CLERICAL POLITICS.
To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."
SIR, -A few plain words on the political duties of the clergy may not be wholly without use. The popular notion that "politics are not for parsons" seems to me to spring from the following radical errors :-
1. That religion is meant to show people how to get out of the world as soon as possible—not to teach them their duty in it— politics, therefore, or the art and science of making great and happy nations, are essentially irreligious, and a fortiori unclerical.
2. That there is one virtue for the clergy and another for the laity. This doctrine charms alike a priesthood anxious to buil' a real monopoly of power on an assumed monopoly of holiness, and a people eager to rid themselves of the uncomfortable suspicion that they are expected to be honest and true.
3. That the great clerical duty is not truth but caution, not the assertion of divine justice, but the extraction of subscriptions from Mrs. Grundy. The consequence of the banishment of the clergy from politics has been, and is, to force the Church into the position of a close and selfish corporation, that drives the hardest bargain it can with the State and the world, upon the principle of spoiling the Egyptians. The consequence of the exercise of the rights and duties of citizenship by the clergy is to make them as harmless and useful in politics as barristers or merchants--as harmless, because they would no longer stand apart from the strife of the State, like armed banditti waiting for spoil—as useful, because as the barristers and merchants on both sides bring their acuteness and their method to the service of their parties, so might each clergyman bring wider charity and deeper self-sacrifice into national life.
I know too well that the Church is her own worst enemy. She has again and again sacrificed the gospel of human freedom to that conservatism which is altogether made up of the vilest ele- ments of worldliness ; but I believe that this would in great part cease if we learned to think that each clergyman is a citizen who owes at least as much to his country as the corporate priesthood
owes to the " interests of the Church." A WHIG PARSON.
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