THE BURIALS BILL.
[TO THS EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] have been a Liberal Churchman all my life, and a constant reader ofthe Spectator for a good many years, yet with all respect 'for your great authority, I cannot accept the conclusions at which you have arrived on the Burials Bill. " Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in Mis." Like Rip Van Winkle, I sometimes scratch my bead and rub my eyes, asking myself if I am still the same man I was,—whether the principles of religious liberty I have long upheld are really the same as those of which at the present day we hear so -much. I have lived for years in the midst of all sorts of strong political Dissenters, and have inspected the schools of the deanery to which I belonged. I never met with any shadow of a grievance as to religious education in our schools, or as to burials in our church- yards, though I have occasionally read of grievances (happily quite exceptional), the freaks of a few, as distasteful and annoying to the Clergy as to the Dissenters themselves.
The Burials Bill does not involve a mere question of clerical privilege. The Clergy at large (I am myself unattached, and `therefore untouched by the Bill) were never more thoroughly Agreed than on this subject. And though some of them may take exclusive ground, the great mass of calm, and moderate, and liberal men are thoroughly convinced that, whatever the plea advanced, or however sentimental or popular the cry, the Bill is simply meant to sap the foundations of the Established Church. And surely they are right in this conviction.
The analogies of foreign countries have but little bearing on the question, for there is no rival religious power threatening the prevalent form of religion. Nor is Ireland, a case fairly in point. I myself voted for the Gladstone Ministry, which over- threw the Establishment in Ireland. I did not, as you yourself did not, recognise any analogy between the Church of a minority, and such a minority, there, and that of a majority, and such a majority, here ; between a Church like an exotic that did not take kindly to the soil, and one which, like ours, is blended with *every fibre of our history.
From the Dissenters' point of view, it would seem that they are, somewhat inconsistently, crying out for " concurrent endow- ment." Burial is a civil right, and that they already enjoy. A religious service, whether ours or theirs, of whatever complexion, can have no necessary connection with civil rights or sanitary re- quirements.
If liberty of conscience really requires the non-existence of any establishment, or the non-recognition of God in school or church- yard, or in the administrative machinery of the State, as such— and there are those who assert this, however frightful the conse- quences of such secularism in all sorts of directions—let the Bill be honestly fought on this issue, as Sir Wilfrid Lawson and his friends fight it. Meanwhile, I confess that 1 quite agree with the senti- ments of the Vicar of Selby's last letter.—I am, Sir, &c., G. M.
Previous page
