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 A CHARGE ^^- 
 
 DELIVERED TO THE 
 
 jLa^ ^/L//^ 
 
 CLERGY AND CHURCHWARDENS OF THE DIOCESE 
 OF PETERBOROUGH 
 
 At his Third Visitation, October, 1878 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM CONNOR MAGEE, D.D. 
 
 BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH 
 
 LONDON 
 DALDY, ISBISTER & CO. 
 
 56, LUDGATE HILL
 
 LONDON : 
 
 PKIXTED BY VIRTITE AND CO., LIMITED, 
 
 CITY ROAD. 
 
 k
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Neutrality of the Clergy in Politics 3 
 
 Attitude of the Church towards political assailants 5 
 
 Burials question^ 6 
 
 Secularism in Education 8 
 
 Democratic hostility to the Church 9 
 
 Duty of the Clergy to the Establishment . 14 
 
 Duty of the Laity to the Church 16 
 
 Diocesan Statistics .18 
 
 Church Extension 18 
 
 Church Services ........... 19 
 
 Confirmation 19 
 
 School Boards 20 
 
 Diocesan Inspection . . . . . . . . . .21 
 
 Sunday-schools 21 
 
 Children's Services 22 
 
 Diocesan Conferences 23 
 
 Progress of the Church during the last ten years 23 
 
 Reforms and Amendments 26 
 
 Diocesan Finance 26 
 
 Augmentation of small benefices 27 
 
 Supply for Spiritual emergencies 29 
 
 Supply of Ministers ........... 30 
 
 Revival of Diaconate 31 
 
 Sub-Diaconate 32
 
 iv CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGR 
 
 Revival of the Diaconate 33 
 
 Earlier age for Ordination 34 
 
 Ecclesiastical Legislation 36 
 
 Ecclesiastical Litigation . . . 37 
 
 The Ridsdale Judgment- 38 
 
 Ambiguity of Ornaments Rubric 39 
 
 Submission to Final Court of Appeal 40 
 
 Revision of Rubrics 43 
 
 Recommendation of Lambeth Conference as to Ritual . . . -45 
 
 Comprehensiveness of our Church 46 
 
 True Unity possessed by our Church 47 
 
 Loyalty to the Church 50 
 
 « uiuc Z
 
 A CHARGE, 
 
 &c. 
 
 Reverend Brethren, Brethren of the Laity, 
 
 MY first words to you on this occasion are naturally those of 
 congratulation and of thankfulness that we are not meeting 
 amidst the distractions and the horrors of a great European war. 
 
 The peril, more than once of late so imminent, of our becoming 
 actors in the strife, of which we have been such anxious spectators, 
 has passed away. So, too, let us hope, are passing away from 
 the lands which have been the scene of that terrible conflict the 
 miseries which it has inflicted, to be succeeded eventually by the 
 blessings of peaceful and well-ordered freedom and civilisation. 
 
 As English citizens we have had, and doubtless still have, our 
 differing opinions as to the issues at stake in that conflict, and as 
 to the merits of the settlement by which, for the present at least, 
 it has been terminated ; but as Christians, who believe that above 
 the imperfect counsels and erring passions of men there reigns 
 the overruling Providence of God, we can all unite in thankful 
 acknowledgment that it is by His goodness and mercy that we 
 have thus far been spared the trials and the sorrows that must 
 accompany even the most successful of wars. 
 
 Thankfulness, however, for our own safety in the presence of 
 the trials of others is a feeling in which we may easily indulge too 
 much and too long. The position, which we have occupied during 
 the last three years, of deeply interested spectators of a contest in 
 which we were resolved to take if possible no part, has not been 
 altogether morally safe or wholesome. Such a position is apt to 
 generate a spirit of selfish regard for our own interests and of 
 growing indifterence to losses and sufferings which do not affect 
 these. It tends also to a habit of self-righteous judging of 
 
 B
 
 2 A CHARGE. 
 
 the faults or the sins of other nations, and a self-satisfied contrast- 
 ing of them with our own superior virtue and wisdom, to which 
 we are ready to attribute our escape from the calamities which 
 have befallen our neighbours. Such a temper of mind is as 
 dangerous for nations as it is for individuals. It is the pride 
 which so often goes before, because it so often tends to bring 
 about, a fall ; blinding us as it does to faults of our own, only too 
 like it may be to those we are condemning in others and leading 
 therefore if uncorrected to like disaster. The human nature 
 which we have seen sinning and suffering in Turk or Bulgarian 
 does not differ so very much from our own that we can afford to 
 neglect the lesson which their sufferings should teach us, that we 
 too are, as a nation, under the moral government of God ; and that 
 for our sins, unless we repent and amend, there may be in store 
 as great or greater chastisement than theirs. We would do well 
 to remember that there may be other and worse enemies for nations 
 than those which threaten them from without ; that peace may 
 have her crimes, her miseries, as well as war — nay, that these may 
 even prove the more formidable and more lasting of the two. 
 The ignoble love of ease and pleasure ; the degrading worship of 
 wealth ; the demoralising frauds and dishonesties that come of 
 the fierce haste to possess it ; the senseless extravagance of luxury 
 that too often follows on its possession ; the effrontery of vice that, 
 flushed with pride and fulness of bread, no longer condescends to 
 pay to virtue even the tribute of hypocrisy ; the low cynicism that 
 sneers away all those better thoughts and higher aims that are the 
 very breath of a nation's nobler life ; and — springing out of these — 
 the strife of interests ; the war of classes widening and deepening 
 day by day, as the envious selfishness of poverty rises up in natural 
 reaction against the ostentatious selfishness of wealth ; the dull, 
 desperate hate with which those who want and have not, come at 
 last to regard the whole framework of society which seems to them 
 but one huge contrivance for their oppression ; the wild dreams of 
 revolutionary change which shall give to all alike, without the pain 
 of labour and self-denial, those enjoyments which are now the 
 privileged possession of the few, but which the many long for with 
 a bitter and a persistent longing : — these are some of the seeds of 
 evil which, sown in our own soil and by our own hands, may one 
 day rise up an exceeding great army more to be dreaded than the 
 invading hosts of any foreign foe. The glare and the glitter of our 
 modern civilisation may hide these from our view for a time ; we 
 may fail to see how some of the most precious elements of our 
 national greatness are withering in its heated atmosphere, or what 
 evil things are growing to maturity in the darker shadows that it 
 casts ; but they are there nevertheless, and if we heed them not 
 and reform them not, the time may come when we may wish that 
 the sharp and sobering discipline of war — nay, even the terrible 
 trials and sorrows of defeat — had visited us in time to save us from
 
 A CHARGE. 3 
 
 the greater horrors bred of our own sins in time of profoundest 
 ease and peace. 
 
 It is well that we should remember this. It is well that we, 
 my reverend brethren, while we pray, and teach our people to 
 pray, that God may " give us peace in our time," should never fail 
 to warn them that this good gift of God, like all His other gifts, 
 may prove a blessing or a curse according to the use we make 
 of it. 
 
 In the protracted and bitter controversies which this Eastern Neutrality of the 
 question has provoked amongst ourselves, the clergy generally [l'"^^ '" ^°''' 
 have taken but little part. This has been made matter of rq[:)roach 
 against them by those who, on other occasions, are ready enough 
 to denounce " the political parson," and who would doubtless have 
 raised the same cry on this occasion, had the clergy taken a line 
 opposed to their own. This neutrality of the clergy has not, I 
 am persuaded, sprung, as their accusers allege, from indifference 
 to considerations of justice and humanity, or from servile adherence 
 to the powers that be. The clergy, like other men, have their 
 political predilections ; but it is as great a calumny to say that 
 these have constrained the majority of them of late to a cowardly 
 silence against their own better convictions, as it would be to say 
 of those who did speak strongly on one side of this question, that 
 their utterances were prompted by their political leanings or in- 
 terests, and not by their conscientious belief that they were aiding 
 the cause of the oppressed against the wrong-doer. A better and 
 a truer reason for the silence of the great body of the clergy in 
 the late, as in other, political controversy, is to be found in their 
 general unwillingness to mix themselves up with the strifes of 
 political parties, an unwillingness which seems to me both natural 
 and right on the part of those who occupy the position of ministers 
 of a National Church. The clergyman of the Church of England 
 is the pastor of all his parishioners, to whatever party in the State 
 they may belong, and he does well, as a rule, to avoid, as far as 
 possible, identifying himself with any one of these parties, lest 
 by so doing he weaken his spiritual influence over any of his 
 people. 
 
 It is easy to denounce this neutral attitude of the clergy in 
 politics as selfish and cowardly, and to adduce it as a proof of the 
 numbing and deadening influence of an establishment which 
 induces its ministers to neglect their rights and duties as citizens. 
 The answer to all this is very simple. The duties of an English 
 clergyman, who is an officer of the State as well as of the Church, 
 are duties of a citizen, as truly as are those of a judge or a 
 soldier; like these they may clash with other duties to which 
 he is not professionally bound, and in this as in every other case 
 of conflicting claims of duty, the only question to be decided is, 
 which are to be paramount and which subordinate. A soldier, 
 
 B 2
 
 4 A CHARGE. 
 
 for instance, would hardly be justified in absenting himself from 
 an engagement in order to vote at an election ; or a judge in 
 neglecting an assize in order to speak at a political meeting. And 
 the clergy may, I trust, be pardoned if they regard the duties of the 
 pastor as higher than those of the politician. There may, of 
 course, be cases where the political question at stake involves such 
 clear issues of morality or justice that it may be the plain duty of 
 the minister of rehgion to utter his testimony boldly and loudly 
 for the right and against the wrong. Such an issue, for instance, 
 was involved in the question of the slave trade. Such an issue 
 many conscientious men believe is now involved in the question 
 of legislative dealings with intemperance. But such issues should, 
 I venture to think, be clear and unmistakable before they induce 
 the pastor of an English parish to forsake the quiet duties of 
 his calling for the arena of political strife. I trust that I shall 
 not be supposed, in saying this, to cast the slightest reflection upon 
 those of the clergy who felt it their duty to take an active part in 
 the press or on the platform on this Eastern question. I have not 
 a doubt that those who did so were fully persuaded that this was 
 just one of those cases where the call to pohtical action was one 
 of highest and clearest moral obligation. But they would, I trust, 
 in their turn be ready to admit that a question on which the 
 Enghsh nation was and is so largely divided, and on which men 
 of the highest and purest character took opposite sides, cannot 
 have appeared to all alike the simple question of right or wrong 
 which it seemed to them ; and that those of their brethren in the 
 Ministry who did not follow their example of active interference 
 in it, may nevertheless have been as keenly alive as they were to 
 the interests of humanity and of freedom, though they may have 
 differed from them in their judgment, or may have honestly felt 
 themselves unable to form a judgment, as to how far those interests 
 might be promoted or hindered by any particular course which 
 statesmen on either side might urge or adopt. 
 
 That the clergy were thus largely neutral in this Eastern ques- 
 tion, while on the other hand Nonconformist ministers took an 
 active part exclusively on one side of it, is a fact which we have been 
 assured must have an ill effect upon the political future of our 
 Church. It may be so, though it seems to me that the forces 
 engaged in the contest for and against the Establishment lie too 
 deep to be greatly affected by such a superficial and passing stimulus 
 as this. But that this contest will be renewed with increased 
 eagerness, and it may be on the part of our assailants with increased 
 confidence, now that the excitement of foreign politics is giving 
 place to renewed interest in domestic legislation, is tolerably 
 certain. It may be well for us then, on the eve of the renewal of 
 a struggle in which we have so deep an interest, to attempt calmly 
 to estimate the nature and the direction of the forces arrayed 
 against us, and to consider how it behoves us to deal with them.
 
 A CHARGE. 5 
 
 And when I ask you to do this it is, believe me, with no thought 
 
 of engaging you in anything so un edifying or so unsuited to this 
 
 place and occasion, as the calculation of poHtical chances, or the 
 
 suggestion of political strategy on the part of members of our 
 
 Church. I desire rather, if I may, to lift this question of the Attitude of the 
 
 Church and her assailants out of the level of mere party politics, church towards 
 
 , ^ -r /- 1 • •. -1 • , • 1 , , political assail- 
 
 and to see it we can find in it some considerations which may help ants. 
 us in the discharge of our duties as ministers of religion, and 
 Avhich may guard us, too, against some possible mistakes of conduct 
 or temper to which, as ministers of the National Church, we may 
 be at this moment especially exposed. For a protracted contest, 
 such as that into which we are being forced, resembles a protracted 
 law suit in this respect, that he who is engaged in it has to think 
 not only how he may best defend the interests involved in it, but 
 also how he may best protect himself from the injurious and dis- 
 tracting effects of it upon his own heart and life. 
 
 Speaking generally then, and without taking note of partial or 
 individual exceptions, there are three forces in modern society 
 which are united in the attack now being made upon the 
 National Church. These are Sectarianism, Infidelity, and Demo- 
 cracy. There are, it is true, still here and there philosophical 
 thinkers of the more advanced school of politics, who advocate the 
 theory of a National Church of a very undogmatic character ; and 
 there are even one or two infidel writers who have had something to 
 say for such a Church on the ground of public utility ; and there 
 is still a section, though a diminishing one, of the Nonconformists 
 who deprecate, or at least will not yet agitate for, the severance of 
 Church and State. But looking at the broader and deeper 
 currents of these three forces, they are setting distinctly and 
 strongly against the Church. 
 
 In the first place then as regards the political assault of Dissent 
 upon the Church, it is to be regarded as both natural and inevitable. 
 It is true that Dissent in its earlier stages had no such hostility, 
 and that what Nonconformists long aimed at was not the abolition 
 of the Establishment, but room or triumph in it for themselves. 
 Such facts, however, only prove that there is that, either in the 
 essential spirit or the outward circumstances of Nonconforming 
 religious communities, which forces them sooner or later to dis- 
 card the principles of an Establishment and adopt in their stead 
 those of Voluntaryism. Modern Dissenters are therefore as litde 
 troubled by our quotations in favour of Establishments from Owen, 
 or Howe, or Baxter, as modern Wesleyans are by our quotations 
 in favour of the Church from Wesley's sermons. They tell us 
 fairly enough that all these quotations only show that they under- 
 stand their own principles now better than they did at first, and 
 that if they were Voluntaryists once against their will, they have 
 since learned to be Voluntaryists on principle.
 
 6 A CHARGE. 
 
 We may therefore calculate on the whole political strength of 
 modern Dissent being finally cast into the scale against the Church 
 Establishment. Now if we were to speculate, as I do not propose 
 to do, as to the probabilities of the success of this movement, we 
 might say that these were far from being so hopeful as its leaders 
 regard them. 
 
 It pnay be doubted whether Dissent has not lost more than it 
 has gained by the intensely pohtical character which it has of 
 late been acquiring; whether in the end the spiritual forces 
 in any country may not prove, even in the field of politics, 
 the most powerful of all ; and whether, therefore, even on the 
 low ground of political expediency, the Church has not chosen 
 the wiser course in devoting to spiritual and pastoral work among 
 the masses of the people the time and the energies which 
 her assailants are expending in stirring up those masses against 
 her. 
 
 My object, however, is, as I have said, not to indulge in specu- 
 lations of this nature, but rather to invite you to consider what may 
 be the effect at this moment upon the tone and temper of Church- 
 men, and especially upon us of the clergy, of these persistent 
 political assaults upon our Church. May we not fear then that 
 these may produce in us a hard unyielding temper, a tendency to 
 insist with the utmost tenacity on the very smallest points in 
 dispute between us and our opponents, and to our justifying this 
 on the ground that nothing we can say or do will avail to con- 
 ciliate them, and that to make any concession, whether reasonable 
 or unreasonable in itself, must have the appearance of weakness, 
 and can only serve therefore to encourage further attacks ? Are 
 we not liable, in such a tone of mind, to forget that charity, 
 generosity, concession to the weakness and the prejudices of 
 others, are in themselves Christian duties, and that they are 
 duties especially incumbent upon the ministers of a great and 
 privileged Church, which, just because it is great and strong, 
 should strive to show itself large-hearted and charitable, and above 
 the petty jealousies which are the bane of smaller communities? 
 Above all things is it not incumbent upon us to show that we 
 value our rights and privileges, whatever they may be, not selfishly 
 for our own sakes, but for the sake of those greater interests 
 they were meant to promote ; and to take care that we give no 
 colour to the accusation so freely brought against us, that we 
 care more for the Church than we do for Christianity ? 
 
 Let me venture upon an illustration of what I have been saying 
 on this point, though in so doing I am well aware that I am 
 treading upon delicate ground, and that what I am about to say 
 will not be popular with many who now hear me. 
 
 The demands of the Dissenters in the Burials question are 
 clearly and indeed avowedly urged on political grounds and with 
 ulterior political aims, and they are based, as most of us
 
 A CHARGE. 7 
 
 Churchmen think, upon no shadow of justice or right whatever. 
 I for one have never been able to see how the fact that a man 
 has seceded from the National Church gives him a right which 
 no member of that Church possesses, to say what he pleases in 
 the parish churchyard any more than in the parish church. Nor 
 can I see how any such right can be conferred on any one — 
 Churchman or Dissenter — by the fact, even if it were one, that 
 churchyards are national property, any more than the fact of the 
 Houses of Parliament being national property confers upon 
 every citizen the right to say what he pleases in them, or even 
 to enter them save at certain times and under certain condi- 
 tions. It seems to me therefore that Churchmen are and have 
 been perfectly justified in resisting the attempt to obtain this 
 imaginary right by the force of legislation. But, on the other 
 hand, I have always held that there are concessions which the 
 Church, while retaining still her rights over her own grave- 
 yards, might have made, not in the least as a matter of poli- 
 tical expediency or in the vain hope of buying off her as- 
 sailants, but simply on the grounds of Christian charity and 
 kindness, and of doing to others as we would have them do to 
 us. I have never been able to see the harm or the danger to 
 the Church, in the clergyman allowing the Christian mourner, or 
 even the minister selected by him, to utter, by the grave of 
 some loved one just laid to rest, words of prayer or praise. I 
 have never been able to see why the clergyman should not him- 
 self be allowed to speak at the grave of the child of a Christian 
 parent, who, however mistakenly, may have delayed for him the 
 rite which admits to the Christian Church, words of sure and 
 certain hope or of consolation to surrounding mourners, even 
 though he might not and ought not to use the service which is 
 framed exclusively for the baptized. 
 
 Now in saying this I am well aware that I expose myself to the 
 disapproval of those who maintain that such concessions on the 
 part of the Church would be utterly wrong in point of principle. 
 To such I can only say, so long as you think this you are bound 
 in conscience to refuse to make them ; you must stand by your 
 principles at whatever cost of pain to others or to yourself. But 
 if there be any, and I believe there are not a few, who, while 
 they see nothing wrong in principle in such concessions, refuse to 
 make them on the ground that they will never conciliate the poli- 
 tical Dissenter, or that it is politically wiser to stand up at this 
 moment against all concession, then I say to such men you are 
 falling precisely into that fault of which you accuse the Dissenter, 
 of preferring political to religious considerations ; you are making 
 in this matter just as real, if not as great, a mistake as he who, 
 believing that there was a principle involved in such concession, 
 should nevertheless make it in order to " conciliate the Dis- 
 senter."
 
