Another correspondent, whose latter we publish, condemns purchase in the
Church as placing all patronage in the hands of the landed gentry. That is the reason, he says, why so many clergymen are Conservatives. That is true enough, and is a great evil, but it is not so great an evil as the limitation of benefices to the very narrowest Calvinists would be. That is what we fear from popular election, and, as we need not tell our correspondent, the practical alternative to patronage is election. We do not defend purchase for its own sake—and hoped we had made that clear—but out of a dread of limiting the Church to one of the sects within it. Th e ratepayers of England as a mass are either careless or Calvinist, and we shrink from entrusting a monopoly of patronage to men of either kind. Liberals in polities we should obtain, no doubt, but liberals in theology ? Are the clergy of the electing sects liberal ?
