The Sun.
London, England, 1864-03-28 00:00:00

than they do now, was to show themselves, and to
be the centre alike of the pomp of the State and of
the gaieties 9f the well-to.do world ; and the hearti-
ness with which they performed this duty deter--
mined their popularity far more powerfully than
their moral qualities, or even than their political
tendencies. William 111. was greatly superior in
almost every moral quality to Charles 11., but there
is no question which was the more popular of the
two. George unpopularity when he was gay '
and fashionable was undoubtedly great, but it did
not approach in intensity to the odium which he
incurred in later years, when a growing taste for
luxury, combined with a dread ot exhibiting his
faded charms, drove him to become a gastronomic
hermit. And the public instinct is right in this
matter. A Sovereign may neglect the administra-
tive part of his duties, and if he be served by com-
petent Ministers, the commonwealth will suffer no
damage. But no one can supply his place for the
purposes of representation. Hereditary monarchy
is upheld, in spite of many inconveniences which
attach to it, because the emotion of loyalty has been
ascertained by experience to be not only a cheap
defence of order, but one for which no substitute,
even tolerably effective, can be found. But loyalty
needs to be stimulated by external display, by the
pomp and circumstance of power, by all
the kindly feelings which personal intercourse
creates between Sovereign and subject. It' a
Sovereign omits to keep it alive ley such means, he
leaves unfulfilled that one function which no one else
can perform in his stead. To say that the advisers
who fail to guard him against such an error are
only allowing him to prejudice his own position is
to speak of the matter much too lightly. They do
far more than this. They are not so much risking
the personal popularity of the Sovereign as bring-
ing into disrepute the institutions of which his office
is the keystone, and the permanence of which is in-
fluenced by the personal life of every occupant of
the throne.
EXAMINEII.—To meke up for the brevity of his
note on eternities, the Archbishop of Canterbury
has written a long pastoral letter to his flock, lay
and clerical, upon the theological questions mooted.
Perhaps it is not the fault of the Primate that he
does not make clear the knotty questions he dis-
cusses, but certain it is that his explanations im-
mensely increase perplexity. For example, what
can be made of this passage, a maze of words and
phrases, in which the reader is bewildered and
lost ?--
Lastly if the Bible be " before all things," and no more
than they" written voice of the congregation," even though
that congregation shall have prayed to God that " by his
holy inspiration" they " may think those things that be.
good," it will be at the utmost no more than the voice ot
the Church, which cannot be adduced to establish doctrine
if that voice shall utter or "ordain anything contrary to
God's word written"—of the Church, which may not "so
expound one place of Scrieture that it be repugnant to an-
other."
There ie a break of light in this view of Mr. Wil-
son's opinions :
The sum and substance of that which ho labours re•
peatedly to establimh I cannot but consider as conveyed in
the following sentence :—" It may," he says, "be expressed
thus—the Word of G is contained in Scripture, whence
it does not follow that it is co-extensive with it." The
meaning fairly to be put upon these words I hold to be that
there are parts of 11,.1y Scripture which are not the Word
of God, and this assertion I conceive to be entirety incon•
sistent with the articles, which identify the Holy Scrip-
tures and the canonical becks of the Old and New Testa-
ment, with God's Word written, and thus make the one
co-extensive with the other.
But the main point is the Archbishop's advice
and direction as to what is and what is not permis-
sible in the way of inquiry, and the results :
You may be induced to ask what is the degree of liberty
allowed to each of you, according to the mind of the
Church, in dealing with the Bible. The view I have taken
of the claim which the whole of the Holy Scriptures has to
be treated as:the Word of God cannot interfere with the right
of discussing questions as to various readings or the ge-
nuineness of a disputed text ; for this is no more than to
argue that a given text or reading is not a part of any ca-
nonical book. But such an argument on the part of a
c'ergyinan is a widely different thing from his assertion
that a portion ot the Bible which he has acknowledged to
belong to a canonical book is not the Word of God.