 8 A CHARGE, 
 
 That a National Church should be specially obnoxious to the 
 Infidel is a matter of course, while at the same time it is no small 
 proof of the real value of such an institution. It is in his eyes, 
 however, a national provision for the maintenance and the spread 
 of opinions which he regards as equally false and pernicious. The 
 clergy are for him a band of obscurantists, whose interests are 
 bound up with the defence of superstition and the obstruction of 
 free thought ; and accordingly he denounces the Church as the 
 great obstacle in this country to the progress of humanity. We 
 must expect, therefore, that the whole force of unbelief will be cast 
 against the National Church in every question which in any way 
 involves the interests of religion. Now at this moment this force 
 is directed against the Church mainly upon one point — that of 
 education. The secularist party in the State, intensely desiring as 
 it does the complete secularization of the centres of thought and 
 learning in the nation, seeks eagerly to oust the Church from her 
 old position in these as the representative of Christianity, and in 
 this attempt it has, as we know, succeeded to a considerable extent. 
 Now there is, as it seems to me, a danger here that the Church, 
 wearied out in the struggle for religion in education which she 
 has been waging, not for herself but for the nation, should with- 
 draw from it at last ; and, leaving the ground he has won to the 
 secularist, should set herself simply to the religious training of 
 her own children in her own institutions. 
 
 To this the Church may be forced at last, but let her wait until 
 she is forced to it. The Church of the nation ought surely 
 never to divest herself, of her own free will, of her great function of 
 leavening, so far as she may, the thought and intellect of the nation 
 with the truths of religion. She ought, on the contrary, if she be 
 faithful to her trust, to seize and cling to every opportunity given 
 or left to her of discharging this office, whether in the primary, 
 middle-class, or university education of the people. 
 
 Let me illustrate my meaning on this subject by referring to the 
 point in connection with it which most practically concerns us in 
 this diocese. I mean the position of the Church with respect to 
 primary education. In the great education controversy of the 
 last few years the Church, wisely accepting the conditions of the 
 State, has won for herself the right to teach in her own schools the 
 whole faith of the gospel to all who will accept it at her hands ; 
 and it is also largely owing to her efforts that this faith has not 
 been entirely excluded from the State schools throughout the 
 country. There is still room, if there be no very high or secure 
 place, for religion left in these. This being so, what is the duty 
 of the Church respecting these schools ? Not surely to stand 
 entirely aloof from them and leave them to drift, as they would in 
 that case certainly drift, more and more into mere secularism. Is 
 it not rather the duty of Churchmen, while strenuously maintain- 
 ing their own better system, still, wherever these schools exist.
 
 A CHARGE. 9 
 
 to try and find their place in them ; and moreover in so doing to 
 accept loyally the conditions of the system, in the working of 
 which they are taking part, trying only to infuse into it as much 
 of religious teaching and influence as those conditions will allow ; 
 showing clearly that they are doing this in the interests not of 
 the Church but of Religion, and winning thus, it may be, at last 
 the sympathy and co-operation of those who, though not members 
 of our communion, still care more for serving Religion than they 
 do for injuring the Church? It seems to me that this is both 
 a wiser and a manlier course than that Churchmen should set 
 themselves merely to denouncing all board schools as " nurseries 
 of irreligion," or that they should try to thwart and cripple them, 
 where they have been estabhshed, by ill-advised appeals to the 
 ratepayers against them in the name of economy \ a piece of 
 strategy which in one notable instance has resulted only in a 
 damaging defeat to the Church, and in giving opportunity for the 
 accusation against the clergy that they are the pretended friends 
 but real opponents of the education of the people. 
 
 Doubtless it is hard upon Churchmen that they should have 
 the burden of supporting their own schools and at the same 
 time of trying to increase the efficiency of others. But this is 
 a burden incidental to the position of the Church as the religious 
 servant of the nation. She may not shrink from it if she be faith- 
 ful — she will not shrink from it if she be wise. For if the time 
 should ever come when she should be forced to surrender her 
 schools to the State — and the process of surrender is certainly 
 going on already — she may have good cause for thankfulness 
 should the system of State education to which her children 
 were at last transferred have meanwhile been kept, as far as she 
 could keep it, free from the taint of secularism. For this reason I 
 hail with satisfaction the effort that has been made in this diocese 
 to give religious instruction to pupil teachers in board schools. 
 Such efforts may meet with unpleasant rebuffs, but they are wise 
 and right in themselves, and I trust they may be persevered in. 
 
 That the spirit of modern democracy is strongly hostile to our Democratic 
 Church is certain. To inquire into all the reasons for this would church^ 
 take us far beyond the limits of my present subject ; the question 
 runs out into the far larger and deeper one of the hostility of 
 modern political thought in its more advanced forms, not only to 
 established Churches, but to Christianity itself. This, which is 
 indeed one of the gravest and most startling phenomena in our 
 modern civilisation, may well occupy the serious and anxious 
 consideration not only of all Churchmen, but of all Christian men. 
 It is obviously, however, one which it would be impossible for me 
 to discuss on this occasion. What I ask you to consider to-day 
 is simply the question, how in the face of this fact we ministers of 
 the National Church should bear ourselves? Whether anything that
 
 10 A CHARGE. 
 
 we can do may lessen, or on the other hand increase, this feeUng, 
 the existence of which we must honestly admit and recognise ? 
 
 In the first place, then, there is one thing which we clearly 
 ought not to do, namely to attempt to combat this political 
 attack by merely political weapons ; to aim for instance at 
 strengthening the Church by allying ourselves and her more and 
 more closely with those powers in the State which are most 
 opposed to democracy. To do this could in the end only have 
 the effect of deepening the hostility we deplore, and of giving 
 colour to the accusation already unjustly made against us, that 
 the parson is the natural ally of the rich and the great, and the 
 enemy of the people. There is, however, an error of an exactly 
 opposite nature into which the clergy may be tempted, namely, 
 that not of resisting the democracy, but of trying to disarm it 
 by divesting themselves in their character as clergymen of what- 
 ever they may see to be especially offensive to the people. For 
 instance, the clergyman may attempt to meet the cry against sacer- 
 dotalism, by surrendering those lawful claims of spiritual authority 
 with which the Church has invested him, by preaching an undog- 
 matic Christianity, by depreciating theology, by secularising as 
 far as possible his whole tone of teaching and life in order to 
 show how truly liberal and unsectarian the minister of an Estab- 
 lished Church maybe. Such a pandering to the worst prejudices 
 of the people— to say nothing of its unfaithfulness — fails of its 
 own end ; by none is it seen through more quickly than by those 
 whom it seeks to win ; they know perfectly well that the Prayer 
 Book which this undogmatic and unsectarian clergyman reads 
 every Sunday makes of him something more and something else 
 than what he affects to be ; and they thoroughly despise accord- 
 ingly the man who thinks to please them by playing false to it. 
 Let me not, however, be mistaken here. I am not presuming in 
 what I have just said to judge those of our clergy who in the 
 honest dread of the spirit of sacerdotalism may have gone, as some 
 think, too far in the opposite direction : amongst such men are 
 some of the noblest spirits of our Church. I am speaking only of 
 attempts at winning popularity, if not for one's self, for the Church, 
 by teaching which it is hard even with the utmost stretch of charity 
 to reconcile with loyalty to the Prayer Book or to the Bible. 
 
 This, however, though it is seen here and there amongst us, is a 
 fault to which the clergy of our Church as a body are not given. 
 Our greatest danger lies the other way. It is that not of undue 
 depreciation, but of undue exaltation of the claims and powers 
 of the priesthood, and that not for our own sakes, but for the sake 
 of the Church, which many may think needs to be thus spiritually 
 strengthened in proportion as her temporal powers and privileges 
 are assailed. This motive has been pleaded, and I have no 
 doubt quite honestly pleaded, in defence of those " Ritualistic 
 excesses " on the part of certain of the clergy which are causing
 
 A CHARGE. II 
 
 just now so much anxiety to many of us. Noting as they do the 
 patent fact of the ahenation of large masses of the people from 
 the Church, and remembering that this has not always been so; 
 recalling with a fond regret, how in the days before the Reforma- 
 tion the Church and her priesthood held the people in loyal 
 allegiance, and forgetful of the fact that it was in those very days 
 that the superstitious errors and extravagant usurpations of the 
 Church were sowing those seeds of infidelity which have since 
 ripened to such terrible maturity ; they have persuaded them- 
 selves that if they could but restore the " Faith of our fathers," they 
 would regain for the Church all of that allegiance which in their 
 opinion she has lost by departing from that faith. Accordingly, 
 they are attempting what is really neither more nor less than the 
 revival of medieval Christianity in all the old splendour of its 
 ritual, and in all the beliefs which that ritual is supposed to sym- 
 bohze. And they boast, and not without some show of reason, that 
 they are thus succeeding in winning back the people to the Church. 
 They point, and their defenders, even where they do not alto- 
 gether sympathize with them, point to their work amongst the 
 poor in the poorest and most neglected parts of our great cities, 
 to their crowded churches and attached followers amongst the 
 working classes, and they ask us, is the Church of England so 
 strong amongst the people that she can afford to dispense with 
 such help as this ? 
 
 Now I will not stop to inquire how much of this success is 
 owing to their ritual, and how much to what all must admit to be 
 their self-denying lives amongst and for the people. Nor will I 
 ask how far — granting even that this success is owing to their 
 teaching and their ritual — such teaching and ritual are lawful for 
 them in their present position as ministers of the Reformed 
 Church of England, and whether therefore they are free to pur- 
 chase popularity for her at the price of her purity. But I 
 will ask them to consider whether after all they may not be 
 mistaking a partial and temporary success for a large and en- 
 during one — whether they may not be alienating from the 
 Church by their proceedings more than they are attracting. 
 Naturally they see more of those whom they attract than of those 
 whom they alienate. They take no heed of the scornful con- 
 tempt with which the great body of EngHsh working men regard 
 their proceedings, nor of their deepening estrangement from the 
 Church which allows of these ; or if they do, they regard it only as 
 a sign of the infidel spirit of the times, which they must aim at 
 conquering by stronger and still stronger assertion of what they 
 regard as the Catholic faith in its integrity of doctrine and 
 worship. 
 
 Let us test, however, the real value of this experiment, by 
 noting its result where it has been tried upon the large scale and 
 for a long time. The Church of Rome, whose doctrines these
 
 12 A CHARGE. 
 
 men are reviving and whose practices they are imitating, has 
 enjoyed all the advantages which these are supposed to confer, 
 and has enjoyed them during all those years in which our Church 
 has been deprived of them. If imposing ceremonial, if pictures 
 and banners and incense and processions and pilgrimages, if the 
 highest assertion of the claims of the priest and of the authority 
 and value of the confessional could have secured the allegiance 
 of the people, she has had all these in a degree which we can 
 never hope to rival. What has been the result ? Simply this, that 
 she has lost her hold of the people all over Europe to a far larger 
 extent, and far more hopelessly, than the Church of England has 
 done, or is likely to do. There is surely far more both of prac- 
 tical and speculative infidelity in those countries which have been 
 since the Reformation under her sway, than there is in England at 
 this moment. Is it then, apart from all other considerations, a 
 course so wise as some seem to regard it, this of borrowing the 
 weapons of Rome, just as we see them breaking and falling from 
 her hands ? Would not the result of the experiment, if it were 
 ever largely tried by our Church here, be the same as it has 
 been with her, namely the establishing of a narrow spiritual 
 despotism over the few, at the cost of a deep and wide-spread 
 spiritual revolt on the part of the many ; the severance of the 
 Church from the intelligence and the life of the people ; 
 her certain rejection from her office of national teacher ; and, 
 what is even more to be dreaded, the spread of unbelief and 
 irreligion through the nation at large which would only too 
 probably follow its divorce from the Church, not on grounds 
 of politics but of religion — not because the nation had come 
 to think that Christianity might be taught without a National 
 Church, but because the National Church had forced it to doubt 
 w'hether Christianity was worth being taught at all ? Of course, it 
 those of the clergy who are thus attempting to revive what the 
 Church of England has disowned and rejected as we think — or un- 
 happily neglected as they think — believe that they are setting forth 
 to the world really and truly her doctrines and the very truth of 
 God besides, they must continue to do so at any cost or at any 
 hazard to themselves or to her position as an Established Church ; 
 and God forbid that I should urge on them the thought of any 
 such risk as a motive against giving effect to the convictions of 
 their consciences. I am only urging on them now that they are 
 under the saddest of infatuations if they suppose that they are in 
 this way serving the Church by regaining for it the affections of 
 the people at large. I am only entreating those of the clergy who 
 may be disposed, on this ground at least, to sympathize with or to 
 adopt these practices, to consider whether in so doing they may 
 not be making a great and a dangerous mistake as regards the 
 interests both of the Church and of religion in this country. 
 There is, however, a course which we of the clergy may take to
 
 A CHARGE. 13 
 
 attach the people to the Church, a wiser as well as a simpler one 
 than that of attempting to alter her character and teaching in one 
 direction or another. It is that of trying fully to realise these 
 and to display them in their truest and most attractive form. 
 
 The Church of England, whatever be her faults, has in her, as 
 she is at this time, and would have still more if her own prin- 
 ciples were fully carried out, larger elements of a truly National 
 and, therefore, really popular Church, than any other in Christen- 
 dom. With her citizen clergy, owning no foreign allegiance and 
 not severed as a celibate caste from their fellow-citizens ; with 
 her Bible and her Prayer Book in " the vulgar tongue understanded 
 of the people ; " with her moderate claims for spiritual authority ; 
 with her large comprehensiveness and tolerance of diversity of 
 thought in all things non-essential ; with her endowments not 
 drawn from the people but used for them ; with her rank and 
 privileges held on stringent conditions of public service, and open 
 to the acquirement of the poorest and humblest member of the 
 community ; she might hope, if any Church can hope, to reconcile 
 the opposition between modern democratic thought and the 
 Christian Church. It may be her good fortune to do this ; but it 
 is at any rate our duty to see that she fail not in this through any 
 fault on the part of her clergy. 
 
 Let us try if we cannot show to the people the English parish 
 priest as he ought to be, the servant, for his Master's sake, of every 
 man in his parish, whatever his rank or condition ; neither proud 
 to the poor nor servile to the great ; never ashamed of his office, 
 yet never lording himself in the strength of it over God's heritage ; 
 bold to rebuke the vices of the highest as well as of the lowest ; 
 truly honouring all men with the courtesy that comes from seeing 
 in every one a member of Christ and an heir of heaven ; approv- 
 ing himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God. 
 Let us learn, in these respects, from the rude criticisms of our 
 assailants. They are often unjust, often ignorant; they are some- 
 times shrewd and just; let us profit by them when they are so; 
 let us amend what they show us to be really amiss ; let us supply 
 what is lacking ; let us strengthen the things that are ready to die ; 
 and when we have done this, we may plead the more effectually 
 with those with whom our lives shall have already pleaded for our 
 Church. We may ask them, for instance, to consider whether 
 there is anything so very lordly and aristocratic in the position 
 which enables the son of a day-labourer to stand up before the 
 greatest man in the parish and say his mind without fear or favour ; 
 or which, on the other hand, places the son of a peer at the call 
 of the day-labourer. We may ask — thank God that we can now so 
 often safely do so ! — whether there is anything so exclusive in the 
 Church which throws open her places of worship to the people 
 equally and without money or price to all alike ; we may ask 
 whether the sacerdotalism they are taught so much to dread be not
 
 H A CHARGE. 
 
 checked rather than promoted by the compact of the Church with 
 the State which they accuse as the cause of it ; or whether, if 
 democracy be that form of government which most depends 
 upon the co-operation of all citizens, and therefore needs the 
 largest amount of virtue and self-restraint amongst its citizens, 
 it be not that form of government which, above all others, needs 
 and may profit by an establishment which brings the teacher 
 of morality and religion within the reach of every citizen ; nay, 
 which binds it on him as his duty to press his teaching upon those 
 who, because they most need, most dislike it, instead of supplying 
 it only to those who, because they like it, are ready to pay for it. 
 We may or we may not in so doing save the Establishment, and I for 
 one am not ashamed to say that this were no unworthy achievement, 
 but we should at any rate have justified it ; we should at any rate 
 have saved the Church, established or disestablished, endowed 
 or disendowed, to do God's work amongst the people ; we should 
 have saved our country that deadly struggle between superstition 
 and infidelity, between the priest and the revolution, which is 
 distracting other countries, and which is already, as some declare, 
 beginning to cast its coming shadow on our own. 
 
 cie'/ °t *ti° ^^ ^^^ ^^^'^ ^ have been saying, however, on this subject of the 
 
 Establishment, assaults upon the Establishment, and the best way in which we of 
 the clergy may meet them, I have assumed that the Establishment 
 is " worth preserving." If it be not, of course all that I have been 
 saying is mere waste of your time and mine. More than this 
 even, if it be not worth our while to preserve it, it is worth our 
 while, it is our plain duty, to get rid of it ; for certainly, if it be not 
 a very good thing it is a very bad one. The influences upon the 
 Church of her union with the State must, in the nature of the case, 
 be powerful and far reaching ; they must deeply penetrate her 
 whole organization, and largely mould her whole tone and character 
 and spirit ; they are, therefore, either an immense help or an 
 immense hindrance to that spiritual work for which she exists. 
 Let us make up our minds which they are, and act accordingly. 
 If we are clearly satisfied that on the whole they are, as some of 
 our clergy are telling us just now, mischievous to the spiritual life 
 of the Church, and " contrary to the mind and will of God," 
 our course is very clear. It is first, as honest men, to resign 
 the positions and the emoluments we hold as ministers of an 
 Establishment, refusing any longer to live by what we ought, in 
 that case, to regard as the wages of sin ; and then having gone 
 forth from it, to wage war for its overthrow. But if, on the other 
 hand, we are convinced that the union between Church and State 
 is right and lawful in principle, and that whatever be the partial 
 disadvantages attending it — and there is nothing human that 
 has not its share of these — yet that these are far less than its 
 advantages to the Church, and Ihat the abolition of this union
 
