odd as himself, it might be expedient that he should be suspended and deprived. But when he and his congregation are members of a considerable party in the Church, it seems absurd to drive them out, unless this is the only alternative to forcing a distasteful ritual upon unwilling congregations. In this case, however, it is not Mr. Green who has forced a distasteful ritual upon an unwilling congregation, but the Church Association, aided by the Judi- cial Committee, which is trying to force a distasteful absence of ritual upon an unwilling congregation. There would be no real difficulty in so altering the law as to leave clergymen and congregations free, within certain limits, to choose their own ritual, while forbidding clergymen to impose their own ritual upon their congregations. It is a pity that Lord Beau- champ's well intended effort to benefit Mr. Green was not framed upon these more extensive lines.
We are not without hope that Lord Selborne himself is slowly—very slowly—opening his mind to this view. He said on Tuesday that "in the parish church, at all events, it is fundamentally necessary that those who by the law enjoy temporary emoluments and temporary rights should abide by the law with respect to the conditions on which those rights are to be enjoyed.' For ourselves, we go farther than this. We wish to see this conformity to the law enforced in all churches, only we wish at the same time to see the law itself made convenient and rational. But it would be a great change for the better, if provision were made for limiting the application of the decrees in the Purchas and Ridsdale cases to parish churches. It might seem hard, if a large majority of the congregation of a parish church were obliged to leave it, and build a new church for themselves, rather than forego a ceremonial which they liked. But it is far harder when, as now, the law not only denies to a large majority of the congregation of a parish church a ceremonial which they like, but forbids them to build a new church for them- selves. If Lord Selborne will move the Government to intro- duce a Bill, allowing congregations who are denied the ritual they desire at a parish church to build a chapel in which the ritual they wish for shall be expressly legalised, a very great advance would be made upon the present state of things. When once it had been recognised that a certain ritual is law- ful in particular churches, common-sense would suggest that the migration from the old church to the new should be under- taken by the minority of the congregation, rather than by the majority. In Mr. Green's case, the two aggrieved parishioners and the migratory gentleman might fairly have been left to find or found a church for themselves. If the lovers of Ritual had been in the minority, they would have come under the same rule. We see no way but this of getting over the diffi- culty raised by the Archbishop of Canterbury,—namely, how a gentleman with Mr. Green's convictions is to be kept out of prison, after he has been released.
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