MR. MACKONOCHIE AND HIS BISHOP.
THE correspondence published on Monday between Mr. Mac- konochie and his Bishop is very curious, but, at least on one point of great interest, Mr. Mackonochie evidently thinks that silence is golden. Dr. Jackson had directly challenged, aud indeed earneetly pressed Mr. Mackonochie to explain what interpreta- tion he gives to the oath of canonical obedience to his Bishop which every incumbent takes,—the oath which Mr. Mackonochie had taken "to pay due and canonical obedience to the Bishop of London in all things lawful and honest." Nor is this the earliest vow of the kind which the priests of the Church of England take. In the Ordination Service itself, the candidates for priest's orders are asked, " Will you reverently obey your Ordinary and other chief Jninisters unto whom is committed the charge and government over you, following, with a glad mind and will, their godly admonitions, and submitting yourselves to their godly judg- ments ?" To which each candidate replies, " I will so do, the Lord being my helper." And in words all but identical the same vow is taken in the still earlier ordination service for Deacons. Mr. Mackonochie, therefore, who is not merely a most conscien- tious, but a most scrupulous man, doubtless holds that he is giving to the Bishop of London not only due and canonical obedience in all things lawful and honest, but that he has been obeying him "reverently," and "following, with a glad mind and will, his godly admonitions," and has submitted himself to his Bishop's "godly judgments," in the course he has just taken in relation to the picture and crucifix exhibited in the Church of St. Alban's, Holborn. Let us see, then, what that course is. The Bishop of London wrote to him on June 27 last that "a picture of the Virgin Mary, before which flowers and candles are placed," and "a large crucifix suspended opposite to the pulpit," had been put up in St. Alban's without authority ; that he did not wish to enter into the question of the legality of these decora- tions, supposing them to have been put up with authority, but that it was certainly illegal to put them up without authority, though he did not at all wish to take the matter into Court, and that he (the Bishop) consequently required Mr. Mackonochie on his oath of canonical obedience to remove them. Some little correspondence ensued as to the tacit sanction given to these ornaments by the Archdeacon, who, according to Mr. Mackonochie, had passed them over without complaint for five years past ; but this the Bishop thought irrelevant, and pressed his request that they should be removed. At length, nearly four months after the Bishop's letter, comes an answer from Mr. Mackonochie saying that he can- not comply with the Bishop's wish, that the picture and the crucifix teach the poor constantly by witnessing to the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement ; that if they were taken down, it would be supposed by the poor that some slur was cast on Christ and on his mother ; and that a priest who has to choose between the duty of preaching the Gospel to the poor, and that of "consulting his own safety " by yielding to his Bishop's request, is bound to prefer the former duty. Mr. Mackonochie virtually assumes that if he had obeyed his Bishop's injunction, it would be only because he consulted his own safety. It never seems to occur 'to him that he really owes anything to his Bishop's authority, or to his own oath to submit himself to his Bishop's "godly judg- ments," and all that part of the matter he quietly and completely ignores. In a letter dated November 6 the Bishop returns to this point, sets forth at length what his oath was, and asks Mr. Mackonochie to explain in what conceivable cases that oath can enjoin submission at all, if it does not enjoin submission in a matter of this kind ; whether indeed in Mr. Mackonoohie's un- derstanding of it, the oath is not mere surplusage; and the Bishop remarks that so solemn a thing as an oath which pledges him who takes it to nothing at all, is of the nature of a profanity. To this letter for more than a fortnight the Bishop gets no reply,—not even an acknowledgment of its receipt,—whereupon he writes again, to say that this complete silence means, he supposes, that he is to expect no reply, and that he must proceed by monition from his diocesan Court. Then at last, on November 22, Mr. Mackonochie replies that it grieves him to think the Bishop should have deemed him capable of the discourtesy of leaving his letter unanswered, but that he had been conducting a "retreat," doing duty for an absent curate, and during the last day or two making notes for a reply to the Bishop's letter, which notes, however, he will not naW expand, as he understands the Bishop to have determined to take proceedings in Court, and that he had better, therefore, re- serve his notes for "further use." And so the correspondence ends.