 A CHARGE. IS 
 
 would not help but would cripple her in her great work for 
 God ; then let us resolve to do what in us lies to maintain 
 that union, and with it the blessings we believe it brings to 
 Church and nation. But let us in either case avoid, what is 
 so utterly unbecoming in clergymen of the National Church, an 
 affectation of indifference to this question, a tone of depreciation 
 of the whole controversy as one merely about loaves and fishes, 
 about secular rights and privileges quite unworthy of the serious 
 thought of spiritual men, who may afford to wait the issues 
 of this struggle with perfect complacency, satisfied that in no 
 way the real interests of the Church be affected by it. The real 
 interests of the Church, in the very highest sense of the word, 
 must be deeply affected by it, either for good or for evil. Wealth 
 and influence are as much and as truly God's gifts to a Church as 
 they are to individuals, and, neither by the individual nor by 
 the Church, are they to be lightly thrown away, nor yet, on the 
 other hand, so cherished that we keep them at the cost of things 
 more precious. If our endowments, our privileges, or anything 
 else in our position as a National Church, be really a talent given 
 us of God, then we shall have to answer to Him for casting these 
 away. And if we really doubt whether these are a trust of such a 
 nature, have we any right to retain them ? They are certainly 
 given us as such a trust by both Church and nation. The union 
 of Church and State surely was intended for the spiritual good 
 of both. If we doubt this, have we any right to retain our position 
 as trustees appointed under that trust ? Such a position would 
 not be tolerable or tolerated in the ordinary affairs of life. The 
 first duty of a trustee who finds himself, for whatever reason, 
 growing indifferent to the duties involved in his trust, is to make 
 way for some one else who may be more fully sensible of their 
 importance. Let us have done then, once for all, with this 
 affectation of impartiality on a question on which no English 
 Churchman, no English citizen, has any right to be impartial. Let 
 us have done, too, with what we hear rather too much of just 
 now, peevish cries for disestablishment and threats of seeking lor 
 it, whenever men cannot have everything their own way in the 
 Church, or whenever they see, or think they see, defects or 
 evils in the present state of Church matters. It is the commonest 
 thing nowadays to hear from some angry layman, who cannot at 
 once get his Incumbent to do all he thinks he ought to do, or be 
 all he ought to be, the declaration, that if the Bishop cannot put 
 this to rights for him, it is time he were disestablished ; or from 
 some angry clergyman, vexed with some restraint in his position, 
 as minister of a Church established by law, that at the moment 
 particularly galls him, the exclamation that it were a thousand 
 times better to be disestablished than to put up with this. All 
 this is really childish, and worse than childish ; it is the conduct 
 of men who would burn down some grand old family mansion
 
 i6 A CHARGE. 
 
 in order to get rid of a dark passage or a smoky chimney. But 
 when I say this, I say also what, indeed, I have been endeavour- 
 ing hitherto to show, that the truest and best defence of the 
 Estabhshment on the part of the clergy lies in their own life and 
 work as parish priests. It is well for us that this is so, for we 
 could imagine nothing more unfortunate than that the clergy of 
 our Church should be distracted in their great work for God or 
 warped in the doing of it by considerations of how the manner of 
 it might affect the fate of the contest waged against the Establish- 
 ment; thinking always how they may increase the numerical 
 strength of the Church, or prevent this or that member of their 
 flock, who may after all be no great strength or credit to us, from 
 going over to Dissent ; relaxing the discipline of the Church, 
 already far too lax, lowering the standard of her teaching in Church 
 or in school, lest they swell the ranks of the Church's opponents ; 
 viewing their work, in short, always more or less under this angle 
 of disestablishment, and forgetting that the best way of strengthen- 
 ing the Church is by faithfully, loyally, and thoroughly carrying 
 out her principles and doing her work in her own spirit and way. 
 " He that regardeth the clouds shall not sow," and he that is 
 always scanning the political sky and calculating the coming 
 weather for the Establishment will never be a good husbandman 
 for the Church, 
 Duty of the Laity I liavc Said that the life and the work of the clergyman is the 
 to the Church, j^ggj (Jefence of the Church ; but these are not her only defence. 
 The clergy are not the Church. This is a truth of which our 
 brethren of the laity sometimes remind us when they think we 
 are in danger of assuming too much for our order. And very 
 right and very well it is that they should remind us of this. But 
 will our brethren of the laity bear with me when I remind them 
 that this truth has two sides to it ? If the laity are as truly a part 
 of the Church as the clergy, they are so for work and duty as well 
 as for privilege and right ; they, too, as well as the clergy, have 
 their duty of strengthening the Church, and that in her capacity, 
 not as an Establishment, but as a spiritual society. Political 
 help our brethren of the laity are ready to give the Church ; their 
 money, too, is largely at her service. A Church which in one 
 generation has raised thirty millions for church building and 
 restoration, and fifteen millions for her schools, has certainly no 
 reason to complain of the niggardliness of her laity. But this is 
 not all that the Church needs of her lay members. Their co- 
 operation with the clergy in work and counsel is required, too, 
 and this I am thankful to say is increasingly given, though there 
 is room here for improvement. I confess that I am sometimes 
 tempted to wish that a little more of the energy, the zeal, the 
 organizing power that we see devoted to business or to pleasure 
 could be enhsted in the service of the Church. But there is 
 a support which the Clergy need from the laity in their spiritual
 
 A CHARGE. T7 
 
 work which is even more important than any of these ; it is the 
 moral support of a good example. The laity tell us, and tell 
 us truly, that they value the Church mainly because she pro- 
 vides in every parish the means of grace, and the ministrations of 
 the clergy. Do they always try to show that they value these 
 privileges for themselves as well as for others ; or is the example 
 of neglect of these never set by laymen, who yet would be 
 grievously offended if they were told they were not vvell affected to 
 the Church? Is it no hindrance to the parish priest, in bringing 
 the humbler classes to frequent the house of God, to know that his 
 principal parishioner is either an habitual absentee from it or a rare 
 and unfrequent visitor there ? Is it no difficulty to the minister 
 of the Church, as he tries to win back the Nonconformist or 
 convert the unbehever, to be told, it will be time enough to try 
 and convert us to your Church when your own people show that 
 they believe in her? Let me entreat the lay Churchmen of all 
 ranks and classes in the diocese, who may be lacking in this 
 respect, and to whom I speak, if not in yet from this place, to 
 bear with this word of exhortation from one who as truly owes to 
 them the duty of faithfulness as he does to the clergy; to consider 
 what real hurt to the Church may be caused by their neglect of 
 their duties as Churchmen ; and to remember for their own sake, 
 and for the sake of those who are to come after them, that God's 
 great law for the possession of His gifts is true always, and every- 
 where, that " from him that hath not shall be taken away even 
 that which he seemeth to have," and that those who do not care 
 to use the blessings of the Church may end in losing them. 
 
 For after all, let us consider what this Church of England — of 
 which we so often speak and write, as if it were an abstract some- 
 thing apart from ourselves — really is. It is simply ourselves, 
 clergy and laity, bound together as members of a great spiritual 
 society which exists for one great end and purpose, the deepening 
 of the spiritual life of the nation. The endowments and the 
 privileges which that society possesses are only means to that 
 great end, and it holds them only on the condition that it use them 
 tor that purpose. They belong to the Church by a hke tenure 
 to that by which land and rank were held of old in this realm of 
 England, namely, that of furnishing men when needed for the ser- 
 vice of the State. The National Church is bound in deepest obliga- 
 tions to the nation to furnish it with faithful soldiers and servants 
 to encounter every one of the enemies of its moral and spiritual 
 life, to fight against every form of unbelief or of sin that may 
 assault and hurt the people. For this her bounden duty and service 
 she needs the help of every one of her sons, whether of the clergy 
 or of the laity, and the Churchman who withholds that help, or 
 only slackly and coldly gives it, is proving himself faithless to a 
 great trust and neglectful of a plain duty which he owes alike 
 to the Church of which he is a member and to the nation of
 
 1 8 A CHARGE. 
 
 which he is a citizen. If we ever forget this, if we ever come to 
 regard the rights of the Church merely as rights, and not also as 
 most high and solemn responsibilities, entailing upon every one 
 of us real and pressing duties and efforts, then whether we keep 
 those rights or not we shall certainly deserve to lose them ; we 
 shall certainly be inviting and provoking men to rise up and 
 sweep away from amongst them what would then indeed have 
 become a monopoly of useless and therefore mischievous privi- 
 lege ; nay, w^e should be inviting and provoking for ourselves the 
 lesson from God which the loss of these things might bring us, 
 that the life of the Church " consisteth not in the abundance of 
 the things " that she possesseth. These are truths, brethren, 
 which, obvious as they are in themselves, are only too easily for- 
 gotten in the heat and excitement of a contest for temporal rights 
 and privileges such as that which it may be ere long awaits the 
 Church ; I have ventured, therefore, thus strongly to press them 
 upon your consideration, and to ask you to remember, what I 
 trust that for myself I may ever bear in mind, that the Establish- 
 ment exists for the sake of that great spiritual society which we 
 knovv as the Church of England, and for the work which that 
 society has to do for the people of England ; and that though the 
 Church if she were spiritually vigorous and strong would long 
 survive the Establishment, yet that the Establishment cannot, 
 nor should we desire that it could, long survive the decay of 
 spiritual life in the Church. 
 
 1 And now let us pass from the consideration of the duties of 
 
 '■ clergy and laity as aflected by their position as members of a 
 
 National Church to the question. How these duties are being 
 accomplished amongst us in this diocese? It is my task on such 
 an occasion as this to pass in review before you the history of our 
 diocesan work in the interval since the last visitation. It fur- 
 nishes, I am thankful to say, much proof of steady and hopeful 
 progress. The number of churches restored within the last three 
 years has been thirty-five, and of new churches built, four ; and 
 the sum total of the expenditure on Church buildings and restora- 
 tions amounts to £^c)(),(i2\. In the same period there have been 
 thirty-three schools built or enlarged at a cost of ;^ 15, 103, making 
 a total expended upon churches and schools of _;2^i 14,724, or at 
 the rate of a little more than ^38,000 a year. 
 Exten- The w'ork of Church extension, which in this diocese is not so 
 urgently needed as in some others, has prospered as much as 
 could reasonably have been expected during a period of such 
 stagnation and depression in business as the last three years have 
 been. In Leicester two new churches have been completed, and 
 one new parish created and endowed. Loughborough has gained 
 a new church with its endowment. And in Northampton, of the 
 four new parishes which I told you of in my last Visitation we
 
 A CHARGE. 19 
 
 contemplated providing, we have created and endowed two ; a 
 third, for which we have built a handsome and commodious 
 church, is now waiting its endowment from the Commissioners. 
 Sites have been obtained and temporary churches provided for all 
 four. And in all four I am happy to say clergymen have been 
 for some time working zealously and successfully. 
 
 As regards the services of the Church I note again with thank- Church 
 fulness a steady increase in their number and frequency. The s®"^'"'- 
 number of churches in which Ascension-day is observed has risen 
 from 463 to 504 ; and the number of those in which Holy Com- 
 munion is celebrated monthly or more frequently has risen from 
 429 to 470; while the list of those having it less frequently than 
 once a month, has fallen from 123 to 80. Of these only one is 
 returned as marked by the discreditable peculiarity of an adminis- 
 tration only three times in the year ; that is to say, no oftener than 
 the clergyman can possibly avoid celebrating, without rendering 
 himself liable to legal penalties. There may, however, be a few 
 others in which this practice still prevails, inasmuch as there are 
 sixteen churches which have made no return on this point. I 
 should be sorry, however, to suppose that all of these are to be 
 placed in this unhappy category, and I may therefore safely and 
 thankfully assume that this most grievous form of spiritual neglect 
 has almost vanished from this diocese. 
 
 That there should still, however, be no less than 80 churches 
 in which the Lord's Supper is administered less frequently than 
 once a month, is matter for grave regret. And I should not be 
 dealing faithfully with those of my reverend brethren who are still 
 halting in this respect, if I did not call their attention to this 
 defect, and earnestly entreat its amendment. I am thankful to 
 observe the increase of special services in Lent and Advent, and 
 the efforts evidently made to bring before our people, more and 
 more, the whole teaching of the Church's year. The recurring 
 seasons of that year are designed by her to set forth, one after 
 another, all the great verities of the Christian faith, and we of the 
 clergy cannot be too thankful for the fact, that the proclamation 
 of these has not been left by our Church entirely dependent upon 
 our skill, or even our faithfulness in the pulpit ; but that she her- 
 self is preaching them to the people every year, and all the year 
 round. 
 
 The number of candidates for confirmation is slightly, though Confirmation, 
 not largely, on the increase. It is still, however, far below 
 its proper proportion to the Church population of the diocese. 
 I know how many reasons there are for this, the saddest and . 
 most disheartening of them being, I fear, the commonest of them 
 all — the lack of family religion. How can the pastor hope to be 
 largely successful in urging the young to make the vow that 
 devotes them to a godly and a Christian life, or how can he be 
 sanguine of their keeping it, when he knows that all the influences 
 
 c 2
 
 20 J CHARGE. 
 
 of the home are teaching them to devote themselves to the service 
 of the world, the flesh, and the devil? I am not hopeful, therefore, 
 of a large increase in the number of those confirmed, until there 
 come a large revival of practical godliness in the homes of our 
 people. Let us remember, however, that confirmation is in itself 
 a powerful means to this end. The time of preparation for it is a 
 precious eeed time, which must, if we sow in faith, bring forth its 
 fruit in due season ; though that season may not come in the life- 
 time of the sower. Our work amongst the young must, for most 
 of us, be work for our successors ; let us be willing to labour and 
 that other men should enter into our labours. 
 
 The holding of a confirmation in any parish is, as many of you 
 assure me, a great gain and help to you in your efforts to deepen 
 the spiritual life of your people. I am naturally anxious, there- 
 fore, to vary as much as possible the centres of confirmations in 
 the diocese, as well as to increase their number. There are, 
 however, necessary limits to these, not only of the physical 
 strength of the bishop, but of convenience and suitableness of 
 different centres. I cannot hope to hold a confirmation in every 
 parish in the diocese, much as 1 might wish to do so. I can only 
 entreat the clergy to believe that my desire is to give the benefit 
 of a confirmation to as many parishes in turn as I can, and I shall 
 be always glad to consider the request of any Incumbent in the 
 diocese for a confirmation in his own parish, if he will only have 
 the goodness to make this known to me in sufficient time, before 
 arranging the list for the coming year. After this is made and 
 announced, it is all but impossible to make those changes in it 
 which I am sometimes requested to make. 
 
 Our Church schools have greatly profited by the stimulus ot 
 the Education Act, and are in a state of efficiency which may 
 fairly compare with those of most other dioceses. They are 
 also, it would appear, fairly supported, if we may judge from the 
 fact that only in ten cases in the last three years have any of our 
 schools been rented or given to School Boards. I earnestly trust 
 that in all such transfers, the caution which I ventured to give in 
 my last charge, as to preserving all that can be preserved for the 
 Church in the way of the use of the school buildings out of school 
 hours, has been observed. The school-room, I need not remind 
 you, has its invaluable parochial uses besides those of education, 
 and as it has been in most cases built by the money of the Church, 
 it is only reasonable and right that its use for these purposes 
 should be jealously guarded. 
 
 The number of School Boards in this diocese now amounts to 
 68, the number of Board Schools to 46 ; and it is instructive to 
 observe, that in 53 out of these 68, School Boards Churchmen 
 are in the majority, while in fifteen only the majority are Dis- 
 senters. As I have never heard of any complaints of unfairness 
 or sectarianism against the School Boards in which Churchmen
 
 A CHARGE. 2 1 
 
 predominate, we may fairly infer from this that Churchmen are 
 doing in the diocese, what I have ventured to say in the earHer 
 part of this charge it is their wisdom to do, namely, when they 
 cannot have what we believe to be our own better system, 
 loyally and fairly to join in carrying out the system in which the 
 State invites and gives them place to work for religious educa- 
 tion. 
 
 As regards our diocesan religious inspection, it is now so Diocesan in- 
 all but universally accepted and preferred in the diocese, that ''P'''^'"'"- 
 I need say nothing to commend it. There are still a few 
 schools in which it is declined ; but the majority of our school 
 managers have, I imagine, no wish now to revert to the former 
 system of voluntary inspection, gratefully as they may remember 
 the zeal and self-denial of those of our brethren who gave them- 
 selves to it in times past. Our diocesan inspectors report a general 
 and steady improvement in religious knowledge in most of our 
 schools, and a general willingness on the part of school teachers 
 and managers to co-operate with them. This good-will of our 
 school teachers is all important ; indeed, it is essential to the suc- 
 cess of any system of religious inspection. They have a power 
 of passive resistance which might prove fatal to it, and their 
 sympathy and co-operation in it give proof that they recognise 
 the help it gives them in the religious training of their pupils. 
 
 We have lost since last visitation the invaluable services of the 
 Rev. J, B. Harrison, our Diocesan Inspector for the Archdeaconry 
 of Leicester, though I am thankful to say that we still retain him 
 as an Incumbent in the diocese. I have, with the assistance of the 
 Archdiaconal Board of Education, selected a successor, for whom 
 I can express no better wish than that he may follow in the steps 
 of his predecessor. 
 
 On the subject of Sunday-schools I do not propose to address ■'^imday-sriioois 
 you at any length, as you would not desire that I should forestall 
 the discussion on the report of the committee on this subject 
 appointed by our diocesan conference of last year. The statistics, 
 however, which they have collected will be of permanent interest, 
 and as I have obtained them by the favour of the committee I 
 place them on record here. Answers to a paper of queries issued 
 by the committee have been received from 505 schools. From 
 61, I regret to say, no information has been obtained. May we 
 hope that those Incumbents who have declined to supply this in- 
 formation may reconsider their decision, and give us before the 
 meeting of conference next year the means of completing our 
 diocesan statistics on a matter of such interest and importance 
 as this? Need I assure them that there is and can be no power 
 on the part of the committee or of the conference to interfere 
 in any way with their management of their schools ? They can 
 but offer recommendations founded on the information or the 
 suggestions they may receive, and these recommendations it is of
 
 22 A CHARGE. 
 
 course free to every Incumbent or school manager to accept or 
 reject as he may think fit. 
 
 It appears from the returns which have been received that the 
 total number of scholars attending in 505 schools is 49,97?; of 
 whom 24,690 are males and 25,287 females, showing a degree of 
 equality in the attendance of the sexes which I was not prepared 
 to see, and which contrasts strikingly and suggestively with the 
 great inequality in this respect in the numbers of those presented 
 for confirmation. The proportion of this number to the population 
 of parishes, omitting fractions, is i in 10, and taking each arch- 
 deaconry separately it would appear that in the archdeaconry of 
 Northampton i in 9 attend Sunday school; in that of Oakham i 
 in 8 ; and in that of Leicester i in 11. 
 
 Of these scholars, 1,295 rnales and 1,750 females, or a little 
 more than one-sixteenth of the whole, are over sixteen years of age ; 
 a fact which shows us the point at which our efforts at retaining 
 hold of the young, whether in the Sunday-school or in some other 
 way, need to be directed and strengthened. 
 
 The total number of teachers in these 505 schools is 1,757 
 males and 3,001 females ; classes for the instruction of these 
 are conducted by the clergyman in 102 parishes, and the returns 
 also show that in many parishes help and advice are given to the 
 teachers by means of publications. There is one other fact 
 noticed in this report which I observe with especial thankfulness ; 
 it is that children's services are now held in 135 of our parishes. 
 In every parish where this is the case, the Church has made a 
 great step towards remedying a serious evil and danger in our 
 English religious life — the weariness of the children's Sunday. 
 Children's Ser= I fear that in our zeal to utilise the Sunday to the utmost for 
 the religious training of the young, we sometimes forget how sore 
 that weariness may be for the child, who spends the greater part 
 of the day between lessons in the Sunday-school, not always 
 attractively taught, and long services and sermons in church, not 
 specially calculated to interest the childish mind or heart, and 
 then we wonder that so many of our young people, as soon as 
 they are free to do so, forswear Church and Sunday-school to- 
 gether, and that for life. And yet the Sabbath was meant for 
 these too. They have surely their share in that day of rest, which 
 is their Lord's day, who willed that the little ones should come 
 unto him, and who blamed those who would have kept them from 
 Him. He is a faithful pastor then as well as a wise one, who 
 strives to make Sunday a happy day for the little ones of his flock; 
 and certainly he helps to do this who gives them on that day, 
 a bright, brief, hearty service, such as they can understand and 
 enjoy, and which may make their Father's House for them a 
 pleasant place, which having once learned to love, they may in 
 after years not willingly forsake. 
 