There is surely something contradictory here.
ee whole is to be accepted as the Word of God,
flarts of the whole may be questioned and
though t -
denied! The Primate admits that
the autt
re
di , texts, the genuineness of which
there asputee. ora'.
}her
.ved at be that those
matter• of discussion ; but
is allowable, nay, pro
if the conclusion fairly etho
texts are not the Word of Goy:;parts are thereby
rejected of the whole for which acioeptance and im-
plicit faith is claimed ! How is this to be recoil=
tiled with reason and logic.? If there are any parts
of the whole that may be regarded as not genuine,
and the Primate admits there are texts epee: to
this doubt, is not Mr. Wilson's proposition
borne out, that the Word of God is
contained in Scripture, but that Scripture
may not be co-extensive with the Word
of God ; in other words, that Scripture may contain
passages not of Divine authority, or, as the Arch-
bishop would express it, not genuine ?
LONDON REVIEW.—Turf quarrels and Turf scan-
dals have been rather frequent of late. It is not
very long ago since we had the great " Reindeer'
case ; and now we are called upon to witness a
grand struggle between the Jockey Club and the
Morning Post. There is something, we fear, in the
influences or associations of sporting calculated to
develop a spirit of contention in its followers and
devotees. The perpetual excitement oil, matches
impending or in course of settlement—the stimulus
of betting—the constant atmosphere of rivalry,
flavoured not seldom with a smatch of fraud—ap-
pear to put the minds of racing gentlemen into a
favourable frame for wrangling and litigation.
With such large sums of money at issue, this is
scarcely to be wondered at. A man who may lose
his thousands if the horse on which he has betted
heavily comes in second, or recedes into the vacuum
described by sporting reporters as " nowhere," can-
not be expected to be very amiable in temper, or
constitutionally inclined to play the part of peace-
maker. But in the case of " The Earl of Coventry
and Others v. Willes," tried on Tuesday before Mr.
Justice Crompton on the Norfolk Circuit, the Jockey
Club appears to have exhibited an amount of petty
spite more characteristic of a set of angry old women
than of a body of English gentlemen. The com-
mencement of the quarrel dates back to the autumn
of 1862. At the First October Meeting of that year,
a match was run between Capt. Burnaby's Tarragona
and a horse named Michel Grove. The latter was the
victor, but a very general impression was entertainer
that a fraudulent bet had been made by Captains
Burnaby and Annesley, by which the public had
beets induced to back Tarragona, and that Captain
Burnaby, the owner of that horse, had instructed the
jockey, Nightingale, to lose the race. The stewards
of the Jockey Club accordingly commenced an in-
quiry into the allegation ; but it appears somewhat
to have hung fire, and on Oct. 20 Mr. Willes, the
sporting reporter of the Morning Post, published in
I that journal, under his usual signature of " Argus,"
some comments on the delay of the stewards of the
Jockey Club in giving their decision, the parties in-
volved being naturally desirous of having the impu-
tation removed if it had been unjustly fastened on
them. This criticism on the stewards was endorsed
by a leading article in the same day's paper. The
Jockey Club fired up into red-hot indignation. It
demanded an apology of Mr. Willes. Mr. Willes
refused. It then came to a resolution that Mr.
Willer " be warned off the land and property of the
Jockey Club at Newmarket." Subsequently Mr.
Willes, on April 20, 1863, wrote a letter to the
secretary of the club, stating that his remarks "were
penned solely from a sense of duty as a public
writer, and without the slightest intention to give
pain or annoyance to any single member of the
club." This was not held to be sufficient apology,
and Mr. Willes was formally warned off the course
—an act which in effect classified him with swindlers
and blacklegs, since the ground is open to any one
who chooses to subscribe, and is only denied to
persons of notoriously or obviously bad character.
