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 /- 
 TWO YEARS OF CHURCH PROGRESS. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 THE CHURCH CA.USE AND THE CHURCH PARTY. 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE « CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER, 
 FOR JANUARY, 1862. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 J. AND C. MOZLEY, 6, PATERNOSTER ROW 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1862. 
 
 One Shilling.
 
 TWO YEARS OF CHURCH PROGRESS. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 THE CHURCH CAUSE AND THE CHURCH PARTY. 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE " CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER,' 
 FOR JANUARY, 1862. 
 
 LONDON : 
 J. AND C. MOZLEY, G, PATERNOSTER ROW- 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 1862. 
 
 One ShiUinij.
 
 LONDON : 
 
 rUTNTED BY R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOT?, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL.
 
 . TWO YEARS OF CHIJEOH PROGEESS. 
 
 It is two years since we gave a sketch of the growth and 
 actual attitude of the Church cause and the Church party. In 
 the interval which has elapsed, various Church questions have, 
 more or less, shifted their ground, so it will not be unprofit- 
 able to review their present condition under the additional light 
 of recent events. At that time the S. George's-in-the-East 
 scandal was at its height, and the theatre-preachings had not 
 arisen to stimulate the sated palate of religious emotionists ; while 
 'Essays andlieviews' were still unpublished and unanticipated. 
 The Convocation of York was not yet a deliberative body, and 
 those frequent conglomerate meetings of clergy and laity com- 
 bining the two sides of Church politics — never acknowledged, but 
 always felt within them — which had grown out of the revival of 
 regular synods and the decay of Church Unions, were new to their 
 equally useful and diplomatic mission. Lord Ebury's raid on 
 the Prayer-Book had not yet got into straits between the solid 
 opposition of the ten thousand clergy and the hai'dly less damag- 
 ing burlesque of his own offspring, on his own showing, yawning 
 over the Good-Friday Collects. The House of Commons had 
 not yet acted out that immortal series of Wednesdays which, 
 in scattering right and left the various anti-Church projects of 
 many liberal members, inflicted a grave repulse on the marriage- 
 law amendment intrigue, snubbed the 'Liberation' aggression 
 on churchyards and endowed schools, extinguished Mr. Locke 
 King's attempts to introduce universal disorder, and placed the 
 church-rate controversy in a position which has imposed its equit- 
 able compromise as a duty upon Churchmen, and branded the 
 rejection by Dissenters of any fair proposition as an anti-social 
 offence. The Education Commissioners' verdict vs^as still an object 
 of anxious speculation ; and the new education minute had not yet 
 exploded like a shell in the middle of our quiet village schools. 
 
 The chief vicissitudes in secular affairs which have checkered 
 these twenty-four months, have been the union of Italy, minus 
 Rome and Venice, under one sovereign, with constitutional in- 
 stitutions; in England, the formal abandonment by politicians of 
 simulated zeal for parliamentary reform as an engine of political 
 a2
 
 4 Two Years of Church Pr'ogress. 
 
 offence and defence, and the great National Loss ; in France, 
 commercial experiments and financial dangers ; in America, the 
 bursting of the bubble of democracy — the foundering in the 
 deep seas, by its own unwieldincss, of that tall menacing galleon 
 which had so long hovered round the snores of the Old World. 
 
 If we are asked whether we think the account sums up with, 
 profit or loss to the Church, we have no hesitation in replying, 
 with profit. Indeed, of all the items of the balance-sheet which 
 we have recapitulated, the only one which, upon the face of it, 
 seems detrimental, is that of 'Essays and Reviews.' We grant 
 to the fullest the dangerous character of that pernicious volume ; 
 we recognise to the utmost the signal run which it has had among 
 sensation readers, cumulating in its reprint in the feuilletons of 
 Australian newspapers; but we reckon on the other side, the 
 valuable shock which it has given to that large class of floating 
 respectability, which nothing but such a revelation of ulterior in- 
 tentions would have strung up to a more manly confession of a 
 faith which was always implicit with them. Estimating at its right 
 weight the frothiness of that popularity which the book has yet 
 attained, we believe that all its success will, in the long run 
 — and not a very long one either — prove most detrimental to 
 that party, self-named of progress, who thought to set up their 
 Koran in the prosy lucubrations of the ' Seven Champions of 
 un-Christendom.' Two years ago, speaking of the Broad Church 
 (so-called) party, we divided it into two classes, as follows : — 
 
 ' The Higli Churcli cause combines the different sections of its followers in 
 the belief of an apostolic ministry and sacramental grace. Low Churchmen 
 liave their Shibboleths. But the definition of a Broad Churchman as such is 
 merely the negative one, that he does not choose to be called either High or 
 Low. There are persons using the name who consider " Church " merely as an 
 expletive, and in whose eyes " Broad " is pretty well synonymous with indistinct 
 and undefined, " Christians unattached," in short, who have not openly left the 
 Establishment. But it is most unjust to impute this cliaracter to Broad 
 Churchmen as a class, for we are convinced that under that vocable are in- 
 cluded many men really zealous for the Church cause, and for the bene esse of 
 the actual Prayer-Book Church, but to whom the name and idea of party, in 
 connexion with religious affairs, is peculiarly offensive, and who, accordingly, 
 take refuge in an appellation which they consider has come into existence as a 
 protest against the High and the Low Church parties.' 
 
 W^e now appeal with confidence to the divergence of thought 
 evolved in the authorship on one side, and reception on the 
 other, of * Essays and Reviews ' in proof of the justness of 
 our antecedent estimate. 
 
 The general result of the two years of Church progress 
 within which we confine our present investigation, has been to 
 confirm that tendency towards conservative consolidation, of 
 which, in our former article, we indicated the beginnings. 
 Bright aspirations of universal peace. Catholic consent really in 
 
 , u/uc '>
 
 Tivo Years of Church Progress. 5 
 
 operation, dissent self-immolated, prelates leadinor senates, and 
 adjudicating from the heights of the Avorld's tribunals, have 
 faded into the evening twilight. A much humbler, more 
 prosaic line of duty has been opened out, if not to our aui- 
 bition, at least to our persistent exertions. Keeping things 
 .well at home has been acknowledged as an aim not un- 
 worthy even of unspotted holiness, high intellect, and prac- 
 tical indefatigability. There are those who will attack this 
 open acceptance of a more confined sphere of activity, this 
 abdication of a lively hope of ever beholding in tlie flesh any 
 extraordinary manifestation of the long prayed-for salutare 
 Israel in our generation, as a proof of blunted faith, debased 
 motives of action, or even of incipient worldliness. We are 
 prepared for the imputations, which we can only meet by an 
 appeal to the providential order of the world's course, as a 
 standing protest against the lawfulness of expecting extra- 
 ordinary manifestations; and as a proof that those who do their 
 duty most straightforwardly under ordinary circumstances are 
 the best prepared to grapple effectively with unexpected con- 
 tingencies. A few years ago we seemed to be playing double 
 or quits; now the preservation of the Church being assured, 
 we may more confidently exert ourselves in strengthening 
 its bulwarks. If there is no great hope of any abnormal 
 amelioration of the Church of England in our time, so there 
 is no great fear of any hopeless deterioration. We are neither 
 likely to hear the call to assemble in universal council, 
 nor yet the warning voice to go hence and abandon our dese- 
 crated altars. The battle of Church life is incessant, and it 
 covers a wide field, and so our pickets must be both numerous 
 and vigilant. We are not for the moment discussing the accidents 
 of the ceaseless conflict with the visible powers of evil ; we are 
 merely looking to those exertions which are destined to maintain 
 the be7ie esse of the existing English Church, as a movement 
 towards the most hopeful evangelization of our masses. The 
 sustentation of a learned and well-trained, and therefore in- 
 fluential clergy, is not the least difficult or least needful of these 
 endeavours. The necessity of learning and of training is now 
 theoretically acknowledged. R. H. Froude's crude sally in 
 favour of a 'snob clergy' is no longer appealed to as a pro- 
 phetical utterance. But the broad fact remains behind, that the 
 heedless subdivision of parishes, and the scant endowment of 
 district churches, has lowered the standard of requirenients for 
 the Christian ministry, and rendered reconstructive reformation 
 more difficult than it would have been, had the problem of mis- 
 sionary development in populous places been put before the 
 Church, with the enlarged lights of its actual experience. We
 
