The Express.
London, England, 1861-10-10 00:00:00

THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN S VISITATION.

The Bishop of Lincoln has commenced his trien-
nial visitation, begiuning of course at his cathedral city,
where the attendance of his clergy was very large. The
right rev, prolate s charge is very long, and it touches upon
a great variety of topics.

With regard to church rates, his lordship observed that the
duestion now stood on intelligible grounds. !twos no longer a
emand made by an organised minority, who had persuaded
the country that they were • majority, to be released from
payments to which conscientious objections were made. It
was avowedly the first great step towards the secularisation
of the entlowmente of the church of England. It was the
duty of every churchman, however anxious for peace and to
forego the rate rather than prolong the contest, to take care
not to assent to any compromise which, whilst it conceded
the principle of the establishment, would fail to conciliate
its assailants. To any measure that would satisfy the ob-
jectors without weakening the bade of the national church
they would willingly assent, Re did not see what consci-
entious objections could be entertained to church rates
which might not be urged against any other tax
the paymeut of which was agreed to by the majority.
To grant exemption on the ground of personal
objection would be to concede • principle which
would render constitutional government impossible.
Referring to the " Essays and Reviews," his lordship said,
the history of opinion was a history of reactions ; and
showed that the volume in question was a symptom rather
than a cause of a great reaction in the public mind from
the overstrained teaching of the tractarian movement. He
bore testimony to much good that had been effected by
that moverreut io bringing back into prominence our
privileges and duties as members of Christ's mystical
body, the Church • in teaching more widely the signiti-
-011300 and value of the sacraments; in fixing the eye
and grasp of faith more on the objective facts of reve-
lation ; and in putting distinctly forth the cardi-
nal troths of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and
the Atonement, and shedding on them • flood
of light from the previously neglected stores o:
Patristic theology. But he condemned, in emphatic terms,
the tendency of the same school not only to carry ritualism
into formality or superstition, and to. overlay the essential
verities of justification conversion, and personal sanctifica-
tion, by an exaggerated sacramental system and human
mediation, but also to substitute authority for evidence ;
to check the exercise, and almost to deny the right, of pri-
vate judgment: to repress rationalism by chiding mason
into silence before the decisions of the church,
usher than by treeing out the bounds of reason's
domain ; to encourage credulity rather than to elevate faith;
and to lead men to think that to believe because they were
told, was a higher virtue than to believe because they
were convinced. He then showed how this substitution
of credulity for reason and of authority for evidence was
at once preparing for, and inviting, • terrible reaction •
and bow the destructive scepticism which had resulted
from the metaphysics of Germany, combining with the
ebb of opinion and the receding tide of the previous move.
meat, by exalting the subjective above the objective, and
making the thinking self the measure of truth and false-
hood, set intuitions above revelation, and the verifying
faculty of the individual man above authority, testimony,
and all the evidence of history. Faith overstrained has
relaxed into doubt ; and we have around us a spreadieg
scepticism arising from • habit of mind which rejects the
law of evidence, and accepts as sufficient proof or disproof
its own prepossessions and sentiments, and its own coecep-
tions of truth and falsehood, et: right and w.rong. While
acknowledging the cause for anxiety which existe his lord-
ship concluded by denying that there was any reel ground
of alarm. He pointed out that there never was • time
when the church was free from danger, and Cluistiaoity
without its special though evervarying triads ; and he ex-
horted the clergy to prayer, to fidelity, to earnest study of
the Holy Scriptures, and of the too much neglected die Mes
of our own church ; and to a faithful inculcation among
their flocks of the great and distinctive truths of the I im-
pel, avoiding on the one hand concession or compromise of
any revealed verity, and on the other all overstatements
and unsupported systems of doctrine.

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