TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE RELIGIOUS GUIDANCE OF THE BISHOPS.
THE Bishops have unquestionably entered a good appearance during this Irish Church discussion, not only as orators, but as political debaters. If they would only think it their duty to care as much for the religious side of politics as they evidently do for the political side of religion, they might make some of the most powerful and acceptable members of the Upper House. The Bishops of Ripon (Dr. Bickersteth), and of Tuam (Dr. Bernard), did not, indeed, obtain any close attention. The former is a grating, dogmatic, narrow-minded speaker of the dismallest class. The latter is mild, but without power. Yet four at least of the episcopal speakers have displayed a vigour and eloquence not even approached by any of their party in the House of Commons, except Sir Bounden Palmer, and, in his own peculiar way, Mr. Disraeli. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a perfect model of the temperateness, dignity, and lucidity of a life peer. The Bishop of Derry is a fine specimen of the somewhat florid taste, but rich humour and wide reading, of the Irish Protestant dignitary. The Bishop of St. David's is a scholar of the highest type, with a pure love of truth, and even purer love of knowledge, and that slightly ironic edge to his genius, which enables him, by the merest turn of his weapon, as it were, to wound without lacerating his opponents in debate. The Archbishop of Dublin is a little too querulous and plaintive for success as a debater, and he cannot speak —but even Ms speech has a certain classical refinement about it when you come to read it in quiet, without the feminine associations of lawn sleeves and aprons. And the Bishop of Peterborough, though he can speak with far too much of the special pleader's subtlety when he has, as he had on Tuesday, a poor case and is so intent on proving that all the world habitually mistakes the grossest injustice for the purest justice that he rather weakens our confidence in his sounder arguments, has displayed so keen a sagacity at least in rejecting worthless arguments, so considerable a tact in adapting what seem to us arguments not much better for the audience he was addressing, and so consummate an oratorical genius in the form and manner of his eloquence, that he might well take the most commanding position open to an ecclesiastic in the House of Lords.
But, after all, though we may heartily congratulate ourselves on finding prudent and able and keen andhumorous and eloquent speakers either in our Bishops or in any other class of our legislators, the chief advantage we ought to look for from the former is a tone of mind less worldly, more earnest, of purer morality, more anxiously guarded against the fallacies of self-interest, in a word, more spiritual, and if it only might be, also more ardent, a little less weighed down by the cares and pettinesses of this life, and more capable of enthusiasm, than our other legislators. We do not say it is in the highest degree reasonable to expect this. After all, bishops and clergymen have never been, and never ought to be, anything but ordinary men. They will always share the virtues and faults of the laymen among whom they live. Only they are, or at least sometimes are, and always should be, selected for feeling a more eager interest than usual in our highest concerns, and a more real enthusiasm for them. If, at least, bishops have no superiority over ordinary men in moral and spiritual insight, their selection for offices of government is scarcely justified. In any case, it is impossible not to ask, after such a debate as this,—a debate in which the Right Reverend Bench have taken so conspicuous and so brilliant a part, Was the tone of debate raised, or was it not raised, to a higher level by their arguments / Did they, or did they not, show a severer appreciation of their own inducements to be partial than other Peers? Were they more exacting with themselves, more fully disposed to do justice to their opponents, than otherPeers I Did they compel men's consciences to go beneath the surface of party-action, and to answer the sort of questions by which, when we are really alone beneath the eye of God, we test the sincerity and depth of our own principles?' We fear that of only one of the Episcopal orators we have heard, can as much as this be said in any sense, and that was of the Bishop of St. David's. And we say this, as far as we know ourselves, not because he happens to agree with us, but simply because he really did introduce a deeper and more self-testing tone into the debate. Just look a moment at the chief ideas of the better episcopal speeches. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who was the first of the prelates to break silence, and whose speech was in its way
eminently statesmanlike, distinguished all he said by a high prudence, a manly and sagacious self-restraint, but beyon& this not a syllable of his speech went. He threw out a hint that the resumption of some millions of Church property by the nation could not but injure the security of all property, but he intimated, with a modesty that seemed to be more politic than genuine, that on such a subject he was no match for the Law Lords, and passed from it. He then entered on the only thought of his speech, that State endowments sustain a sober religion, while the Voluntary system, so far as it succeeds, can only succeed in maintaining a fanatical religion. "There is a sort of spurious religion which lives in the passions of the people,"—the sort of religion, we imagine, to which the apostles appealed, at least as far as this test goes, for they certainly had to make their faith find its own supplies out of the pockets of those to whom they appealed. Beyond this deep dislike to agitation, to fanaticism, to excitement (which the Archbishop expressed far more fully than the reporters have allowed to appear), there was no other approach to a moral or religious argument in his whole speech. "Let your moderation be known unto all men, and clinch it by a State-Church if you can, and by reasonable endowments, if you can no longer do this without defying the national will,"—such was the spiritual essence of the Archbishop's advice. We do not say that was not the advice of a statesman. We do say it was as far as possible from the advice of a moral and spiritual leader who desires to enter into the sublime Christian passion to win others even by losing yourself.