 (j Two Years of Church Progress. 
 
 place this peril in the front, because we esteem it the most 
 dangerous, because insidious, foe of the Church. It is very 
 closely allied to that delusion of the day, which confounds scenic 
 self-abasement with self-denying Christian humility ; which says 
 that Apostles are commissioned to serve tables, and applauds the 
 histrionic enthusiasm which would abandon the study or the 
 cathedral, to harangue cadgers from the steps of an omnibus, 
 as though this were the beginning and end of the Church's 
 work. Theatre preaching is, after all, but the abuse of this 
 way of thinking, and as its abuse, it has its utility in startling 
 worthy persons, who might otherwise have continued bound in 
 the entanglements of the specious delusion. 
 
 Apart from this danger, the Church of England is, just 
 now, as far as we can judge, in that condition of arrested 
 change, which promises permanence, and renders amelioration 
 possible. Recent appointments to the episcopate, made by the 
 ci-devant 'man of God,' indicate the tardily-attained convic- 
 tion that the function of the Church is not to ape the conventicle; 
 for certainly Wigram, Philpott, and Thomson, are not names 
 which we connect with platform clap- trap. Dr. Vaughan, who 
 was for a few days a ' designate,' would have been a living 
 proof that earnestness does not exclude learning, and that all 
 is not Exeter Hall outside the ranks of professed High Church- 
 manship. The appointment of Dean EUicott is also a recog- 
 nition of the right functions of a cathedral. To l>e sure, the 
 throne of S. Cuthbert, Cosin, and Butler, has just been mounted 
 by a prelate, who alone among the Episcopate has pronounced 
 himself favourable to an alteration of the Prayer-Book. But 
 it remains to be seen whether this ill-judged charge of Bishop 
 Baring, at Gloucester, is to be accepted as a policy for the 
 future, or the laboured renunciation of an impossible theory. 
 The anti-Prayer- Book agitation may still simmer on, but in 
 the meanwhile its discomfiture is safe so long as its advocacy 
 continues to be the apanage of the amiable but not judicious 
 peer who stands identified with that hopeless cause. The 
 world's politics have grown too serious for people to run gra- 
 tuitously into any such entanglement as the minute disputations 
 attending a Prayer-Book Keform Bill, or Commission of Ee- 
 visiou, would infallibly produce, and Lord Ebury is too com- 
 promised to have any great prospect of persuading any influential 
 body to listen to liis alternative schemes of petty disturbance. 
 In the meanwhile, the real inconvenience which he blunderingly 
 strove to rectify, is reforming itself, in the ever increasing, 
 and now officially permitted system of dividing services, and of 
 having separate litanies and communions. 
 
 Of course a necessary accident of this settling down of Church
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 7 
 
 difficulties is the api)arent l)lurring of the sharp liues of Church 
 party warfare. A Churcli conservative reaction as mucli implies 
 that the zeal of ardent Chui'ch ameliorators is modified, as that 
 the indefatigability of Churcli pseudo-reformers is restrained. 
 This condition of things has undoubtedly its disappointing and 
 disappointed side. It involves an acquiescence in a medium 
 level of general moderation which would have seemed intoler- 
 able to the ardent spirits of fifteen years ago. But it equally 
 implies what those ardent, because more youthful Churchmen, 
 did not sufficiently appreciate — the superior advantages of a wide 
 area of modified success over a steep and desperately defended 
 vantage ground of limited extent. The Church movement at 
 one moment ran the risk of being an ' ism,' and being guided by 
 * ites.' It has escaped this danger, and it may now confidently, 
 in spite of multiplying Peel districts, expect to pass on the 
 English Church, to a coming generation, as — if not all, or by a 
 great deal all, that the most moderate yet steadfast Churchman 
 might wish it to be — at all events, a national institution, standing 
 on a higher general level, doctrinal, practical, and national, than 
 it did in our fathers' and grandfathers' days; appealing to nobler 
 natures ; more generally and more generously beloved and suj)- 
 ported. It will be our children's and our children's children's 
 office to use the opportunity which we bequeath to them to 
 advance their inheritance to some still higher and more secured 
 position. 
 
 In our former article, we dwelt at considerable length upon 
 the rise, decay, and downfal, of that system of Church repre- 
 sentation — excellently contrived, as we maintain, for a very 
 useful object — the Church Unions ; voluntary and elastic 
 bodies, recruited exclusively and avowedly out of the High 
 Church ranks, and intended to sustain not only the Church 
 establishment, but the genuine doctrines of the Church. We 
 may assume that these Unions died out because they had accom- 
 plished a successful work. This work was the preservation, 
 through a very anxious period, of that spirit of genuine Church- 
 manship which has become the habitual nature of so many 
 persons of various stations and ditifering accom})lishments, to 
 which, under Providence, we owe our preservation from calam- 
 ities which might otherwise have overwhelmed the English 
 Church. AVe are now, we repeat, living in quieter times. 
 Points that we used to fight about, with a half-unconscious 
 pride in their partizan character, are now the rule of action of 
 persons then most strongly antagonistic to us. In those days, 
 for example, the advocacy of free Churches rested upon a 
 resolute minority ; now the apologist for pews has to excuse his 
 iwn perversity or daring. The use of occasional litanies at
 
 S Two Years of Church Progress. 
 
 unusual periods, and still more of the holy Communion, as sanc- 
 tifying occasional events, would have been remarked upon :is a 
 badge of extreme partizanship. It is now accepted on all sides 
 as a seemly and wholesome thing. Journals to which we used 
 to look with scared anxiety for the attacks which they made 
 upon our exertions, are now half trusted as friends, half listened 
 to as candid monitors. 
 
 We do not impute this change of feeling formally to the 
 Church Unions — bodies of a defensive and not n legislative or 
 missionary character. But we have a right of appeal to it as 
 alike giving grounds for asserting that Church Unions have 
 been very useful, and for explaining why they have now 
 fallen into neglect. In their place has grown up a series of 
 organizations, composed on different principles, and termed 
 generally Church Defence Societies. The immediate cause 
 of their rapid success was the notoriety which the blundering 
 effrontery of some of their own leaders gave to a wide con- 
 spiracy against the Church in its political and pi'oprietary 
 aspects, under the specious appellation of the Society for the 
 Liberation of Religion from State Control and Patronage — 
 more compendiously entitled the Liberation Society. Church- 
 men were fairly frightened and disgusted by the insolence of 
 this association, and began to form Church Defence Societies, 
 on the principle of uniting Churchmen of all shades of opinion 
 for all such objects as they could combine in promoting, and 
 particularly in antagonism to the assaults of the Liberation 
 Society. The central body which undertakes to control the 
 action of the local societies is that Church Institution of 
 London, to whose first beginnings we alluded in our former 
 article. We need not now recapitulate how this Institution was 
 moulded out of Mr. Hoare's system of lay consultees, or explain 
 its somewhat complex organization, by which an exclusively lay 
 society in town acts as at once the mouthpiece and the adviser 
 of clergy all over the country. It has certainly made its in- 
 fluence directly felt, and it has indirectly screwed up the 
 clergy to better views of combined action, and more appre- 
 ciation of systematic co-operation. 
 
