The Church Defence Association held a meeting at the National
Society's Rooms, the Broad Sanctuary, on Wednesday, to protest against the amendment carried last week by a majority of sixteen in the Lords in relation to the Burials Bill. The Hon. Wilbraham Egerton, M.P., who took ..the chair, said that 12,900 clergymen had signed a protest against .Lord Harrowby's clause, and that the object of the meeting was to give that protest some lay support. And accordingly, whatever support ecclesiastical laymen could give, was given. Mr. Hubbard said that if the amendment were ultimately adopted, one hundred and twenty-three different sects would be admitted into the Churchyard, with liberty to preach any doctrines they pleased there,—as if that were not already true of cemeteries, and as if any harm could come of letting a little whiff of heterodoxy now and then exhale in a Churchyard, which had done no mischief when it floated over the surface of a cemetery. A clergyman—the lay support having, we sup- pose, not quite sufficed—objected to the Churchyards being given over " to malevolent Dissenters and political mountebanks,"—the " imputed " malevolence damnifying them much in the same way, we suppose, in which " imputed " righteousness justifies. And so the Defence meeting went on, driving its sting into its foes, with so much recklessness that there was great risk of its entering some vital part of its own frame. Like the scorpion, which in its rage stings itself to death, the Church Defence Association is but too likely to achieve suicide, while contriving exterminations.
Previous page
