A BRAWLING BISHOP. B OTH our Bible and our Prayer-book take
what we must call a singularly moderate and even diffident tone in speaking of the Bishops. The one allusion to them in the Morning Service expressly admits that the healthful spirit of grace shed down upon them is a " great marvel," being ap- parently the only thing contemplated in that service in that par- ticular light ; and St. Paul, though he does not hesitate to say that to desire to be a Bishop is to " desire a good work," and therefore gives no pretext for the false modesty of the nolo epis- copari, yet takes apparently especial pains not to put the quali- fications of the office too high. Our greater dignitaries must have often drawn themselves up, we should imagine, in con- scious superiority to at least some of those vices enumerated in his letter to Timothy as disqualifying for the episcopal station. " A bishop, then," said the great and statesmanlike Apostle, "must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach ; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre, but patient ; not a brawler, not covetous ;—one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity ; not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must have a good report of them that are without,"— not a very ambitious list of sacerdotal virtues—not ap- parently placing the episcopal standard very high above that of other men. Perhaps the real standard in the Apostle's mind was not the lower for being so simply and unambitiously expressed. Yet we fear that the Bishop of Manchester, Dr. Prince Lee, falls short not only of the highest Christian inter- pretation which may be put upon this standard of episcopal virtue, but of its most obvious and vulgar sense. He is clearly not "patient," and not "apt to teach;"—people after reading his recent correspondence with the 'Vicar of Rochdale will assuredly think that whether a "novice" or not he is "lifted up with pride ;" that he is not long likely to have " a good report of them that are without ;" and that he might, in short, be described as a " brawler," without any undue extension of the meaning of that word. A " striker," we trust he is not yet, though the very vindictive moral blow that he has ad- ministered to the Vicar of Rochdale would render us far from easy as to the future if accident should bring him face to face with his opponent. This is a painful moral situation for an English bishop, but the facts of the case we are about to relate certainly show it in no milder colour.
The Bishop of Manchester is patron of the living of Roch- dale, to which belong,—situated in the centre of the borough, —some thirty acres of glebe land, now of course very valuable. It was proposed to sell this land for the benefit of the Church, and at first the legal right to sell was supposed to be vested in the patron of the living,—that is, the Bishop. In the end this was judicially decided to be a mistake, and it was ruled that the power to sell was vested in the actual incumbent, the Rev. Dr. Molesworth. The Vicar wished for the Bishop's counsel as to the price he should ask for the land, but the Bishop, apparently mortified at the dis- eovery that he had legally no title to deal in the matter at all, and that he was only consulted in it through the anxiety of the Vicar to secure his sanction, declined in any way to be a party to the sale, and threw the whole responsibility of naming the price on the Vicar. The Vicar then named a price varying from 5001. to 6001. an acre, and on this basis negotiations went on for some months, and were nearly completed whoa the Bishop sent a protest to the Town Clerk of Rochdale against the sale on such terms, and hinted, it is said, at legal proceedings. Such at least is the story of .the preliminaries of the quarrel as it is now given to the public. Dr. Moles- worth was of course much annoyed, and vindicated his action in the Rochdale Observer and Manchester Guardian, stating that he had " positive evidence that subsequently to his Lordship's knowledge of the judicial opinion [that the land might be sold] he proposed the sale of the whole excepted land at 4001. per acre." This was not correct. Dr. Molesworth had what he believed to be positive evidence of this from his own solicitor, who showed him an extract from his diary to the effect that he (the solicitor) had seen a letter of the Bishop's dated the 17th of April, 1861, "wherein he suggests the sale of the lands in question (I) as they are at 4001. an acre ; (2) as they might be improved, 6001.; (3) if for building, 1,2001.' This of course was fair evidence for the Vicar of Rochdale to act upon, though it appears not to have been correct. For the Bishop's letter did not suggest the sale of the laud on these terms, as it ran thus :- "(Not to be published.) "Mauldeth Hall, 17th April, 1801. "Dear Sir,—The prices talked of, not proposed, are-1. As they are, 4001. per acre ; 2. As they might be improved, 6001. ; 3. If for building, 1,2001.—Yours, &c., "G. Healey, Esq." "3. P. MANCHESTER."
An error had first crept into the solicitor's diary in stating that the Bishop's letter " suggested " what he carefully stated was only " talked of, not proposed ; " and this error had been slightly exaggerated by the Vicar (who, it must be remem- bered, had never seen and had no access to the original letter of the Bishop) in substituting the word "proposed" for " suggested," so that at last he seemed to assert for the Bishop precisely what the Bishop (unknown to him) had guarded himself against saying. The origin of the blunder is plain enough, and we agree with Dr. Molesworth that it was due to the Bishop's refusing " the means of co-operation and practical discussion without which our beneficial discharge of our duties as administrators is almost impossible." After throwing upon Dr. Molesworth the whole responsibility of fixing the price, refusing to advise him, and not even com- municating to him the letter containing the prices " talked of but not proposed " in the Bishop's immediate vicinity, it was clearly as much his own fault as the Vicar's that the latter should believe himself to have " positive evidence " that the Bishop had sanctioned a price, which he had only "talked of." This Dr. Molesworth explained to the Bishop in a letter transmitting the extract from the solicitor's diary which he had regarded as his "positive evidence" in the matter.
