A very lengthy correspondence was published in Thursday's Times between
the Bishop of Winchester and Canon Basil Wilberforce, on the action taken by the latter in preaching to an audience assembled in a Congregational chapel at South- ampton. With regard to the legality of this course, which the Bishop of Winchester, on the authority of two eminent eccle- siastical lawyers, denies, we can express no opinion, though it does seem to us strange that there should be anything more of disloyalty to the Church in preaching in a Nonconformist pulpit than there is in preaching on the stage of a theatre or in the open
streets. However, law is not always founded on abstract reason, and the act of preaching in a Nonconformist pulpit is, we suppose, held to imply a sort of constructive sympathy with schism,—an indifference to the special forms and ceremonies of the Church against which the Nonconformists enter their pro- test. On the abstract issue, we should have supposed that a genuine Churchman might be trusted to preach in any place in which he was allowed to speak freely his own religious convic- tions ; but, as a matter of fact, we suppose that the distrust of such freedom is rather the fear of its abuse by those who would be likely to imply their secret revolt against the exclusive principles of their Church, than distrust of its use by genuine Churchmen.
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