BOOKS.

BISHOP WILBERFORCE'S ESSAYS.*

WE are inclined to think that, upon the whole, the republication of these Essays in their present form is a grave mistake. The tempta- tion, of course, was great ; success, from the publisher's point of view, nearly a certainty ; yet there were, we think, considerations which might have weighed heavily on the opposite side. Brilliant as was the lamented author of these pages, endowed with varied talents of no mean order, and possessing the gift of the golden mouth, he was, before all things else, an ecclesiastic. Twenty, nay, ten years ago, his weight in things ecclesiastical was con- siderable. If it did not diminish with advancing years, at leant- the attitude of the world in which he lived towards matters.

ecclesiasticalchanged utterly. The religious thought of this- country has, to any keen observer, undergone, for good_ or for evil, a great change during the last decade. And the great religious systems which must ever be the embodi- ment of that thought, when it solidifies or crystallises, suffer a temporary suspension of some, at least, of their functions during a period of theological. indefiniteness. Questions which in 1860 raised all the fiercest passions of partisan warfare, and induced the "sons of thunder" to call down fire from heaven on those who had propounded them, have shrunk into insignificance before a less dubious danger. Men with any religious faith at all can- no longer afford to wrangle over the fanciful speculations of one- Christian giant,f or single out for persecution and hot indignation another,I for differences which assume thetr true proportions when_ the question is not, how far may freedom of thought be allowed in the National Church, but how far is there any spiritual thought at, all for which to claim liberty? when the question is no longer as to the right apprehension of truths which from their very nature require a divine revelation, but whether such truths exist to apprehend. The battle-field ia changed, and while charging an external foe, it is surely, well that the memory of wounds we- gave each other in civil war should be buried in oblivion. And it is on this ground that we deprecate the republication of the Essays before us, In the heat of debate, some personal bitterness almost invariably lends edge to the weapons of theological warfare ; but the brilliant, though unjust sar- casm, the stinging reproach, which, may be tolerated in the- ephemeral literature of the hour, while the retort is ready, and neither party weighing, perchance, their, words, assumes very different proportions in a work intended to live. We have here Essays written while the storm raised by Essays and Reviews (a storm so utterly out of proportion with the intrinsic merits or demerits of the book), was at its height. If the Bishop could look down from those "clear heights" he may now have attained, can we for-a moment imagine he mould again endorse and send forth to the world such sentences as these ? It is Professor Jewett who- f or the moment is under his lash :— "The Professor does not deserve even the poor praise of originating error, but is content, if he can but sow the seeds of sceptical doubtful- ness, to stoop to be a plagiaristalso, . . . . He does not consider that so much as one word is necessar340 ,establish the truth of his state- ment. He seems to expect that no one Win refer to the passages that he has bracketed, or that all will be too ignorant to know the utter-

groundlessness of his assumption. It is impossible to suppose Mr. Jowett ignorant of these solutions ; and yet how can we absolve- him from ignorance, without finding him guilty of the far graver fault of gross critical unfairness,—of suggesting as acknowledged discrepan- cies, variations in the common narrative which he knew admitted of the easiest reconcilement?"

And here is a reproach which specially touches one, certainly- the most innocent of the guilty seven to whose influence not a few men can trace the awakening of the deepest religious con- convictions of their lives,—areproach we cannot for a moment believe but that the Bishop not of Oxford, but of Winchester,. would have expunged, had he foreseen its republication :— "They may indeed,—especially those who are charged with the edu- cation of the young, by their cruel use of the art of suggestion and by venturing on such matters as these,—be able,' spargere voces ambignas,' to sow doubts in minds which but for them would never have been haunted by such spectral shapes, and to shake the foundations of what might have been built up into a firm belief : they may incur the awful guilt of placing stumbling-blocks in the way of unwary feet, and destroy- ing the weak brother for whom Christ died: but we cannot believe that they will exert any wide-spread influence in the Church of our land, or amongst our people. The English mind is too calm, too sound, too essentially honest, to be widely or deeply affected by such speculations as these—and more especially from such months."

* Essays. By Samuel Wilberforce, D.D. London : John Murray. 1874.

Dr. Temple. Professor Jovrett.

But we do not care to pursue the subject. In his elaborate Essays on the whole question, the Bishop has not done very much for his own side, since, as we can never tire of reiterating, to knock clown error is by no means necessarily to establish truth. But there are many other subjects in the volumes before us free from -the charge of polemical asperity, some of general interest, others

• -owing most of their force to the circumstances of the moment which called them forth ; we have, for instance, a curious essay on the Church and her Curates, written in 1867,—curious, because while throwing all the weight of his name and position into the side of helpfulness to the curate, and we may add, his most honest sympathy —as those who trusted his personal kind- liness knew full well—to that side also, there is a comforta- ble assumption of the vast gain it would be to the nation that sll its clergy should be well off,—an almost amusing estimate 'of the social advantages of that state of well-being, and an intolerance of any possible opposition to that pleasant conviction, which mark a mind two-thirds of which was ecclesiastical in its innermost construction. Speaking of those who may be clamouring, some for the reform, some for the remodelling, -some for the abolition of our national Church Establishment, he says

An electric condition of the air quickens into a very troublesome activity all the lower forms of animal life ; and speculators, and nostrum- -mongers, and men of one idea, are always excited by a thundery state rof the political and imolai atmosphere. Societies for the Revision of the Prayer-book, and Anti-State Church Societies, and Liberation 'Societies, and the like, feel that their time is come, and begin buzzing about amidst the larger and more highly animated organisations which they so pertinaciously infest, and stinging or irritating all whom they Scan reach. Any one who has noted the degree to which the scarcely visible insects which haunt the gem-like islands of the Lake of Kil- larney can at such time madden the old boat-men, whose tawny skins look -utterly midge-proof, can in some degree understand the annoyance -which these congeneric swarms are ready to inflict in such paroxysms ,of their vitality on the defenders of our great institutions."

