31 MAY 1862, Page 9

THE BISHOPS ON UNIFORMITY. L ORD Ebury nibbles away, like an

industrious Whig mouse, at the net that confines the English clergy, yet he does not get any great gratitude, and does get some very rough pats from the noble prey within the meshes. Nor do we much wonder that it is so. On the one hand, this cautious little friend is not altogether judicious in his zeal, not being quite so careful as he might be to discriminate be- tween the natural and the artificial integuments of his pro- teges ; on the other hand, by .long confinement, the captives themselves have begun to confound the two, and often seem to regard the entanglements which fetter their freedom .almost as a dress of honour. Sometimes Lord Ebury is in- discriminate, and gnaws away quite cheerfully at some part of the Liturgy which the clergy justly regard as belonging to the living organization of their Church ; and this natu- rally gives rise to impatient words and starts. Sometimes, the clergy are so proud of their own chains that they would rather give up a vital organ to the tooth of the unwelcome deliverer than the net at which he nibbles. Thus it was last Tuesday, when Lord Ebury asked leave to untie one single knot out of half a dozen which are supposed to fret the con- sciences of the clergy. The extreme Liberals of the Episcopal Bench with one voice entreated him not to go so fast and far, since the tremendous relaxation proposed might leave clergymen in the comparative freedom of only three neces- sary and solemn ties, should they wish to interpret the Liturgy and its teachiiigs in general in a non-natural sense. It was "a very serious thing, indeed," said the mild and liberal-minded Bishop of London, " to tamper even in the slightest degree with an Act of Parliament, which had existed now for two hundred years, notwithstanding the attempts made at different times to subvert it It was a very great matter indeed, when they regarded this Act not only as a time-honoured Act, but as partaking of the character of a charter by which the Church and State are united." And this was the general tone adopted, even amongst the most liberal : who could tell how near this Act might or might not be to the foundations of the Church, or at least to the common foundations of Church and State ? Might not the whole structure rest upon it ? Might not this license to the clergy to dispense with saying that every word of the Prayer Book had their fullest assent - and consent, be the beginning of the end? No longer com- pelled to do more than give it a general assent, as " contain- mg. nothing contrary to the Word of God," what could restrain them from giving a general dissent, under the - name of an assent ? The Church being, as. Father Newman long ago called it, an Act of Parliament Church, not a Church resting on the will of God, the withdrawal of one of the undermost Government layers might bring all to ruin. This was the general key of thought among the liberal over- seers of the Church as they stand on its highest tower, looking anxiously down at the basement.

Again, the Church Conservatives, the Bishop of Oxford, Lord Dungannon, and those who seem to hold that the nearer the Church is to a gaol, with clergy both for warders and prisoners, the nobler and more powerful it becomes, openly intimated their conviction that if the clergy bad once ceased to contract to supply stated truths, there would soon be no believers in those truths left to supply them. This, at least, is how we understand. Bishop Wilberforce's otherwise very unintelligible elo- quence about the great superiority of "objective truth" to external "harmony," which in no other way seems to touch the object of poor Lord Ebury's humble little measure. " The noble lord," said the Bishop of Oxford, " fancied the effect of such a system to be harmony ; but there was some- thing better than harmony, and that was truth—truth objective in what we hold—truth subjective in what we be- lieve as we teach it, and the whole tenour of what the noble lord said was, that provided men were willing to use the appointed service, they might teach anything they liked." To which kind of truth does this statement of the Bishop of Oxford's against Lord Ebury belong ? It certainly is not " objective truth," for Lord Ebury had not pleaded in favour of harmony, and had pleaded a good deal in favour of " subjective truth ;" while neither he nor any one else, un- less it be the Bishop of Oxford, would be able to show us how a slight diminution in the number of the legal contracts made by clergymen would affect " objective- truth" as it is in itself at all. If the bishop's eloquence means anything, it seems to be, that if you were to release English clergymen from the express contract to teach certain' propositions we should largely diminish the number of men who have, or suppose themselves to have, any grasp of these propositions, by leading them to the disastrous necessity of teaching—just what they believed, and nothing better. From this terrible result the Bishop of Oxford naturally recoils with horror, and in exhibiting it to Lord Ebury as the legiti- mate result of his proposal, imagines that he will load him with shame.