When, then, we ask ourselves what precisely Mr. Mackonochie thinks that his oath of canonical obedience to his Bishop, and his solemn vow in the Ordination Service to submit himself to his "godly judgments," means, we can only reply that, as far as we can see, in Mr. Mackonoehie's case it only binds him to extend to his Bishop the ordinary courtesies of secular life, and forbids him to think of leaving his letters entirely without an answer ; nay, that it may perhaps have laid him under a conscientious obliga- tion to reply to them within at least three weeks, or even sooner, if the duty of conducting a " retreat " and taking the duty of sick colleagues, leaves him at liberty to do so. Of course Mr. Mackonochie will say that what the Bishop desires him to submit himself to in this case is not a " godly " but an " ungodly " judgment, and that it is not a thing "lawful and honest," but unlawful or dis- honest, or both, to take down a picture of the Virgin Mary, and a crucifix, from the walls of his church at the Bishop's admonition, But assuming that answer, one is only the more curious to know what sort of submission Mr. Mackonochie really thinks himself bound to pay to his Bishop, and what judgment differing in any degree from his own he would really think entith d to the epithet 'godly.' In the "Tracts for the Times" one of the writers said, "a Bishop's lightest word, ex cathedra, is heavy ;" and that used undoubtedly to be the old High-Church doctrine, Dr. Newman, after his conversion, having once convulsed an Anglican audience by showing bow unwilling the Bishops were to accept the sacred and authoritative character with which the Puseyite party in- vested them. But here, at least, we have a Bishop who does not make light of his ecclesiastical authority at all, but appeals to it most emphatically. And here is one of a party which dwells with unspeakable emphasis on the grace of ordination, who never- theless apparently treats his ordination vow as a thing wholly Irrelevant to his duty as regards the ornamentation of his Church, and though twice appealed to especially on that head, does not so much as condescend .to explain how he reconciles this vow of obedience with his deliberate resolve to act just as though he had no bishop at all, or his bishop had no authority over even the least essential decorations of his church. True, he says that to remove the picture and the crucifix will seem to be yielding to the heretical tendencies of the day in relation to the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement. But then, as he well knows, no one in the world accuses Bishop Jackson of any such heretical tendency, and it is Bishop Jackson who enjoins him to remove them, lest they either encourage Mariolatry and idolatry, or at least give rise to the scandal of a general belief that such things are encouraged. Moreover, the very same poor whom he is so careful not to shock by doing at the Bishop's instance what, if it had been done at the instance of a Sooinian or a Latitudinarian, might have led to the imputation of heresy, know perfectly well that in resisting the Bishop's injunction, he is making very light indeed of his vow of obedience. And might they not be even more seriously shocked by the light interpre- tation of such vows as this, than they would be by the removal, at the request of an orthodox Bishop, of ornaments which that Bishop considers likely to lead to superstition or scandal ? Mr. Mackonochie, at all events, must answer the question in the negative. He thinks it much safer to be proved capable of making light of his vow of obedience, than to be supposed capable of withdrawing from his church a (rather redundant) bit of tes- timony to his own faith in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement.
Dr. Littledale last week in a very remarkable letter in our own columns showed, we think, with a good deal of force, how apt our Ecclesiastical Courts have been to strain the letter of the law, under the pressure of what they deem policy, and how seriously Mr. Mackonoohie himself has suffered from this disposition. We at least have often insisted on this tendency of our Eccle- siastical Courts, and have always severely condemned it. But may it not be fairly said that this disposition to evade eccle- siastical obligations which are alien to the doctrinal views of those who have incurred such obligations, extends to all parties in the Church alike ? Mr. Mackonochie has been, we be- lieve, treated very hardly by his ecclesiastical superiors on trhe judgment-seat. But Mr. Mackonochie himself appears to us to play fast and loose with ecclesiastical obligations in exactly the same way as his superiors, when they oome into collision with his own favourite doctrinal ideas. The Bishops are opposed to some of these doctrinal ideas, and so the obedience he has sworn to them weighs light as a feather on his conscience. It takes him over a fortnight even to bring his mind so far to bear on his Bishop's injunctions, as to reassert his intention of setting them at defiance. What, then, we cannot help asking, is the value of his veneration for the doctrine of apootolioal succession ? All his own super- natural powers as a priest have, we presume, been received, in his belief, through the laying-on of hands by a Bishop whose in- junctions he now thinks it hardly worth his while even to con- Bider. Can the recognised personal depositary of powers so great, be entitled to no more than the ordinary courtesies of life, —and a very scant measure of those,—even from one who o*es all his official qualities to the Bishop's imposition of hands ? Is the self-will which he resigned when he became part of the super- natural system, to revive again, in more than its natural energy, the moment he finds himself at issue with his superiors on doctrinal points ? We confess that Mr. Mackonochie and his friends are a puzzle to us. We can understand considerations of policy distorting the mind even of English Judges, for men of the world are too apt to be guided by worldly considera- tions. But we find it difficult to understand how the great preachers of obedience and humility, who make so much of the divine subordination of offices in the Church, and who talk of the duty of subjection to those who are set over them in the Lord with an unction that sometimes almost revolts us, can reconcile it to their consciences to treat their ecclesiastical superiors with a scarcely-veiled, or rather, say, completely frank, contempt. They make as little of their injunctions as if those injunctions were lighter than vanity itself, and they deal with episcopal claims of obedience as if they were accounts rendered for imaginary debts, which, there- fore, they might fairly forget until a moment of leisure gave them the opportunity of remarking that these claims always had been, and always would be, by them ignored. Can it be that the moment the region of ecclesiastical obligation is entered, every body, whether Judge or Clergyman, assumes as an axiom that he need acknowledge those obligations only which recommend them- selves to his doctrinal as well as his moral creed ?
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