 Accompanying the returns to their queries much information 
 
 vices.
 
 A CHARGE. 2 1? 
 
 of a general kind and many practical suggestions have been given 
 to the committee, and they have in their report made recommenda- 
 tions which will, I have no doubt, prove of great value and interest. 
 All that it seems necessary for me to say further on this subject 
 now is, that it seems to me dear, that while our Sunday-schools 
 give the same evidence of zealous and successful labour as do our 
 other departments of Church work, there is room for improvement 
 in general method and system, and especially in the all-important 
 work of the selection and the training of the teachers. 
 
 The appointment of this committee and of others on subjects Diocesan Con- 
 of practical importance, is one of the happy results of our diocesan ^'"■^"^®^- 
 conferences. Year after year I feel the value of these, and the 
 help and strength they give in the government of a diocese. 
 They give the Bishop just what it is so important and yet so diffi- 
 cult for him otherwise to obtain, the expression of the mind of 
 the clergy and laity of the diocese after full and open discussion 
 and debate. The decisions at which such representative assem- 
 blies arrive are certainly far better entiUed to be regarded 
 as the voice of the Church in any diocese, than are those party 
 manifestoes and declarations so much in vogue amongst us of late 
 years — the signatures to which, given often hastily and without 
 ever having heard the other side of the question, often, too, under 
 considerable pressure as a token of party allegiance, really indicate 
 little more than the relative strength or zeal of the parties which 
 originate them — and which unfortunately too often commit those 
 who sign, especially amongst the younger clergy, to positions and 
 opinions from which they find it difficult afterwards to recede, • 
 however much they may wish to do so. I am as desirous as 
 any one can be of hearing the true voice of the Church; but I 
 think we are far more likely to hear it in the deliberate utter- 
 ances of our representative assemblies than in the discordant 
 party cries which are so constantly echoing and re-echoing all 
 around us. 
 
 ■ I trust, too, that the clergy and laity are realising the advantages 
 of these free conferences in which they meet, to learn each other's 
 minds, and to gain, what men will never gain so long as they keep 
 aloof from one another, a spirit of mutual respect and tolerance, 
 such as I am thankful to say our conferences have largely dis- 
 played. 
 
 You will see from this review of Church work and life in this Progress of the 
 diocese for the last three years, how much cause there is for t^,e'"^1'ast'^""tea 
 encouragement. Spite of many drawbacks and defects, and of years, 
 much opposition, we have made real and steady progress; and 
 this is still more apparent when we extend our retrospect over the 
 larger period often years during which I have known this diocese. 
 As I look back on that period now drawing to a close, I can see 
 i68 churches restored or rebuilt, 282 schools built or enlarged, and 
 an expenditure on these two departments of Church work alone of
 
 2 4 A CHARGE. 
 
 ^2^402,000, or at the rate of more than ;^4o,ooo a year. I can 
 see the 'mischievous exclusiveness of the pew system giving way 
 to free and open churches ; our Church schools passing safely 
 through a crisis of legislature that at one time was thought to 
 threaten their existence, but which has really resulted in making 
 them more effective than ever ; diocesan religious inspection esta- 
 blished and accepted ; diocesan conferences gathering the clergy 
 and laity together, and helping to weld the diocese more and 
 more into a strong and organized whole, instead of a weak and 
 unwieldy collection of isolated parishes ; the clergy drawing to- 
 gether more closely for brotherly counsel and co-operation ; the 
 help of the laity more freely sought and more fully rendered ; the 
 Church growing daily more powerful and respected in our great 
 towns, where not so long ago she was weak and despised for her 
 weakness ; in one word, tokens on every side of renewed and 
 vigorous and successful life in the Church. As we see these 
 things, brethren, may we not thank God and take courage ? May 
 we not recognise, not boastfully, when so much yet remains to be 
 done, but humbly and thanklully, the work which the Church has 
 done, the progress she has made even in that comparatively brief 
 period ? 
 
 And now as we look back on that period, let me ask you, or 
 rather let me entreat you to ask yourselves each one this question : 
 Can I honestly say that I have been seriously hindered in my 
 share of this great work by any existing rubric, law, or canon 
 of the Church, or by any legal interpretation of these ? Can I 
 say, for instance, that I should have been more successful in 
 winning souls for God, or in building up His people in their 
 most holy faith, if I had been free to preach in dissenting 
 chapels; or if I had been allowed to wear a green garment in- 
 stead of a white one, or to place thirty-six lighted candles on the 
 holy table instead of two unlighted ones, or to perform, indeed, 
 any one of those ceremonies which recent decisions have pro- 
 nounced unlawful ? Or as regards those relations between Church 
 and State which so many are declaring just now to be so grievously 
 hindering the work of the Church, on which of these can any one of 
 you lay his hand and say, This has really crippled me in my work 
 as a parish priest; that has really prevented me from doing what I 
 felt to be important for the spiritual good of my people? And if, 
 as I suspect, the answer from the most successful workers amongst 
 us would be, I have felt no such hindrance ; I have often wished 
 that I could reach in my work to the limits allowed me by the 
 Church, but I have never felt that to do it efficiently I need pass 
 beyond these — if there be still ample room within those limits 
 for more work than we can well do, and if within those limits 
 such 'good work has been done, let me ask you to consider 
 seriously what is the real worth of those complaints which we 
 hear all around us from friend and foe, of an enslaved Church,
 
 A CHARGE. 25 
 
 hindered by the fetters ot" the State from all the great work which 
 she might do if these were once brol^en ? 
 
 Look round upon what the Church of England has done 
 during the last thirty years at home and abroad, and ask your- 
 selves, Is there any religious body in Christendom that has 
 done more in the same time, of the true and proper work for 
 which Churches exist, than this enslaved and fettered Church of 
 England? Let us ask this question too: Has there, during that 
 period, been any one measure for which the Church has unani- 
 mously asked the Legislature as being essential to its spiritual 
 work for the nation, which it has not obtained? Beginning with 
 the revival of Convocation, and ending with the increase of the 
 Episcopate, what is that reform, that improvement, which the 
 State has refused whenever it has seen that the Church was 
 really united and in earnest in asking for it ? And if this be so, 
 let me entreat you to consider seriously whether we would show 
 our good sense or our wisdom, in joining those who are just now 
 shrieking and gesticulating for liberty, and declaring that if it be 
 not granted speedily the Church must at all hazards break the 
 chains with which the State has loaded her. Observe that I do 
 not say, I do not think, that there is nothing in the existing 
 relations between Church and State which is capable of being 
 amended, or may need readjustment. It were hardly possible 
 that time, " which is the great innovator," should have made no 
 such changes — both in Church and in State — since the sixteenth 
 century, as should call for corresponding change in the relations 
 then established between them. Such changes have undoubtedly 
 taken place, and Churchmen are therefore perfectly justified in 
 seeking for such readjustments of their union with the State as 
 may fairly represent this altered condition of things ; and what is 
 more, I believe that if they seek for them in a calm and temperate 
 spirit they may obtain them. But what I protest against, is this 
 feverish impatience for great and sweeping change, to be obtained 
 now and at once ; this crying up on every side of some here ic 
 remedy which is to save the Church if only it be taken without 
 delay; this unthankful forgetfulness of all the work the Church 
 has done, and all that she might do, even if these boasted remedies 
 were never tried, or these great organic changes never ettected. 
 Let us pause, my reverend bretlnen, before we risk the Church 
 of England, as she is, with all her faults and defects, in the attempt 
 to realise all at once some heated vision of what she might, or 
 ought to be ; let us rather consider how large may be the sacrifice 
 of personal and party preference, of conviction even in things 
 non-essential, which may be called for at our hands, for the sake 
 of preserving the peace, and with the peace the efficiency and the 
 safety, of the Church of England. 
 
 There are however, doubtless, practical reforms and amend-
 
 26 
 
 A CHARGE. 
 
 Reforms and 
 Amendments. 
 
 ments in the Church for which we ought to strive ; for some of 
 which we need, but for many of which we do not need, the help 
 of the Legislature, but are quite capable of effecting them for 
 ourselves. 
 
 On former occasions I have set before you some of these, both 
 as regards our own diocese and the Church at large, and I now 
 proceed to mention some others which seem to me to be both 
 desirable and fairly practicable, if we can only agree in attempting 
 them. 
 
 In the first place, then, let me say, that while the idea of 
 diocesan organization is fairly gaining ground amongst us, and 
 we are all more and more realising that there is such a thing as 
 diocesan as well as parochial work for the Church, we have not 
 I fear yet accepted generally the conclusion which naturally 
 follows from this, that for the maintenance of diocesan institu- 
 tions we need a well-organized system of diocesan finance. The 
 idea of parochial finance is of course familiar to every good 
 parish priest, and such an one I am sure understands that it is 
 not safe to trust any parochial object of prominent importance 
 merely to the chance of the charity sermon or subscription list ; 
 he has learned the value of systematic and regular collection of 
 the contributions of all in the offertory, the regular laying by on 
 the first day of the week by every man, which is the true scrip- 
 tural principle of giving to the Church. Now, surely the principle 
 which is found so valuable in the parish is equally so for the 
 diocese. 
 
 We need for diocesan objects a diocesan offertory, just as we 
 need for parochial objects a parochial offertory. It is not safe or 
 wise in the one case, any more than in the other, to trust solely 
 to the uncertain and variable source of the subscription list. Sub- 
 scribers die or leave the diocese, new ones must be found by the 
 unhappy secretary of the diocesan society, and large cost must be 
 incurred in circulating appeals which few take the trouble to read ; 
 while, after all, these eftorts only obtain the subscriptions of the few 
 wealthy and more prominent members of a diocese, and fail to 
 gather in the small contributions of the many, who indeed, for the 
 most part, never hear of these needs of the diocese, and have 
 no opportunity given them of aiding them. The consequence is 
 that every now and then some important diocesan institution is 
 on the verge of extinction, and is only saved by the spasmodic 
 efforts of some zealous supporter. That I am not speaking at 
 random in this matter some of our diocesan secretaries well 
 know. Diocesan inspection, for instance, in one archdeaconry 
 in this diocese has narrowly escaped this peril, if it has 
 escaped it. 
 
 Now it has been proposed and agreed to, as you are aware, in 
 two successive meetings of our diocesan Conference, that we 
 should endeavour to prevent these dangers to our diocesan insd-
 
 A CHARGE. 27 
 
 hitions in the same way as other dioceses have done ; namely, by 
 a regular and methodical system of collections all over the diocese 
 for certain diocesan objects ; the rural deanery being in each case 
 the local association for the purpose, and the clergy giving an 
 annual sermon for it, and paying to the rural dean as treasurer 
 such sums as they might receive, and the committee of Conference 
 receiving and distributing the money so obtained, for the purposes 
 to vi'hich the Conference has assigned them. 
 
 I am aware that while this plan has been adopted in many 
 rural deaneries, it has not yet made as much way as I could wish 
 in the diocese. The idea still seems largely to prevail, that this 
 is an attempt at dictating to the clergy what charities they shall 
 advocate, or that it is in some way intended to supersede existing 
 societies or institutions in the diocese. Let me once for all 
 declare that such an impression is utterly erroneous. This 
 finance association is really and simply a diocesan collector, 
 receiving the money of those who are willing to give it, and 
 paying it over to the association or institution to which it is 
 assigned by the donor. The only exception to this is in the 
 case of the augmentation of small benefices, for which no asso- 
 ciation already existed, and which therefore has been taken in 
 hand by the committee of Conference itself. And as to dic- 
 tation to the clergy, how is it possible that there can be such a 
 thing, where every clergyman is and must be free either to decline 
 to advocate any of these objects, or to select any one of them 
 which may specially commend itself to him, and they can hardly, 
 I should have thought, be all of them distasteful to any one. 
 
 Let me urge on the clergy of this diocese, then, to dismiss once 
 for all from their minds all thought whatsoever of interference 
 or dictation in this matter, and to regard this proposal in its true 
 light, as an attempt to place on a broad and secure basis institu- 
 tions, the value of which I am sure will be generally admitted, and 
 which have been approved of by the Conference of the diocese. 
 Let me beg of you, then, that you will give this experiment, if it 
 were only as an experiment, a fair trial, and that you will grant a 
 sermon once a year in each of your churches for these united 
 diocesan objects, or for any one of them that you may specially 
 prefer. 
 
 One of the objects to which funds thus obtained are to be Augmentation 
 devoted is the augmentation of small benefices. Let me plead fices.'"''" ''^"°" 
 earnestly for this. It is not right, it is not decent that there 
 should be, as there are, in the ministry of our Church, clergymen 
 in the receipt of an income which is below the wages of many of 
 our artisans. " The labourer is worthy of his hire." " They that 
 preach the gospel should live of the gospel." Is an income of 
 eighty or one hundred, or even of a hundred and fifty pounds 
 a year a reasonable " hire " for educated Christian gentlemen who
 
 2 8 A CHARGE. 
 
 labour for the wealthiest laity in Europe? Can he be said to "live" 
 who has no more than this for his livelihood and that of his family ? 
 Is it creditable to us that this should be so, or that being so, we 
 should make no effort to amend it? How is it that this has not been 
 done long since ? The laity of the Church are, as I have said, far 
 from illiberal. How comes it that their liberality has not yet found 
 this channel ? I grudge no shilling that has been laid out in restor- 
 ing and adorning our churches, and yet I cannot help feeUng how 
 strange a contrast there sometimes is between their rich and lavish 
 adornment and the ill-requited labours of those who serve in them. 
 There must be a reason for this ; where are we to find it ? It 
 comes, perhaps, partly from the fact that the clergy are naturally 
 unwilling to complain of their small incomes ; but mainly, I think, 
 from two other reasons. First, the idea that our Church is a very 
 wealthy body, and that if her wealth were only redistributed there 
 would be enough and to spare for all. This is a mistake which has 
 been again and again refuted. The entire income of the Church, if 
 all put together and divided, would not, it has been calculated, give 
 an average income all round to every one of her ministers of more 
 than ;!^2 5o a year, and no one, I suppose, would imagine it possible 
 or wise to reduce all clerical incomes to this one dead level of 
 straitened maintenance. No redistribution of the Church's wealth 
 then that could possibly be looked for would sufficiently augment 
 the incomes of the poorer benefices ; and if we wait for this before 
 we set about the augmentation we shall wait for ever. Another and 
 a more serious objection is that drawn from the proprietary interests 
 of private patrons and the sale of advowsons. Why, it is asked, 
 should we increase the value of a benefice merely to enable the patron 
 to make a better bargain for it in the market ? There is some force, 
 it must be owned, in this argument, and it shows that one of the 
 ill results of our present traffic in livings is that it thus tends to 
 impoverish the Church and the clergy. But, not to say that this 
 can have no application to the case of livings in pubUc patronage, 
 or that it is possible even as regards private patronage to make 
 arrangements which might prevent the augmentation going into the 
 patron's pocket, let us take the case at the worst — let us suppose 
 that when we have in augmenting the living made it saleable, it is 
 actually sold. Have we not even in that case gained for the Church 
 and for the parishioners who are no parties to this sale, a decent 
 remuneration for the clergyman ? Have we not given them a 
 better prospect of obtaining the services of a duly qualified 
 minister ? And is the fact, then, that a patron may, though it does 
 not follow that he will, enrich himself in consequence of our 
 gifts, to prevent our doing this great and immediate good to the 
 clergyman, the parish, and the Church ? Surely if we are to wait 
 to remedy an evil that is in our power to remedy until other evils 
 are remedied that are not yet within our reach, we shall remedy 
 nothing. Let us do one thing, and that the most pressing thing,
 
 A CHARGE. 29 
 
 at a time. Let us " provide things honest in the sight of all men " 
 by augmenting to a decent living the incomes of our clergy. Let 
 us also set about reforming abuses of Church patronage ; and it 
 might be no small help in so doing if we could show that the Church 
 by her contributions to the value of livings had in many cases 
 tlius obtained as it were a moral lien upon them, which might en- 
 title her to be heard in her protest against their being made the 
 subject for further sale and barter. But let us not delay the one 
 plain and urgent duty, until the possibly distant day when we can 
 discharge the other. I plead, then, with the laity, I plead with 
 our richer brethren of the clergy, for the augmentation of the 
 smaller benefices in this diocese, and I trust that we shall not rest 
 satisfied until we have secured p^2oo a year and a house to every 
 Licumbent in it whose income is now below that amount. 
 
 In addition to the making proper provision for the sustenance Supply for 
 of the regular and settled ministry amongst us, we need greatly g^ndes^' ^^^^' 
 some provision for what I may term the spiritual emergencies of 
 the diocese. From time to time in the history of a diocese there 
 come sudden calls upon the Church for efforts of a special kind, 
 which our ordinary parochial machinery was never calculated to 
 meet. The quiet life, for instance, of some half-dozen country 
 parishes is suddenly invaded, as we have lately seen in some 
 parts of this diocese, by crowds of labourers engaged upon the 
 works of some new railway. The clergyman in each of these 
 parishes finds himself suddenly surrounded by a large new popu- 
 lation, whose ways and habits of thought and feeling are all as new 
 and strange to him, as he and his Church and parish are to them, 
 and who require, if they are to be dealt with to any good purpose, 
 all the energy, activity, and special aptitude of a specially qualified 
 missioner. And while he is standing dismayed in the presence 
 of such a new and overwhelming field of work as this, or trying 
 to find help of the fittest kind for it, the golden opportunity of 
 winning these souls whom God's providence has thus brought to 
 the very door of the Church is passing rapidly away. The multi- 
 tude that have gathered round about her must go away unfed, not 
 because she has no compassion for them, but because she is not 
 ready to distribute to them the bread of life. 
 
 Or take again the case of the town pastor, where from some 
 cause or other the population has largely and rapidly increased, 
 and who sees his parish suddenly covered with that network of 
 little streets and squares with which we are all so familiar in our 
 large and growing towns \ where the newly congregated masses of 
 the people are to be speedily won or altogether lost to the 
 Church, and where the pastor, utterly worn out and borne down 
 as he often is with the effort to minister to a population that 
 already overtaxes his energies, stands aghast at this new demand 
 upon his strength.
 
