this circumstance especially-that the Church of England at that time was better provided with able and faithful ministers than it had ever been before, and is in like manner better provided now than it has ever been since. I have been strongly impressed by this consideration; it has made me more apprehensive that no human means are likely to avert the threatened overthrow of the Establishment; but it affords also more hope (looking to human causes) of its restoration. "The Church will be assailed by popular clamour and seditious combinations; it will be attacked in Parliament by unbelievers, halfbelievers, and misbelievers, and feebly defended by such of the ministers as are not secretly or openly hostile to it. On our side we have God and the right. OlσTÉOV Kai EλTIOτiov must be our motto, as it was Lauderdale's in his prison. We, however, are not condemned to inaction; and our hope rests upon a surer foundation than his."Vol. vi. p. 222. The shallow pretext under which all the havock made in the Church is justified, that the Church is "public property," has perhaps never received a more forcible answer, than in a letter written about the same time to the Rev. Neville White : "Public property the Church indeed is; most truly and most sacredly so; and in a manner the very reverse of that in which the despoilers consider it to be so. It is the only property which is public; which is set apart and consecrated as a public inheritance, in which any one may claim his share, who is properly qualified. You have your share of it, I might have had mine. There is no respectable family in England, some of whose members have not, in the course of two or three generations, enjoyed their part in it. And many thousands are at this time qualifying themselves to claim their portion. Upon what principle can any government be justified in robbing them of their rights? "Church property neither is, nor ever has been, public property in any other sense than this. The whole was originally private property, so disposed of by individuals in the way which they deemed most beneficial to others, and most for the good of their own souls. How much of superstition may have been mingled with this matters not. Much of this property was wickedly shared among themselves by those persons who forwarded the Reformation as a scheme of spoliation; and in other ways materially impeded its progress. Yet they did nothing so bad as the Whig ministry are preparing to do; for they, no doubt, mean to give to the Romish clergy what they take from the Irish Protestant Church."-Vol. vi. pp. 205, 206. Let it not be supposed, however, that the external dangers of the Church alone excited Southey's alarm for her safety. He was by no means blind to the perils which threatened her from within : "When Church reformation begins, if revolution does not render it unnecessary, I fear we shall find many Judases in the Establishment. It was more by her own treacherous children that she was overthrown in the Great Rebellion than by the Puritans. But this must ever be the case."-Vol. vi. p. 154. Who these Judases were, in his opinion, he tells us pretty plainly in another passage, written in 1830 : "I am inclined to think that the Church is in more danger from the so-called Evangelical party among its own clergy than it would be from lay-assistance. These clergy are now about to form a sort of union,— in other words, a convocation of their own, that they may act as a body. They have had a Clerical breakfast in London. The two Noels, Stewart, who is brother-in-law to Owen of Lanark, and was here with him some years ago, and Daniel Wilson were the chief movers. There have been two reports of the speeches in the Record' newspaper, and a Mr. M'Neil (heu! quantum mutatus!), who very sensibly objected to the whole scheme, had the whole meeting against him."-Vol. vi. pp. 93, 94. Nor was he blind to the dangers impending from other and opposite quarters. To one of these he thus alludes in 1838: "The publication of Froude's Remains is likely to do more harm than is capable of doing. 'The Oxford School' has acted most unwisely in giving its sanction to such a deplorable example of mistaken zeal. Of the two extremes-the too little and the too muchthe too little is that which is likely to produce the worst consequence to the individual, but the too much is more hurtful to the community; for, it spreads, and rages too, like a contagion."-Vol. vi. p. 271. We hardly think the suppression of the name in the second line of this extract fair. Is it one of those names to which we are, at this time, indebted for the spread of the contagion predicted with such wonderful accuracy? Be this as it may, the prophetic sagacity of the Seer of Keswick is attested yet in another direction : "James II.'s conduct in obtruding a Romish president upon Magdalen, was not worse than that of the present ministry in appointing Dr. Hampden to the professorship of divinity. If they had given him any other preferment, even a bishopric, it would have been only one proof among many that it is part of their policy to promote men of loose opinions; but to place him in the office which he now holds, was an intentional insult to the university. In no way could the Whigs expect so materially to injure the Church, as by planting Germanised professors in our schools of divinity."-Vol. vi. p. 291. We have purposely so selected our extracts, that they shall convey a lesson and a warning to each one of the many adversaries 110 The Life and Correspondence of the late Robert Southey. by whom the cause of God's Church and of His truth is at this time menaced. And let none of those to whom one or other of the remarks we have quoted may apply, think that he may turn the edge of the reproof by objecting that Southey was a political writer, who could not be expected to take a more than superficial view of the deep questions which he handled with such incisive force of language. We may again appeal to his letters for proof that his thoughts on these subjects were the fruit of long observation and profound reflection, and that he meditated on them under a deep sense of their eternal importance : "Our occupations withdraw us all too much from nearer and more lasting concerns. Time and nature, especially when aided by any sorrows, prepare us for better influences; and when we feel what is wanting, we seek and find it. The clouds then disperse, and the evening is calm and clear, even till night closes. 