BISHOP BARNES AND MR. MARSHALL [To the Editor of the
SPECTATOR.] Sin,—Your correspondent, Mr. Major, has addressed three questions to me. I must, therefore, in courtesy reply. I. I am asked whether the Church Times did not " bitterly attack " Bishop Barnes when his appointment was rumoured. I have to-day looked up the files at the office of the Church Times and have read both the paragraph referred to by Mr. Major, and also the article in the following issue. I find nothing in either of them to justify such a description. The appointment was, of course, adversely commented upon. On the other hand, I find most courteous references to the Bishop's learning and charm of manner. 2. Is not the right question to ask, whether it is true to describe certain doctrines as " pagan " and " magical " rather than whether it is cour- teous to do so ? Certainly the question of truth is the more important, but I cannot regard the question of courtesy as being either unimportant or irrelevant. To apply these adjectives to the catholic doctrine of the Sacraments appears to me to be as far removed from truth as it is from courtesy. 3. If the Bishop believed them to be " pagan " and " magical," ought he not, in loyalty to his consecration oath, to drive out " erroneous and strange doctrines," publicly to condemn them as such ? The answer to this question is in the negative. The private opinions of individual bishops do not furnish the standard of the doctrine of the Church. Nothing but chaos could possibly result if individual bishops took to publicly condemning any doctrine with which they did not happen to agree. Moreover, the doctrines in question, though the Bishop of Birmingham may think them erroneous, cannot by any stretch of the term be described as " strange " since they have been held continuously in the Church for about eighteen hundred years.
No bishop on his own initiative has the smallest right to condemn publicly and to attempt to drive out doctrines which the Church of which he is an officer allows. It is surely a matter of common knowledge that there are great differences of opinion in the Church on these and many other matters, and that men of equal learning, equal intellectual ability, and equal sincerity, hold very different views.
The Church as a whole tolerates, and rightlytolerates,these differences. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. Men differ in their powers of spiritual discernment just as much as they do in their intellectual powers. Truth is many-sided, No one can appreciate the whole of it. While each one of us may and should state his own positive beliefs within the wide limits of the Christian creeds, it ill becomes any one of us, more especially it ill becomes a bishop, who has to exercise fatherly supervision over men of different views, to denounce in terms of little courtesy doctrines which he happens to think mistaken, but which he knows are devoutly held by a large part of the community over which he is called to preside.
Can we not cease from these unhappy controversies, and get on with the work that matters ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
[We regret that we cannot continue this correspondence —. En. Spectator.]
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