INDELIBILITY OF ORDERS.
[TO THE EDUCE OF THE " SPECTATOR:1
Sin,—In your last number you have called the attention of your readers to a passage in one of Mr. Bright's speeches at Birmingham, in which, to use your language, " he made the first direct attack he has yet made on that frightful iniquity, the indelibility of Orders, the law which binds a Protestant clergyman who has become a Catholic or a Deist to continue a Protestant clergyman or starve. It is actually the fact that if a vicar who has unhappily become an Atheist honestly lays down his gown, and tries to live by secular avocations, he is liable to imprisonment." For this last assertion you alone appear to be responsible, and your language is rather stronger than Mr. Bright's, yet in my opinion not at all too strong, if the facts are as Mr. Bright and you represent. The subject is certainly of sufficient importance both to the Clergy and the Laity, to make it very desirable that the real state of the case should be well ascertained and clearly understood.
Your language, and that of Mr. Bright, is so positive as to the law, that I do not venture to meet it with the assertion that no such law exists. I will only say that it appears to be entirely unknown to writers who treat expressly on the subject of the dis- abilities of the clergy, and that if they may be trusted, the only disabilities, or rather restraints, to which the clergy are subject as to trading are limited to the time of their holding any cathedral preferment, or benefice, or curacy, or lectureship, or whilst licensed to any ecclesiastical office. But even during this time, and while he is officiating as a clergyman, he may be engaged in various "secular avocations," only with the restriction that he is not to carry on his business in person. This is certainly something very different from the state of the law which you denounce as a "frightful iniquity." Some may be rather inclined to complain of its laxity. I may add that if such a law as you describe ever existed, it would seem to have become obsolete. If I am not mis- taken, a clergyman who was not long ago deprived of his living on a charge of false doctrine became a member of the Stock Exchange. Another who had become a Roman Catholic was, I believe, either admitted to the Bar, or declared to be admissible by one of the Inns of Court. Either of them certainly might have opened a shop at Birmingham without the slightest. fear of imprisonment.
Candour, however, requires me to acknowledge that by the Seventy-Sixth Canon it is directed that "no man being admitted a deacon or a minister shall from thenceforth voluntarily relinquish the same, nor afterward use himself in the course of his life as a layman, upon pain of excommunication." But I am sure you would not say that " one of the very first duties of the new Par- liament will be to sweep away this "—cobweb.
I might observe that if the " indelibility of orders " consisted in the law the existence of which I have ventured to question, " indelibility" would be a strange term to apply to a thing which might any day be swept away by Act of Parliament. It must have had a different meaning in the mind of those who applied it to Holy Orders. They must have connected it with an opinion or doctrine. But on this arise two questions. First, what the doc- trine is, and next, where it is to be found ? It would be hardly
reasonable to expect that Mr. Bright should be able to answer either of these questions, which lie so far out of the way of his pursuits ; only it is unfortunate that the propriety of his observa- tions, and I am afraid I must add of your own, depends entirely on that answer. He himself says nothing as to the supposed difference between the clergy and other men, which would not be applicable to soldiers and sailors, physicians and lawyers. Nor, permit me to say, Sir, do you, when you say that the only object of the oppression you assail " is to feed young men in orders with the idea that they are superior to laymen." No doubt, the clergy, in proportion as they are sincere and earnest, will be apt to believe that their calling is superior in importance and dignity to every other. But I do not think that is an opinion in which they differ from most Dissenting ministers.
I have the less right to expect that Mr. Bright or you should explain more clearly what you mean by the " indelibility of orders," considered as a doctrine, because I am myself unable to refer to any authoritative statement on the subject. The more important question of the two is, where is the doctrine to be found? If it is a doctrine of the Church, it ought to be found in some of her formularies, and especially in her Ordination Services. But I venture to say that there is as little trace of it there as there is of the famous and generally believed nolo episcopari in the order of Consecration of Bishops. There may be expressions which some in as well as out of the Church think too strong with regard to
the dignity of the office. But the question is not as to that, but as to an indelible character supposed to be impressed by the ordination on the person ordained, apart from the discharge of his office. This is what has to be shown.
However little Mr. Bright may know of Anglican theology, he can hardly fail to be aware that there is a large party in the Church as strongly opposed as he can be to the sacerdotal claims of the clergy. They might have been obliged to him for what he has said as to the tendency of the views against which they con- tend, though it was not reserved to him to discover the affinity of High-Church doctrine with that of Rome. But they cannot thank him for ignoring their existence, and representing opinions which they detest as the doctrine, not of a party in the Church,
but of the Church itself.—I am, Sir, &c., A CLERGYMAN.
[Our correspondent rightly states the provisions of the Act 1. and 2 Viet., c. 106, which are confined to clergy holding, or licensed, or "otherwise allowed " to perform the duties of any ecclesiastical office. But the inference he draws from that Act is wrong. The penalty it imposes for trading is not imprisonment, but suspension for the two first offences, and deprivation for the third. The question as to the indelibility of Orders is much deeper. Our cor- respondent calls the Seventy-Sixth Canon a cobweb, but he forgets that the Canons are recognized not only by statute, but by judicial decisions. The careful way in which the House of Lords abstained from expressing any extrajudicial opinion upon the force of the Canons is a noticeable feature of the late case of "The Bishop of Exeter v. Marshall," Law Reports, 3 House of Lords, 17. In the case of " Barnes v. Shore," the Arches Court, and, what is more important, the Court of Queen's Bench, held that an ordained clergymen could not divest himself of his orders or escape ecclesiastical discipline. Lord Denman said that Mr. Shore could not by taking the oaths as a Dissenting minister " divest himself of the character of a priest in holy orders with which he has been clothed by the authority of the Church of England when lie was ordained by one of her Bishops, and when he vowed and promised canonical obedience to that Church ; from that character and that vow and promise he can be released only by the same authority which conferred the one and enjoined and received the other. The Seventy- Sixth Canon provides in express terms that " no man being admitted a deacon or a minister shall from thenceforth voluntarily relinquish the same, nor afterward use himself iu the course of his life as a layman, upon pain of excom- munication;" and the churchwardens are to present him. Therefore, though he may as a Dissenter be exempted by the 4th section of 1 statute, 1 W. and M., c. 18, from being sued in the Ecclesiastical Courts for mere nonconforming to the Church of England, he is not exempt by that or any other Act from canonical obedience to the bishop as a priest, in regard to anything he may do according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England." The case is reported in the 8th Queen's Bench, p. 640, and in 1 Robertson, p. 382. It follows that a bishop may cite any clergyman before his Court for a breach of canonical obedience, may admonish him to re- frain from any similar breach in future, and on being disobeyed may treat him as contumacious, and put in force the writ de contuntace capiendo, the form of which is provided by the 53 George III., c. 127, and the consequences of which are six months imprisonment. We did not say that this law was in full vigour, or that bishops ever enforced such penalties. But the law exists all the same, and whether a law be a cobweb or a spider's web is a question which a fly would not like to put to a practical test.—En. Spectator.]
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