66 Long and intimate conversance with Romish and sectarian history, with all the varieties of hypocritical villany and religious madness, has given me the fullest conviction of the certainty and importance of these truths, from the perversion and distortion of which these evils and abuses have grown. There is not a spark of fanaticism left in my composition: whatever there was of it in youth, spent itself harmlessly in political romance. I am more in danger, therefore, of having too little of theopathy than too much,-of having my religious faith more in the understanding than in the heart. In the understanding I am sure it is; I hope it is in both. This good in myself my ecclesiastical pursuits have certainly effected. And if I live to finish the whole of my plans, I shall do better service to the Church of England than I could ever have done as one of its ministers, had I kept to the course which it was intended that I should pursue. There is some satisfaction in thinking thus."-Vol. v. pp. 250, 251. It would be easy to multiply proofs of the closeness of the bond by which Southey's public labours and his soul's inmost life were happily linked together in one harmonious effort to discover, and after he had discovered it, to believe, to obey, and to maintain the truth. But our task is done. We have traced the discipline by which Southey's mind was led into that line of thought, at once independent of all external bias, and accordant with the truth, which gave, and continues to give, him a claim, such as few men ever have had, to be reverentially listened to as a watchman and prophet in Israel. Of him it may with exceeding truth be said, that "being dead he yet speaketh." ART. VI-1. Charge of the Bishop of London in Nov. 1850. 2. Charge of the Bishop of London in 1842. 3. A Farewell Letter to his Parishioners. By the Rev. W. J. E. BENNETT, M.A. 4. Letters of D. C. L., Reprinted from the " Morning Chronicle." 5. A Plea for "Romanizers," so called. A Letter to the Bishop of London. By the Rev. ARTHUR Baker. IN ordinary times, and under ordinary circumstances, we should scarcely have thought that it fell within our legitimate province to consider, at any length, the causes or the consequences connected with the retirement of any individual clergyman of the English Church from a position he formerly occupied. But there are circumstances of such a special nature connected with the resignation of the Rev. W. J. E. Bennett, that we feel we should be wanting in our duty to the Church of England if we were not to take some notice of them. Since the delivery of his Charge, in November last, and especially since his acceptance of Mr. Bennett's resignation, the Bishop of London has been the object of the most unsparing attack and misrepresentation from a particular section of the Church. In all quarters connected with that section, with one honourable exception, that of the English Churchman," the changes have been rung, usque ad nauseam, upon the "weakness," the "vacillation," the "inconsistency," ," the "intolerance," and the "despotic tyranny," of the Bishop of London. The "Theologian and Ecclesiastic," in its February number, told its readers, in an article called "The Panic and its results," that the Bishop of London had gone beyond his power, at the mere bidding of a hired mob," to silence an obnoxious clergyman; that he "wanted a victim, wherewith to appease Exeter Hall," and had therefore sacrificed Mr. Bennett. The "Guardian," fearful, doubtless, of compromising its position by an open attack, has omitted no opportunity of sneering at the bishop's conduct. A writer of very great ability has been advocating Mr. Bennett's cause, and vituperating the Bishop of London, in a series of very remarkable letters in the "Morn 66 ing Chronicle," under the signature of D. C. L.;-and, as a climax, Mr. Bennett himself has thought it consistent with his duty to the Church, and with his vow of canonical obedience to his bishop, to publish a "Farewell Letter to his Parishioners," of some 250 pages, in which, from the beginning to the end, ab ovo usque ad mala, he has done all in his power to hold up his diocesan to public contempt-in which he compares himself to St. Chrysostom, banished from Constantinople by the intrigues of the Empress Eudoxia, aided by the unrighteous Bishop Theophilus'-in which he represents the Church of England as "lying on the waters a helpless water-logged wreck," out of which he is cast "by the force of the waves," while "the stormy winds do rend her deep and wide" (p. 228);-in which he tells his parishioners that they "must not expect that human nature, with its many infirmities and constant needs, will long bear up against the ever-recurring wants of spiritual love and longing for the things of God, which it is in vain searching for in the Church of England-I mean in the Church of England, as now interpreted, in the diocese of London" (p. 227). That Mr. Bennett will himself regret the publication in a very short time, quite as much as we can do, we have not the least doubt, but litera scripta manet. It is very much easier to make unjust charges, than it is to destroy the effect of them, when once they have been made; and therefore we consider it our bounden duty, for the sake of the truth, for the sake of the Bishop of London, who has done heretofore such good service to the Church of England; for the sake of the Church of England, which now, more than ever, requires a continuation of those services; for the sake of Mr. Bennett's successor, placed, as he will be, in a most trying situation; and, especially, for the sake of Mr. Bennett's late parishioners; we think it, we say, our bounden duty, to show by a reference to facts which are beyond controversy, and to dates which cannot be falsified, that the Bishop of London simply accepted, much against his own will, the reiterated resignation of Mr. Bennett; that Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Bennett alone, is responsible for his separation from the churches and the parishioners of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, and St. Barnabas, Pimlico; and moreover, that, inasmuch as Mr. Bennett refused to yield to the oft-repeated wishes of his diocesan, the bishop was bound to take the course he has taken, not simply by his love for the Church of England, but by his duty to that special portion of it, of which the "Holy Ghost hath made him an overseer." There are three principal questions to be considered 1 The italics are ours. |