The Bishop of Derry did make some appeal to the imaginative side of religion, but as far as we can judge, it was only to that of the Roman Catholic religion, not his own. He explained the sort of religious compulsion under which a Roman Catholic gives generously to his Church,—" When he looks in imagination to the spirits of the loved and lost, when he looks back on all the unkindnesses which may have taken place in life, what man with a man's heart would not coin that heart into gold, if he could only help them? As long as the coarser motives of fear and the finer motives of love remain, the Roman Catholic priesthood will always have a tremendous leverage." And Dr. Alexander seemed to think there were no "finer motives of love" in the Protestant faith, to supply the place of that affectionate desire to buy souls out of purgatory to which he attributes the rich Roman Catholic revenues. Is not that a simple confession that the Protestant Establishment in Ireland has withdrawn itself pretty completely from those deepest places of the soul which, even though through superstitious fictions, the Roman Catholics know how to reach Is not this a curious confession by a Protestant Irish bishop that his Church wields at least no profound spiritual fascination in its present prosperity? "In her prosperity, she said, I shall never be moved,' "—so strongly, she thought, had the Lord made her establishment to stand. Is it not barely possible for the Bishop to conceive that there may be some gain to that Church, not quite of the human kind, in the trouble which is coming upon her ? At any rate, the Bishop of Derry seems to us quite naïf in his confession that the Protestant Church has at present lost the secret of reaching the depths of the Irish heart. The Bishop made one claim, however, for his Church,—that if it had not won the faith of the external Catholic population, it lied brought the humanizing influences of science and literature to bear upon the nation's life. If the Irish nation will not eat of the fruit of the tree of life, he said, still "the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." Probably no one is a better judge of that than Dr. Alexander, who is himself an accomplished literary man. But what shall we say of the argument, that it is worth while, we will not say, to rob a nation, for that the Bishop disputes, but, at least, to let a nation believe itself robbed, and let the jealousies which grow out of that belief continue, in order to strew the grave of the love which ought to exist between Catholic and Protestant, in this babes-of-the-wood fashion, with the fallen leaves of literary fancy? The Bishop thought that for the House of Commons to justify in any degree the jealousy felt by Irish priests, themselves living in poor hovels, of the more luxurious parsonages of the Establishment, is in his own not too fastidiously courteous language "a panegyric on nastiness, and an apotheosis of filth,"—entirely ignoring the whole point of the matter, which is that the luxurious parsonages are built out of national funds, which, if so employed at all, ought in justice to have furnished the priest his dwelling. The Bishop of Derry only added, in a spiritual point of view, to the debate, evidence of decently but not too well controlled party-passion, and a deep conviction that Catholicism gets far more " leverage " -out of its falsehoods, than Protestantism out of its truths. The Archbishop of Dublin's speech was little more than a moan, barbed with the taunt that this act of justice to Ireland was conceived in fear (of the Fenians), was the offspring of a craven spirit, and would win for the statesmen and the party who carry it, nothing but contempt in addition to the hate entertained before. We need not comment on the .spiritual value of this curious outburst of spiteful ecclesiastical temper. Dr. Trench evidently thinks the injunction to covet earnestly the charity which believeth and hopeth all things can have no possible application to political life.
