The Bishop of Lincoln (Dr. Wordsworth) reopened last week the
Church of Marston, and on being asked to er...r...ecrate an addition to the churchyard, he said, " /Co, excuse me ; I cannot, now. If the Burials Bill passes, consecration would be a mockery, a nullity !" And on the following day, making a speech at a luncheon, after the reopening of Blakeney. Church,
he said, after a severe attack on the Burials Bill, that as the House of Commons had disestablished Irish landlords and hares and rabbits, he feared it might not be unwilling before long to disestablish Bishops, priests, and deacons. "If we are to be treated as ground game," he said, "I hope we may not sacrifice our principles, but that we may fight manfully for them, and die game." There is a large amount of mental confusion in this gallant utterance of the good old Bishop's,—he seems to be under the impression, for instance, that ground game usually "die game," which is not a sportsman's view of the case, even though they be game when they die,—but the most perplexing of all the ideas running through his speech is his general sense of a common cause with Irish landlords on the one hand, and. with hares and rabbits on the other. We do not see the analogy to either. The Bishop cannot divest himself, apparently, of the impression that he and his clergy are secondary appurtenances of the land, and liable to disturbance if the landlord loses any part of his power,—a very modest view of their position, which would partly explain his harping so painfully on the con- nection between the clergy and "ground game."
Previous page
