The Press.
London, England, 1858-10-02 00:00:00

THE PRESS, OCTOBER 2, 1858.

took upon herself:to do a small stroke of Epis-
copal work on her own hook. She convened
not only the Curate but his Rector before her
own self, in a species of private parochial visita-
tion, in the course of which it is clear from her
own account that she applied the screw of the
Confessional to the offending Curate with quite
as much stringency as he himself' had applied it
to the victim of his " systematic course." His
denial of the grosser and more offensive parts of
her version of his proceedings she treated with
an incredulity becoming her religious zeal, and his
attempts to refer her to the Book of Common
Prayer as the rule of his conduct she encountered
with that lofty scorn for what may be said on the
other side of the question, which is the not un-
usual accompaniment of strong convictions.
One more actor in this strange business de-
serves to be singled out from the general crowd
of witnesses and tale-bearers—the clerical neigh-
bour of the offending curate. In the plenitude
of that peculiar Corm of " brotherly love" which
we regret to see so frequently displayed by the
clergy towards one another, he rushed to the
assistance of the female quasi-Bishop of Boyn-
hill, and used his best endeavours to denounce
his brother's alleged delinquency to the bishop
of the diocese, as well as to blazon it abroad in
the public prints.
To crown all, the indelicacy of the questions
put and pressed by counsel on both sides in a
crowded court, before a mixed audience, casts
every possible indiscretion of which the over-
precise Curate may have been guilty, altogether
into the shade; and the mixture of hardihood
and levity with which they are answered by the
-" injured female" gives the lie direct to the no-
tion of any outrage having been committed upon
her delicate sense of feminine modesty.

Looking at the whole story in its exquisite and
complicated absurdity—which, were the subject
less grave, would be supremely ridiculous—we
own to a feeling of deep humiliation that such a
case as this should be exhibited to the world as a spe -
cimen of religious earnestness on either side of the
question. For the unseemliness of this exhibition
the Bishop who instituted the inquiry is certainly
not responsible. His Lordship appears from the first
to have formed a pretty correct estimate of the me-
rits of the case; but as the impartiality of his judg-
ment was called in question, he did wisely in letting
the matter take its course even to this lame and
pitiful conclusion. Indeed, we cannot help think-
ing that it would have been well if his brother
of LONDON had, in the somewhat similar case
brought under his notice, acted with like impar-
tiality. Meanwhile, it is quite clear that neither
the condemnation of the Rev. Mr. POOLE, nor the
acquittal of the Rev. Mr. WEST, will settle the
question in dispute, or put an end to the con-
troversy carried on with such painful asperity.
And yet a few grains of common sense, mixed with
a few grains of chazity, might suffice to set the
matter at rest. That our Church contemplates
the receiving of special confession of sins by her
ministers as a remedy for consciences unusually
troubled or burdened with any extraordinary
weight of guilt, cannot, in the face of divers
passages in her Prayer-book, be honestly
denied. As to the question whether those di-
rections and counsels be in accordance with the
teaching of Holy Scripture, we own that we
would rather trust to the sober piety of the com-
pilers of the Book of Common Prayer than to
the hotheaded religionism of our own day. On
the other hand, it appears to us equally unde-
niable that nothing can be further from the in-
tention, or more inconsistent with the spirit, of
the I'rayer-book, than the establishment of a
spiritual tyranny over men's consciences, in the
shape of a regular system of habitual confession
to a priest, enjoined upon, or recommended to,
all, as an ordinary means of grace. That the
general rules of our Church on this subject are
liable to abuse in the hands of indiscreet or dis-
honest men, is doubtless true; but that is no
argument against the soundness of those rules : it
is the common fate of all rules, even of those laid
down by inspired lips and pens.
Read with an unprejudiced mind and an honest
purpose to apply them to the business in hand,
the cure of souls, those rules are not only per-
fectly intelligible, but marvellously adapted to the
condition and the wants of human nature. To
affirm that everybody is competent to understand
and to manage his own spiritual state, ;and that
recourse to a spiritual adviser in cases of difficulty
is a mere invention of przestcraft, is as absurd as