Unfortunately, however, Lord Ebury had neither sug- gested nor wished anything of the kind. His proposal was. an exceedingly humble one, so humble as scarcely to have been worth urging at all. It was, not to destroy truth by cancelling human contracts to teach it, but only to endanger it, we presume, by cancelling one out of several obligatory contracts to teach it,—one that is somewhat more vaguely general and burdensome than the rest. Even had Lord Ebury's measure passed, instead of being received with a general cry of warning, the remaining guarantees for clerical orthodoxy would have been as follows : "Every one previous to ordination must subscribe to the Thirty- nine Articles in the terms of the 13th Elizabeth, and must then sub- scribe to the three articles of the 38th canon ; the first of which was the oath of supremacy ; the second, an affirmation that the Book of Common Prayer containeth nothing contrary to the Word of God, that it may be lawfully used, and that he will use the same and none other in his public ministrations ; and the third, another form of sub- scription to the Thirty-nine Articles. Then, on being admitted to a benefice, he had again to declare his conformity to the Liturgy, and his assent for the third time to the Thirty-nine Articles. Surely in all those subscriptions there was sufficient (if such defences were of any real value) to keep out everything except a wolf in sheep's clothing, against which, as Dr. Vaughan truly observed, nothing would avail."

All that poor Lord Ebury's audacious bill proposed was to obliterate one additional guarantee, namely, that every clergyman admitted to a benefice must make also the fol- lowing declaration: " I, A. B., do declare my unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained and prescribed in and by the book entitled the Book of Common Prayer,' —a declaration far more sweeping and precise than any which is required from them with regard to the Bible. This proposal it was, and this only, which brought down upon Lord Ebury the Bishop of Oxford's scathing wrath, and the general entreaties of the Episcopal Bench to take care where he was going. The general impression of these overseers of our faith seems to be that the great duty is to get words of affirmation general enough to leave no scope for independent thought. Bishop Thirlwall, for instance, could not conceal his anxiety lest this inner fourth portcullis should be wholly done away with. It might, he thought, stop one or two leaning to independent convictions, who would not hesitate at the other three, and therefore, though he would relax it, he would by no means wish to see it practically merged in the other three. The object might be, perhaps, best attained, if such a form as this were substituted at every stage of the clerical initiation : "I, A. B., do declare my unfeigned wish to adopt all the conven- tional lines of thought commonly regarded as orthodox or sound by persons in authority in the Church, and to accept and interpret the Articles, Prayer Book, and Rubrics, in the way for the time being re- puted the most common acceptation ruling in high places."

This, as far as we can understand, would really come nearest to episcopal modes of thoughts, and would doubtless ensure the kind of clergymen who best ripen, not to say rot, into bishops—men with a happy faculty for catching and illustra- ting clearly the prevalent common-places of piety, and who carefully eschew all personal convictions. The only objection might be, that clergymen of this calibre would not teach anybody to believe anything ; but only propagate the sort of impressions that it would be just as well to have, if it could be managed; and, as men will believe something, and any deep belief scatters such prevalent impressions as a wind scatters a mist, it would not be managed long. You cannot both have a thoroughly " safe" clergy and a docile people. The alternative will always remain,—if the clergy are to influence popular faith, they must be free and uncon- ventional ; if they are to be safe, they must be wrapt close in all conventionalities. And the Episcopal Bench evidently think the latter the wiser alternative. The " wise and prudent" have generally thought so. The only objection is, that truth has not always been committed to the " wise and prudent," but rather hidden from them, and committed even to those who are paradoxically described as " babes ;" —not quite the designation we should choose for the Bishop of Oxford, and scarcely even for the young men who, as he tells us, flock to him in their -difficulties, but no one of whom ever had a scruple as to the declaration in the Act of Uniformity. Lord Ebury's clients evidently come to him to help them in straining out the gnat ; while the Bishop of Oxford's disciples probably ask at once for that higher lore which teaches how to gulp down the camel. And no doubt they are well taught.