 The congress of liural Deans, assembled in London last spring 
 under its auspices, was an evidence of the sort of influence which 
 the Institution was able to bring to bear u{)on the country. 
 The office of those who composed that meeting gave it a kind of 
 synodical character ; and the persons who were present at it were 
 sufficiently pleased with their day's work to make it probable 
 that the expei'iment would be repeated. If this were done, the 
 often desiderated infusion of a larger proportion of the paro- 
 chial clergy into the Church's synodical action would be some-
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 9 
 
 what irregularly, but still practically effected. Convocation 
 could not fail to attach much weight to the judgment of such a 
 body as a congress of the Rural Deans of England, and 
 that congress would no doubt assemble in concert with the 
 sessions of the constitutional synod. The influence of the 
 Church Institution has, of course, its concomitant disadvan- 
 tages, as it can only be worked at the expense of a perpetual 
 compromise Avithin the Society's own Committee-room, where 
 many questions of vital interest, in various ways, to different 
 members of the body, are never allowed to be broached. 
 Yet this very compromise has its good side, in tending to 
 bring together persons who, but for such an institution, would 
 have gone on bi'ooding over and exaggerating their points 
 of difference, while now they are driven to seek joint action 
 upon those matters in which they agree, and can co-operate 
 together. 
 
 It is somewhat curious that the particular question — to which 
 more than any other the Church institution owes its existence, 
 should be the one on which it has to confine itself to generalities, 
 and to repeated condemnations of Sir J. Trelawny's particular 
 Bill. To be sure, at the recent congress of Church Defence 
 Societies, holden at Cambridge, the same policy was adopted. 
 The reason is ob\ious, namely, that there is unfortunately a 
 division of opinion among Churchmen as to the best method of 
 taking advantage of that remarkable turn of fortune which has 
 converted the majority of seventy-four for the total abolition of 
 Church-rates, into the Speaker's casting-vote against it. There 
 on one side is a considerable body whom it is, perhaps, rather 
 unfair to describe as the no-surrender men, for they are, 
 most of them, willing to surrender all the constitutional safe- 
 guards, which place it in the power of a majority to defeat 
 a rate, but are wholly unwilling to offer any relief to 
 the conscientious objector. The policy, generally speaking, 
 of this section, is to assimilate the levying of the rate to that 
 of the poor-rate, to emancipate districts from the control and 
 (Miurch taxation of the mother Church, and to allow the vestry 
 itself, at its good pleasure, to excuse or else insist on payment 
 from each objector. Another, and we should hope a larger party 
 agrees with this one in the emancipation of districts and in tlie 
 improvement of tiie method of levying, but offers in return the 
 quid pro quo of excusing those from payment who object to the 
 rate — some plans insisting on, and others dispensing with the as- 
 surance on the i)art of the objector that his scruples are consci- 
 entious or that he is a Dissenter. In compensation, they insist 
 that the man who will not pay shall not have a seat at the 
 Church vestry, but that its concerns be managed by hond fide
 
 10 Two Years of Church Pro(/ress. 
 
 Churchmen, instead of its being tlie bull-ring where brawling 
 Nonconformists are to bait tlie Church and its minister. A third 
 party has happily died away, which attempted to compromise 
 the question by abandoning that portion of the rate which 
 related to worship expenses, and only retaining a fabric rate. 
 The evils of this i)roposal were ])atent. If the Dissenter were 
 expected to i)ay the rate cheerfully, because his rate was not 
 meant to pay for surplice or Prayer-Book, but only for walls 
 and roof, he would, if he were a logical man, be very willing 
 to accept the proposition, and rejoin: ' Very v/ell, here is my rate, 
 ' now give me my share of the walls and roof. You demand the 
 ' payment from me, because you tell me these churches are 
 ' national edifices, devoted to the worship of the Almighty by 
 ' the whole people. I am one of the people ; the congregation 
 ' with which I worship belongs to the nation ; make it pos- 
 ' sible for us conscientiously to worship God, according to the 
 ' form in which we can join, within that building.' This line 
 of argument would have been jtcrfectly unanswerable when 
 addressed to persons who had . purposely converted the Church- 
 rate into a fabric-rate for the sake of netting the Dissenters' 
 quota. There was the example also of the manner in which the 
 Government had usurped the fabrics of the Churches in many 
 continental States, to point a moral against a usurpation, which 
 would have been precisely similar in character, though perpe- 
 trated by Demus, and not Tyrannus. Still, some peo[>le of 
 great intelligence have been found to urge the scheme, but 
 within the last year circumstances seem to have really startled 
 them, and to have contributed to silence a proposition which 
 had better never have been uttered. The indefensible and 
 uncanonical concession of the Bishop of Calcutta, in permitting 
 to Presbyterian ministers the joint occupation of Churches 
 within his diocese, startled and shocked good Churchmen ; and 
 Sir Morton Peto, with that blundering audacity which the Liber- 
 ation Society mistakes for bold policy, endeavoured to get in the 
 point of the wedge with his Nonconformists' Burials Bill, and 
 only succeeded in pinching his own fingers. He has thus fairly 
 put Churchmen on their guard, and we shall be greatly sur- 
 prised if any proposition tending towards the system of omnibus 
 Churches can again win any favour in their eyes. 
 
 The first authoritative proclamation of the exemption policy 
 synchronised remarkably with the turn of the tide in favour 
 of the retention of the ancient custom of Church-rates, 
 for it was contained in the report of that committee of the 
 Duke of Marlborough, which sat during the sessions of 1859 
 and 1860, and which elicited those answers of Dr. Foster and 
 Mr. Morley, which finally unmasked the Liberation Society.
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. ^ 1 
 
 Bills embodying the principles of the report have been pre- 
 sented to the two Houses by the Duke of Marlborough himself, 
 Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Cross, and it is certainly now the solution 
 which offers the most reasonable hope of an enduring com- 
 promise to the minds of statesmen who wish well to the Chui'ch. 
 Mr. Disraeli, it will not be forgotten, when he came out at the 
 close of 1860 in the character of defender of the faith, embraced 
 the no-surrender doctrine in its most extreme aspect. A year 
 later, in his parallel speech, he dropped all allusion to it, and 
 only denounced total abolition. The acceptance of it would be 
 the most j)olitic method by which Lord Palmerston and Lord 
 Russell could mend that stupendous error of judgment, which 
 led them at one bound to change from no surrender to total 
 abolition at the instant of a turn of tide in favour of Church- 
 rates ; and we should hardly think that ministers, such as tlie 
 Duke of Newcastle (whose antecedent reputation of good 
 Churchmanship made his similar escapade less pardonable) and 
 Sir George Lewis, would object to the same door of escape, 
 now that recent events have given a fresh lease to the j^resent 
 administration. If they want a hint to guide them as to the 
 irresistible stress of the popular side, they may find it in the 
 significant fact that the Whig candidates for Finsbury and 
 Nottingham, one of them a Cabinet Minifter^s heir, ow^e their 
 ignominious defeat to the ostentatious and damaging patronage 
 of that acknowledged champion of the Liberation Society, 
 Sir Morton Peto. Anyhow, it is generally acknowledged 
 that any Church-rate settlement must proceed from the Govern- 
 ment of the day, and the impression is every day being 
 strengthened that the Church will go on putting itself more 
 and more in the right, and Dissenters more and more in the 
 wrong, if the former continues to offer a reasonable com- 
 promise, involving personal exemption, and Nonconformity 
 persists in rejecting it. The detail of what dissent calls 
 'ticketing,' is one which, in condescension to their crotchet- 
 iness, must be carefully considered, especially since that 
 strange outburst of simulated scrupulosity which led them 
 to defeat the religious census of last year, and thereby re- 
 duced Mr. Mann's ponderous volume of religious statistics, with 
 which we have for some seven years been pelted, into waste 
 paper. If the result of the whole transaction would be to lay the 
 whole Church-rate question at rest with a tacit exemption of 
 those who would not pay, there would be little cause for regret 
 except on one ground, that some legislation is needed for 
 district churches, and that if any legislation at all takes place it 
 might as well be final. One thing is certain, that the party 
 which endeavours to establish the perpetual liability of Dissenters
 
 12 Tivo Years of Church Progress. 
 
 to pay on the score that a national Church implies the 
 Church of every body, in defiance of the whole current of legis- 
 lation since 1688, must, to be consistent, land us in principles 
 which are wholly inconsistent with belief in the Church as a 
 Divine institution independent of the civil polity within which 
 it is situated. 
 