 30 A CHARGE. 
 
 Or let us take the case of an epidemic in town or country, 
 where even with the help of the nurse or the sister, the clergy- 
 man finds himself utterly unable to minister to the needs of 
 the sick and the dying; or where he is himself laid aside 
 from his work by sudden and temporary illness, and finds it, as 
 we know so many do, all but impossible to procure at a moment's 
 notice the clerical help that he requires. Such emergencies as 
 these, and they are frequently occurring, cannot always be met at 
 the moment Avhen they occur. They need some provision made 
 before and ready for the occasion. Now if there were in every 
 diocese — say in the cathedral city — a stafi" of clergy placed at the 
 command of the bishop and ready to go at a moment's notice 
 wherever he might send them, and if these mission clergy were, 
 in the intervals of such more urgent work, to be engaged in 
 study, or in helping in the mission work of the Church in 
 the town where they lived, what a strength the Church would 
 gain by such a readily disposable force of specially trained 
 ministers as this ! At present she has all her forces engaged in 
 action ; do we not want a reserve from which to send in reinforce- 
 ments just where they are required? Can we hope to gain this 
 new force for the Church in this diocese ? It only needs what we 
 have most at our disposal — money. And I trust that there may 
 be those amongst our faithful laity who will, now that it is put 
 before them, come to the help of the Church in this respect. 
 
 Supply of Mi- Closely connected with this question of the supply of clergy for 
 special emergencies, is that of the supply of men for the work of 
 the ministry generally. The lack of this is beginning to be 
 seriously felt amongst us. I am constantly hearing from Incum- 
 bents in this diocese, both in town and country, of the all but 
 impossibility of obtaining curates ; and if this be the case as 
 regards the ordinary demand and supply of the diocese for its 
 existing wants, how are we to hope to meet the growing demands 
 which increasing population and increasing work are ever throw- 
 ing upon the clergy ? The fields of the Church, as we look upon 
 them at this moment, are indeed white unto harvest ; must that 
 harvest be left ungathered, or gathered by other hands than hers, 
 because her labourers are so few? What can we do then to 
 meet this crying need of our Church ? If we ask the causes of it 
 with a view to remedy them, we find that they are many and 
 various, and some of them I fear not likely to lessen, but rather to 
 grow stronger, in the future. The rival attractions of the many pro- 
 fessions and occupations now open to all under our competitive 
 system ; the high prizes thus held out as compared with the 
 poorer worldly prospects of the ministry ; the early age at which 
 men may enter upon these as compared with that fixed for ordi- 
 nation ; the cost of university education; the increasing salaries, 
 which incumbents with fixed incomes must now pay for the ser-
 
 A CHARGE. 31 
 
 vices of curates ; and possibly, too, the spread of sceptical thought 
 and the unsettled state of mind of many of our most promising 
 young men, which makes them unwilling to bind themselves for 
 life by any dogmatic pledge : all these things are against us in 
 the matter of ministerial supply. 
 
 Now we may attempt to meet these difficulties, and we are 
 meeting them to a certain extent, in various ways ; by endeavours 
 to assist poorer students for the ministry in their university career; 
 by theological colleges which enable some to dispense with uni- 
 versity training ; or again by the efforts of such societies as 
 the Additional Curates and Church Pastoral Aid to assist in- 
 cumbents in providing curates ; or of the Curates Augmentation 
 Society in increasing their incomes. I doubt, however, whether 
 all these together will ever give us — they certainly have not yet 
 given us — anything like a sufficient supply of ministers to meet our 
 most pressing demands. 
 
 And even if we could hope in these ways largely to increase 
 the number of clerg}', it becomes a serious question how far it is 
 safe or right to do so, unless at the same time we make a corre- 
 sponding effort, and that on a very large scale, for their maintenance. 
 For it must be remembered that every additional curate added to 
 the ministry increases the number of our unbeneficed clergy, and 
 delays the period when they may expect to obtain, in their turn, 
 preferment. The number of benefices therefore remaining com- 
 paratively stationary, and the number of clergy being at the same 
 tinie largely and rapidly increased, must tend to bring about a 
 large amount of clerical distress and discontent, and of scandal to 
 the Church from the spectacle of aged curates whom long years 
 of service have left only curates still. This may, I fear, be 
 regarded as rather a low and secular view of this question ; but 
 so long as human nature is what it is we may not safely over- 
 look it. I can only hope that those who may denounce the 
 secularity of this objection are prepared to meet it, not by a lofty 
 and spiritual disregard of the secular requirements of the clergy, 
 but by an effort to supply them. When they do this, but not 
 until then, it will be safe to disregard the common-sense question. 
 How if you greatly multiply the clergy of the Church are you to 
 provide for them ? 
 
 Pressed by these considerations, many whose opinions are Revival of Dia 
 deserving of the highest respect are recommending that we should '^°"^'^'^- 
 resort for the supply of spiritual aid that we need to what is termed 
 the lay, or more correctly speaking, the permanent diaconate. 
 They propose to admit to the diaconate members of our Church 
 while still retaining their secular calling, and who should, as a rule, 
 not seek for the priesthood, but remain deacons for life. There 
 is no doubt that this would at once relieve us of the difficulty of 
 the maintenance of the diaconate, which now so largely hinders 
 its increase amongst us, and would open up a large mine of
 
 32 A CHARGE. 
 
 spiritual wealth to the Church. Nor can I see anything in it op- 
 posed to Scripture or to Church principles. The diaconate would 
 in that case, I believe, much more closely resemble that of the 
 primitive Church than ours does now. I see, however, these diffi- 
 culties in the way of attempting it. In the first place the strong 
 repugnance to it of the laity, who look upon it as lowering their 
 ideal of an English clergyman, as they have hitherto known him. 
 Whatever may be the real value of this objection, the fact that 
 it is so strongly entertained, seems a reason why the experiment 
 should at any rate not be tried just yet. There is, however, 
 another and perhaps a stronger reason against it, and it is, that if 
 we were to ordain deacons of this class, and at the same time, 
 as we should doubtless have to do, were to continue to ordain 
 those whom for distinction's sake we may term clerical deacons, 
 we should then have, side by side, two classes of deacons, the 
 one devoted entirely to the ministry, and engaging in no secular 
 work or calling — the other still engaged in secular pursuits ; and 
 I confess that I cannot regard, without apprehension, the possible 
 rivalries and estrangements likely to arise between these two widely 
 differing sections of the same order, nor the secularising influence 
 of the one upon the other. 
 Sub -Diaconate. It sccms to me that for the present, at least, we would do well 
 to turn our minds to the other alternative, of largely increasing 
 both the number and the work of the order of lay readers, or 
 sub-deacons, already established amongst us. I would gladly see 
 the number of these lay evangelists much greater than it is at 
 present, and I would give them, as they showed themselves 
 fitted for it, all that work of a deacon, save the ministry of the 
 Word in the parish church and the deacon's share in the adminis- 
 tration of the Sacraments, which is set forth in the exhortation 
 to deacons by our Church. In this way we should be largely 
 helping the work of the deacon by an order of sub-deacons, 
 just as the work of the priest is helped by that of the deacon, 
 while the deacon might still be what he really now is — simply 
 a probationer for the priesthood ; and in this way, too, we 
 should be preparing the way for trying under the most favour- 
 able circumstances, if it ever is to be tried, the larger experi- 
 ment of the permanent diaconate. It is important, however, 
 if this sub-diaconate is to do its real work of supplementing 
 the ordained ministry, that it should not be regarded as a 
 stepping-stone to it, by means of which men, not otherwise duly 
 quaUfied, may hope to obtain ordination. Such a view of the 
 office would be very disastrous in its effects — both on it and on 
 the ministry. It would at once limit the number of those who 
 sought the sub-diaconate to those who intended to proceed after- 
 wards to the ministry, and it would tend to that lowering of the 
 standard of qualification for the latter, which is just what we 
 should strive to avoid. I trust, therefore, that those who may
 
 A CHARGE. 3^ 
 
 seek this office in this diocese will do so for its own sake, and for 
 the love they have for the work it gives them as lay members of 
 the Church of Christ, and not expect that I shall recognise 
 service in it as a claim for admission to holy orders on easier 
 terms than those required of other candidates. The number of our 
 lay readers as yet amounts only to 30, but I hope, as 1 have said, 
 to see this number greatly increased, and the order increasingly 
 recognised as one both of honour and usefulness in the Church. 
 
 The revival of the true work and office of the diaconate, whether Revival of the 
 in this or in any other way that the wisdom of the Church may ^'^conate. 
 devise, is, I am persuaded, one of the reforms most needed 
 amongst us at this moment. For the truth is, that this office has 
 been almost lost to us by the manner in which we have dealt 
 with it. 
 
 In theory, of course, we fully recognise its importance. Our 
 Church declares that it is to be "held in reverend estimation," as 
 one of those orders of ministers which, " from the apostles' time, 
 have been in Christ's Church." And when she recites, as she 
 does in her service for the ordination of deacons, the history of 
 the first institution of the diaconate by the apostles, she evidently 
 intends to refer us to that, as showing the true reason for the 
 creation of this office, namely, that there should ahvays be an 
 order of men in Christ's Church who should do a particular w'ork, 
 which it was not fit that the presbyters should do. Their 
 special work which they were not to leave for any other, was 
 to be the ministry of the word and prayer. And in order to 
 enable them to give themselves continually to this, the deacon 
 was appointed to discharge all those other and more secular 
 parts of the work of the ministry, which would otherwise distract 
 the presbyter from the more proper duties of his office. Now, 
 surely, if such help is needed by the presbyter from the deacon, 
 it is needed always and everywhere, and not only in some places 
 and for a brief time. If the need for the deacon be perma- 
 nent and be inherent in the nature of the office and duty of the 
 presbyter, then wherever there is the presbyter charged with the 
 ministry of the word, there should also be the deacon to relieve 
 him from the " service of tables." But how is it that we practi- 
 cally deal with this office, which Scripture and our Church thus 
 declare to be of such permanent value and importance? Is it not 
 the fact that we aim at dispensing with it, or at getting rid of it 
 when we have it, as soon as we possibly can? 
 
 When an incumbent seeks for a curate, is it not his great 
 desire to find one in " full orders," that is to say, to do his work 
 as a presbyter, without the help of a deacon? Or if he obtains the 
 services of a deacon, he is impatient until he acquire priests' 
 orders, that is to say, until the office of the deacon is abolished in 
 his parish, which is thenceforth to be ministered to by two priests, 
 neither of whom can truly realise the Scriptural idea of his office, 
 
 D
 
 34 A CHARGE. 
 
 by giving himself continually to prayer and to the ministry of 
 the Word, because both of them must give themselves largely to 
 all that " work " for which the inspired wisdom of the apostles 
 had provided the order of deacons. So that, in fact, Ave are guilty 
 of the strange inconsistency of maintaining in theory that the 
 diaconate is always necessary to the Church at large, and of as- 
 serting in practice that it is not necessary, is in fact rather un- 
 necessary and undesirable, in each one of those cures of souls, 
 which taken altogether constitute the Church. 
 
 And what is the result of this practical absorption of the 
 diaconate into the presbyterate in our Church ? Is it not that we 
 find the parish priest everywhere overburdened by the secularities 
 of his position which ought to fall upon that very order of the 
 ministry which he has been so impatient to suppress in his own 
 parish? What diligent and pious priest is there amongst us who 
 does not know how hard it is for him to find time to spare, from 
 making or working all the machinery of his parochial organization, 
 for the study of the Word, for the care of his own soul, and for 
 dealing individually with the spiritual needs of the souls com- 
 mitted to his charge ? And is not the reason for this to be found 
 in the fact that the priest is trying to do that which is not the 
 true and proper function of his ofitice, that he is attempting what is 
 indeed truly work for God, but for the doing of which God has 
 provided him with help which he is neglecting to use ? 
 
 And may it not be that God is teaching us, by this very failure 
 of our most devoted parish priests to do all that they feel ought 
 to be done for their people, to consider whether we are really and 
 truly doing His work in His way, or trying instead to do it in our 
 own; and whether, therefore, this difficulty we are now ex- 
 periencing as to the supply for the work of His ministry may not 
 be the way in which He is leading us to recover one of His own 
 gifts to His Church which we have almost lost through our own 
 neglect, but which may be ours again if we will only reclaim and 
 use it aright ? 
 Earlier age for There is, howevcr, a reform as regards our present diaconate, 
 Ordination. •yvhich I am Satisfied might be effected with very happy results, 
 and which I am most anxious to see attempted ; it is that of 
 reverting to what was the rule of the Church for a hundred years 
 after the Reformation, by fixing the minimum limit of age for 
 ordination to the diaconate at twenty-one, instead of, as it is at 
 present, twenty-three years, leaving that for the priesthood what 
 it is now, twenty-four years. The advantages of this change would, 
 I think, be these : — First, that it would relieve the ministry from 
 the disadvantage it now stands in as regards other careers, which, 
 because they can be entered so much earlier, are drawing away 
 so many young men from us. Next, it would tend to the revival 
 of the real diaconate, because such deacons would not, on this 
 plan, be licensed to preach by the bishop, as deacons now are, as
 
 A CHARGE. 35 
 
 a matter of course, the instant iheyare ordained ; but only as they 
 showed themselves qualified for the ministry of the Word. But 
 especially it would meet the serious evil, which I know not how 
 we are to meet in any other way, of the present lamentable want of 
 study and preparation in many of the candidates for the ministry. 
 How great this really is, bishops and their examining chaplains 
 probably only know. Nothing is more common than for a young 
 man, who is applying to a bishop for ordination, to tell him that 
 he has had only time to study divinity since he took his degree 
 three months, or at most six, belbre his application ; that he 
 has since been "getting up " one or two of the books required by 
 the bishop for candidates for orders, and he has no doubt but 
 that he can "get up" all the other books in time for the next 
 ordination ! Of preparation for the ministry other and better 
 than this he has never so much as thought. Of ecclesiastical 
 history, of pastoral or dogmatic theology, of the contents and 
 history of his Prayer Book, and, alas ! sometimes of those of his 
 English Bible, he is complacently ignorant. He has never once 
 tried to speak in public, nor ever practised the reading of the 
 Liturgy, but is quite ready to make his first attempts in each of 
 these difficult arts at the cost of some much-enduring congrega- 
 tion. And it is on the strength of qualifications such as these 
 that young men seriously propose to themselves to enter on the 
 solemn office and weighty charge of teachers of religion to the 
 people. Is there any profession in the world, save that of the 
 ministry, into which men would dream of trying to enter, while so 
 ignorant of its requirements as this ? What would be said of the 
 heads of the medical profession, for instance, if they admitted men 
 to practise on the bodies of their fellow-creatures as ill qualified 
 as those whom we are expected to admit to practise upon their 
 souls ? Is it any wonder, if young men prepared thus for the 
 ministry go easily over to Rome, or Dissent, or Scepticism ? What 
 ballast of learning or thought have they acquired to keep them 
 from being carried away by the first wind of doctrine, the first 
 plausible argument or advocate that they encounter? And yet, if 
 we bishops were to raise the standard for the ministry to its proper 
 height — if we were to require, for instance, as we ought to require, 
 that every candidate for it should have completed two years of 
 preliminary study and training, we should only succeed in cutting 
 oft", almost completely, the present too scanty supply of candidates, 
 the majority ot whom neither would nor could, as things now are, 
 afford the time for such preparation. 
 
 Nor is this difficulty really met by our Theological Colleges ; for, 
 valuable as these institutions are as supplementing university 
 training, no one would wish that they should supersede it ; and 
 if they do not, and if our clergy generally are to be what we would 
 certainly desire them to be — university graduates — the same 
 difficulty, as to time for study after graduating, arises respecting tlie 
 
 D 2
 
 36 A CHARGE. 
 
 Theological Colleges, and they can never, therefore, hope to train 
 the majority of our candidates for the ministry. 
 
 Now if we cannot, and I fear that we cannot, hope to secure the 
 needful time for study before the ordination of the deacon, the 
 next best thing would surely be to secure it in the proposed inter- 
 val between his diaconate and his priesthood. During that time 
 I would have his studies directed, as in this diocese they are now 
 in the shorter interval of the one year of the diaconate, by the 
 examining chaplains of the bishop, and he should be periodically 
 examined in the results of those studies, an examination in which 
 our Theological Colleges might give us most valuable assistance. 
 
 He would remain, in short, for three years at school, in what 
 would practically be the divinity school of the diocese, before he 
 were admitted to the priesthood. In this way we should combine 
 two things now unfortunately opposed to each other — a somewhat 
 larger supply for the ministry, and a higher standard of training 
 for it. One other advantage, too, would result from this plan, 
 that it would tend to secure three years' probation before any man 
 could be put in charge of a parish, and so prevent the scandal we 
 sometimes see now of a youth of twenty-four, with just one year's 
 experience of his profession, entering on the duties of — it may be 
 a large and important parish which has been " held " for him 
 until he should be " priested ! " 
 
 This subject of supply and preparation for the ministry 
 naturally leads on from the affairs of our own diocese to some 
 considerations affecting the Church at large, which I am desirous 
 of bringing before you. We may pass rapidly over the ecclesias- 
 tical legislation, or attempts at legislation, of the last three years, 
 as presenting httle that calls for special note. An unfortunate 
 attempt at settling the Burials question in the House of Lords, by 
 conceding everything for which the Church has contended, has led 
 to what I am sure its promoters had no wish for — its further 
 postponement to what may not prove a more convenient season. 
 
 A measure has been introduced this session respecting the 
 insurances of ecclesiastical buildings, which, after being referred to 
 a select committee and amended in many respects in accordance 
 with their recommendations, now lies before the clergy for their 
 consideration. Opinions are largely divided upon its merits. My 
 own inchne in its favour, as obtaining for the Church, as her 
 own insurer, those large profits now obtained by insurance com- 
 panies, and as not in my judgment, in its amended form, unfriendly 
 either to the interests or the liberties of the clergy. This is, 
 however, a point on which the clergy must judge for themselves ; 
 they can have the bill if they wish for it, and they will not have 
 it if they disapprove of it. I hope that it may accordingly receive 
 full and careful consideration in our ruri-decanal chapters. 
 
 Two bills for the increase of the Episcopate have become law,
 
 A CHARGE, 37 
 
 giving the Church the additional strength of six new sees. As 
 this was legislation which simply enabled the Church to expend 
 her own money upon increasing her own spiritual efficiency in a 
 way which she felt to be needful, it naturally provoked a certain 
 amount of opposition in Parliament from those who thoroughly 
 understand the fact that the spiritual efficiency of the Church is 
 her best defence against her assailants. The contradictory and 
 unreal arguments urged by these persons show clearly enough 
 what the real motive for their opposition was ; while, on the other 
 hand, the fact that Parliament passed this measure in spite of their 
 resistance may be taken as proving that the legislature is still 
 willing to deal fairly and justly by the National Church, whenever 
 it is fully and fairly informed by that Church of its real wants and 
 wishes. 
 