And now the Bishop permits that discreditable tendency to " brawling" which St. Paul especially interdicts to bishops to issue in full force from the episcopal lips :- " Mauldeth Hall, Manchester, Tune 4, 1864.
"Reverend Sir,—Your statement that you had ' positive evi- dence' that, subsequently to my knowledge of the judicial opinion, I proposed the sale of the whole excepted land at 4001. per acre, is a most deliberate and shameless falsehood."
This is mild language, and the accusation of " deliberate falsehood" is reiterated at the close of the letter. How many times had his Lordship already incurred the Apostolic cen- sure ? Clearly he had been far from " vigilant," for the blunder, such as it was, was due to his declining all responsi- bility for vigilance in the matter. Whatever his language is, it is not " sober," nor " of good behaviour," nor can it be denied that the Bishop showed himself by it quite the re- verse of "apt to teach." As to being " patient, not a brawler," even the Bishop's best friends would not venture to affirm it of him in this case ; but it might have been open to them to hope that it was a momentary effusion of temper sure to pass away as suddenly as it came. Unfortunately, however, this does not seem to have been the case. Dr. Molesworth replied to this insulting letter with pardonable warmth, but made the double mistake first of not apologizing for and regretting the unintentional misrepresentation of which he had certainly been guilty, and secondly of " praying " that " you may have grace to see your errors, and repent of revilings and threatenings sadly inconsistent with the character of a Christian bishop, and damaging only to their author." No man in the heat of an anger however pardonable, should " pray" aloud for his antagonist. It is not only the most irritating but usually the most malicious and nu-Christian form of wrath. Here matters rested for upwards of three months without further correspondence. Then, after ample time for cooling down and regret, came the final act, which we cannot help considering so petty and full of ecclesi- astical spite as to lower the Bishop not only to the average level of temper and passion among profane persons, but inde- finitely below it. No gentleman deserving the name would, after three months' consideration of the circumstances, have persisted in regarding Dr. Moles worth's statement as a delibe- rate falsehood, establishing for him the character of a liar. In any one who looks calmly at the matter it simply proves that Dr. Molesworth was hasty in his reliance on the accuracy of another man's diary, and inaccurate in quoting even what he had seen there. Yet this was the view taken by the Bishop. Oa the 14th September last Dr. Molesworth found that the Bishop had refused to countersign his testimony to a certificate he had given to his curate, treating any certificate of Dr. Moles- worth's as utterly unworthy of credit, and speaking of him without reserve as dishonest, behind his back. We have no fault to find with the letter in which Dr. Molesworth demands an official and public apology. It desists from " praying " as a mode of expressing anger, and addresses the Bishop in the manly tone of an insulted man who is determined not to sub- mit to insult. The Bishop commences his reply thus :- " Mauldeth Hall, Manchester, Sept. 15, 1864.
Reverend Sir,—It —It is perfectly true that I declined to counter- sign a testimonial in favour of a clergyman to which your name was then the only one appended of the beneficed clergy of the diocese. It is equally true that, so far from apologizing for so doing, I shall pursue exactly the same course should a similar document be presented to me."
The Bishop then reiterates the old story as to the misrepre- sentation of the Vicar's letter as to the " positive evidence" of the episcopal sanction for the sale of the land at 4001. per acre, and concludes :—" Until this [statement] is proved or re- tracted, I refuse to hold further correspondence with you or countersign your name as worthy of credit." This seems to us far worse than "brawling." The violence of the Bishop's first letter was unepiscopal, and un- Christian, and unwarranted by the facts, and, as he must have known, the least likely way in the world to extort an apology from a man who had made an honest mistake. But this is worse than violence, it is petty malice hoarding up op- portunities for revenge. To any right-minded clergy it would be impossible hereafter to feel any kind of moral or spiritual deference for a Bishop who had acted in this way without afterwards expressing sorrow or self-reproach. A man who declines to advise his Vicar in a difficult and responsible duty, who protests against and discredits his action when he has at length decided upon it, gives him only uncertain secondary evidence of what his own view is, and charges him with wilful and malicious falsehood for relying too confidently on that uncertain secondary evidence,—and finally, after the delay of months, treats him publicly, though not face to face, as a liar, shows, to our mind, so little knowledge either of the spiritual laws of God or of the social ethics of gentlemen, that we should find it difficult to treat even his office with due respect. There may be features in the case not yet brought out, but the Bishop in his letters confines the grounds of his insults strictly to the details of the case before him, hint- ing at nothing beyond them ; and certainly on those grounds we cannot conceive anything less like the conduct either of a Christian or a gentleman than his own. His conduct might be most precisely described in contradictories of those duties of Christian charity so grandly enumerated by St. Paul,—which have since his time become more or less, thanks to the Apostle, the standard not only of professed Christians, but of all noble minds. The Bishop suffereth little and is unkind, doth behave himself unseemly, seeketh his own, is easily provoked, thinketh evil, beareth nothing, believeth nothing, endureth nothing—at least from the Vicar of Rochdale. The correspondence is a national disgrace, only less injurious to our Church than to the Bishop of Manchester.
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