THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER AND MR. DOLLING.
TAT E do not propose to attempt to allot with any pre- V the amount of blame which is due either to the Bishop of Winchester or to Mr. Dolling in the recent controversy about the services at St. Agatha's. There was indeed on both sides a microscopic vision which we should gladly have seen exchanged for a little judicious blindness. How much of this latter quality the late Bishop of Win- chester possessed it is hard to say ; but it is pretty clear that he had more of it than his successor. According to Mr. Dolling, Bishop Thorold " knew when to see and when not to see," but then Mr. Dolling is only a competent witness in regard to the latter faculty. The late Bishop seems to have shut his eyes a great deal where St. Agatha's was concerned ; it is less evident what were the occasions on which he opened them. We will say frankly that we wish that Bishop Davidson could in this respect have followed Bishop Thorold's example. Mr. Dolling has done such a remarkable work at Landport that the Bishop might, as it seems to us, have taken him over as a legacy into the history of which he did not feel bound to inquire. A Bishop has to be blind to a good deal if he would not hamper good work by discouraging the eccentricities which so often accompany it. It is impossible, however, to deny that there ought to be some exceptions to this rule, and we cannot wonder that Bishop Davidson thought that he was justified in treating Mr. Dolling's action at St. Agatha's as one of them. And even if we assume that the Bishop was mistaken in the first instance, it must be. admitted that the responsibility very soon passed over to Mr. Dolling. Let it be granted that the Bishop was needlessly punctilious in asking Mr. Dolling to make certain changes in the services, we have still no choice but to pass a similar censure on Mr. Dolling. He too was punctilious in refusing to make the changes demanded of him ; and considering the relative positions of the two men, it seems to us to be a greater error in a clergyman to refuse to make concessions to his Bishop in matters which do not involve principle, than it is for a Bishop to ask a clergyman to make them. We can quite under- stand that many things which, to the Bishop of Win- chester, might appear to be things indifferent, would seem to Mr Dolling to involve a surrender of very important truths. If, for example, the Bishop had requested him to give up vestments, Mr. Dolling might have said that though there were decisions of the Courts in favour of the opposite view, he could see nothing in the Ornaments' Rubric save a positive com- mand to wear them. But, to take only a single point, will Mr. Dolling contend that when the Rubric in the Communion service runs, "And the Gospel ended, shall be sung or said the Creed following," and when his Bishop insists that, the Gospel ended, the Creed following shall be sung or said, he is bound in conscience to omit it on certain days ? We will assume that Mr. Dolling has satisfied himself that in this case disobedience to the letter of the Rubric is the only or the truest way of obeying it in the spirit. But he must also admit that the Bishop has the letter on his side,—that to say the Creed when- ever the Gospel is said is at least a priind-facie execution of the order that the Gospel ended, the Creed shall be said. And if he admits this, we are at a loss to see how he justifies the abandonment of his work at Landport. Had he made this, and two or three other similar changes, the Bishop would, to all appearance, have been satisfied, and it is hard to understand why Mr. Dolling should have found it so impossible to make them. St. Paul gives as a general rule of conduct, "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." Is the Bishop of the diocese the one man to whom this rule does not apply ?
It is .true that Mr. Dolling pleads another reason for the course he has taken. He says that the Bishop of Winchester does not agree with him upon certain ques- tions of doctrine. And he is so far right in this contention that the Bishop did say early in the correspondence that in his judgment some parts of Mr. Dolling's teaching were contrary to the teaching of the Church of England. But standing by itself this statement comes to nothing more than a difference of opinion upon matters in which there is very great room for difference of opinion. There is nothing to show that the Bishop ever asked Mr. Dolling to alter his teaching, still less that he made his under- taking to do so, a condition of licensing St. Agatha's. If he had done so we should have been the last to blame Mr. Dolling for refusing. To determine what is the doctrine of the Church of England, is often a very difficult process, and one the conclusion of which will be very much influenced by the precise point from which the inquirer starts. To one man it will seem that the doctrine of the Church of England is everything that was legally held and taught before the year 1536, except in so far as it has been expressly denied by competent authority since that time. To another man it will seem that the doctrine of the Church of England is to be gathered exclusively from the formularies which are now in use. There is much to be said in defence of either of these theories, and the choice of one or other of them will depend upon the view taken of the relation of the Church of England to the Church Universal and of the Church of the nineteenth century to the Church of the Middle Ages. It is quite natural that a man who has arrived at his conception of the doctrine of the Church of England by one of these processes, should think the result of the other process inaccurate and misleading ; and we know of no reason why this should not be as true when the champions on either side are a Bishop and one of his clergy, as when they are two clergymen or two laymen. The Church of England being what she is, and having the history she has, we do not see that the exponent of either theory has a right to rule the exponent of the alternative theory out of the Church of England. But this need no and ought not, to prevent a Bishop from saying: think that your teaching is contrary to the teaching of the Church of England. I cannot make you see this by argument, and I probably have not the power, and certainly have not the wish, to make you admit it by process of law. But I have the right to make it plain to you what I hold upon this question, and it happens that, having the right I have also the wish to make use of it.' If Mr. Dolling denies this, if he cannot be content with bolding his own view of the teaching of the Church of England, and insists further upon satisfying himself that it is also the view taken by his Bishop, we really do not see how he is to take any clerical work except in a diocese where he can honestly say that he does not know what his Bishop thinks. And in these days it is increasingly difficult to compass this state of blissful ignorance. Bishops are so much more given than formerly to expressing their opinions on unexpected subjects at unexpected times, that the aggregate of evidence as to what they think is enormous. A Visitation Charge is as often as not a summa theologiae, and its delivery in the spring is no guarantee that it will not be followed in the autumn by a confessio fidei delivered at a Diocesan Conference. Consequently, wherever Mr. Dolling goes he will be open to the disturb- ing discovery that the Bishop of the diocese thinks that in this or that particular his teaching is contrary to the teaching of the Church of England. But in this respect he is no worse off than the Bishops themselves. It is more than probable that there is a good deal in the teaching of the Bishop of Liverpool which the Bishop of Lincoln thinks contrary to the teaching of the Church of England ; it is all but certain that there is a good deal in the teaching of the Bishop of Lincoln which the Bishop of Liverpool thinks contrary to the teaching of the Church of England. Mr. Dolling has apparently a conception of an ideal unity between the beliefs of a Bishop and the beliefs of his clergy which is altogether beyond the possibility of realisation. He is as much shocked at finding that his Bishop does not agree with him as to what the doctrine of the Church of England is, as Newman was when he made a similar discovery nearly sixty years since. But what was a reasonable shock in the one case is not reasonable in the other. Mr. Dolling belongs to a school of Churchmen which has long been claiming the application of the maxim, " Live and let live." That claim has of late years been admitted to an extent which a generat:on ago would have been thought impossible ; and now, instead of enjoying and using his freedom, we have Mr. Dolling demanding that his Bishop shall not only let him think what he will, but shall say in so many words that he likes his way of thinking just as well as his own.
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