NEWS OF THE WEEK.
MR. DISRAELI has written another extraordinary letter, this time to a constituent. The Rev. Arthur Baker, Rector of Addington, Bucks, wrote, it appears, to his Member to ask what he meant by his assertion that the High-Church Ritualists were in secret combination with Irish Romanists for the destruction of the union between Church and State. Had Mr. Baker been in the House when the assertion was made he would scarcely have asked the question. Mr. Disraeli, however, explains that he " has the highest respect for the High-Church party," to which we are much indebted for the "maintenance of the Orthodox faith, the rights of the Crown, and the liberties of the people." When he had finished that sentence, the Premier remembered that the Evangelicals were powerful, and added he had no wish "to intimate that the obligations of the country to the other great party in the Church were not equally significant." Indeed, all parties in the Church are good, or, as Mr. Disraeli puts it, party is a " beneficent necessity." He referred only to an "extreme faction" now in open confederacy with Romanists, and using the Liberation Society, with "its shallow and shortsighted fanaticism," as an " instrument." That society will probably " be the first victim of the spiritual despotism it is now blindly working to establish." With a profound sense of the fitness of things, Mr. Disraeli, having first doubtless consulted an almanac, dates his letter " Maundy Thursday." Was ever such a comedy enacted before heaven? We can of course have no objection, as Liberals, to see Mr. Disraeli thus break his own party into fragments ; but as Englishrhen we protest against the First Minister of the Crown bringing his office into discredit. Even Titus Oates did not wink at the judges as he swore away men's lives.
