A FEW WORDS ON THE REJECTION

OF THE EPISCOPAL BILL.

In the Debate on the Second Reading of the Episcopal Bill for remodeling the Court for Ecclesiastical Appeals, the Bishop of Oxford, according to the report in the Times, closed his speech with a solemn warning to the House of Lords, lest, by rejecting the Bill, they should drive many of the best sons of our Church into schism. The Report, it is plain, gives a very imperfect representation of a speech, which has been described to me, by a man of severe judgement, as a torrent of the most brilliant eloquence, and in which the gifted Prelate must have been inspired beyond his wont by an almost overpowering conflux of feelings. Still one cannot well doubt that the main purport of what he said has been correctly exprest, and that in many passages we have his very words; as, for instance, where he tells the Lords, that, "if they refused to give a second reading to the Bill, they would alienate from the Church of England hearts without whose affection that Church would be weakened and emasculated." From this and other like expressions it is clear, that the eloquent Prelate, as an eloquent man is ever apt to do, and as a person under his strong emotions could hardly escape

doing, greatly exaggerated the consequences of the decision. For, under God's blessing, we may confidently trust, that, though among those who may be hovering on the brink of schism, there may be some of the brightest ornaments of our Church, yet the great body, ninety-nine hundredths, of our faithful, godly ministers would continue firm in their loyalty to their spiritual Mother; while of the laity I cannot think that we are likely to lose more than a few, and those chiefly women in the higher classes. On these grounds, when I have been told that certain persons have of late been brooding over a plan of following the example of the Free Church of Scotland, by seceding from the Establisht Church, and forming a free Episcopal Church in England, this plan has seemed to me altogether visionary. For, not to speak of the insuperable constitutional difficulties which beset a plan for erecting a schismatical Episcopate, the movement in England is not a national one, like that in Scotland, but confined in the main, so far as I can judge, to a portion of the Clergy, who, if they tried to set up by themselves, would mostly find themselves without a congregation.

Nevertheless I cannot but fear that the Bishop of Oxford's prognostications are not wholly groundless. I am afraid that there are persons,-how many I cannot even guess,whose allegiance to our Church has already been so grievously shaken by divers causes during the last twenty years, that they only hang to it by a few threads, which a single blow, or even an inward recoil, may snap. It is a strange state of things, a most morbid, feverish state, a strange issue of what was called a Catholic movement, a strange reaction from what was meant to overthrow all private judgement. Such is the judicial constitution of

the moral world.

When men set themselves up to strive against the true, divinely appointed order of things, they find themselves before long hurried into the very extremes of that against which they had been contending. We who desire to maintain our footing calmly and steadily in the station where God has placed us, see them drifting by us, first one way, and then the opposite way, according as the wind changes.

In this diseased state of men's minds, in which any casualty may precipitate a crisis, even the rejection of the Episcopal Bill may to some give the fatal impulse, which will drive them from the arms of their spiritual Mother. to whom? To whom can a son betake himself, when he flies from his Mother?

...

To whom shall he

fly from her? He who flies from his Mother's arms, is too likely to betake himself to the arms of a harlot. For what has his Mother done, that he should fly from her? What is she doing, that can drive any dutiful child from her? What is there in the rejection of this Bill, that should produce this effect? At all events it is not her act. If it be indeed wrong, it is not her wrong. She would not be doing the wrong, but suffering it. In such a case her loving sons will cling to her with an increase of love. They will not fly from her, because she is weak, because she is opprest. In this respect, it seems to me, the Bishop of Oxford, in his eagerness to win his immediate point, has somewhat indiscreetly overstated his case, and thereby furnisht a plea to those who are thinking of leaving us. He speaks, unless the Report greatly misrepresents him, as though the rejection of the Bill was almost to be a reason, why they, who are hesitating about quitting the Church, should take the decisive

step, and go out from us. He dissuades them indeed from doing so; but the great stress he lays on this argument would seem to imply that there is some real force in it. Now, according to the turn which the Debate took, I would earnestly contend, the adoption or rejection of the Bill ought not to weigh a single straw in the scale of those who are pondering whether they shall rush into schism or no.

For what is there, that can be regarded as in any way justifying a person in abandoning the Church of his Baptism? the Church by whom he was grafted into the body of Christ, and who has nourisht and brought him up as her child, and has fed him with the milk of the word, and with the sacramental Body and Blood of her divine Lord? What, I mean, unless he should be brought to the terrible conviction that she is not, and never has been a true Church; which cannot be the case with those whose abiding with her is said in any degree to depend on the recent vote in the House of Lords. Surely it cannot be anything less than a deliberate act of her own, by which she denies some essential part of the Faith, or at all events deliberately sanctions such a denial, or gives up some essential principle. There is no need to consider in what extreme cases such an act might justify a man's leaving her. It is enough for the present argument to assume, what will hardly be disputed, that nothing short of such an act can supply a reasonable cause for any one to say, I, who from my baptism upward have been a faithful son of the English Church, whom God placed in her, and has bred up in her, can no longer continue to be so, can no longer serve her, no longer love her, but must join the host of her enemies. He who divorces himself

from her must be able to alledge some determinate act of hers, which compells him to do so. His apostasy must be preceded by hers. Now in the debate on Monday night nothing of the kind was at stake,-no point of faith whatsoever, nothing like an essential principle. The question at issue was, what is the best constitution for the Court which is to try Ecclesiastical Appeals? and this question, as then treated, is altogether one of practical policy.

It may indeed be contended, for it has been so,— that the Court of Appeal ought to be constituted, not by the Civil Legislature, but by an Ecclesiastical Synod, and that no tribunal can exercise a legitimate authority in pronouncing on the doctrines of the Church, unless it derives that authority from herself. This might be deemed a question of important principle: only they who maintain this, take up a position which historically is wholly untenable; and their errour is as though they would bring a ghost to a banquet, where no seat is left for him. The Ecclesiastical Court should indeed be constituted by the Church, as coincident and identical with the Christian Nation and State, and declaring its will through the organ of its Government and Legislature. The notion that it must be constituted by a Convocation of the Clergy, is refuted by history. There are difficulties indeed arising from the changes in the constitution of our Legislature, which is no longer exclusively formed by members of our Church. But these difficulties spring necessarily from the divided condition of the English nation, from the prevalence of Dissent and Schism: nor are they greater or more insuperable in this respect, than in all our other relations with the State. So long as our Church