The Bishop of St. David's speech was a great contrast to that of the Archbishop of the suffering Church. No doubt it was far easier for an Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of St. David's to be calm and statesmanlike. It is not their fate which trembles in the balance. But Dr. Thirlwall was not only calm and statesmanlike like Dr. Tait, his speech had also a true spiritual tone, of which Dr. Tait's had not a trace. His exposure of the " heathenish " character of the sacrilegious argument was conceived in the truest spirit of both Hebrew and Christian faith ;—(though the Pall Mall does hanker after showing that, though a superstition, it is here and there sanctioned by the Jewish Scriptures, and by Christian writers, which is no doubt true, and no doubt, also, the same could be asserted of almost every other superstition in its turn ; but even the eloquent advocate of Bentham's apostolate in the Pall Mall will hardly assert that any among his favourite writer's wooden theses has done so much to break down this superstition as to the dedication of specific articles to God, as the spiritual scorn of the Psalmist and the searching invective of Christ). But the finest part of the Bishop's speech was that in which he condemned so gravely and so severely the angry party denunciations of Popery, not because he approved the spirit of the Papacy, but because he heartily disapproved and feared it, while maintaining that the enormous, the exceptional strength of the Church of Rome in Ireland, is due less to the defects of the Irish character than the defects of our English rule, in attempting to balance it by the competing principle of Protestant ascendancy. In this part of his speech, the Bishop struck the highest note reached by any orator hitherto in. the House of Lords, excepting in Lord Granville's appeal to England to do to Ireland as she would wish that Ireland under "the same circumstances would do to her ;" and he not only struck this note, but he did so without the slightest tone of spiritual pride, without launching any taunts at the Protestants of Ireland, in the most earnest spirit of calm self-knowledge. Yet even he might, we think, have gone deeper,—might have made an earnest appeal to the deeper generosity, the deeper enthusiasm of Christian principle, to apply that spirit of self-sacrifice to public matters which is recognized as the highest standard of Christian action in matters which concern the individual soul.
The Bishop of Peterborough, in his very brilliant speech, took, as it seems to us, an infinitely lower ethical and spiritual tone than the Bishop of St. David's, not merely because he took The opposite side, but because the tendency of his argument was almost necessarily to quibble on a great subject. When he compared the religious work entrusted by a Government to a special Church, to the manufacturing work entrusted by a Government to a special firm, he can hardly have concealed from himself that such duty is entrusted by the 'Government to a special firm, as it believes, for the
benefit of the whole nation, and the firm is selected only because it is for the benefit of the whole nation. Does he contend for a moment that the nation has not the right, and is not even under the obligation, to judge for itself whether that is so or not ; and if it decides absolutely in The negative, has it not the right, and is it not even under the obligation, to withdraw that trust ? If he denies this, he carefully concealed the denial under plausible liberal pro fessions; if he admits it, then, by virtue of his own analogy, the nation is merely doing now what every State does at times, 'cancelling a contract which is injurious instead of beneficial. Yet the Bishop's effort was to make out a strong artificial ease of grievous injustice against the nation for cancelling this unfortunate and grievous contract. He denies, we suppose,
That it is unjust for a government, as the representative of a
nation, to contract, at the cost of that nation, for what is not for that nation's advantage ; yet to assert that the Irish Church is an advantage to the greater part of Ireland is a mockery. Again, when he compared the cancelling of unjust confisca tions of Catholic property to individuals in centuries past, to the cancelling of a public contract, the power to cancel which the nation never did or could give up, he greatly abused his wonderful power of plausible and eloquent exposition. He might as well say that we are bound to give back the land confiscated to Norman nobles on the Norman conquest of England for the same reason for which we are bound, in modern days, to repeal laws passed in the interest of a class (like the Corn laws), and to use our permanent legislative power equally for all alike. The injustice of an unjust confiscation of individual property to individuals is long ago past. It would be a new and greater injustice to try to undo it. But the injustice of a bad use of our legislative power with regard to public property is not and never can be past, and the Bishop is hardly honest with himself when he argues from one case to the other. Indeed, brilliant as Dr. Magee's address is, it seems to us just such an effort (with a little more of oratorical sparkle in it) as we might expect from Lord Cairns. There is not a glimmer throughout the speech that the reverend prelate had really fallen back in his own heart on the ultimate moral and spiritual principles which it should be the duty of his order to recall to the English people in such debates as these.
On the whole, though the Bishops have made a great display in this debate, but one of them has struck a really religious tone. They have appeared as brilliant laymen, one of them a little more prudent, another a little more humorous, a third a little more plausible, a fourth a little more pitiful, a fifth a good deal more sparkling, than the greater lay Peers ; but only one of them decidedly more Christian, and perhaps even he not striking so high a note as Lord Granville.
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