-One of these insects, while buzzing about the larger and more highly animated organisations, speaks " of Bishops and their -salaries." The Bishop evidently objects to the term ; well, the labourer is worthy of his hire, and " wages " is a better word ; but we heartily endorse every word that can be said, either by the Bishop of Winchester, or by any one else who has looked equally closely into the subject, as to the great evil of under-paid curates,—of making men who should be free, If they are worthy to serve, dependent on the caprices of a congregation almost for food and raiment. But no good comes of over-staling a case, and we think there is a very unnecessary, not to say un- courteous, fling at a class of men who, if not ornaments in the Church, often do its rougher work extremely well, as well as much exaggeration, in the following sentence

If, for instance, we estimate the capital laid out in fitting an ordi- mary English clergyman for his work, and compare it with what he can hope to earn in his profession, the result is most startling. We say nothing of the 'Literates '—who are still in well-regulated dioceses re- -calved as candidates for Orders only in rare and exceptional cases, and with regard to whom it is almost as impossible to calculate the cost of /production as it is that of the wares of the' Cheap Johns' of other trades —but as to those who have passed through the regular school and aca- demic courses, we cannot estimate the outlay of capital under the most favourable circumstances at less than a thousand pounds sterling."

When we remember how large a body of our clergy is recruited from boys who have won scholarships at grammar-schools, we believe this in many cases to be an over-estimate, and the Bishop could hardly be unaware that where that amount, and double per- haps, has been expended, it is not a usual result of such expenditure that the curate has to live for -an unlimited period, possibly for his whole life, on 1100 a year. Such cases arise, and but too often, perhaps ; and the possibility should be guarded against. But certainly the larger proportion of married curates supplement their incomes by writing, taking pupils, workhouse or asylum -chaplaincies, and in various other ways which do not necessarily militate against their professional usefulness. The rank and file in other professions are by no means so differently paid as we might be led to suppose,—witness the younger members of the Bar. The Bishop says the salaries of the leading clerkships in the house of a successful man of business might endow a dozen arehdeaconries. We think the clerks in such a house would be very much surprised to hear it. But the Bishop argues that the evil result of this low standard of clerical remuneration is that the ranks of the clergy, hitherto recruited from all classes, but principally from the higher and highest, will, if there be no in- creased rate of remuneration, be necessarily filled by the sons of poor men. The sentence which follows might, but for very sadness, provoke a smile

The injury to the higher classes of society would be immediate.

It would not be easy to estimate the degree in which, in that rank of society, the presence of the clerical son or brother, or even equal, tends to keep evil out and to bring in good. The whole tone of white society in our West India Islands was, we are told, in a short time altered by the sending-out of Bishops who took an equal social standing with the highest members of the community. The real object of maintaining Me equal place of the mitre with the coronet is not thereby to exalt the spar-item/0y, but to leaven the temporalty."

A stranger commentary on the words of Him who said, "My kingdom is not of this world," was surely never penned.

But perhaps throughout this particular essay no mistake is greater than the way in which lay-help is ignored. The Bishop, who writes of the clergy as appearing to the laity as" men of a more divine knowledge and deeper philosophy than themselves," says, "A handful of heroes could not long occupy a plain against a host of enemies. Briareus himself could not, with his hundred hands, weed out the noxious growth of a million of acres. The clergy are utterly under-handed. How can one pastor deal with the spiritual necessities of ten thousand souls?" How, indeed But good generals seldom lack able adjutants,—it is the general- ship which is wanting.

The lighter sketches in these volumes, such as " Keble's Biography," "Royal Authorship," "Sandwich Islands," &c., will be read, we think, with far greater pleasure, and we might add, profit, than those on more abstruse subjects ; and had all the polemical essays been omitted, these alone would have made an interesting volume. But there is another aspect of the Bishop's mind, in touching which, criticism has far more grateful work to do. Nothing can be more delightful than when, freeing himself from all episcopal and other trammels, we find him entering heart and soul into the work of the naturalist and the sportsman. Whether writing in 1846 or twenty-seven years later, in 1873, the same passionate love of nature is visible everywhere. We lay down his essays on "The Naturalist on the Spey," heartily wishing these volumes were filled with similar pages. Though written as far back as 1860, there is much in the elaborate article on Darwin's origin of species which will interest the general reader who has at all carefully considered the subject ; but, of course, though the Bishop writes, "We feel as we walk abroad with Mr. Darwin very much as the favoured object of the attention of the dervish must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which 'were sparkling unregarded beneath the earth, hidden M yet from all eyes save those which the dervish had enlightened," and though he does full justice to this part of his subject, yet "here," he says, "our pleasure terminates, for when we turn with Mr. Darwin to his argument, we are almost immediately at variance with him." But it is with Mr. Knox, in his rambles in Sussex or on the banks of the Spey, that the Bishop can give himself up to unmitigated delight. What White has done for Selborne, Mr. Knox, according to the Bishop, has done for places through which he carries us ; and our advice to those who wish heartily to enjoy the late Bishop of Winchester's writing is to read the essays in the first volume in which he treats of these subjects, and leave his polemical disqui-

sitions to the oblivion we think he would himself have desired for them.