scurrilous to an archbishop. Consequently the raciest specimens will be found in the controversial pamphlets which he has written against his Metropolitan, the Primate of all England. From these remarkable publications, therefore, we shall extract a few of the most striking passages; which will have an additional interest, beyond the merits of their style, as illustrating still farther the Bishop's interpretation of that oath which he has taken of reverence and obedience to his Archbishop.

Let us first take the following example of the promised. ' reverence':

'My Lord, there is one observation which is forced upon the mind by this your teaching. It is rank Popery—and worse than Popery.' 'I stand aghast when I hear such teaching from such a

place.' (Letter, p. 14.)

Next let us turn to the following strokes of delicate irony:'There are one or two objections to your scheme, which my own reason would be unequal to encounter. Perhaps your Perhaps your Grace's may be more successful!' (Ib. p. 19.) Such is the declaration of your book; but a new light has burst upon you, it seems, while preparing a preface for it.' (Ib. p. 42.) Turn we to your third witness, another very illustrious name, Bishop Jeremy Taylor. Your Grace will be glad to hear that he really wrote what you cite from his Baptism of Infants.' (Ib. p. 32.)

The audacity of this last insinuation equals its insolence. That Bishop Philpotts, of all people, should accuse an antagonist of habitually quoting works which he had never read! Bishop Philpotts, whose famous blunder about the spurious African Canons has been the amusement of the literary world, ever since it was so deliciously exposed by Mr. Goode! Bishop Philpotts, who so incautiously adopted the quotations (sent him by some partisan) from what he calls Duaren's great work,' which Mr. Gorham conclusively proves him to have never seen!

6

After the foregoing, we shall be less surprised at the following accusations of fraud, falsehood, and betrayal of trust, directed against the Primate:

Your citation of Bishop Taylor, which you have so unsuspiciously received, is absolutely palpably fraudulent.' (Ib. p. 33.) 'So much suppression of the truth converts a formal absolution of Mr. Gorham into a virtual condemnation of his doctrine. Grave charges thus glossed over are tacitly acknowledged, while the individual is acquitted. My Lord, truth does not usually thus shun the light. (Ib. p. 59.) I grieve to think, that instead of leading, you must have misled those whom you were to instruct, not only by mis-stating the matters on which you advised, but also by mis-quoting all or almost

1852.

6

His Vituperation of Opponents.

89

all the authors cited by you in confirmation of your statement.' (Letter, p. 25.) Tell the Church, whose highest functionary you are, why you did not endeavour at least, to correct the lay judges whom you were summoned by your Queen to advise in matters of spiritual learning. Tell us why you permitted them to deceive themselves so grossly. Tell us, above all, why you joined them in giving such judgment to the world.' (Ib. p. 63.)

So far we have seen the way in which the Archbishop is addressed in the second person; but the effect is scarcely less striking when his assailant vituperates him in the third.

we read:

6

· .

Thus

'The Archbishop. . . . thought fit to desert the duty of his office.' (Pastoral, p. 111.) This unhappy judgment exhibited the Archbishop as regardless of an essential duty of his high office.' (Ib.) That surrender [viz. the institution of Mr. Gorham] can be regarded only as the voluntary betraying of a high and most sacred trust. Traditor potestatis quam sancta mater Ecclesia a sponso suo acceperat. May it be a solitary instance! May the remembrance of it be accompanied with those compunctious feelings, which, if it be remembered as an error, it cannot fail to carry with it! May it thus, with God's blessing, secure both the Archbishop and the Church in which he fills the highest place, from all danger of his again forgeting the responsibilities of his sacred office!' (Ib. p. 12.)

O, Spirit of Molière! Surely the happiest strokes of the Tartuffe are surpassed by this devout ejaculation!* It can only be equalled by the felicitous termination of the letter to the Archbishop, on which Mr. Goode so humorously enlarges ; where a long string of insults ushers in the signature of your 'Grace's affectionate friend for nearly thirty years, and your now afflicted servant, H. Exeter.' Yes! The Tartuffe of nature exceeds the Tartuffe of art; reality is more comic than fiction. But we must hasten to conclude our selection, by a few more extracts from the Bishop's Pastoral. Strange title, certainly, for such a document! recalling associations of rural melodies, peaceful shepherds, and Arcadian repose!

6

We have seen already that the Archbishop had become a 'fautor of heretical tenets,' and had as such forfeited his right to Catholic communion;' we are further informed that His disciplina arcani, it seems, forbids the clergy henceforth to

* We

may

remark that when the Bishop wishes to express peculiar spite against his opponents, he frequently puts his abuse of them into the form of a prayer for their pardon or repentance. Thus, in the 'Helston case,' he gives vent to his feelings against Mr. Le Grice, by solemnly praying for him that he may be judged with

mercy.

bring prominently before their people the "dangerous" truth ' of the spiritual efficacy of baptism; and texts of St. Paul which inculcate it, are henceforth placed in the index expur'gatorius of modern Lambeth.' (Pastoral, p. 45.) And, again, we are told that the Archbishop refers our Lord's teaching to the Devil.' 'This is the comment of our Lord himself, on his own heavenly lesson of mercy; yet this we have seen condemned by the highest officer of our Church as heterodox, as Popish, ay, and by implication,-I tremble while I write the word as Devilish.' (Ib. p. 27.)

Surely our High-Church Prelate must have smiled internally when he made this quotation from the Methodist Preacher in Crabbe's satire :

'And go, it says, and to the Devil go,

And shake thyself— I tremble, but 'tis so.'