 If the ecclesiastical legislature of the last three years has not Ecclesiastical 
 been very active, this cannot be said of ecclesiastical litiga- L'"°^"°°- 
 tion during the same period ; that has certainly been rife enough, 
 and may prove fertile enough, too, in results which may need all 
 our patience and wisdom to deal with. There is much, it is true, 
 ill our recent legal combats of merely passing interest. Petty 
 technical triumphs or failures in modes of procedure, or questions 
 of rival jurisdiction between courts ecclesiastical and civil, are 
 after all mere skirmishes in a larger contest upon the issues of 
 which they can have no lasting effect. They will settle them- 
 selves somehow, sooner or later, and at last some case must come 
 for decision in which no technical flaw of procedure or of juris- 
 diction can be found, and which will therefore raise broadly and 
 clearly before the Church and the nation the question really at 
 stake, namely, will the clergy of the National Church, or will they 
 not, obey the law as finally interpreted by the Supreme Court of 
 Appeal in causes ecclesiastical ? Whenever this question is thus 
 finally and definitely raised, there can be but one of two results : 
 either general submission on the part of the great body of the 
 clergy, with, it is to be feared, suffering or secession of a minority ; 
 or else general resistance by the clergy, followed by separation of 
 Church and State. For that either the nation on the one hand, 
 or the Church on the other, could long tolerate a state of open 
 war between them, when they could terminate it by a separation, 
 is impossible. Sooner or later, then, if our present litigation 
 continues, the issue must be decided which has been raised upon 
 the recent judgment of the Judicial Committee of Privy Council, 
 and which, though temporarily obscured by these smaller questions 
 of procedure under the Public Worship Regulation Act, must 
 ere long emerge in all its clearness and importance. Indeed it is 
 obvious that, whatever the Public Worship Regulation Act may 
 have done to accelerate or embitter this question, it has arisen 
 independently of that Act, and would remain to be dealt with if 
 that Act were repealed to-morrow. For, whatever inferior courts
 
 38 A CHARGE. 
 
 we may substitute for any now existing, it is clear that these as 
 courts of the reahn would be bound to accept the ruling of the 
 highest court of appeal ; and if this is to be rejected on principle, 
 so must theirs be too, as iniieed we know that decisions of the 
 Court of Arches, given prior to the passing of the Public Worship 
 Regulation Act, have been rejected on this ground alone. 
 
 The question, then, which you have a right to ask me at this 
 moment, as your bishop, is, whether I am prepared to acquiesce 
 in the decision in the Ridsdale case, and to advise you to do 
 the same ; or whether I am prepared to advise you to resist, 
 and to join you in resisting and defying this judgment. 1 
 say to join you, for I fully admit that in such a question a 
 bishop has no right, and ought to have no wish, to sever himself 
 from his clergy. If wrong and injustice are really being done to 
 the clergy or the Church, bishops should undoubtedly be foremost 
 to resist it, and to share with their clergy the sufferings such re- 
 sistance may bring. On the other hand, when they do not in 
 any particular case take this course, may they not fairly ask to be 
 credited with believing that it is not one that is called for under 
 the circumstances; and that the clergy shall not too hastily 
 assume that the only reason why a bishop has advised them to 
 submit when they think that the Church is wronged, is that 
 though he knows that as well as they do, he is too cowardly and 
 time-serving to stand up as he should do for the right ? 
 The RWsdaie I venture then to say to you, my reverend brethren, and I 
 Judgment. coufess without much fear of such an accusation at your hands, 
 that in my opinion this recent decision gives no warrant for such 
 defiance as some are now counselling you to offer. Let us con- 
 sider the reasons alleged why we should defy it. Setting aside 
 such really puerile and unworthy ones as that the court was not 
 unanimous, or that the judges were browbeaten and terrified into 
 giving a judgment against their better convictions, there are, it 
 seems to me, two reasons, and two only, deserving of serious 
 consideration. One is that the judgment so directly contradicts 
 the plain law of the Church, which we have vowed to obey, that we 
 have no choice but to resist it. The other is that, be the judg- 
 ment good or bad, the court it emanated from had no right to 
 give it, inasmuch as it is a " secular " and " State-made one," 
 and that any interference of such a court with the sacred right 
 of the Church " to interpret her own formularies " is a usurpa- 
 tion to be resisted to the death. Now as regards the first of 
 these pleas, I admit fully that it is valid in /oro conscientice, not 
 of course in any other court ; even they who urge it do not 
 maintain that a man can free himself from the judgment of a 
 lawful court by saying that he thinks it bad law ; he can only, if 
 he feels himself bound to do so, resist and suffer for conscience' 
 sake. But surely before he takes this step, with all its conse- 
 quences not merely to himself but to the peace and, it may
 
 A CHARGE. 39 
 
 be, to the stability of the society of which he is a member, he 
 should be very clear indeed that he is entirely right, and that the 
 judgment he is defying is entirely wrong. Have we then such 
 an absolute certainty that this is so as regards the Ridsdale 
 judgment? I cannot think that we have. 
 
 For what is it that the judges have been called on to interpret ? Ambiguity of 
 A rubric for the ornaments of the minister which names no ^rk.'^™^"'* ^"" 
 ornament, and describes none ; which tells him only that those 
 ornaments are to be retained and be in use which were in use by 
 authority of Parliament some three hundred years ago, and which 
 sends him therefore to search for its interpretation through Acts of 
 Parliament, advertisements, canons, injunctions, visitation articles 
 ranging over many years of the most troubled and unsettled 
 period in our ecclesiastical annals ; a rubric every word of which 
 has been made the subject of most learned debate, in which men 
 equally learned and presumably equally honest have taken 
 opposite sides ; a rubric for which at this moment it seems there 
 exist no less than six different interpretations,* all supported by 
 arguments more or less plausible ; a rubric which in its studied 
 and guarded generality was most probably framed with a view to 
 closing up for the time a dangerous controversy, but of which it 
 was only too truly foretold that its ambiguity would one day breed 
 "debate and scorn." 
 
 Now let us ask ourselves, is it after all so very certain that any 
 interpretation of such a rubric as this is so absolutely and un- 
 questionably the true one, that a Christian man is justified in 
 defying the legal tribunals of his country and throwing Church 
 and State into strife and confusion in order to carry it out? 
 
 For my own part I must, at the risk of being accused either 
 of great dishonesty or of great stupidity, candidly confess that I 
 have seen no interpretation of this rubric for or against which much 
 might not be said. Undoubtedly there is much to be said for 
 what we may call the ritualistic interpretation of it ; but I cannot 
 read the arguments of learned counsel, or the elaborate and 
 able judgment of the court, without also seeing that there is much 
 to be said for the opposite view. Indeed, I am simple enough 
 to think that a rubric which requires the aid of fifteen judges, 
 lay and ecclesiastical, sitting for nearly a fortnight in order to 
 decipher its meaning, cannot be so perfectly clear from all 
 ambiguity as is alleged ; and that being so, I am content to have 
 its meaning ruled, not by an unimpeachable judgment, which I 
 believe to be in the nature of the case impossible, but by 
 authority to which I can with a clear conscience submit myself. 
 Now I do not of course expect that all men should see this as I 
 do, I only ask those to whom their own interpretation of this 
 rubric may seem far more certain than it does to me, to consider 
 
 * See a pamphlet entitled " Five Counter-Theories to the Ridsdale Judg- 
 ment." London : Marlborough & Co.
 
 40 A CHARGE. 
 
 whether something may not fairly and reasonably be said for the 
 other side, and whether they may not therefore in their conscience 
 and for peace' sake submit to a judgment from which they differ. 
 
 If, however, the court which gave this judgment had no legal 
 authority to give it ; if its existence be a mere usurpation and 
 wrong ; what becomes of this appeal for submission in a doubtful 
 case to authority ? Are we not in that case free to set its deci- 
 sion aside and follow our own ? Possibly so ; though even in 
 that case we might do well, in a matter in itself not essential to the 
 faith, to acquiesce, for the sake of peace, in the decision as possibly 
 right per se, even though not of binding authority. But is it the 
 ^o case that the Supreme Court of Appeal as it now exists is abso- 
 lutely without any claim to our submission, not because it may 
 be badly constituted, but because it is " State made and secular ? " 
 Has the Church, let us ask, in this country enjoyed for the last 
 three hundred years and more the right that is now claimed for 
 her of " interpreting her own formularies without any interference 
 from the State?" Is it not, on the contrary, the fact that this alleged 
 taint of secularity cleaves more or less deeply to every form in 
 which the Crown has exercised its supreme right of appeal in 
 causes ecclesiastical since the time when, having gained the 
 submission of the clergy in convocation, it obtained from 
 ParHament in the Statute of Appeals the power to name at its 
 own discretion judges of appeal in such causes? And if so, what 
 is it that we are asked to do, but to effect by resistance a reversal 
 of this settlement, and thus to regain for the Church a right of which 
 she has been, as it is said, unjustly deprived by the State ? Now 
 the practical question which we have to consider when. this pro- 
 posal is made to us of the clergy is, not merely whether this right 
 truly belongs to the Church, bat whether, if it does, the proposed 
 defiance of existing jurisdiction is the proper way of regaining 
 it. What we have to ask ourselves is, whether we who have of 
 our own free will accepted our present positions in a Church 
 which has, for three hundred years and more, acquiesced in a 
 certain relation to the State, are free to turn round upon the 
 State and say that the conditions under which we freely and 
 knowingly placed ourselves are an intolerable wrong and injustice, 
 and that therefore we shall proceed, not to strive to alter them, 
 but to get rid of them by the simple process of breaking them. 
 I cannot think that we are free to do so, still less that we are 
 bound in conscience to do so, and I hold therefore that I am 
 giving no merely servile and cowardly advice to you, my reverend 
 brethren, if I counsel you to continue as regards this particular 
 judgment an acquiescence in those relations between Church 
 and State which the Church of England, and which some of the 
 best and holiest of her sons, have accepted for centuries. Let us 
 reform, or strive to reform, if we think it right and wise to do so, 
 these relations ; but do not let us inaugurate our reforms by an
 
 A CHARGE. 41 
 
 insurrection, unless we can plead before God and man — what I 
 do not see that we can plead in this case — that such an insurrec- 
 tion is a plain and a paramount duty. 
 
 But if we are not bound in conscience to defy, now and at 
 once, this judgment of the Court of Appeal, regardless of all con- 
 sequences, we may allow ourselves time calmly to consider what 
 those consequences may be, and what we are really likely to gain 
 by such defiance either for the liberty or for the peace of the 
 Church. 
 
 Let us suppose in the first place that our resistance leads, as it 
 very possibly might, to severance between Church and State ; 
 should we in that case have escaped the interpretation by State- 
 made courts of the formularies of the Church ? Certainly not, so 
 long as the property or the civil rights of a single citizen might be 
 involved in such interpretation. Let us suppose, for instance, 
 that we were to-morrow what is called a Free Church, and that a 
 clergyman of this Church were to repel, as a clergyman lately did, 
 a citizen from the Holy Communion, and that the person so 
 repelled, instead of suing him, as he may now do, in courts 
 ecclesiastical, were to sue him, as he certainly could do, in the civil 
 courts for defamation of character, and that the clergyman were 
 to plead, as a clergyman lately pleaded, that he had only obeyed 
 the rubrics of his Church — can there be a doubt that the courts 
 would claim and exercise the right of inquiring whether those 
 rubrics had really been obeyed by the clergyman ? And what 
 would that be but an interpretation of the Church's formularies by 
 a State-made court ? The freest of free churches then, it would 
 seem, cannot hope to escape this power on the part of the State 
 thus to interpret the very innermost rules of its spiritual disci- 
 pline. There is, indeed, one kind of Church, and one only, which 
 can hope to escape this, and that is an Established Church. The 
 Crown ma}^, if it think fit, delegate the whole or any portion of 
 its appellate jurisdiction to the National Church. It has done 
 so, for instance, in the case of the Estabhshed Church of Scot- 
 land. But this is a right conferred by compact with the State, 
 and the Scotch Kirk possesses it because, if I may use the 
 expression, it is more established even than ourselves. It is, 
 therefore, no paradox to say, that to retain its connection with 
 the State is the only way in which any Church can ever hope 
 to obtain this much-coveted right of interpreting in the last 
 resort its own formularies, and that those who most deprecate 
 secular judgments in spiritual things, should of all others be 
 slowest to sever that connection. 
 
 There is, indeed, a mode of escape from State interference, not 
 for the Church, but for the individual clergyman, by adopting the 
 principle of Congregationalism pure and simple. The clergyman 
 may, if he pleases, make himself the hired servant of his congrega- 
 tion, appointed and paid by them, and dismissible at their plea-
 
 42 A CHARGE. 
 
 sure. In that case, doubtless, there would be nothmg for the 
 State to adjudicate upon if he and his congregation were to differ. 
 They would anticipate any such interference, simply by declining 
 to retain his services as soon as they disliked his ritual, or his 
 doctrine, or himself. And this is really what some of our clergy 
 are proposing at this moment, when they are demanding that 
 whatever ritual they adopt, " they shall not be molested " for it, so 
 long as their congregations are satisfied with it. For what is this - 
 but a demand to substitute the will and choice of the congregation 
 for the law of the Church ? Of course at this moment this is an 
 exceedingly convenient arrangement for the clergyman, who is 
 protected from the power of the congregation by the legal rights 
 secured to him by the law which he is setting aside in their name. 
 But a position such as this, which combines at once all the privi- 
 leges of law with all the sweets of lawlessness, is obviously one 
 which could not be maintained in a disestabhshed and disendowed 
 Church, where the congregation would be the paymasters, and 
 where the clergyman would assuredly learn before long, that it is 
 one thing to persuade a congregation of whom he is legally inde- 
 pendent to join him in defying the law, and quite another thing to 
 persuade a congregation on whom he is dependent to acquiesce in 
 his defying them. When that time comes, if it ever does come, 
 some of those who had been busiest in bringing it about might 
 find the little finger of a congregation heavier than the hand of 
 the most tyrannical of bishops. 
 
 But let us suppose, on the other hand, that by agitation and 
 resistance we obtain for the Church of England this right of 
 interpreting, in her synods, her own formularies — let us see what 
 would be the result. Would it give us peace ? Not if we are to 
 believe the declarations of some of those who are demanding it, 
 that they would not submit even to the voice of our Church in her 
 synods, unless with the reserve that she shall interpret all her for- 
 mularies according " to Catholic usage," and that if she does not 
 in their judgment do this, they will defy her voice as resolutely as 
 ever they did that of the Privy Council ; that if, for instance, 
 Convocation were to join with Parliament in forbidding vestments, 
 it would be the " duty of Catholics not to submit nor secede, but 
 to resist." But waiving this difficulty, and assuming that the liv- 
 ing voice of the Church in her judicial capacity would be loyally 
 obeyed by all her clergy, how would this new state of things 
 affect the present liberties and rights both of laity and of clergy ? 
 And first as regards those of the laity. The clergyman who is 
 placed over his parishioners without any assent on their part, 
 and who thereby acquires over them rights, " secular and State- 
 made " as well as of a spiritual kind, is, as we know, bound to 
 minister the discipline of Christ to them " as this Church and 
 Realm have received the same." How long do we suppose would 
 the laity of the Church endure, that in any case where the question
 
 A CHARGE. 43 
 
 arose whether the clergy were keeping this compact, that question 
 should be left for the clergy alone to decide ; the Realm, which 
 now represents the laity, having handed them over absolutely to 
 the will and discretion of a purely clerical assembly? How long 
 would it be before the laity would demand that if Convocation is 
 to have the same rights as the General Assembly of Scotland, it 
 shall be on the same conditions, namely, that the whole Church 
 shall be from first to last thoroughly leavened in government and 
 discipline with the lay element ? Now this complete and radical 
 change in 'the Church of England might be a good or a bad 
 thing; but it is a thing which would, in the event we are 
 speaking of, certainly come to pass ; and I greatly doubt whether 
 it is a change which many of those who desire to make Con- 
 vocation into the final court of appeal have fairly contem- 
 plated. 
 
 But how would it be as regards the liberties of the clergy ? 
 The voice of the Church in her synods means, for all practical 
 purposes, the vote of the majority in Convocation. Have the 
 clergy fairly considered how far they are prepared to hold their 
 benefices on the tenure of the votes of the majority in an assembly 
 in part at least elective, and necessarily subject to those party 
 influences which enter into every popular assembly? Is a body 
 of this kind really the best fitted for calm and impartial judicial 
 inquiry? Lay judges, we are told, are liable to be swayed by 
 party bias; are ecclesiastical judges always so free from this? 
 Bishops, it is said, are unduly swayed by the voice of public 
 opinion ; are elective and popular assemblies always insensible 
 to this influence ? And if they are not, may it not be that this 
 new court of appeal might bring us of the clergy in the end no 
 more of hberty than it might bring to the Church of peace? 
 A free Church and a free clergy, it may be well for us to remem- 
 ber, are by no means identical terms. Free Churches have, 
 indeed, been well described by one of their advocates, as institu- 
 tions, one of whose greatest merits consists in this, " that the 
 majority can always turn out the minority." Now if the clergy, 
 having fairly considered all these things, are prepared, neverthe- 
 less, from a strict sense of duty, to brave them all in order to 
 obtain this right which they claim for the Church, well and good, 
 let them do so ; but let those, on the other hand, who may not 
 hold this case of conscience to be so very clear, fairly weigh all 
 the consequences of this new agitation they are invited to join 
 in before they commit themselves to it. 
 
 But is there no way out of our present distress, save this of Revision of Ru- 
 revolutionising the Church of England ? Have we not, as regards *'""' 
 at least the present subject of our disputes, a much simpler and 
 safer way, and one that has been at hand for us any time within 
 the last four years? Our recent litigation would have been impos- 
 sible but for the ambiguity of this ornaments rubric. If that had
 
 44 A CHARGE. 
 
 been dear and definite, there could have been no room for law suits 
 to ascertain its meaning. Why should we not make it so ? The 
 State not only allows but invites us to do so. The Public Worship 
 Regulation Act was never intended to enforce the rubrics as they 
 are. At the very time that it was passed, the State gave to the 
 Church the opportunity it asked for of amending these. Why 
 should we not then long since have availed ourselves of this 
 opportunity ? Why should we not have agreed that the Church 
 in Convocation should state plainly and definitely what orna- 
 ments her ministers should use ? If she wishes for some 
 distinctive eucharistic dress, let her name it. If for the surplice 
 only in all ministrations, let her prescribe it. If for the black 
 gown in the pulpit, let her say so. If this were done, the 
 machinery of the Public Worship Regulation Act and the Privy 
 Council might rust disused for want of material on which to 
 work. Until this is done, this machinery or any other we may 
 devise will never lack occupation. If we will have rubrics that 
 need la^vyers to interpret them, we may expect law suits to the 
 end of time. If we desire to escape litigation we had better 
 resort to wise and definite legislation. 
 
