[TO THE EDITOR OF THE 4` SFECIATOR SIR,—You Unily gave
me E0 much space last u ee'-, that I must only ask you for a few lines to-day, by way of explanation.
1. May I venture to remind you of your own words on May 19 ? You then said, in speaking of the moderate men :—" Added to the instinct of self-preservation will be the more generous dis- like of deserting their friends when they are in trouble, and thus the first result of the Ridsdale Judgment may be to introduce vestments into many churches into which they have not yet found their way." To this I said :—'You have rightly divined my mood, for one. I cannot help wishing I had these vestments, if only in order to be in the same boat with those who have been so hardly treated, and I never thought of wishing it before.' In the Spectator of the 26th this impulse, which on the 19th you thought natural, has become (in an editorial note) " childish, splenetic, and wholly indefensible." Be it so. It will, therefore, be a relief to your mind, and perhaps to others, to let me say that I do not dream, any more than Dr. Pusey, of giving our opponents the advantage of a course which it might be possible so to describe. At the same time, I venture to think the first thoughts of the Spectator more reasonable, more generous, and therefore more like itself, than its second.
2. May I disabuse your mind of another misconception which is evidently a source of real discomfort to you? You always speak of the " gaudy" or " gay" vestments. They may be so, and they may also be, and frequently are, of plain white linen. In this latter form only can I conceive of their reasonable use in parish churches like my own. Had their lawfulness been estab- lished, and bad the permission to use them been followed by a stipulation from the Bishops and Convocation that in this simpler form only should they be adopted — except with the consent of the Ordinary—the change to the eye in their adoption, would have been the smallest possible, and we should have been in quiet possession (as I still believe we shall be, by whatever path of fuller freedom) of vest- ments, historical, significant, and distinctive of the priest, in the highest office of his ministry.
3. May I offer a single remark on the letter which precedes my own ? We " moderate " or " liberal " High Churchmen—as we have come to be called, by no assumption of our own—have had much cause to thank you for your hearty generosity and scru- pulous justice to our position. Mr. Lee-Warner's letter is not the first evidence we have seen that your candour and kindness are unacceptable to some of those who arrogate the title "Broad," and in some moods affect a monopoly of both wisdom and charity. Only the other day, the Church Times saw fit to call me a Broad Churchman. From that quarter I cheerfully accept the compli- ment. In the same spirit, I trust, Sir, that you may be able to lie patiently under the imputation of injustice and partiality from those who show so remarkable an appreciation of the dictates of justice, and whose toleration embraces everything but the Catholic religion. You will not be the first so-called Broad Churchman, who has had to choose between the regulation breadth of the Broad-Church party, and the genuine largeness of Christian charity and common-sense.—I am, Sir, &c., St. Saviour's Vicarage, Horton, May 30. JoHN OAKLEY.
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