 The signal check given to the agitation for legalizing marriages 
 which Christianity calls incestuous, must not be passed over, nor 
 must it be forgotten. The cause so rebuffed is a very damaged 
 cause, but those whose selfishness egged it on are still living 
 and still suffering for their own misdeeds. It would be deep 
 ignorance of human nature not to be prepared for attempts on 
 their part to regain their lost ground, if they saw the oppor- 
 tunity, through the negligence of the defenders of the marriage 
 law. 
 
 The refitting of Lichfield Cathedral, which was reopened 
 at the close of October, is an event which calls for our 
 gi-ateful commemoration. It is not so much «n account of 
 the material beauty of the pile itself and of the fittings which 
 Mr. Scott has created, that we dwell upon this event as one of 
 great importance. For years past cathedrals have been on 
 their trial. They have been overhauled and mutilated, and they 
 seemed ready to perish. How then is it that the reopening 
 of a cathedral in a small midland town presented the unwonted 
 spectacle of an earnest crowd of reverential worshippers, which 
 dispassionate reckoners estimated at five or six thousand ? 
 How came the thousand singers and hundreds of commu- 
 nicants? These circumstances point to a great change in 
 public feeling. They do so the more because the rehabi- 
 litation of Lichfield cathedral is but one among many in- 
 stances. LlandafF cathedral had also been reopened very few 
 weeks before. Peterborough is being restored and popularized, 
 and every one knows what is being done at S. Paul's. Dean 
 Peacock's work at Ely is matter almost of history. Dean 
 Goode is stirring up Yorkshire to a restoration of Ripon 
 Cathedral. The thirty thousand pounds Avhich Sussex has 
 found to reinstate Chichester Spire is something more than a 
 merely architectural excitement. In Ireland, too, Tuam and 
 Belfast are going to follow the example of Kilmore, and build 
 cathedrals. Choir gatherings have become a national institu- 
 tion — in one word, cathedral bodies have met the people half 
 way, and the people accept their advances. We do not yet 
 see more than the first glimmerings of what may come from 
 this all-important event. Even in regard to external worship, 
 the spectacle of Lichfield cathedral, so sumptuously and so 
 correctly fitted, is a standing contradiction to the assertions of
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 13 
 
 those who would degrade our churches to the type of the con- 
 venticle, on the pretext that dignified ritual is contrary to 
 English feelings. How cathedral restoration is to grow into 
 cathedral extension, is too wide a topic for this place. 
 
 The crowded meetings which have taken place in London 
 under the presidency of Lord Brougham, and at Oxford under 
 that of the Vice Chancellor, in favour of Mr. Woodard's third 
 school for the lower middle classes, and the support which the 
 Times has bestowed upon the scheme, are a solid proof that the 
 simple earnest zeal of that good man is now bearing good fruit, 
 and that his scheme of leavening the middle classes of society 
 with sound education in Church principles is no longer an im- 
 probable dream. All who have looked into the matter know 
 too well that it is those classes for whom INIr. Woodard is 
 labouring who have hitherto proved the mainstay of Noncon- 
 formity ; it stands to reason, accordingly, that a plan which 
 tends to make them Churchmen and to give them some of those 
 elevating feelings which the higher strata of society derive from 
 a Univei'sity education, must tend to advance the cause of the 
 Church in those quarters where hitherto it has confessedly been 
 the weakest. 
 
 The year 1861 will, we believe, be distinguished in the annals 
 of our Reformed Connnunion as that in which tliat Church 
 emancipated herself from the connexion, which once seemed indis- 
 soluble, between the English ritual and the English flag. L^p 
 to the first day in 1861 there were, speaking generally, only two 
 nationalities within which the English Chui'ch in its complete- 
 ness could be said to exist. The one was the British empire, 
 with its dependencies, and such adjacent countries as stood in 
 terror of the reprisals of the British right arm. The other was 
 the United States, on which depended missions in Africa and 
 China. To whatever other triumphs the Church revival in our 
 communion could point, that of enlarging the area of the really 
 independent realms in which it was to be found could not be 
 reckoned. The taunt of the Romanist and the Dissenter, that 
 it was merely the Queen's Church, had still to be answered, not 
 rebutted. But the year that has gone by has swelled the list 
 with four additions. Its first week witnessed the consecration 
 in Cape Town cathedral of the simple-hearted devout Mackenzie 
 for the central parts of Africa. Whatever may be thought of 
 the commercial prospects of his mission, of its Christian and 
 civilizing value there can be no two opinions among Churchmen. 
 A little later, Patteson was sent out to the dark islands of tlie 
 South- Western Pacific, Avith the mission and the blessing of the 
 apostolic Selwyn ; and his honoured father lived long enough to 
 have his last days cheered by the thoughts of his son's life-long
 
 1 4 Two Years of Church Progress. 
 
 self-sacrifice. The mournful third Sunday in Advent saw the 
 consecration at Lambeth of Mr. Staley to the ejnscopal throne 
 of that remarlcable group of islands in the North Pacific, which 
 have, while still governed monarchically under a native dynasty 
 — though in a great measure peopled by English and American 
 settlers — grown up from a nestof heathen cannibals intoacivilized, 
 Christian, English-speaking, and constitutional commonwealth. 
 Bishop Staley takes up his mission, not as an experiment, but 
 on the invitation of the king himself, a Hawaiian pur sang, but 
 an educated gentleman, and a Churchman by conviction. Who 
 then can deny that this mission is one for which we may well 
 auspicate good things in store ? 
 
 The fourth instance of the English communion finding itself, 
 during 1861, in contact with new independent governments 
 differs from the three otliers. Two of those are missionary 
 aggressions on the realms of darkness ; the third the incorpora- 
 tion of the complete Church into a realm where Christianity and 
 civilization had already penetrated. The fourth case is that of a 
 great commonwealth splitting in twain, and the Church of the 
 English communion in the seceding portion having at once the 
 will and the way to recast itself in a Catholic spirit upon a 
 national basis. Hitherto we have been able to look with pride 
 upon the unestablished daughter Church in the United States. 
 Henceforward we may be able to point with similar feelings to 
 that which exists within the Confederate States, 
 
 There are, as we shall proceed further on to detail, some very 
 interesting incidents of a strictly ecclesiastical nature which have 
 grown out of the American secession. But, irrespective of these, 
 the whole history of the sudden disruption of that menacing 
 colossus of yesterday, which first came into existence four years 
 after the birth, in the still British Boston, of the living Nestor of 
 Parliament, is so full of teaching of a moral character, bearing 
 upon the Church's mission in the world, that we beg no pardon 
 for a short digression on its aspects. In what we say we shall 
 throw ourselves back into November, and assume for the moment 
 that no San Jacinto and no Trent had ever navigated the ocean. 
 The antecedents either of President Lincoln or of President 
 Davis are not germane to our present inquiry. What, as Church- 
 men, we are concerned to observe is, the internal condition 
 of the once great republic, mainly peopled by the descendants of 
 British ancestors, which speaks the English language, and which is 
 now rifted by a secession which one side calls a rebellion, and the 
 other a resumption of sovereignty. The comparative statistics 
 hitherto of our communion north and south of the Potomac form 
 not the only or the first consideration which presses on us. 
 The Episcopal Church in the Northern States may hitherto
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 15 
 
 have been numerically and theologically stronger than in the 
 Southern, and yet it may not have leavened the mass of their 
 corruption. We liave likewise, dealing as we are with mundane 
 issues, to ask wiiether the influence which it has exercised on 
 the body politic and body social is proportionately stronger in 
 comparison with its numbers. The air m one place may be so 
 umch thicker than in another, that a gaslight in the one may 
 not show the traveller his jjath half so well as a candle in the 
 other. As in theology there are tlieological virtues, so in politics 
 and in social life there are political and social virtues, Avhich act 
 upon as they are reacted on by Christ's Church, with all the 
 advantage which the comparative strength of the Church gives 
 to the mutual influence. The Northern Siates may or may not 
 be the scat of all that spirit of the world which it is the object 
 of religion to counteract. Old Rome was very civilized, but 
 S. Paul did not go there to praise and to admire. 
 