The victim of this act of petty tyranny, feeling con-
siderable doubt as to the power of the stewards to
exclude respectable people at their will and pleasure,
gave notice that, on a certain day, he should com-
mit a trespass on the course, not in any spirit of
bravado, but simply that the issue might be raised
in a court of law. This was accordingly done, and
the action tried
in on Tuesday was the result. Some
of the main points, however, had already been de-
cided the Court of Queen's Bench. Mr. Willes,
as the defendant, had pleaded the prescriptive
right of the public to go upon the race-course during
the races ; but this, upon demurrer, had been disal-
lowed by theQueen'eßench,which held that the occu-
petion of the land wee with the Jockey Club, as
represented by the stewards for the time being, and
that they possess the right of exclusion. The only
issue for trial, therefore, was involved in the defen-
dant's additional plea that he had " leave and
licence" from the plaintiffs to go upon the ground.
That the stewards, jointly with the other members
of the Club, are the occupiers of the land, seems to
have been proved beyond a doubt. Toe portion of
heath so used has been conveyed by the Crown to
the Jockey Club, which charges for training horses
and using the betting ring, and deputes to its various
servants the several regulations of the course. The
annual subscribers' ticket to the betting ring bear
on their back the words, "The holder of this ticket
shall be compelled to resign the same, and to leave
the enclosure, on the order of any one or more of
the stewards of the Jockey Club, and shall have no
claim to a return of the money, &c. ;" and it ap-
pears to have been generally understood that the
stewards, for the sake of preserving order, are
vested with the right to remove objectionable per-
sons. But then comes the plea of " leave and
licence," This was based on the fact that, since the
defendant had been warned off the course, a new
set of stewards had come into office, and, as he had
received no warning from them, the original "leave

and licence" to enter the inclosure, derived from th
subscribers' ticket, had not bee* rescinded. Mr
Wines, in fact, sought to set up a distinction be-
tween toe three plaintiffs, as stewards of the Club,
and the Club generally. But this manifesely won
not hold water. As Mr. Justice Crompton observed,
" The Jockey Club is not a corporation ; it has no
common seal, but acts by its stewards." The
stewards, on this occasion, were as clearly act-
ing on behalf of the body generally ros the ehair-
man of a board acts for the whole bocrd, or
the President of a Republic issues his procla-
mations in name of the State. On the purely
legal ground, therefore, we cannot but think
that the verdict for the plaintiff, with which
the action concluded, was correct ; but the nominal
damages—one shilling—showed how little the jury
approved the spirit in which the Jockey Club bad
acted towards Mr. Willes. That spirit was clearly
one of malevolence. The great offender, after all,
was the Morning Post, Mr. Willes was only the
humble agent of that journal. What he had felt it
his duty to write, the paper ho represented had con-
firmed and repeated in its leading columns. If the
comments complained of were unjust and libellous,
the stewards might have brought an action against
the conductors of the offending. ,journal; but this
they omitted to do, and it is, tn erefore, to be pre-
sumed that they were conscious of having no case.
to have attacked the Morning l'ost would at least
have been courageous ; to mal to a set upon Mr.
Willes—to warn him off the grow fad, and class him
with gipsies, betters from the back-slums, and
thimble-riggers—was a piece of angry spite which
puts the stewards and all who actee with them in
an essentially false position, which th a little triumph
of a verdict upon mere points of law will not go far
to help. It is greatly to be regretted that Lord
Stradbroke's amendment, " that it was not expe-
dient to take notice of anonymous writers in the
public prints," was not carried. As it was, it re-
ceived ten votes to twelve against it ; so that the
feeling in the club was far from unanimous. And
what, after all, have these petty perseontors gained ?
" The letters of Argus," says the elfoisraing Post in
its leading article of Wednesday, " wig be continued
by Mr. Willes, except from Newmarkte, where he is
forbidden to appear, and the letters of Argus will be
written as trustworthily and honestly ff. am Newmar-
ket by other gentlemen who will be doputed to act
in his piece. This is but a sorry result fox the Jockey
Club to obtain. It wes the Morning Post which
offended them—the Morning Post wit rt whom they
were angry, simply because :ney were in the wrong;
4eci against us they are powerless." Tnisis always the
mistake of those who cannot understand that the
press, with right on its aide, is a power that ennui
ultimately be withstood.