64

DUTY OF THE CHURCH IN TIMES OF TRIAL.

confounded with the wreck of other nations.

Therefore

it admonishes us all, that we are each and all bound to do everything that in us lies, to preserve and uphold the State of England, each according to the means and opportunities granted to him,-to cast out whatever has the seeds of death in it, and to infuse, to propagate, and to foster whatever has the principle of life and immortality (z). We are to do this primarily in ourselves, and next in whatever sphere of action God has appointed for us. Then may it come to pass, that, as the bell, which tolls the funeral knell, has often to change its note, and ring the joyous marriage-peal,-yea, as the funeral bell itself, when it tolls the death of a saint, announces the marriage of his spirit to the Heavenly Bridegroom,-so will these funeral bells, which have been tolling the ruin of Kingdoms and Churches, prepare the Church and People of England for the Marriage-feast of the Lamb.

NOTES.

NOTE A: p. 6.

My Letter to the Dean of Chichester has been the subject of severe animadversions, especially in a Pamphlet by a person calling himself "a Cambridge Tutor," and in a series of long, elaborate Articles in the British Magazine. Of course I was prepared for this. I did not take up my pen on that occasion without counting the cost. But I have not found anything material in the arguments urged against me, which requires any addition to what has been said in the Postscript to the second Edition of that Letter; and I am unwilling to revive an irksome, neverending controversy on minute points of detail. Nor should I have made this slight allusion to my assailants, except that the writer in the British Magazine tries to shew that I myself have been guilty of the sin, with which I have charged the impugners of the Bampton Lectures, by garbling my extracts from them. Had I done so, such an act would be doubly reprehensible in But his main ground for the accusation is, that, in quoting a long passage, several parts of which I omitted, "there are no dots, or marks of omission" (p. 530). The reply to this is very simple. The omissions are denoted, not by dots, but by dashes. My accuser indeed says, "the dashes would hardly be supposed to have that intention." Yet I know not why, if such be an ordinary mode of designating omissions. So far as my observation has extended, it is the most usual one; though it may be that I have been led to adopt it by its continual occurrence in Niebuhr's Roman History; the precision of that writer, and his reluctance to swell out his notes, making him merely quote those words from the passages he refers to, which bear

me.

directly on the inference he wishes to draw from them. Whether dots or dashes are the commonest mode adopted nowadays by English printers for designating omissions, I know not; nor is it worth while to enquire. At all events the latter are still not unfrequent; and that they were in use two hundred years ago, appears from Milton's Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, where, complaining of the licensers, he says: "If the work of any deceast author, though never so famous in his lifetime, and even to this day, comes to their hands for license to be printed or reprinted, if there be found in his book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the highth of zeal, (and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet not suiting with every low, decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, the Reformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon him their dash.”

It is so difficult to attain to complete accuracy in such minute points of typography, that the dash by which I meant to mark an omission, may here and there have been left out by the printer, though I am not aware of it. This however is not garbling a quotation. Garbling involves an intentional misrepresentation of the passage quoted, mostly one injurious to the writer, though in my case it would have been otherwise,a misrepresentation, which, by leaving out certain words, twists. the meaning of the passage into something different from the author's purpose. Such an act is a sin against truth, which I have not wittingly committed, and which my opponent, with all his efforts, has not convicted me of. My omissions are of such words as did not seem to bear on the immediate argument for which the passage was quoted, mostly of words which had no significance with reference to any part of the controversy. In a very few cases, it may be, the words omitted might have appeared to call for a separate elucidation. My purpose however was not to write a commentary on every questionable expression in the Bampton Lectures. It was merely to shew that the extracts brought forward, as grounds for the proceedings against the author, gave an erroneous representation of his views,

in a word, that they were garbled. Even as it was, I was under the necessity of making a number of long quotations; and I gladly embraced every opportunity, that I could conscientiously, of curtailing them.

NOTE B: p. 7.

In the discussion which took place in the House of Lords on this subject in February last, the Bishop of St David's, according to the Report in the Times, said, that "his right rev. friend (the Bishop of Exeter) had spoken, as if the power which had hitherto been exercised in substance by the Crown, had been an absolute and irresponsible power.-His right rev. friend had forgotten this very important feature in the case, that, when the Crown exercised this power, it was strictly limited as to the object selected for nomination. It was not a power to nominate anybody whom the Crown might think proper: but it was a power limited to a certain known class of persons, who in the eyes of the law were equally well qualified to be the object of nomination. His right rev. friend-had made much too great a distinction between the inferior and superior orders in the Church: he appeared at the moment to have forgotten that there was no ulterior qualification required for the functions of a Bishop, which was not equally required for the functions of a Presbyter. The qualifications required for the Presbyter, and which fitted the Presbyter for the after functions of a Bishop, were the main qualifications: all others were secondary, and comparatively immaterial."

This is an important observation, and quite conclusive as an answer to a case suggested by some alarmists, that, if the power of the Crown were to be exercised without any sort of check, it might nominate a Jew or a Mahometan. Still there is no absolute warrant in the previous ordination, that every person who is ordained Priest will be qualified for the Priesthood. Even with the utmost vigilance on the part of the ordaining Bishops, unworthy candidates may gain admission. Moreover, during the long period

which mostly intervenes before a Priest is raised to the Episcopate, disqualifications, unknown at the time of his ordination, may have become notorious. His life may have been openly immoral; or his opinions, as we have seen happen in so many lamentable instances of late, though previously in unison with the doctrines of our Church, may have diverged from them, whether toward Romanism, or toward Rationalism and Socinianism. Now surely it is not unreasonable to demand, that the Church should have some legal security that a person thus disqualified shall not be placed among her rulers. Nay, the need of such a security is greatly hightened, now that the Prime Minister will no longer be necessarily a member of her body, but may be a Dissenter, a Unitarian, a Romanist, or perchance, ere long, a Jew. This security would be afforded by those very forms, which have just been proved to be nullities, if they were but allowed to become realities. That they were originally intended to be so, is plain, without our entering into a historical demonstration to prove it for no forms are ever set up in the first instance with the purpose of being empty and powerless. They were meant to have force, however they may have lost it. Nor would the revivifying of those forms invest the Archbishop, as has been contended, with a veto on the appointments of the Crown. For the nominee of the Crown would only be rejected in a case where there was decisive legal evidence of his unfitness. The Archbishop would not act discretionally, but judicially, somewhat in the same manner in which a Bishop at present may refuse to institute a priest to a living, when he can shew valid cause for his refusal. But in fact the very existence of such a security would almost ensure its never being called into activity, by preventing the Minister of the Crown from nominating a person whose nomination could be called in question. Vexatious objections, such as were offered in one at least of the recent cases, might be dismist summarily.