 After long deliberation and an attentive study of the bearings 
 of the controversy, we assume the responsibility of saying that 
 the cause on whose side the substantial justice of the struggle 
 preponderates, and that for whose success in the interests of 
 religion, and also of our communion, we ought, as English 
 Churchmen, to wish, is the cause of the Confederate States. 
 We make the assertion with our eyes open to the existence 
 in those States of that monstrous ' institution,' as Southerners 
 are Avont to term it, slavery. But we do so Avith our eyes open 
 to the further facts that slavery is a colonial bequest, not a 
 republican invention, introduced into regions where the Avhite 
 man is often as exotic by birth as the black, and more so 
 by nature ; that the South, while as yet blindly refusing to 
 acknowledge its inherent indefensibility, has in many respects 
 mitigated its practical evils, and that it has in the Con- 
 federate constitution prohibited the slave-trade as a por- 
 tion of the constitution itself, instead of leaving the prohibition, 
 as in the United States, to be a merely legislative provision. 
 We do so, recollecting that the violence of the abolitionist 
 section in the North has driven back the South from further 
 measures tending to the gradual extinction of the system ; such as 
 the measure which was proposed in the Virginian Legislature ii 
 1833, for gradual emancipation, and which, having then been los, 
 by only a single vote, has never since been renewed, thanks to the 
 subsequent growth of the party of Lloyd Garrison, Wendell 
 Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Charles Sumner. As little can 
 we shut our eyes to the fact that, with the exception of this 
 knot of sincere abolitionists, the North is in reality more deeply 
 involved in all the guilt of which slavery may be the fount than 
 South Carolina or" Gcoi'gia. The North traffics in it, makes
 
 16 Tivo Years of Chi't'ch Progresf^. 
 
 it the basis of its own selfish coinincrciul and nianuracturing; 
 sj'Stem, while it maintains an organized persecution of those 
 pariahs of the Northern section, the free blacks, on which the 
 slaveholding South cries shame. As far as the future of the 
 black race is concerned, we are convinced that the longest step 
 ever taken, across the Atlantic, towards its complete though gra- 
 dual emancipation, was the secession of the South. The political 
 reasons connected with the balance of power in the two Houses of 
 the old Federal Legislature, which induced the South not only to 
 maintain slavery in the older States, but to force it on new States 
 and territories whose climate repudiates the institution, have 
 disappeared with the secession, and so the system is left to find 
 its level, while the free trade, which the Confederacy proclahns, 
 will every year open it more and more to English ways of 
 thought and English influences. The result of these various 
 powers in operation on each other, will, we believe and trust, be 
 to insure lahentihus annis, first internal amelioration, then 
 serfdom and villeinage, and ultimately a constitutional system 
 for the black population of the South. This hopeful future 
 could not be predicted for the South, if it were to be cannonaded 
 and ravaged into reunion. Such a contingency would only lead 
 to two results, either the sudden emancipation of millions wholly 
 unfitted for immediate licence, or the riveting moi'e closely and 
 more hopelessly the chains of their servitude. Even now, Mr. 
 Lincoln, in his recent message, has no better consolation to offer 
 the free blacks of the United States than a forced deportation. 
 
 In short, if slavery had been the one real grievance, the 
 South need not, and would not, have seceded. The intolerably 
 unjust Navigation Laws and sordid protectionism of the North, 
 which intentionally cut those vast rich provinces oflP from the re- 
 maining world in the Interests of New York, Massachusetts, and 
 Pennsylvania, was the shoe that really pinched. Their political 
 allies in the Northern States would not, or could not, befriend 
 them in their extremity. The election of a President by a mi- 
 nority of the primary votes of the whole Union, amounting to 
 nearly a million, and against the unanimous voice of the South, 
 was a strong intimation that the day of compromise had passed its 
 eleventh hour. The North called what then took place, rebellion; 
 but in using that ugly word it forgot its own origin as a power 
 of the earth, and it affixed its own interpretation to a document 
 which was, and was meant to be, ambiguous. The constitution 
 of the United States (we call attention to the peculiarity of the 
 very appellation), was emphatically a compromise between 
 States which had recently promoted themselves by ' rebellion ' 
 from colonies to sovereignties, and statesmen, who looked to a 
 strong central power. It was drawn up so as to favour either
 
 Two Years of Church Pi^ogress. 17 
 
 party at a time when the interests of the Union were homofre- 
 neous as compared with those of the present day, and when the 
 area and population of the Federation were comparatively insig- 
 nificant. Since 1787, its growth in extent and numbers, over 
 regions across which Providence has stamped the natural lines of 
 demarcation, has made that impossible which then v/as barely 
 possible. The South, reading the constitution according to the 
 interpretation held, as it seems, even in 1787, by statesmen 
 whom America calls illustrious, found there the doctrine of 
 State sovereignty as the centre of loyal allegiance ; and it found, 
 according to its ideas of policy, that the time had come to give 
 the practical preference to their State sovereignty, and on these 
 principles it made Mr. Davis President of a Confederacy. The 
 North read in the constitution that the Union had absorbed 
 all State sovereignties, and it believed that its material in- 
 terests favoured the absorption, and so it sustains Mr. Lincoln 
 as President of a Union. Biit Mr. Davis is really no more a 
 rebel from Mr. Lincoln, than Mr. Lincoln from Mr. Davis; they 
 respectively and legitimately represent different readings of a 
 document not meant to be straiglitforward by those who framed 
 it, and who carried it with long delays, only in consequence of 
 its ambiguity, through the legislatures of thirteen jealous 
 sovereignties. 
 
 Dismissing, then, from our minds the natural and laudable 
 prejudices which the apparent legitimacy of the Northern and 
 rebellion of the Southern Government might have occasioned, 
 we have to ask ourselves whether, as Churchmen, we see any- 
 thing on either side which ought to bias our wishes. The 
 good estate of the Church in the State of New York, not a 
 little owing to the vast endowment which it possesses tliere, in 
 consequence of the business district of the city being in a great 
 measure owned by the corporation of Trinity Church, is, of 
 course, a material consideration tending to influence our judgment. 
 So, too, the orthodox complexion of the clergy in the dioceses of 
 Seabury, Doane, and Whittingham, leads us to look at the 
 fiite of the commonwealth in those States with no little interest, 
 and not the less so, because the facts are patent which indicate 
 the possibility of the orthodoxy of Maryland being ere long 
 ranged on the side of the Confederacy. But after we have made 
 these admissions, we have said all. We believe it will be better 
 for the orthodox party in the North to be so in a general 
 convention of an exclusively Northern National Church. We 
 shall give proofs that the prospects of Church progress in the 
 ' councils,' general and diocesan, of a Southcrti National Church 
 have been improved, and are likely still more to improve, by the 
 separation. We believe, irrespective of the special accidents of 
 
 B
 
 18 Two Years of Church Progress. 
 
 either Reimblic, that the characteristics of the overgrown, ill- 
 compacted old Federation were making themselves felt through 
 the Church, which aped the civil organization in its constitution. 
 In the General Convention of 1859, when a proposal for a 
 general Court of Appeal was brought forward, the measure was 
 rejected, not on its intrinsic merits which seem to have been ad- 
 mitted, but because the members of the Convention, both North, 
 and South, foresaw the results which might have endangered the 
 still existing unity of the Church which even then hung on a 
 fragile thread. We are accordingly convinced, that there is 
 better hope for the truth in two homogeneous National 
 Churches, keeping each other in check, and stimulating each 
 other to exertion, than in a body which would, in each successive 
 reunion of the triennial Convention, have had to swallow world- 
 wide differences of social feeling, reflected, whether the Bishops 
 and delegates wished it or not, in its ecclesiastical action, or else 
 be ever standing on the brink of a dissolution in most admired 
 disorder. 
 