it would be to contend tha,trtl)awimanagdin:
On.
Physic are utterly useless for the management of property or of bodily health, and are a mere device for sup.. porting two pr Assions.
the
other hand, that the spiritual discipline of a man's
soul cannot be carried on without the interven•
tiou of a priest, and of a system of confession, is aq
preposterous as it would be for a man never to eat
a meal without directions from his doctor, nor to
venture upon purchasing a suit of clothes, or
hiring a shoe-boy, without the professional
assistance of an attorney. Let not the clergy turn
their office of spiritual guides and counsellors into
a system of pedantic ecclesiastical domination, and
let not the laity allow themselves to be frightened
by the bugbear of Auricular Confession into an
unreasoning hostility to what is, after all, in
every limn of religion and school of theology, an
important feature of the ministerial functioK
This, it appears to us, is the conclusion to which
common sense points; and if the humiliating
result of the Boyn-hill investigation shall be the
means of directing public opinion into this train
of thought and feeling, even that lamentable ilk.
play of unchristian animosity in the cause of
religion will not have been without its use.

DWELLINGSeviIs
ls
of
our social EcoTditilota have
St sc the
begun to attract public attention, the efforts of
philanthropists have been divided between two
classes of remedies. Of these, the one deals with
the results, with the evil fruit when it drops
from the stem in full ripeness, and, strewed
copiously over the surface of society, proves at
once offensive and noxious; the other deals with
the causes which produce those results, the evil
root from which the evil fruit has grown, and by
eradicating the former seeks to arrest, and even-
tually to prevent, the continued growth of the
latter. There can be but one opinion as to the
comparative merit and efficacy of those two
classes of remedies, and of the two systems of
social amelioration by which they are respectively
suggested and employed. No one can deny that
" prevention is better than cure." Unhappily,
however, society has scarcely had the oppor-
tunity of deliberating to which of the two
systems it would give the preference. It was the
accumulation of evil results that aroused the
mind and awakened the conscience of the public
to the fact that there was something amiss in the
social state of large masses of our population. It
was by social nuisances, some of them of the most
intolerable character, that philanthropy was
called into action. And the natural consequence
of this was the creation of a vast corrective
machinery to meet the pressure of the most
urgent evils which obtruded themselves upon the
eye. Union workhouses and model prisons, re-
formatories and penitentiaries, hospitals and
lunatic asylums, multiplied upon us, at an enor-
mous cost of public money, and by great and
laudable efforts of private charity.
With all this no fault is to be found. It was
the natural course of things. The corruption of
the blood was not suspected till the body was
covered with sores, and these had to be attended
to in the first instance. But a continuance of
the most careful poulticing will do little good,
unless the blood can be purified, and the forma-
tion of fresh ulcers prevented. After expending
no end of money and social science upon such
institutions as those above named, our next effort
must be to render them useless, or, since we
cannot hope for that, to diminish the pressure of
candidates upon them. To this, which is un-
doubtedly the more rational as well as the only
really efficacious way of dealing with our social
evils, we have been gradually feeling our way.
But in this direction we have yet much to learn;
and on reviewing what has been done in the way
of applying preventives, we are obliged to confess
that, considering the character which we claim,
and in many respects deserve, of being an emi-
nently practical people, we have proved ourselves
sad bunglers.
The first glimmering of the preventive system
was more than half a mistake. "Do you wish to
improve the masses ? Do you wish to keep them
from falling into habits of vice and crime, 0.
preserve them from all the miseries, moral,
mental, and physical, consequent upon the forma-
tion of evil habits ? There is but one way to set
about it. You must educate them. Knowledge
were
is power." The suggestion took. Schools ,
set up in all directions; the demand for teaeners