The Press.
London, England, 1858-03-27 00:00:00

RELIGION IN PARLIAMENT.

Ws are not much surprised at the wish which
is so often expressed. that all religious ques-
tions could be excluded from our Parliamen-
tary discussions. No doubt the sort of hand-

ling which such questions do receive, when
broached in the House of Commons, is quite
enough to excite such a wish.
But is it practicable to gratify this wish, at
any reasonable price? This is a matter which
may be questioned. Si!ailAr perplexities will
present themselves in other affairs of lifa.
Myriads of women, to escape temptation,
have flung themselves into convents. Men
have done the same, or have taken ORIGEN'S
course, to escape from possible evil. But does
success follow, in even a majority of cases?
This may be doubted.

The difficulty Rea deeper than the greater part
of mankin care to look. Man is more than the
noblest of animals : he is twofold, having a
&ail as well as a body. Nor is this all. Even
his soul has two parts, or two sympathies ;
one leading him downwards, to the habits of
the brute—the other bearing him upwards, to
the abodes of the angels.

Setting at naught all this, and pertina-
ciously ignoring it, there is a school which
would know nothing of man but his " secular "
existence ; and would declare that, as for
religion, it is a matter which must rest be•
tween man and his God ;—their practical mean-
ing being, that they wish to hear nothing
about it.

But this is a foolish notion ; for it can only
be realized when a man's religion is merely
nominal. If it be a substantial thing, and
have any truth about it, it must be shown in
a man's life and actions. Like wedded love,
we do not want it paraded or displayed to the
gaze of others ; but if it be real and earnest,
it will show itself, silently and unobtrusively,
in a thousand little acts of daily life.
We cannot turn religion and religious ques-
tions out of Parliament, till we have first turned
them out of two other thrones. Religion has
sway over millions of our people ; and as long
as that is the case, it must be seen and heard
of everywhere. But, beside this, religion is en-
throned in our institutions ; and before we
can silence it in Parliament, we must purge
away a great many things which have existed
for centuries in our statute-book, in our com-
mon law, and even in our lands and houses.
The secularists tell us—and Lord MACAULAY
is somewhat of their way of thinking—that the
duties of Governments and Legislatures are
to guard us from foreign assaults, and, at home,
to protect life and property. If this be a cor-
rect view, and if it had been held by any of the
sages of old, the perplexing question would
arise—" How we ever came by an Established
Church ?" For we presulue that an earnest,
thoroughgoing secularist, if he were framing
the constitution of a State, would hold such
questions as creeds and churches to be alto-
gether beyond his province. And such a theo-
rist must also be of opinion that, in admitting
such things into our State system, the Eng.
lish legisiators of old were strangely mistaken
Such opinions, however, cannot be lightly
held. If any statesman, like Lord MACAULAY,
judges that an Established Church is a polit►-
cal blunder, he must be prepared, so soon as
a good opportunity can be found, to rectify
that blunder, by getting rid of the Establish.
ment. Mr. HENRY DRUMMOND—than whom
there is no more acute member of either
House—touched this point, in the course of
last Monday's debate, when he said :

Matters could not go nn in this way. Here was a case
where the Church of England stood directly in the way of
a change which was thought—and he did not deny it —to
be politically right. If ever there was an instance of " in-
compatibilite des misers," jnatif)ing a separation, this was it.
The first thing which the noble lord the membtr for L'lll
don ought to do was to go into the new Court of Divorce
and get a lissolution of the mat rine of Church and State.
He did not see how it was possible to get out of the diffi-
culty in any other way. It was no fault of the present gene-
ration—the thing had been going on for years, and at last
we had arrived at a state of aff..irs which was most discredit-
able. The evil must be got rid of somehow or other, and
he saw no other way of getting rid of it than by separating
Church from State.

Let it be observed, that when Mr. DRUMMOND
said that " the Church of England stood in the
" way of a change which was thought to he
" politically right," he di ,l not mean, Le could
not mean, that the Church had any direct
pecuniary interest in the matter. What he
meant was, that the very idea of all Estab-

lished Church rested upon the Christian
profession of the State. If the State is not
even professedly Christian, how can it set up,
and maintain, an Established Church? Hence,
argued Mr. DRUMMOND, if you want to admit
the Jew into the Legislature, begin in an in.
telligible and rational way, by separating the
Church from the State, and declaring that the
State, in future, will be "of no particular
religion."
Mr. Dauxistosn is a perspicacious reasoner.
He does not, like many men, grope his way,
one step at a time, uncertain what is to follow.
lie knows that all truths are linked together,
and that you cannot take one of a series, and
shut out, or forget, the rest. _

Nu doubt many members thought, on Mos.
day, " Well! if we can only get rid of this
" wretched Jewish controversy, we shall soon
" be able to shut all other religious disputes
" out of Parliament." But the very next
night must have rectified their ideas a little
on this noint. They had passed the Jew Bill
through-committee, and might hope to have
no further debate on that question during the
present year. But, lo ! the very next night,
there came another religious controversy, and
one in which Liberals were quite as forward
as Conservatives. The Liberal Member for
Norwich favoured the House with his views
on the 16th and 18th verses of the 18th of
Leviticus ; and on the 25th of Deuteronomy ;
and on the force properly belonging to the
canon law. He was answered by Mr. Div Err,
the Liberal Member for Exeter. Mr. Fox, the
ultra-Liberal Member for Oldhatn, gave his
views of the Mosaic economy ; and Mr.
PULLER, the Liberal Member for Hertford-
shire, gave a very decided opinion that the
texts cited from Leviticus did forbid such
marriages, and upon that belief he rested his
vote.