 It is a fact, however much Ave may wish to blind our eyes 
 to it, that although the Church may be stronger in New 
 York than in any other city of the ex-Union, all the powers of 
 evil are also pre()onderatingly more strong in that colhcvies 
 gentium. We could fill pages with proofs of the vice, the luxury, 
 the infidelity, the materialism, and the rowdyism of that de- 
 graded city, but the })ainful recital would carry us away too far 
 from our immediate oljject. It is sufificient to say, in one word, 
 that everything which is disgraceful to the great capitals of the Old 
 World, is found reproduced in a deteriorated form on Manhattan 
 Island. The ill influence of New York spreads over the entire 
 Union, as that of Paris pervades all France. The preternatural 
 mendacity which has come to the surface in all which the North 
 has said and written on the present war, finds its head-quarters 
 in that ' sensation ' town of turmoil and cabal. The unblessed 
 attempt of New York to erect itself into the artificial condition 
 of being the commercial capital of all the New, if not of the Old 
 World also, was, as we have indicated, a great motive cause 
 of disruption, and its defeat, we trust for ever, would in itself 
 stamp the secession as a blessing to all civilized nations. Boston, 
 the Northern city next in influence though not in population, 
 diflers widely from New York in every respect, and not the 
 least in its far greater outward respectability. How far the 
 refd advantage equals the outside show, is a question we had 
 rather not solve. Materialism is the palpable form of evil in 
 New York. The Church there, as we have shown, is powerful 
 comparatively, and yet seems impotent to grapple with the ram- 
 pant vice about it. In respectable Boston the Church is weak
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 19 
 
 and Puritanised, compulsory secular education has had full swing, 
 and the ground is divided between intellectual infidelity, and all 
 those last, most hopeless, phases of superstition, Avhich are engen- 
 dered not of blind faith, but of sated scepticism. 
 
 We have recently fallen in with an illustration of the popular 
 religion, as we must by courtesy term it, in Boston, so significa- 
 tive that we make no excuse for quoting it, painful as it is to 
 recapitulate such blasphemies. In that refined and intellectual 
 city which, be it always recollected, holds up its head in such 
 lofty contempt at the rowdyism of New York, a rangazine is 
 published by a gentleman universally esteemed the most respect- 
 able publisher in all the United States, called the Atlantic 
 Mooithly, and the November number commences with an article 
 on George Sand in that fast style of moral sensualism, ill-co])ied 
 from French models, which has invaded so much of our own 
 periodical literature. The article would not have struck us as 
 more particularly offensive than many which we have come 
 across on this side of the Atlantic till we reached the peroration. 
 Here the writer, worked up to enthusiasm by his subject, predicts 
 for Madame Dudevant a future in the Walhalla of great women, 
 not without their faults as he considerately admits, but still worthy 
 of Bostonian canonization : ' For there is a gallery of great 
 
 * women, great with and without sin, where thou must sit 
 
 * between Sappho and Cleopatra, the Magdalen thy neighbour 
 ' — nor yet removed wholly out of sight the Mother of the Great 
 
 * Forgiveness of God/ Our readers will not require to be told 
 who is intended by the last phrase. We confidently assert 
 that no English periodical which was not published with 
 the express intention of shocking morality, would venture 
 upon such an apposition to Madame Dudevant, Yet the Atlantic 
 Monthly is the organ of the vei-y cream of intellectual Ame- 
 rican society. We conclude, therefore, that this way of talking 
 is considered religious in the city of Theodore Parker, Emerson, 
 and Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and in the State where Andrew 
 rules and Bigelow deals justice. One of the lights of Bos- 
 tonian literature is Mr. Hildreth, the author of a popular 
 history of the United States, and a prominent abolitionist. 
 The most successful novel of that party, next to those of 
 Mrs. Beecher Stowe, is Hildreth's ' White Slave,' a publica- 
 tion which, we believe, has had considerable vogue among 
 religious circles both in this country and in the United States. 
 Those of our readers who have not had the ill-luck to read it 
 may be surprised when we tell them what is the plot of this 
 eminently moral autobiographical romance. Mr. Mildrcth, unlike 
 Mrs. Stowe, starts by marrying his hero, the ' White Slave,' 
 and leaves him, after many' adventures, hapjiy and prosperous.
 
 20 Two Years of Church Progress. 
 
 The * White Slave ' is^ we need hardly say, depicted as the 
 model of a Christian and gentleman ; and yet the action on 
 which the whole tale turns, and for which the author holds up 
 his ideal creation to the reader's entire admiration, is that of 
 luring his own half-sister into an incestuous marriage, by con- 
 cealing the relationship — * unwilling,' to quote the book, 'to 
 liarass Cassy with what I esteemed unnecessary scruples.' Mr. 
 Hildreth's object in planning this loathsome plot was of course 
 to create an unproven impression of promiscuous concubinage 
 between masters and slaves. 
 
 The fruits testify to the tree. England and all Europe are 
 ringing with the anger, the imbecility, the inconstancy, the 
 greed for empire, the bloodthirsty animosity of the Northern 
 Government. We are every day confronted by fresh instances 
 of its neglect for laws, municipal, constitutional, or international; 
 its determined purpose to win its end, in the words of one of its 
 most popular generals, Butler of Boston, 'by the light of their 
 smoking and rebellious cities.' The Church may be, as we have 
 often been told, and are wiUing to believe, the most important 
 denomination among the Northern ' upper ten thousand,' the men 
 and women of refinement, wealth, and social culture. But in 
 the Northern States the upper ten thousand are the disfranchised 
 class of the comn)unity ; and the man who belongs to it, but is 
 ambitious, must forswear his antecedents, if he looks for power. 
 If we turn to the States which own the sway of Jefferson 
 Davis, those who are living at a distance, and who only ap- 
 preciate matters across the Atlantic by the lights which the 
 American columns of their favourite ne\vspa[)er may shed, must 
 have noticed a remarkable intellectual, if not moral pheno- 
 menon. Of old, Englishmen used to connect those trains of 
 thought, which the better citizens of the States would designate as 
 ' spreadeagle ' and ' bunkum,' and we should term vulgar osten- 
 tation and overweening national vanity, with the whole United 
 States. Possibly the rifie-bearing, bowie-knife-wearing South- 
 erner was looked upon as the greatest offender. How is it, 
 then, that the instant the blister lias been taken off, the moment 
 tliat the healing knife has completed the amputation, the 
 South, so far as we can judge of it by its official publications, 
 has apparently cast off bunkum and exaggeration, spreadeagle 
 and mendacity ? How comes it that it writes and speaks in 
 •accents which would sound natural from English legislators, but 
 which we do not somehow connect with Pogram and Brick, 
 Knickerbocker and Biglow? Every newspaper in England has 
 had, willingly or unwiUingly, to certify to the genuine ring of 
 President Davis's Message compared with the spongy, illiterate, 
 carping, and extravagant })criods through which Mr. Lincoln
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 21 
 
