MR. BERESFORD HOPE*: Sir, I to admit the Church laity. But from am glad to be able to agree in one senti- one end of his present speech to the other, ment-almost the last he uttered--which that side of the Bill has been kept in the fell from my right hon. Friend (Mr. background; and thus I find myself deCowper-Temple). He said that his Bill prived of the help which the able advocacy was not brought forward to benefit any of my right hon. Friend would have given particular school of thought. I do not me in fixing the points on which I feel think that it is. I think not only that certain that that relaxation would be it will benefit no particular school of dangerous. My right hon. Friend has thought, but that it will not benefit any fallen back upon precedents and inconsistent or logical thought at all. If stances, and I am glad he has done so, I desired in place of thought and study for they have their value; but to be to introduce sensationalism, or what my valuable they must be accurate, and right hon. Friend pleasantly calls a run on all fours; and in face of that desire for variety, I should feel sure that requirement one of his most astonishing I possess the means of doing so within statements was the assertion that the this Bill. My right hon. Friend spoke American Church recognized this prinstrongly and learnedly upon precedents; ciple of his Bill. His proof was that a he is much impressed with the value of certain clergyman-who, as I may add, is Church discipline and authority. I noted named Dr. Tyng-introduced a minister those words in his speech, and I observed of another denomination into his pulpit, with pleasure the importance which he to the great disapprobation both of his attributes to those principles. But I Bishop and of the community to which rise on the other side-having as much he belongs. I have not the canons of respect for authority and discipline as the American Church by me, but I bemy right hon. Friend-in the name lieve I am right in saying that by that of the liberties and rights of the con- act Dr. Tyng contravened those canons. gregations; I stand up on behalf of The matter was taken up and investithe laity whose liberties would be im- gated; and if Dr. Tyng did not substanperilled under the intolerable, because tially suffer, that only shows that the unlimited, tyranny contained within the discipline of the American Church is not four corners of this Bill. There is a strong for practical purposes; but it does class of people in this country whose not prove that Dr. Tyng and his abettors existence is too often overlooked during acted in conformity with the spirit of their our Wednesday deliberations, but who canons. Then my right hon. Friend still have an existence, and whose rights appealed to the Preaching Orders of the we are bound to protect. These are not Middle Ages. I ask what were those the people "with itching ears," who Preaching Orders? They were bodies of carry on dissipation under political or men in the most complete subjection social pretexts for six days in the week, and submission to the Church of Rome, and then fill up the gap upon the and who were sent out to preach because seventh by indulgence in rhetorical fire--and only because-they were absolutely works, but those quiet people who go to Church to worship God in the way their fathers did, and to be instructed in their duty. That class of people will find their status much imperilled by this Bill; but before proceeding to discuss its provisions, I must remark that in the speech of my right hon. Friend I observe a remarkable deficiency. In the course of the observations following the introduction of the Bill I threw out some interlocutory remarks, and said that it did not appear to be limited to the admission of Nonconformist ministers, but that as it was drawn it would admit a Church layman into the pulpit. On that my right hon. Friend jumped up, and said that the Bill was intended

identified with the system on behalf of which they spoke. Yet that institution is quoted as a precedent for an occasional license to preach to be given to persons who are not identified nor even in conformity with the body whose pulpits they are to occupy. The practice may have been right or wrong, the Friars may have been good or bad, and this Bill may be a beneficial or a dangerous thing; but as an illustration of the advantage of it, the instance proves absolutely nothing. Then my right hon. Friend falls back upon the Fourth Council of Carthage. What argument does he find there? The canon to which he refers is one to limit, not to confirm, occasional sermons. There may

be lawful for the Bishop to license them to preach "an occasional sermon or lecture." What does he mean by an "occasional" sermon? The duties of every Sunday are occasional compared with the other days of the week. The phrase may mean anything, from a casual

to one which recurs every fourth, or third, or second week. It may be so worked as to authorize a complete cycle of weekly discourses by different orators. Each sermon may be an occasional one as far as its particular preacher is concerned; but if the clergyman manages the arrangements dexterously, they will as a whole be habitual, and the unlucky parish may find itself condemned to an endless series of sensational orations duly announced by illuminated placards at the church doors. But the most astounding feature of the clause is its hazy enactment enabling the Bishop to license these occasional sermons or lectures. It is, as if on purpose, left vague whether the clergyman is to ask for, and that the Bishop is to grant the license each time, and for only one sermon; or whether the license is to overflow the one occasion, and if so, for how