 And can we imagine any more humiliating or more dangerous 
 position in which the Church can approach the State than this, 
 that after we have been invited to settle our differences by defin- 
 ing and settling our own laws in some reasonable and charitable 
 fashion amongst ourselves, we should, when the time for doing 
 this had expired, come to Parliament and say, " We have done 
 nothing of the kind ; we have trimmed and altered a few minor 
 rubrics here and there, which no one cares seriously about, but 
 those which are the real cause of our troubles, and for dealing 
 with which letters of license were really given us, we have been 
 afraid to touch ? " And what was it that until very lately^hindered 
 us from making this attempt? The fear, forsooth, that if we altered 
 these rubrics we might " break our continuity with the Catholic 
 Church ! " or lose our Catholic heritage ! Has it then come 
 to this, that members of the great historic Church of England, 
 linked as she is to primitive antiquity by the great deep moorings 
 of creeds and sacraments and word and ministry, really fear that 
 she would drift away from these if she altered the dresses of her 
 ministers ? Is it true that we hold on to the primitive Church 
 only, as it were, by the skirts of her garments ; or can there be 
 any portion of our Catholic heritage more clearly ours than our 
 right "as a particular or National Church to decree and alter rites 
 and ceremonies not ordained of God," as we may think fit, " pro- 
 vided only all things be done to edifying ? " The truth is, and we 
 must confess it with some sense of shame, that what really has 
 hindered us in this matter, for a long time, was our divisions and 
 party strifes. So long as a decision in the courts was pending, 
 and that one party amongst us looked to it to sustain a victory,
 
 A CHARGE. 45 
 
 and the other to reverse a defeat, both extremes joined in de- 
 precating any revision of the ornaments rubric. Now that this 
 decision has been given and all hope from further litigation is 
 almost at an end, I am thankful to see a better and a wiser spirit 
 prevailing. The Lower House of Convocation of the Province of 
 Canterbury has agreed, by a very large majority, to a recommenda- 
 tion that the distinctive eucharistic dress now legal in cathedrals 
 may be worn, with permission of the bishop, in parish churches. 
 And if this be, as I trust it may be, agreed to in the Upper 
 House of our own province and in the sister province of York, 
 we may have peace. The voice of the Church will at last have 
 spoken for the clergy, and the great body of the laity would, I am 
 persuaded, be only too glad to close this miserable controversy 
 by anything like a reasonable and moderate compromise. It is 
 in this course and this only that I see any hope for us of escaping 
 from our present troubles, and I trust that there is enougla of 
 courage and common sense and charity left amongst us to enable 
 us to take it. Meanwhile, let me draw your attention to the 
 utterance in this question of ritual observance given by the 
 bishops who took part in the" recent Lambeth Conference ; 
 and let me remind you, in so doing, that this utterance was 
 agreed to unanimously in an assembly, the majority of whose 
 members had no interest in upholding the jurisdiction of any 
 English court of law. The decision then unanimously come to 
 was " that no alteration from long-accustomed ritual should 
 be made, contrary to the admonition of the bishop of the 
 diocese." 
 
 I cannot but hope that the principle thus affirmed, reason- Recommenda- 
 able surely in itself, and certainly in accordance with Catholic conferenc™ab^to 
 principles of worship, may commend itself to the general accept- Ritual. 
 ance of the clergy of this diocese. You will observe that it does 
 not affirm that no change in the existing ritual in any parish is to 
 be introduced without the previous sanction of the bishop. It 
 only declares that these are not to be persevered in against his 
 admonition ; that is to say, it only asks that in a question of 
 expediency and edification, the clergyman should be willing to 
 submit his private and individual judgment to that of him who is 
 set over him in the Lord. Am 1 asking too much then, even of 
 the most determined opponent of the late judgment of the Privy 
 Council, if I ask him to accept instead this purely spiritual judg- 
 ment of so many bishops of the Catholic Church ? In this 
 diocese such acceptance would happily involve, as yet, no very 
 painful sacrifice on the part of any of the clergy, for I am not 
 aware of any instance in which a clergyman of this diocese has 
 felt it his conscientious duty to introduce any ceremonial forbidden 
 by the judgments of the courts. If then I should ever feel called 
 upon to admonish any one of you not to do this, I should only 
 be asking him to continue, for peace' sake, that forbearance which
 
 46 A CHARGE. 
 
 he had hitherto practised of his own accord. And I am bound to 
 add — and 1 do so readily and gratefully — that my ten years' 
 experience of the government of the clergy of the diocese, leads 
 me to hope that I should not make such request in any case in 
 vain. 
 Comprehensive- To retum, howevcr, to the suggestion which I have made above, 
 Church. """^ that our ritual disputes should be settled by some reasonable and 
 charitable compromise, embodied in some distinct and definite 
 rubric on the points in dispute. I have further to observe, that if 
 such compromise is to be really lasting, if it is to be anything but a 
 patched up truce, agreed to in mere weariness of strife for the 
 present by two contending parties in our Church, and sure to be 
 broken again ere long, it must be accepted on both sides loyally and 
 frankly as right in principle, and not as a matter of expediency 
 merely. That is to say, it must be recognised on both sides that 
 the Church is right when she aims at retaining within her pale both 
 those two great parties which have always existed within it ; that 
 her comprehensiveness is not a mere historical accident or a poli- 
 tical necessity of her position, but a great and important prin- 
 ciple which it would be not merely impolitic but wrong for her to 
 surrender. If we do not recognise this, peace between these two 
 great parties is impossible, for if either party believes that its 
 opponents have really no lawful place in the Church, and that 
 their presence there is due only to her weakness or her unfaith- 
 fulness, then it is bound, in faithfulness to her, to seek for their 
 expulsion. Neither party can or ought to be content so long as 
 what they believe to be heresy is sheltered within the Church, 
 and they will and must therefore do all in their power, the one to 
 expunge from the Prayer Book all the " remaining germs of Popery," 
 and the other all the " unfortunate leaven of Puritanism " which 
 the Reformation, as they believe, has left there. And so the con- 
 test will sooner or later be renewed, if not about ritual then about 
 doctrine, if not in the law courts then in pulpit and platform, in 
 Church Union and Church Association, until either one side or 
 the other does triumph, or until the Church, as is far more likely, 
 is torn to pieces by their strife. Meanwhile another and a serious 
 evil arises from this way of looking at the comprehensiveness of 
 our Church as a misfortune and defect and not as a merit. It is 
 that many of her members grow dissatisfied with her position and 
 weakened in their allegiance to her. They begin to doubt whether 
 a Church which includes so many diftering opinions, which leaves 
 so many questions open, and which speaks on others with such 
 guarded caution and apparent want of dogmatic clearness, can be 
 really faithful to her great office as the Ecclesia docens — of setting 
 forth the whole truth for her children ; and whether, therefore, 
 they are not bound to seek or make for themselves some Church 
 which shall be less comprehensive but more united. And accord- 
 ingly we see, from time to time, her sons rising up and leaving her ;
 
 A CHARGE. 47 
 
 some for the last new schism which splits itself from her iotus teres 
 atque rotu?idus, perfect as yet in its internal unity, and quite satis- 
 fied that it has carried away with it the whole truth in all its 
 simplicity and perfection ; others for the older and larger schism 
 of the Church of Rome, which boasts that she too is free from the 
 taint of comprehensiveness, that she possesses the whole truth 
 perfectly and dogmatically defined, and that she is therefore at 
 unity within herself, as we of the Church of England can never 
 hope to be. And as these leave us they tell us in parting that 
 this Church of England is but a Babel of contending parties and 
 sects : that she has no word of definite teaching with which to 
 still this strife within her ov/n bosom, and that they have been 
 driven from her by their desire for what they have at last attained 
 elsewhere — unity and peace. 
 
 Now let us do justice to this feeling on the part of those True Unity pos- 
 who leave us. It is a very real and a very powerful one, and it church. '^^ °"' 
 has this element of truth in it, that unity is a note of the true 
 Church, that it is what our Lord prayed for in order that His 
 Church might thereby manifest His mission to the world, and 
 that a Church which has it not and desires it not cannot be truly 
 His. Nevertheless it might occur, one would have supposed, to 
 those who think of leaving us for our supposed lack of it, that 
 there might be some flaw in their idea of unity. For if this con- 
 sist in freedom from internal dissensions secured by absolute dog- 
 matic teaching on all questions, the argument against us because 
 we have it not is equally valid against Christianity itself; it is 
 indeed the favourite argument of the sceptic against Christianity, 
 which he declares cannot be in possession of any real and definite 
 truth, or Christians would long ago have ceased to wrangle about 
 it. If we are to leave the Church of England, then, because she 
 is a Babel, how can we remain in that larger Babel of Christendom 
 which includes her with all her contentions, and also all those 
 other Christian communities from whom she differs, with their 
 contentions too ? 
 
 Or again, might it not have occurred to these seekers after 
 unity, that taken by itself it is absolutely no test whatsoever of 
 trutih ; that there may be a unity of error as well as of orthodoxy ; 
 that Judaism, for instance, and Islamism display this quality of 
 unity as strongly as Christianity, and even more strongly; and that, 
 therefore, before we accept the unity of any Church as the reason 
 for our submission to it, we are bound to inquire into the truth of 
 those doctrines in the belief of which its unity consists ? Or 
 again they might remember that before they can enter the Church 
 which is to give them peace by forbidding for ever that use of 
 private judgment which they regard as the cause of all our 
 strife, they must stake their whole faith in her and her teaching 
 upon one supreme act of that very private judgment which they 
 are ever after to resign ; for that they can never be more sure that
 
 48 A CHARGE. 
 
 the Church of Rome is the true Church, or even that unity is a 
 note of the true Church, than they are that the act of isolated 
 private judgment by which they arrived at these conchisions was 
 right. All this, however, only shows how powerful and attractive 
 is this idea of unity and of the repose that it brings to minds 
 weary of strife, when it blinds men to intellectual difficulties such 
 as these. Let us consider, then, what is the real worth of this 
 argument from unity, and how far it really tells for or against our 
 own Church. 
 
 Unity, as I have said, is not under any circumstances a proof 
 of truth. It may, however, be a presumption for it ; it is an in- 
 ducement at least to our belief in any opinion, that a great many 
 persons unite in holding it ; as, for instance, the general agree- 
 ment of mankind in the belief in a God, or in a future state, has 
 always been regarded as a strong presumption in favour of the 
 truth of those beliefs. But it is clear, that in order to give it this 
 value, unity must be combined with catholicity. The unity of 
 one man in the belief of his own opinions proves nothing ; it is the 
 fact that a great many others share it with him that tells, so far 
 as it does tell, in its favour. It is clear, too, that every addition 
 which any one makes to the number of his beliefs so far tends to 
 diminish their catholicity. The more articles we insert in our 
 creed the fewer will be the number of those who receive them all. 
 Some definite articles there must of course be, for there can be no 
 comprehensiveness where there is nothing to comprehend ; but 
 every new article necessarily diminishes the area of this compre- 
 hension and gains unity at the cost of universality. It is evident 
 therefore that the Church which, in order to settle any dispute 
 within her pale, adds unnecessarily any article to her creed, re- 
 quiring men to believe as de fide any thing which is not of the 
 essence of the faith, has so far diminished her cathoUcity, though 
 she may thereby have increased her internal unity. She has 
 narrowed herself within a smaller area of belief than that on which 
 she was designed to stand while she invites the world within her 
 pale. She has gained peace within her own borders, but it is at 
 the cost of creating fresh strife and schism in Christendom at 
 large. And she has lessened too the value of her own unity as a 
 test of her orthodoxy, exactly by the amount of schism she has 
 thus created. She can no longer plead for her new doctrine that 
 it is held by the Catholic Church, unless she go farther and claim 
 to be herself the one true Catholic Church, anathematizing all 
 others ; and unless, in order to secure the unity she aims at, she 
 further forbid all questioning of her teaching by proclamiing her 
 own infallibility. In that case all her members, so long as they 
 remain her members, must accept her teachings whatever they 
 may be. She has thus secured unity, but it is the unity of an 
 heretical schism, which in order to obtain this specious oneness has 
 severed itself from the true unity of Christendom, and bound
 
 A CHARGE. 49 
 
 itsell" by its false claim to infallibility to remain such a schism for 
 ever. 
 
 The real question then between our Church and that of Rome 
 is, not whether the latter has secured greater internal unity than 
 we have by defining as defide a number of doctrines on which our 
 Church has declined to give any such definition ; but whether she 
 had any right to erect these into articles of faith, and whether, if 
 she had, she has defined them truly. If she has failed in either of 
 these respects, she has lost either truth or catholicity or both in her 
 effort after a false unity ; and until, therefore, we have settled both 
 these questions — or in other words, until we have gone over the 
 whole doctrinal controversy between us and Rome — her argument 
 from unity is worth really nothing. It means really no more than 
 that which the newest of new sects might say for itself, that it is 
 united in its opinions, or, in other words, that it beheves all that 
 it does believe. 
 
 The claim of our Church upon the allegiance of her children is 
 exactly the opposite of this ; it is that she has declined to define 
 most of those questions on which Rome has pronounced dog- 
 matically because she holds that she may impose nothing as de 
 fide but what is found in Scripture, or may be proved thereby, 
 and therefore that when Scripture is silent she must be silent too, 
 where Scripture has not dogmatized neither may she do so. She 
 is, therefore, sparing of dogma, cautious and guarded in definition, 
 because she knows that Scripture and the primitive Church have 
 always been so. She leaves many questions open, though at the 
 risk of much internal dispute about them, because she believes 
 that she has received no command and no authority from her 
 Lord to close them ; and, where she has defined, it has more often 
 been negatively than positively, rejecting some over-definition on 
 the part of Rome as false and as unduly narrowing the bounds 
 of the Church Catholic ; but erecting within those bounds no new 
 limits of her own. In so doing she loses the compact unity of a 
 spiritual despotism, but she retains for her children the true 
 Catholic heritage of freedom. 
 
 But has she really lost true unity in her faithfulness to true 
 catholicity ? Has the Church of England no unity of the faith 
 either within herself or with her sister Churches ? As her 
 children gather together in her public worship and recite the 
 creeds which united the Church Catholic for centuries ; or hear 
 the word of which that Church has been from the first the witness 
 and keeper; or partake of the sacraments in which they who 
 share them become one body ; have they no real, no vital and 
 essential oneness with the Church of all ages? Or when, as 
 lately we have seen, one hundred bishops of the Anglican Com- 
 munion, representing Churches in all parts of the world, diversely 
 organized, diversely governed, not absolutely alike in rite or 
 ceremony, having used their inherent power to alter these accord- 
 
 E
 
 5° 
 
 A CHARGE. 
 
 ing to need and expediency " as happeneth diversely in divers 
 
 countries," could yet declare with truth respecting all these 
 
 Churches that, " united under one Divine Head in the fellowship 
 
 of one Catholic and Apostolic Church, holding the one faith 
 
 revealed in Holy Writ, defined in the creeds and maintained by 
 
 the Primitive Church, receiving the same canonical Scriptures of 
 
 the Old and New Testaments as containing all things necessary 
 
 to salvation, they teach the same Word of God, partake of the 
 
 same Divinely ordained sacraments through the ministry of the 
 
 same apostolic orders, and worship one God and Father through 
 
 the same Lord Jesus Christ, by the same Holy and Divine Spirit 
 
 who is given to those that believe to guide them into all truth " — 
 
 was there no evidence then given to the world that Churches may 
 
 retain the unity of the laith without the aid of infallibility, and 
 
 keep full communion with each other without the binding force 
 
 of a visible centre of unity ? Was there no proof then given 
 
 that it is possible for Churches to be at once largely free and 
 
 largely diverse, and yet largely and truly one ? Brethren, let us 
 
 be satisfied with such unity as this, and let us continue to yield a 
 
 hearty and loving allegiance to the Church in which we can realise 
 
 it, and not sufter ourselves to be entangled again by vain dreams 
 
 of an unreal unity, under a yoke of bondage from which God's 
 
 good providence has set us free, and to which we cannot return 
 
 without the sacrifice of that spiritual freedom which it is our 
 
 privilege to enjoy and our duty to guard. 
 
 Loyalty to the But if the Church of England be thus largely tolerant and 
 Church. comprehensive, if she grant to her clergy a degree of liberty and 
 
 independence greater probably than that enjoyed by the ministers 
 of any other religious community, it is clear that she must largely 
 rely upon their loyalty to prevent their abusing their freedom. 
 It is with the Church in this respect as it is with the State. In 
 proportion as the citizens of any country are well affected and 
 law-abiding, laws may be comparatively few and liberty of 
 individual action large ; in proportion as men show themselves ill 
 affected to the State, laws must be multiplied and individual 
 liberty abridged. The Church of England has not multiplied 
 her laws, whether of dogma or ritual, because she has reposed a 
 generous confidence in her sons that they would not misuse this 
 confidence to her hurt. They may easily do so if they choose. 
 They may force into her broadly catholic statements of doctrine 
 meanings which may be technically and legally within their 
 limits, but which are foreign to their true spirit and intent. 
 They may warp and strain her few and simple rules of worship, 
 until they make her public services the expression of some private 
 dogma of their own, which even if it be just legally permissible 
 for them to teach in their own words, she has never authorised 
 them to express as hers in her ritual. They may affect in matters
 
 A CHARGE. 51 
 
 lying outside the legal limits of her public services — in manuals, for 
 instance, of private devotion, with which they supplement these 
 for their own use or that of others, in their books of direction 
 for the spiritual life, in the practices which they recommend or 
 encourage amongst their followers, in the religious phaseology 
 which they adopt — a tone which is not hers, but which is 
 deeply saturated with the thought and feeling of another and a 
 foreign communion. And yet in all this they may be able to 
 say with perfect truth. We have broken no rubric or canon of 
 the Church, we have formally contradicted no one of her Articles \ 
 we have only used as we thought fit our liberty as English 
 Churchmen : why should any one object to or seek to restrain us 
 in this ? And certainly if the clergy of the Church of England 
 owed her nothing but a hard and literal obedience to the exact 
 letter of her laws, this would be a very sufficient answer. It is 
 quite true that for these things no clergyman in the Church of 
 England can be prosecuted and punished. But is this all we 
 owe to our spiritual mother? Are we morally free as her sons 
 to say and do everything which she has not expressly and 
 formally forbidden us to do ? If she has left us free, is there 
 nothing in her position, in her history, in the whole tone of her 
 teaching and worship, that may show us how far we should 
 restrain ourselves, if we would be truly loyal to her ? What would 
 be said of this plea of mere legality if it were urged in like case in 
 civil life ? What would be thought or said, for instance, of those 
 English citizens who, while England was engaged in a war with 
 some foreign State, were to form themselves into clubs and 
 associations, the members of which should studiously and osten- 
 tatiously affect the dress, the manners, the phrases of the people 
 with whom she was at war, and who, when they were reproached 
 for this were to say, We are free Englishmen, we have broken no 
 law in all that we have done, why should you interfere with or 
 seek to restrain us ? Would not the answer be, You may be, as 
 you say, free Englishmen, but you are not acting like loyal 
 Englishmen ; you are not breaking tlie law, but you are doing 
 something worse ; you are showing your disafl'ection to the 
 country under the shelter of whose laws you enjoy the liberty 
 you are abusing, and your sympathy with the enemies against 
 whom she is contending. And if while our Church is contending, 
 as she is bound, if true to her own history and her place in 
 Christendom, to contend and to protest against the usurpations 
 and the errors of Rome, certain of her clergy ostentatiously 
 affect as far as they can all that is most foreign in Romanism as 
 distinguished from Anglicanism ; if they persistently show them- 
 selves Romanists when they may, and Anglicans only when they 
 must, what are we to think of their plea, " We are within the 
 letter of the law ; prosecute us if you like, punish us if you can, 
 meanwhile we will do as we please?" Can such men be sur-
 
 52 A CHARGE. 
 
 prised if they are told in reply, you are legally free to do as you 
 are doing, and for that very reason what you are doing shows all 
 the more clearly what your real inclinations and sympathies are? 
 What a man does under official and legal compulsion shows us 
 nothing of his real disposition ; that breaks out only where he is 
 free to follow it. " No man," it has truly been said, " is a hypo- 
 crite in his pleasures," and if it be your pleasure to go in the 
 direction of Rome whenever you are at liberty to do so, are we 
 uncharitable if we infer that you would do so, if you could, in 
 those other respects in which you are not free ? And what is the 
 danger to which the Church is exposed by such action on the 
 part of some of her clergy ? It is something, as it seems to me, 
 more to be dreaded than either disestablishment or disendowment ; 
 it is the narrowing of her comprehensiveness, it is the loss of that 
 large liberty and independence which her clergy are now en- 
 trusted with ; or else a violent disruption which would break her 
 into separate fragments, each glowing with the sectarian heat of 
 their separation ; no one of them capable in its narrowness and 
 bitterness of discharging for the whole nation that great function 
 of teacher of a national faith which she is fitted to discharge, 
 because within her pale there is room for larger freedom of 
 thought, and more varied expression of devotion, than is to be 
 found in any other Church in the world. 
 