 floundered. We have reasons for believing that this unwonted 
 moderation of tone is not confined to the productions of the 
 President, but that it pervades the entire system of the Southern 
 government, free as it is at last from the j)ressure of Northern 
 mobs. If we examine the constitution of the Confederacy, we 
 are confronted with instances of the spirit of conservative mode- 
 ration which guided those statesmen who met in Montgomery 
 to mould it upon that of the old United States. We have 
 already pointed to the prohibition of the slave-trade which it 
 contains. It also enacts that the tenure of the Presidentship shall 
 be for six instead of four years, but without the premium on 
 intrigue which the possibility of re-election involved. It gives 
 ministers a seat and a voice on the floor of the Legislature, 
 instead of isolating them in their offices, and handing the 
 advocacy of ministerial measures over to private members 
 clandestinely retained. It cuts off the most fruitful sources of 
 corruption in declaring the permanence of all but the highest 
 offices, and in limiting the objects to wdiich Confederate taxes 
 can be applied ; thus, at one blow, abolishing that frightful sys- 
 tem of universal electoral corruption, which had eaten into the 
 very vitals of the United States. The union of feeling and cor- 
 porate self-devotion which distinguishes the millions of the 
 Southern States under the heavy privations of their isolated 
 condition, may be laid to war excitement; their singular 
 moderation and modesty cannot be. Ameliorations, like these, 
 of language, and tone, and constitution so suddenly revealed, 
 indicate an under-seam of goodness of which we must 
 hitherto have been ignorant, while New York and Boston had 
 constituted themselves the intermediaries of England and the 
 South, mutually aggravating and misrepresenting the one and 
 the other. 
 
 We have before us some remarkable American evidence on 
 this head in a sermon which a clergyman of the diocese of 
 Maryland, the Rev. E. J. Stearns, had the courage to deliver 
 in the city of Newark in New Jersey (an almost suburb of 
 New York) on the Fast Day, which President Lincoln ap- 
 pointed on the 26th of September, and lor which he seems to 
 have been all but ])rosecuted by the United States' district 
 attorney. This preacher, speaking for himself, says, ' To me 
 ' who know both parts of the country thoroughly, who know 
 ' that while each has its virtues, each its faults, nine-tenths of 
 * all the divorces, nine-tenths of all the bribery of electors and 
 ' legislators is at the North,' etc. The South, Kara K(/)/j.a<; oIkov- 
 fievrj, may be dull beside Boston, sluggish beside New York,
 
 22 Two Years of Church Progress. 
 
 authority, the infidelity of those cities in abhorrence, and it is 
 not, as Mr. Stearns testifies, to be taxed with that proclivity 
 to divorce which has eaten into the purity and security of 
 domestic life in those cities. Its system, no doubt, is very 
 faulty, but the faults are on the surface. 
 
 If, as a recent writer, who uses five years' residence in New 
 York as the foundation of an appeal to High Churchmen to 
 side with the North, alleges, there are only 400 Episcopal clergy- 
 men in the South to 1,600 in the North, with only twice as large 
 a population, then all we can say is, that the Southern clergy seem 
 to have been beyond proportion successful in the way in which 
 they have leavened their population. Of course it must not be 
 forgotten that in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South, our 
 Church has had to contend with the antecedent establishment 
 of the Koman communion. But we are not pushed to infer- 
 ential and secondary evidences as to the upward tendency of 
 Churchmanship in the Confederate States. 
 
 The Neio York Church Journal, a paper honourably con- 
 spicuous for the silence on politics whicli it has, under the 
 grievous difficulties of the last few months, continued with few 
 exceptions to maintain, has lately furnished some valuable par- 
 ticulars of the action of the Church in the Confederacy, since it 
 has been left to its own counsels, from which we venture to augur 
 that any changes which may take place in its condition are 
 likely to be in an upward direction. The Church in the 
 Southern States, following the action of the Commonwealth, 
 has naturally detached itself from the union of the Northern 
 dioceses, and has, during the latter part of October, been 
 holding a convention at Columbia, the capital of South Caro- 
 lina, to settle a future constitution, at which, besides clerical and 
 lay delegates, nine bishops attended ; Bishop (and General) 
 Polk, of Louisiana, not being among the number. The convention 
 seems to have debated together while voting by orders. Among 
 the subjects under debate was the future style of the Church. 
 Bishop Elliott, of Georgia, advocated the retention of the 
 original appellation — Protestant Episcopal ; founding his argu- 
 ments on the inexpediency of making changes unless absolutely 
 required, and fearing lest the identity of the Church might be 
 called into question. Judge Phelan, of Alabama, contended 
 that if the corporation remained the same, so would its rights 
 and liabilities ; and Mr. Trapier, a clergyman, took the same 
 view. Bishop Green, of Mississippi, considered the name Pro- 
 testant, unmeaning from its generality ; and that it involved the 
 Church in the odium of the follies and heresies of the various 
 sects. He preferred ' The American Catholic Church.' Mr.
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 23 
 
 Williams, of Virginia, gloried in the term Protestant. Mr. 
 Hines, a clergyman of Tennessee, inquired if there were no 
 errors to protest against but those of the Romanists ; referred to 
 the use of the term Catholic Church in the Creed, and wanted 
 a name that Avould take them back to the days of the Saviour 
 and Apostles. Mr. Fairbanks, of Florida, considered Protestant 
 as superfluous, and argued against expediency, as the lowest 
 gi-ound of action. Dr. jNlason, of North Carolina, had never 
 liked the title Protestant Episcopal. It had always seemed 
 to him to be sectarian, but it was hard to get rid of. Bishop 
 Elliott spoke again in favour of the old name. Bishop Atkinson, 
 of Xorth Carolina, urged that names should conform to things. 
 He thought Reformed more expressive than Protestant ; referred 
 to the Jansenists, and preferred ' Reformed Catholic Church.' 
 Bishop Davis, of South Carolina, dwelt on the inconvenience of 
 change. Bishop Otey, of Tennessee, contended that Protes- 
 tant was a term derived from Germany, and not originally 
 directed against the errors of Rome. He considered the present 
 disruption was the result of Ultra-Protestantism or Puritanism. 
 The Rev. Dr. Crane, of Mississippi, also spoke in favour of 
 Reformed Catholic; while Bishop Lay, of Arkansas, adhered to the 
 present name ; and Mr. Pearce, of Alabama, said that the term 
 Protestant Episcopal, arose in Maryland by a mere accident. 
 Ultimately the debate was adjourned, after an appeal from 
 Bishop Meade, of Virginia, who desired to keep things as 
 they were. On the next day the debate was again animated : 
 Judge Phelan, of Alabama, said it was as well to talk of 
 reformed sun and moon, as of reformed Catholic, and was 
 content with " Episcopal Church." Bishop Elliott again pleaded 
 for Protestant, while the Rev. Mr. Pinckney found fault both 
 with that and with Catholic. Bishop Johns, Assistant of Vir- 
 ginia, was sure Virginia avould not have sent delegates if she had 
 thought this subject was to be discussed, and went on to assert 
 that Protestant indicated a positive faith and worship. Bishop 
 Atkinson considered the choice to be between Protestant and 
 Reformed. Reformed expressed a fact, Protestant a spirit, and 
 one that he could not approve of. Emerson, Beecher, Parker, 
 Strauss, were all Protestants, yet Emerson believed the leaves of 
 the forest were Cod. He then gave further reasons in favour 
 of Catholic. Bishop Gregg, of Texas, agreed with him 
 entirely as to the facts, but thought it wholly inexpedient to 
 make any change. Ultimately 'Protestant Episcopal' was carried 
 by six bishops to three, and a large majority of clergy and laity. 
 But, as it will have been seen, the Catholicity of our com- 
 munion was boldly brought forward, and the very ftxct of the
 
 24 Tivo Years of Church Progress. 
 
 question having been raised and discussed as it was, is very 
 hopeful of the spirit of the Confederate dioceses. A later 
 number of the Church Journal contains the constitution of the 
 
 * Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of 
 America/ as proposed in this convention, and sent down for 
 approval to the various diocesan conventions. The first thing 
 that strikes the reader accustomed to the proceedings of the 
 Church in the United States is, that the ugly term Conven- 
 tion, heretofore used for the synodical gatherings of the Church, 
 is struck out, and the far more ecclesiastical word Council sub- 
 stituted. So tiiere is to be a triennial General Council, which 
 is first to meet in November, 1862, at Augusta, Georgia, and 
 also Diocesan Councils. The lay representatives to this General 
 Council are, we are glad to see, ordered to be communicants ; an 
 amelioration which is, of course, of great importance. There is 
 also a somewhat ambiguous provision for erecting any State 
 which shall divide itself into more than one diocese into an eccle- 
 siastical province, and for creating a triennial Provincial Council. 
 What, however, the relations of this Council are to be to the 
 General Council are not defined, and cannot fail, we should 
 think, to be embarrassing. In one of the latter clauses, they talk 
 of the establishment of a Book of Common Prayer, &c., wliich, 
 we trust, implies that the Southern Church intends to restore 
 some of the omissions which the bad taste and worse theology 
 of the closing eighteenth century made in the English Prayer- 
 Book, as edited for the United States. If the book is taken in 
 hand at all, it must, we believe, be altered for the better. Alto- 
 gether, the details which we have given appear to establish that 
 the prospects of the Church are more hopeful in the Confede- 
 rate States than they were before the great disruption had thrown 
 the Southerners on their own resources. 
 
 The CJuirch Journal for December 4, which we have received 
 since writing the above f)aragraph, extracts an article on this 
 Convention, from the, Richnond Enquirer, the chief paper of the 
 Confederate Capital, It says, ' In taking the necessary steps to 
 ' form an independent Church organization for the Confederate 
 
 * States, everything was done with harmony and good feeling. 
 
 * The Missionary fund and work of the Church in the South, it 
 
 * was found, had suffered no decline since the separation from the 
 ' North, but both were on the increase even under a provisional 
 
 * arrangement.' 
 
 America has, for the present, almost driven Italy out of the minds 
 of stay-at-home politicians. What will come of the consolidation 
 of the Peninsula — an event which, by the way, seems to us 
 just as much to be accepted as the bi-section of the United
 
 Tivo Years of Cliurch Proyress. 25 
 
 States — cannot yet be jii-edicated. One tiling is certain, tliat it 
 is a providentially-ordered mutation, and we may add, that we 
 cannot see how any one holding the Anglican view of the 
 Papal usurpations can fail to look for good arising out of it ; 
 but we should be very cautious not to mar this good by med- 
 dling. For instance, the more books of sound English theology 
 we print and throw upon the Italian markets the better, but 
 the less we attempt direct influence, especially if it comes in the 
 person of one who can be taxed with change of side, the wiser 
 it will be. The Italian reformation, when it comes, must be 
 the work of Italy, wrought out at home by Italians, and shaped 
 in an Italian mould. 
 
 Of the Colonial Church, properly speaking, we have not 
 much to say. It seems, for the two last years, to have been 
 quietly going on, holding its stated synods, and making a pro- 
 gress which may be all the surer because the less noisy. The 
 chief notes of onwardness are in Canada, in which the Bishop of 
 Montreal, after completing his cathedral, has, as first metroj)olitan, 
 held the first Provincial Council, and where the new diocese of 
 Ottawa has been constituted with, we understand, a very satis- 
 factory choice of diocesan. Bishop Chapman has resigned 
 Colombo, and has been succeeded by Bishop Claughton ; and 
 the Bahamas have been constituted an independent diocese. 
 The desirable separation of Singapore from Calcutta, and its 
 incorporation with the diocese of Borneo, is still pigeon- 
 holed in Downing-street. But we trust that it may not be 
 long before this needful step will have been completed to cheer 
 the good Bishop, returned to his sphere of earnest, loving duty. 
 The admirable sense which Bishop Macdougal adds to ability 
 and self-devotion makes us peculiarly hopeful of his mission. 
 There is also a movement in progress to create a new see at 
 Goulburn, in New South Wales, adjacent to which, the new 
 Colony of Queensland has received its independent organiza- 
 tion as the see of Brisbane. How far the miserable war in 
 New Zealand may have aiFected the evangelization of that land, 
 living, as we do, at a distance, we have no means of judging ; 
 but the results cannot fail to be disastrous. Whether the 
 Church will see its way to seizing the opportunity opened out 
 in Madagascar remains to be proved. The importance of 
 its doing so cannot be questioned. 
 
 Altogether, the Church at home and in the Colonies appears 
 for the present to be safe. Present safety would a few years 
 since have seemed a very slight object of congratulation ; but, 
 in the whirl and crash of mundane things, in this age of revo- 
 lutions, stability is progress. Yet it is a safeness which nwX 
 c
 
 26 Two Years of Church Progress. 
 
 be guaranteed by the labourer going to his work with his 
 weapon in his girdle. In the parish and in the provincial Con- 
 vocation the same grounds of hope exist, and the same necessity 
 of vigilance. The old Church of England enjoys advantages 
 which may not be at first sight evident, but which are most real 
 and powerful, in the manner in which its formularies, its ancient 
 Catholic prayers and canticles, its forcible versions, its baptismal, 
 u\arriage, and burial services, have sunk into the hearts of the 
 general people, and moulded their tone of thought, even at second 
 hand with those who voluntarily hold off from public communion 
 with the Church. In the long run, its appeal to popular 
 instincts against po])ular passions would, we believe, be suc- 
 cessful; for, with the exception of Mr. Bright and the bigoted 
 backers of the Liberation Society, Englishmen in general acquiesce 
 in the Church of England, along with Queen, Lords, and Com- 
 mons, and the judges in their scarlet gowns, as an institution of 
 which it is the right thing to be proud. They may not, many 
 of them, be very expert in the doctrines of that Church, but 
 as long as the Church is there with its doctrines under its own 
 keeping, it occupies the vantage-ground. With all the discourage- 
 ments and disappointments which we may have been suiFering 
 from of late years, we cannot honestly refuse to say that we have 
 gained enormously. Convocation revived, a Colonial Church 
 well-nigh created, religious institutions of all kinds set up, 
 communions multiplied, occasions of worship infinitely increased, 
 churches and the services in them beautified and rectified, 
 in every district of the land, are some of the most salient items 
 of the acknowledged gain. 
 
 Let us live to assure these blessings to our successors. Let us 
 live to do so, not only as Churchmen but as Englishmen. In 
 England, happily, the divorce between the Church feeling and 
 the national feeling, if ever it were likely to have taken place, 
 is now suspended, and will, we hope, by the continuance of 
 quiet, be rendered impossible. At this moment we more par- 
 ticularly feel that we are Englishmen, partaking as we do in 
 that immense grief which radiates from the most exalted of 
 English homes, and penetrates the humblest. That grief will, 
 in a few hours from the moment we are writing, be collected and 
 sanctified in that solemn message of God's mercy which the 
 Church claims as its own. The roof of Windsor Chapel will 
 then resound with the aspiration, most rightly used over one 
 who, among no common temptations, was ever faithful, virtuous, 
 true, and pious, ' earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in 
 sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.' These 
 words have accompanied the highest of our race and our Ian-
 
 Two Years of Church Progress. 27 
 
 guage, and the most forlorn and buffeted, to their last home : 
 these words are the authentic voice of the English Church. To 
 them, and to those which go before and which follow after, we 
 commend the cause of the Church among a people of whom the 
 preponderating majority has been accustomed to the burial of 
 Christians, and who would not willingly, if the choice were 
 offered, take in exchange the chance effusions of the fanatic or 
 the godless indifference of a silent funeral. 
 
 :'RINTKD BY R. CLAY, SJON, AND TAYLOR.
 
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