have been prior to this Council some system in existence similar to that which is found in this Bill; but, if so, it was found to work so ill that limitations were put upon a practice which was found to be at variance with the existing canons. Then, again, it is true that after the Reformation, viewing the scarcity of clergy-discourse at some long irregular interval men and the scantiness of population in many districts, laymen were occasionally permitted to preach. Those who have studied the history of the reign of Elizabeth may recollect the one lay sermon of that age which has come down to us, preached upon a day when the High Sheriff of Oxfordshire got up with his sword by his side, and professed that he had come to distribute some dainty comfits to the sweet chickens of salvation. Does my right hon. Friend wish that for the future the High Sheriffs of counties shall preach the Assize sermons? But to proceed to the consideration of the Bill itself. I must say that in this measure my right hon. Friend has transcended the utmost limits of vague and ambiguous language allowed even to the innocent bantlings of a Wednesday afternoon. To begin with the first words of the 1st clause-"It shall be lawful for the Bishop on the ap-long is it to run. Is it to continue for the plication of the incumbent or officiating minister." The officiating minister! Who is he in law? What definition can be given of so fleeting a personage? A tired clergyman may go for a month to the sea-side, and when he comes back he may find that the " officiating minister" who has taken his duty for those four Sundays has, in his absence, brought in a Boanerges from the Potteries to deliver occasional sermons, and has upset the whole good order of his congregation. On one point I praise my right hon. Friend. He has made the thin end of the wedge argument impossible. There is no room for it; for the wedge itself, and the hammer that drives it, and the hand that wields the hammer have all gone in with the Bill. The clause goes on to deal with "persons not in Holy Orders of the Church of England," and my right hon. Friend, as I have said, argued the Bill throughout as if it were intended only to apply to Nonconformist ministers. Why did he not state what he had asserted before-that it would equally apply to laymen of the Church, if such an one desired to preach? In regard to those persons he proposes that it shall

Mr. Beresford Hope

man's life time, or for the life of the Bishop who grants it; or are all future Bishops in the see to be bound by the permission granted by their predecessors? If the person licensed abuses his trustfor we may have even occasional preachers that are disobedient to the laws of good sense, good manners, or morality—as we find that even incumbents are not always obedient to them-where is the power to revoke the license? So hastily and carelessly has the Bill been drawn that the draftsman has actually forgotten to make any provision for revoking the license; and so a gentleman who has graduated at Little Rock, or some other equally distinguished seminary over the ocean, and who is desirous of exhibiting himself to an European audience, may obtain a license, which, when he becomes better known, the Bishop cannot revoke. His sermon may smell of Geneva, with a good deal of Indirect Claims in it, with something of Calvin, and, perhaps, a little of the homonymous spirit; but the Bishop will have given his permission, and he will find himself powerless to withdraw it. The Bill says that the person is not to be in Holy Orders, and

stops there, and so the preacher may distinguished performers enable us to not even be a member of any Christian wile away our week-day evenings. We denomination. A clergyman may apply must take another case. There are such to his Bishop for a license for a distin- things as proprietary chapels. Any person guished foreigner, and that foreigner strong in means, and strong in views, may prove to be an active-minded Maho- may become proprietor of one of these medan, or a Brahmod, or Buddhist. The chapels, and put in his clergyman. That House must not object to me for taking clergyman may go to the Bishop and extreme cases. It is extreme cases which represent that the gentleman who bought test the value of a proposal. We have the chapel, and who put him into it for in the Church about 15,000 clergymen as the pure love of souls, and in order to honest and respectable as a class as are extend the doctrines of the Church of to be found anywhere in the world, yet England, was desirous to give an occathere may be among them different sional sermon in the chapel. How can degrees of respectability, and different the Bishop refuse a license to such a qualities of moral sense. We can sup-man; and yet the fact may be that the pose that there may be some perplexed proprietor has acquired the place only clergyman in a destitute Peel district. because he holds-though hitherto in His church does not fill, and he is at his the dock-opinions in which very few wits end with the expenses of a growing of his fellow-citizens share. He may family. He will find his way to the be an advocate of polygamy, or an enBishop of his diocese and ask leave for a thusiastic believer in the mortality of distinguished American clergyman to the soul; and yet the Bishop will be preach, and probably he will obtain it. equally unable to cancel the permission, Some five or six weeks afterwards he or prove complicity. But I have not will apply for permission for another done with my cases. We are many of distinguished foreigner, and in due us patrons of livings, and most of us go course will again come forward with as down into the country during the Remany like petitions as he may need. cess, and coming as we do fresh from Then the curtain will rise, and the large the debates of this House, I dare say it posters will be unfurled-on one Sunday is the opinion of all of us that we should it will be an enlightened Mahomedan as well be able to speak from the pulpit who will offer a dispassionate survey of as from these benches, especially as there Christianity; the next orator will approach is no one in Church to call "Question." the problem of Creation from the start- Would it not be a dangerous temptation ing point of natural selection; the third to you, Sir, and to all of us, if this Bill Sunday will be thrown in to the rigid passed, to make it a condition of our Calvinist; on another, an accomplished presentations that the pulpit should not Comptist will extol the worship of be cruelly shut against the patrons ? humanity; while the Brahmod will take the next turn with the genteel Spiritualist or Mr. Howard Paul to complete the cycle. This daring clergyman will stand above or below all law. He will have got the Bishop's irrevocable license for all his performers, and he has only to reckon the shoals of listeners who will crowd his church Sunday after Sunday. How is the Bishop to proceed against the clergyman who has obtained his own permission for these men to preach? The Ordinary cannot put the incumbent into the Ecclesiastical Court, for the obnoxious sermons will be none of his, and still less can he proceed against the occasional preachers. Clergyman and preacher can alike defy the Bishop, defy the law, and defy common sense, and our churches will become theatres of entertainments, resembling those with which