 And now, that I may not be charged with merely dealing in 
 general accusations when urging upon the- clergy the duty of 
 loyalty as distinguished from mere legality in their obedience to 
 their own Church, I proceed to illustrate and justify what I have 
 been saying by instances in which it seems to me this distinction 
 has been forgotten. And in doing so I pass by those cases, un- 
 happily too many, which, however much to my point, have been 
 described as only isolated and individual eccentricities, mere 
 " fungous excrescences " such as attach themselves to every great 
 religious movement, and which are sure to die and drop off if we 
 leave them alone. I select three forms of speech which seem 
 to be coming into very general use amongst those who would 
 describe themselves as the most advanced of the " Catholic 
 party." And I select these instead of any particular ritual obser- 
 vances, however extravagant or apparently illegal, because I wish 
 to raise no question on this point of legality. I admit at once, 
 and it is part of my argument, that there is nothing illegal in any 
 one of the expressions I am about to cite. They are " the Mass," 
 " the Sacrament of Penance," and " Sacramental Confession." I 
 do those I speak of no injustice, I think, when I say that these 
 terms are specially affected by them just now, and appear in their 
 speech and writings with a significant prominence. Now as regards 
 the first of these : Why, let me ask, should clergymen of our 
 Church substitute for the terms used by her to describe the Sacra- 
 ment of the Lord's Supper, this one of " the Mass,"' which she has
 
 A CHARGE. S3 
 
 discarded ? It is of all the eucharistic appellations known to the 
 Church the least primitive, the least catholic, and the least signifi- 
 cant. It is not found in Scripture nor in the Church of the first three 
 centuries ; its true meaning is matter of debate, and is at best a 
 trivial and accidental one. The Greek Church has it not ; our own 
 Church deliberately rejected it from her formularies at a time when 
 it was in general use amongst the- people, and when its retention 
 would so obviously have helped that quiet transition from old 
 forms to new, which it was both her duty and her policy to effect.* 
 It has on the other hand become, in its later history in this 
 country, whatever it might have been in its first beginnings, a 
 Roman phrase, and associated in all men's minds with the Roman 
 doctrine of transubstantiation, which our Church has formally 
 condemned. 
 
 Now it might surely have been expected from a loyal minister 
 of our Church, that he would have eschewed as carefully as she 
 has done the use of a term which she evidently regards as one of 
 those things " the abuse of which could not be taken away, the 
 thing itself remaining." Why then is it revived ? Why out of all 
 the rich variety of expressions which are scriptural, catholic, and 
 truly primitive, does any clergyman go out of his way to adopt 
 this one, which is none of these, and which he is not free to use 
 when he speaks the language of his own Church? Because, we 
 are told, he is helping to bring about the unity of Christendom by 
 adopting a term which is used by the whole Latin Church. But 
 might not loyalty have suggested that it is quite as reasonable that 
 Rome should for this purpose adopt our phraseology as that we 
 should adopt hers? And might not Catholic principles have 
 suggested that the union of Christendom would best be obtained, 
 not by one Church adopting with slavish deference the defective 
 terminology of another, but by all Churches reverting to the most 
 catholic and most scriptural expressions, in which case the term 
 adopted to describe the Lord's Supper would certainly not be that 
 of " the Mass ? " What, then, I ask, has this term to recommend it 
 to our use instead of those preferred by our own Church ? And 
 what are we to think of their loyalty to her, who delight in adopt- 
 ing it ? 
 
 Again, let us take the phrase " Sacrament of Penance." What 
 is its theological history ? It is this : that the Church of Rome in 
 the council of Florence, and finally in that of Trent, thought fit 
 to define the number of the sacraments as being exactly seven, 
 
 * The history of the change in the language of our Church in this respect 
 is instructive. In the order of Communion, set forth in the year 1548, the 
 rubric forbids the priest to say " any other rite or ceremony in the Mass," &c. 
 In the First Prayer Book of Ed. VI., published in 1549, the Church no longer 
 rises this term as her own ; she entitles her eucharistic service as " The Supper 
 of our Lord and the Yloly Commnwion, commonly called the Mass." In the 
 Second Book of Edward, published three years later, the word disappears 
 altogether.
 
 54- A CHARGE. 
 
 neither more nor less. And all of these she declares to be equally- 
 true and proper sacraments in all the essentials of a sacrament. 
 Her reasons for adopting this enumeration are certainly not con- 
 vincing ; as, for instance, that it corresponds to the seven planets, 
 or to the seven spiritual diseases of man, or to the seven cardinal 
 virtues, or to the seven kinds of animal sacrifices in the Old Testa- 
 ment. If we adopt it, we do so, therefore, it may be presumed, on 
 her authority alone. Now how has our Church dealt with this 
 question of the number of the sacraments ? In the first place she 
 has given in her catechism a definition of a sacrament which ex- 
 pressly excludes those other five commonly called sacraments. In 
 the next place she denies that these are to be " counted as sacra- 
 ments of the gospel," describing them as being " partly states of 
 life and partly having grown of the corrupt following of the 
 Apostles ; " and lastly, she never formally gives to any one of them 
 the name of a sacrament.* It is true that in her twenty-fifth article 
 she does not absolutely deny to these five the name of sacraments 
 in a certain lower and improper sense, because she was aware that 
 in that lower sense the word sacrament was most laxly used in the 
 early Church as applying to anything which could be a sigiiuin rci 
 sacrce, a sense in which such things as the sign of the cross, 
 exorcism, the polygamy of the Patriarchs, the washing of the 
 disciples' feet by our Lord, and even the divisions of His genea- 
 logy, have been called sacraments. In this sense, in which of 
 course there are not seven but seventy, or seven hundred sacra- 
 ments, these may be allowed to be sacraments, but in no other. 
 
 Now, this being so, what should we expect of a loyal minister 
 of our Church as regards the use of this term " Sacrament of 
 Penance ? " Would it not be that he should avoid it as carefully as 
 our Church has done, lest by the use of it he should mislead 
 people into adopting the Roman numeration of the sacraments, 
 and with that the Roman errors respecting these other five, and 
 especially respecting this particular one ; or that if from a 
 pedantic desire to adopt the earlier and laxer use of the term 
 sacrament he chose to give that term to these other five, he would 
 take care to apply it as freely to other rites and acts^as the early 
 Church did, and to explain in what sense and what alone he thus 
 used it ? What, then, are we to think of those who go out of their 
 way to revive this term, and who use it not only without such 
 safeguards and explanations as might prevent its being mistaken 
 and abused, but in such a way as would certainly seem to imply 
 that they had adopted not only the Roman enumeration of the 
 sacraments, but the Roman doctrine respecting these in addition ? 
 
 * I have said " formally," because in one of the Homilies the term " Sacra- 
 ment" is applied to marriage ; but this is evidently a trace of the old transla- 
 tion of St. Paul's description of it as a great "mystery," and cannot, occurring 
 as it does in a discourse ad populum, be taken as the formal expression of 
 the mind of the Church in defining doctrine.
 
 A CHARGE. 55 
 
 Is this loyalty to the Church of England, or is it a disloyal 
 hankering after the phraseology and the doctrine of the Church 
 of Rome ? * 
 
 Lastly, let us consider the use of the term — more prevalent even 
 than the other two — " Sacramental Confession." If by this be 
 meant, as some do mean by it, only that perfectly voluntary confes- 
 sion in order to the coming to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper 
 with a quiet mind, which our Church allows, and in certain cases 
 recommends, to those whose consciences are burdened with any 
 special grief, there can be no objection to the use of it, save 
 that it is ambiguous and may be misleading. But if there be 
 meant by it, as undoubtedly there very often is meant by those 
 who use it, confession as one of the four parts of the aforesaid 
 Sacrament of Penance as defined by the Church of Rome, namely, 
 contrition, confession, absolution and satisfaction, then the 
 phrase is distinctly Roman and distinctly alien to the teaching of 
 the Church of England, which has never recognised any such 
 sacrament, nor given to the confession she allows any such 
 sacramental meaning and efficacy. 
 
 And if to this use of Roman language on this subject of con- 
 fession be added distinctly Roman teaching; — if instead of re- 
 quiring, as our Church does, that the penitent shall first confess 
 his sin to God, and then if need be to his neighbour^ making 
 restitution to him Avhere he hath offended, and only in the case 
 where such confession has failed to bring peace to the conscience, 
 allowing of confession to the priest, save in the case of the dying — 
 men are taught that the safer way at any rate, if not the only way, 
 to obtain forgiveness is to bring their sins in the first place to the 
 priest, for that he who confesses only to God may be forgiven, but 
 he who confesses to the priest must be forgiven ; if — the penitent 
 being free to limit his confession to the priest to those sins or that 
 sin only with which his conscience is especially burdened, and not 
 being therefore " tied to the numbering of all his sins," — he is told 
 that he must remember and confess every sin he has committed or go 
 away unforgiven — nay, that the keeping back of any sin from the 
 priest in confession is itself a sin needing confession and absolution ; 
 
 * Let me quote on this point the opinions of one who certainly will not be 
 accused of ultra-Protestant leanings, and whose words will doubtless have 
 far greater weight than mine with those who have adopted this language. 
 " Neither in this, nor in anything else which I may allege, do I wish to 
 assimilate our language to that of the Church of Rome, or even to use that 
 of our Homilies, when they call Marriage a ' Sacrament ; ' it would be un- 
 natural and affected and worse. I would rather use the language of the 
 Fathers as to other things than these, lest I should seem to be speaking not in 
 a Catholic but a Romish sense. Yet we need do neither ; on the contrary, 
 since the word ' Sacrament ' has been misused to place the five rites on a level 
 with the two great Sacraments, and there is no necessity for retaining it, it 
 were wrong and cruel to risk perplexing persons' minds by reviving it. The 
 truth which our Homilies imply may also be conveyed in other ways." — (Letter 
 to Dr. Jelf by Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D. ; 1841.)
 
 56 A CHARGE. 
 
 if the priest, therefore, claim the right to examine the whole life 
 and innermost thoughts of the penitent before he consent to give 
 him that which the Church has bidden him to give without any such 
 conditions, namely, the benefit of absolution by the ministry of God's 
 holy word ; if manuals which distinctly teach the whole Roman 
 doctrine of confession in its extremest form are used in private 
 or circulated amongst the young and the inexperienced ; how, 
 I ask, are we to reconcile such teaching and such practice with 
 loyalty to the Church of England ? And is it any answer to the 
 accusation of disloyalty in these respects to say, We have after 
 all broken no law of the Church, we are free to use the words, 
 " Mass," and " Sacrament of Penance," and " Sacramental Con- 
 fession," and even to use or to circulate what teachings on 
 confession we please, so long as we keep within the letter of the 
 law. What is it to you if we choose, for instance, to meet together 
 to " say masses for the departed," or bind ourselves to " labour in 
 bringing young and old to value duly the Sacrament of Penance ? " 
 Can you prevent us in any way from doing this, and if not, had 
 you not better let us alone ? 
 
 Again I ask. Is it really true that clergymen of the Church of 
 England hold themselves free to do, as her ministers, whatever 
 they cannot be punished by her for doing, and that this was all 
 the obligation which they incurred when they took her vows upon 
 them, and gave themselves to her service and ministry ? 
 
 I cannot believe this. I do not believe it of many of those who 
 are using the language and adopting the practices against which 
 I have protested, and much besides to which I have not referred. 
 I am far from accusing all such of conscious and premeditated 
 disloyalty to our Church, I would rather regard this appeal of 
 theirs to mere legality against the charge of disloyalty, as only 
 their answer to those who threaten them with law ; and that in 
 their hearts, many of those who use such language hold them- 
 selves most truly loyal to the Church of England. But there may 
 be an unconscious as well as a conscious disloyalty — an estrange- 
 ment from the spirit and teaching of our Church, of which men are 
 not themselves aware. And this I believe to be the case with 
 many of this school, and especially with many of its younger 
 members who have never carefully studied, if they have ever 
 studied at all, the position of the Church of England in her great 
 controversy with Rome, as set forth by her greatest divines. 
 They have persuaded themselves, or have been taught, that our 
 difference with Rome is only a question " of details," and not of 
 " principles," a matter of words and phrases which admit of ex- 
 planation and reconciliation ; and that as Rome has unfortunately 
 made it impossible for herself to alter her language in the least 
 degree, we must make all the advances to reunion, by altering 
 ours and adopting hers. Their minds are so filled with this vision 
 of a great reunited Catholic Church, that they forget that it is only
 
 A CHARGE. 
 
 57 
 
 through their own mother, the Church of England, that they were 
 born into the Church CathoHc ; that it is at her hands they have 
 received their Catholic heritage ; that her Prayer Book and her 
 formularies are for them her expression of Catholic truth and 
 Catholic worship, as she believes that she has derived these, 
 through the primitive church, from Christ and his apostles ; and 
 that if these are not what she claims for them, if she have lost for 
 us any essential portion of that heritage or mutilated the doctrine of 
 Christ, if wherever she differs from Rome she is less cathohc, less 
 primitive, less pure than Rome — nay, that if she have quarrelled 
 with Rome only on points of " detail " and matters of phraseology, 
 and not on questions of deep and vital " principle," her position 
 is utterly untenable, her claims to our allegiance gone, and that 
 she and we are simply in a state of wanton and unjustifiable 
 schism. 
 
 They are loyal to a Church of England, but it is to a Church 
 of their own imagining ; a Church which has never yet existed in 
 this country ; a Church which is not Roman, for it rejects the 
 Roman obedience, nor Anglican, for it accepts nearly all Roman 
 doctrine, nor yet Catholic and Primitive, for its worship and 
 teaching are mainly Mediaeval ; a Church which dishkes its own 
 history, despises its qwn ritual, and doubts its own orders ; a 
 Church which Rome repudiates, and which England knows not ; 
 a Church which assuredly is not the Church of England as she 
 appears in English history, or as she has defined herself in her own 
 formularies. And yet they have come to believe that this, their 
 Utopia, is the very Church of England of which they are now 
 ministers, and to which they have promised obedience. Now 
 strange and all but inconceivable as such a position seems to me ; 
 utterly irreconcilable as I believe it to be with true loyalty to the 
 reformed Church of England, I am willing to beUeve that to 
 others it does not seem so ; not the less, however, do I believe it 
 to be perilous for themselves and for the Church : perilous to 
 themselves, as it forces now one and now another of them, in 
 obedience to its real logical necessities, to leave us for Rome ; 
 perilous to the Church, as all teaching and practice that is really 
 foreign to her doctrine and discipline must be. 
 
 So regarding it, I have spoken words of warning and remon- 
 strance, which will, doubtless, be little heeded by those they most 
 concern ; but which may have, I trust, some weight with those who 
 are now listening to me. To those who have not yet committed 
 themselves to teaching or to practices such as those I have been de- 
 scribing — to the great body, may I not say to every one of the 
 clergy of this diocese — 1 venture to repeat that word of counsel and 
 exhortation which I have endeavoured to make the key-note of 
 all I have been saying in this Charge. Be loyal — thoroughly 
 loyal to the Church in which it has pleased God to appoint your 
 lot in His ministry. Weigh carefully, scrupulously even, her claims 
 
 F
 
 58 A CHARGE. 
 
 to your allegiance. Consider well, reconsider if you will, her 
 position as opposed to all Papal and Puritan innovation on the 
 one hand or the other ; see if her via media really be the way of 
 safety and of truth for us; judge with keenest scrutiny too, if 
 her relations to the State be lawful, and further, if they be really at 
 this moment for the spiritual good both of the Church and of the 
 people of England. And if, when you have done this, you can 
 honestly say, as before God, we believe that the Church, whose 
 ministers we are, Established, Reformed, Primitive, Scriptural, 
 as we see her to be, is that Church to which we can, with a 
 good conscience, give ourselves as her servants, then be content 
 not only to abide in her service, but to do her work in her way in 
 all hearty and faithful loyalty. She may not be all that even 
 her most faithful sons may desire for her ; but she is and ought to 
 be for us, so long as we remain within her pale, the best and 
 purest Church we know of; and we should be very jealous how we 
 allow scruples as to her full right to all our obedience, or longings 
 after doctrines she does not teach, or practices she does not 
 enjoin, to make us discontented and half-hearted in her service. 
 She needs at this moment the loyal and loving help of all her 
 sons, but chiefly and especially of us of the clergy. I have said, 
 and I believe it, that her future under God depends far more upon 
 what her clergy are and do in this very generation in which we 
 are living than upon anything else. No power or influence 
 from without can do her one tithe of the harm that we can do 
 her, or give her one tithe of the help that we can give her, from 
 within. It is then a grave and a solemn responsibility, brethren, 
 which thus rests upon each one of us. We may, if we choose, 
 and that only too easily and too fatally, hurt the Church by our 
 disloyalty, by our strife and party spirit, or by our sloth and care- 
 lessness ; in that case we shall have to answer for having destroyed 
 a power for good in this our country and in the world, which, 
 once lost, no human wisdom or effort could ever restore. Or we 
 may, not indeed as easily, not without painful toil and self-denial, 
 not without patience and courage and faithful perseverance in 
 well-doing, not without large sacrifice of personal preference and 
 self-will, but yet completely and successfully, preserve and hand 
 on to those who are to come after us the great trust which has 
 come down to us of the pure faith of the gospel of Christ as it is 
 enshrined in the doctrine and the ritual, and brought within the 
 reach of the people of this country by the organization, of the 
 Church of England. May God give us grace, my brethren, to lay 
 to heart these our great responsibiUties, and wisdom and courage 
 faithfully to discharge them for His sake and in His sight. 
 
 PRINTED BY VIRTIE AND CO., LIMITED, CIIY ROAD, LONDON.
 
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