Finally, let us conclude this description of the Archbishop, with the following remarkable specimen of theological arithmetic, which supplies a method of estimating the amount of his heresy by the rule of three. I declare solemnly, and with a 'deep sense of the responsibility which attaches to such a ' declaration, concerning a document proceeding from such a quarter, that I could not name any one work of any minister in our Church which, though of double the bulk, contains • half so many heretical statements as are contained in this one charge.' (Ib. p. 39.) Will our readers believe that in the very next page to this astounding paragraph is the following admonition addressed to Lord John Russell, Lord Ashley, and other noblemen and gentlemen, who opposed the Papal Aggression? 'When men of rank and education suffer themselves to ' partake of the blind and intemperate passions of the populace, they become populace themselves; and are sometimes more ' prominent than the rest in coarse and vulgar violence, because, having burst the bands of conventional decorum, they have nothing left to restrain them.' (lb. p. 40.) Well may we exclaim-suo sibi gladio!

But even more astonishing in its audacity is the following lecture on the sin of schism as incurred by abuse of the rulers and ministers of the Church.' 'Did it ever occur to him [one of the speakers at Freemasons' Hall] to inquire what is the nature and how wide the comprehension of that sin [of • schism]? above all, how near an approach to it he makes who indulges in ignorant and fanatical abuse of the rulers and ministers of the Church to which he professes to belong?' (lb. p. 90.)

1852.

His non-natural Use of Words.

91

Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes? Did it never occur to the Bishop that he was actually putting the retort into the mouth of his opponent; who might well adopt his own arithmetical formula, and defy him to name any other work by any member of our Church, which, though of twice the bulk, contains half the amount of abuse of the rulers and 'ministers of the Church' which is contained in this single Pastoral?

Yet we do not accuse the Bishop, as many do, of being carried away into these extravagancies by uncontrollable violence of temper. On the contrary, we believe all this vituperation to be prepared and uttered deliberately, on system, in conformity with his sense of expediency and of the fitness of things. It is the fashion to call him an incendiary, but if he is an incendiary, it is not purely out of a love of mischief; he is one of those who burn down a house on calculation, for the sake of pocketing the insurance. To judge him fairly, we must always keep in mind that words are his instruments and weapons, the arms with which he fights, and the tools with which he works. And this consideration will lead us to estimate more charitably the second great means by which he has gained his ends, namely, the non-natural use of words. We question at the same time, whether anybody in his position was ever exposed to the humiliating necessity of retracting so many personal misstatements. Take for one example (in his governmental character) the rash assertion, out of zeal for surplicepreaching, that one of his clergy had publicly officiated in no other robe than a great coat; and for another, (in his controversial character) the scandalous imputation on Archdeacon Sinclair, of having falsified a quotation from Thomas Aquinas. The way in which Dr. Philpotts accounted for his having fallen into this latter error is a singular acknowledgment of controversial levity: Your argument seeming to me to require 'Patres,' I 'fancied on memory that this was the word used by you.' Such a method of substituting the subjective for the objective may explain the phenomenon which so much puzzled Mr. Goode, 'that the fourth edition of the Bishop's letter to the Arch'bishop, was delivered to him on the same day on which it was 'first published.' Whatever excuse may belong to a histrionic nature, it must be allowed the Bishop is eminently entitled to it. In the silver tones and fulsome adulation which he occasionally adopts to suit his purpose, or in the outbursts and theatrical performances with which all persons acquainted with the diocese † Ibid. p. 111.

* Pastoral, p. 108, 109.

of Exeter are familiar, he is equally an accomplished actor, only that in both instances he overdoes his part.

Our readers may by this time better understand on what provocation Lord Grey pronounced in the debate of Oct. 11. 1831, his memorable reproof of Dr. Philpotts, in language the House of Lords had probably never before occasion to hear addressed to one of its lay members, much less to one of its Bishops. The Right Reverend Prelate had uttered a foul and calum'nious expression, totally unfounded in truth: nor had he the ' least benefited himself by the explanation which he had entered "into.' It was on similar provocation that Lord Seymour is reported in the Western Times' of July 25. 1847, to have addressed his constituents as follows: It is a calm, deliberate, 'collected statement; and I proceed to show you that that 'calm, deliberate, and emphatic statement is a deliberate falsehood (cheers). Now it is painful to me, as it must be to every one, to say, that a statement so solemnly made is directly false,—not only that it is an error in judgment or a 'mistake, but that it is a deliberate and direct contradiction of 'the truth. Let me tell you, it requires a lawyer to deal with this person, (cheers and laughter). Fortunately a lawyer wrote to him, and guardedly and cautiously as it was written, 'you see how totally it has been perverted and departed from. The famous case of the Bishop of Exeter versus Latimer had its origin in the transaction with the Duke of Somerset here alluded to, and in the Report of Lord Seymour's speech in a provincial newspaper, and the Editor's comments. It was an action of Libel, for calling the Bishop a notorious brawler, and a careless perverter of facts.' The Editor 'justified': and the case was tried by a special jury, most of them of opposite politics to the defendant: when after hearing the Bishop swear to his own version of the affair, they returned a verdict for the defendant. There is something retributive in the quickness with which this verdict followed the Bishop's letter to Lord John Russell on the appointment of Dr. Hampden. He had there enlarged on the text, a bishop must be blameless' writing in that remarkable document, My Lord, a higher authority than any congè d'elire or letter missive has said, a bishop must 'be blameless; not exempt (I need not say) from human infirmity, not free from every breath of calumny or envy, but from 'all which can be justly called blame,-pure from the censure of 'all who are entitled to pronounce judicially upon him.'

Under these circumstances, they must be potent causes in the frame of English society which hitherto have maintained the Bishop in undisturbed prosperity, and enabled him still to