Now, I come to the Bishops. If there is one thing that would condemn this Bill more than another it is the position in which it puts the Bishops; for it starts the Bishops on a totally new line of action, while it affords them no guidance for their conduct. There are 28 Bishops in England and Wales with the Isle of Man28 individual minds-28 different qualities of intelligent thought that are all to be simultaneously brought up to consider this vague and Sibylline scrap. One Bishop will think caution is the best policy, and he will refuse licenses all round. Another will look upon an Act of Parliament as imperative, and he will license all round. A third Bishop will think that the Gospel can lose nothing by free inquiry, and will look out for preachers of startling views to stimulate the flagging orthodoxy of the beneficed incumbents.

Another Bishop may have decided opi- | fied according to the respective by-laws nions upon one set of doctrines, and will of the different denominations, and give only license Nonconformists who hold them the same right of using the pulviews similar to his own. Another Bishop pits as the ordained clergy possess, I may be a High Churchman who will, should oppose the Bill, because it would in working the Bill, ignore Dissenters, destroy the existing Church of England while he uses it as leverage to introduce and substitute a totally novel body. preaching Orders into the Church of Eng- But, at any rate, such a proposal would land-gentlemen who put on brown or be logical and consistent, however revowhite or black gowns, and live according lutionary. But this Bill is not a comto a rule. There are some hon. Members pliment, but an affront to Dissenters. who know that I am not talking at ran- It gives the right to a clergyman to dom, but that there are men of singular patronize his own favourites at the exdress and high rhetorical power who pense of all the others. The man of call themselves English Benedictines or free thought will patronize preachers of Cistercians. These persons-whose zeal one denomination, and the Calvinists will and devotion are undoubted-might fairly go in for another, while the invitation come forward and plead that the right will in each case not be to the body, hon. Member for South Hants had car- but to the man himself; and thus every ried an Act which was intended to re- Nonconformist whom any clergyman may move all doubts as to the legality of the invite, will, in virtue of such invitation, preaching Orders in the Church of Eng- be placed by an external influence in a land; and any Bishop who sympathized position of notoriety above his equally, or with them would have the right to work more deserving fellow-ministers. If the that Act in that sense just as his brother Nonconformists accept this Bill, they will would have the right to work it in a put it in the power of the eager, and sense favourable to Nonconformist minis- the fussy, and the self-seeking among ters. I am not now going into the right the clergy to trot them out and exhibit or the wrong of these opinions and prac- them as cats-paws for the purpose of tices; I point only to what the Bill would filling the churches. And when a Nonsanction. It may-it must-sanction not conformist has accepted such a situation, only free trade in preaching, but it will he will have accepted it as we all accept also sanction the creation of religious invitations to public meetings. Do we Orders in the Church itself, which may not all of us know the feeling of going be right or may be wrong in themselves, to a public meeting with which we have, but which ought not to be brought in perhaps, a very limited sympathy, and by a side-wind in an obscure measure the object of which we do not fully aplike this one. My right hon. Friend prove? But when we are there, the talks of unshackling the Church. How rules of courtesy compel us to sink our does he unshackle it? He will, perhaps, doubts and differences. We get diffuse unshackle a few restless individuals, but and rhetorical, and we express sentiments he will lay heavy burdens upon the great much warmer than what we really feel. body of quiet clergy who know little or So, by the very fact of accepting a nothing of this Bill, and who will cer- preaching invitation, the Nonconformist tainly be startled when they take up will give ground for the assumption that their newspaper to-morrow and find to he has for the time agreed to sink his their surprise what important interests differences with the Church. Now, it of theirs have been discussed behind must be plain to anyone who considers their backs. My right hon. Friend would what are the enormous advantages which hamper the Church for the personal the Established Church possesses, that benefit of some persons well able to take no man would be a Nonconformist unless care of themselves, and that at the ex- he had a real difference of opinion with pense of others in every respect as good that Church. The difference may be a as themselves. mere hair's breadth, or it may be a wide Now, a few words to those Noncon- chasm; but a difference there must be. formists who may fancy themselves com- But once let a Nonconformist accept this plimented by this Bill. Where is the com- invitation, and then the laws of courtesy pliment? If it were proposed to admit will compel him to prophecy smooth into the Church pulpits all Noncon- things; and, instead of counselling the formist ministers who were duly quali-congregation as he himself feels in his Mr. Beresford Hope