Such is the hopelessness, then, of the idea
of getting rid of religion and religious di-eus-
sions in the House of Gnomons. The thing
cannot he done. On the other hand, the
attempt to do it must lead to a great increase
of such discussior►e. The favourite theory of
most Liberals points to that very course which
Mr. DRUMMOND sarcastically suggested. If
we adopt the " secular system," and hold,
with Lord Nlacarmar, that the only duty of the
Legislature is to guard life and property, then,
h► undertaking the separation of Church and
State, we ripen a large crop of religious
questions, which must agitate the two Houses
of Parliament for many years to collie.
So closely interwoven are the State and the
Church in these realms, that to separate the
two, without inflicting mortal wounds on
either, will prove one of the most arduous
tasks that ever a Legislature had to encounter.
Yet, into this controversy must we plunge, in
Mr. DRUMMOND'S opinion, if we deliberately
resolve that our present position is a false
one, and if we judge it right and proper to
assimilate the Constitution of England to that
of the United States, where the Common•
wealth supports no Church, and adheres to
no creed.

CIVIL SERVICE EXANIINATIONS.
THERE are few questions which bring out so
strongly the compromised results which spring
from the conflict of opposing prejudices in
free discussion as the question of admission
to the pablie offices. On the one side are
the adherents of the ancient order of things,
who look upon corruption as a necessary
lever in the machine of Parliamentary Govern•
meat, and on patronage as the only form of
corruption which will now be tolerated. On
the other side is the cast-iron scheino of
open competition, set forth by the citizen
orators in Drury-lane, who aro much too
acute to dream of choosing the clerks in their
own offices by any system of competition, open
or close ; and at their back Mr. GLADSTONE and
the schoolmasters, clamouring for the erection
of the Government offices into what one of
them called a vast Imperial University." The
system which has arisen from the struggle
between the two, endorses the extravaent
views o neither. Patronage is not recognised

as one of the buttresses of Government, nor
are the offices for which so many moral qua-
lifications are required degraded into mere
school-prizes. Competition for each office
among a number nominated by the patron
secures, on the one hand, against. the possi-
bility of corruption—for the permission to
compete is too contingent a gift to corrupt
anybody—and, on the other hand, it saves a
Minister from the necessity of taking into his
office, merely on the ground of intellectual
prowess, a candidate whose integrity or busi-
ness habits he has reason to doubt.
The third Report of the Civil Service Com-
missioners, which has just been issued, re-
cords the progress and the success of the sys-
tem. Notwithstanding their firm adherence
to the compromise which would seem entirely
to exclude the two contending elements, these
pages are a curious evidence of the struggle
betweex them which is going on within its
limits. The lettered dignitaries who have been
evoked from their cloisters to perform the ar-
duous task of raising the scholarship of our pub-
lie offices, are perpetually trying to cram larger
and larger doses of abstruse knowledge into
the confused brains of the meek, uncomplain-
ing candidates, as if to find out the exact point
at which " softening" would supervene in the
average clerkly organ ; while the practical offi-
cials, who find that an encyclopaedia know-
ledge is not to be purchased for a few hun-
dreds a year, and that these scholarly experi-
ments create a dangerous panic among can-
didates, are crying aloud for mercy. Mr. HAT-
TER humbly suggests that history is not an in-
dispensable qualification for a coast-guard—a
benighted view, at which the Commissioners
grumble not a little, and to which they submit
with a very ill grace. Lord CLARENDON will
excuse the Foreign-office clerks from the ne-
cessity of being acquainted with French au-
thors of two hundred years back, so long as
they are at ease with the current French of
the present day—a suggestion for which he
also is somewhat snubbed. Sir DENIS LE
AIARCHANT has discovered that clerks in the
House of Commons are not less efficient from
being ignorant of Greek. The Duke of ARGYLL
thinks that a letter carrier will have reached
the requisite elevation of scholarship when
he can write three or four lines dictated from
an easy book, and can do addition and sub-
traction. We must say that in this controversy
our sympathies are with the officials. The
Commissioners have published iu their Report
bot'a their examination papers, and the marks
which on each subject were assigned to each
competitor ; and, on their own showing, their
ordeal savours far too much of the school and
far too little of the office. We find, far instance,
an examination for a writership at Ceylon.
Here are some of the questions by which the
fitness of a candidate is tested for administer-
ingjustice among villages of rude Cingatese :
Trace the influence of the English school on modem
French literature,
What do you congider to be the chief merits and defects
as philosophers of Plato and Aristotle, respectively?
The equivalent of aluminium is 13.7. How much per
cent. of oxygen, of sulphur, awl of aluminium is containe d
in the anhydrous normal (or neutral) sulphate of alumina?
Give a description of the most important characteristics
Ammon to the trilobites, and give the history of their dis-
tribution in time.
State briefly the argnmenta for and against the opinion
that the Homeric poems are the work of one man.
It must not be imagined that these guess
bons are mere luxuries of pedantry, given to
the candidate as a kind of intellectual exerci•
tation for the gratification of himself and the
examiners. The class of subjects of which
these questions form a part were the actual
subjects on which the competition was decided.
The gentleman who succeeded in classics, in
history, and in science, was appointed to the
writership, and the gentleman who was far his
superior in precis writing, in law, and in poli-
tical economy—the really practical qualifica-
tions of an administrator—was rejected. As
far as the marks given can indicate intellectual
character, the bookworm was preferred to the
practical man. We will not, however, specu-
late invidiously on the successful candidate's
merits. We sincerely trust that his familiarity
with the anhydrous normal sulphate of alumina
v.lll smooth his intercourse with the natives,
and his knowledge of the unity of Homer shed
a halo over his judicial decisions. But we