The Sun.
London, England, 1862-04-25 00:00:00

THE SUN.

LONDON, FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 1862.

Mr. GLADSTONE on America will be looked at
with no little interest on both sides of the water—
luckily, just at the moment there is no transatlantic
electric cable ; if there were, the message it would
have transmitted to Washington would have sadly
interfered with the thanksgivings of Mr. LINCOLN
and his friends. We may suppose what would
have been the perturbation of the Chaplain to
Congress, if just before he left the vestry to preach
his thanksgiving sermon, he had received a tele-
graphic message—" Mr. GLADSTONE, in a great
speech at Manchester, has represented the restora-
tion of the Union as almost impossible." That
unaccountable second cause assigned by Mr. LIN-
COLN for thanksgiving—the non-intervention of
foreign Powers—would have seemed to lose half its
Weight.

While such speaking was confined to the aristo-
cracy of the Cabinet—to Lords PALMERSTON and
RUSSELL especially—it might be supposed in Ame-
rica that the belief in ultimate separation of North
and South was chiefly confined to the English aris-
tocracy—the men who naturally sympathised with
Southern slaveholders, or as they call themselves
Southern chivalry. Mr. GLADSTONE'S speech, de-
livered at Manchester, too, will dissipate that illu-
sion. It will be seen that the commercial talent of
the Cabinet—what on this subject we may call the
JOHN BRIGHT section of it—does not believe in the
final re-union of the now separated States. The
speaker was not one of those, as he distinctly stated,
who envied the growth and greatness of America,
but not the less, he now thinks, that its territorial
greatness cannot remain what it has been. He
makes every allowance for the difficulty of impar-
tiality, on the part of Americans during their pre-
sent excitement, in judging of the conduct of this
country, but he, nevertheless, thinks their judg-
ment of England has been unfair.

They at first asked for and expected our sym-
pathy in their fearful struggle. This, however,
hays the statesman, meant nothing less than that
we should so conduct ourselves towards the North,
that a People, numbering from six to eight mil-
lions, who had at least a fair chance of becoming an
independent nation,
should ever after cherish bitter
animosity towards us. He insists, as so many of
us have done already, on the North refusing to
make the struggle one for freedom, in which case it I
would have been impossible for Englishmen to
withhold their sympathy
and he hints that the
countenance given to Southern institutions by the
North, placed the North and the South, in regard
to slavery, very much, in English i
.11.graent, on the
same ground. He reminds them how ready the
North would have been to give the South the
strongest guarantees for slavery, if it Would but
reunite with it again under one Government, and
reaffirms the unpalateable remark of Lord RUSSELL,
that the quarrel was really one for "supremacy on
one side, and independence on the other."
The question, as our Chancellor of the Exchequer
truly observed, is this—" Is the heart of the South
set on separation; if not, it may be conquered--
but if it be, and if the blood of Washington, and of
the men of Virginia of his day, still runs in the
-"ins of those who inhabit the Southern States,
then it is almost impossible that the military object
should be effected, and even if it were, the civil and

political difficulties remaining would render that
military success a curse and a difficulty to those who
achieved it." This is but indeed the common sense
view, which in various forms has been expressed in
England again and again, The military conquest
of a vast and really hostile country, with so many
millions of inhabitants scattered over it, is next to
an impossibility—and if conquered, it could be re-
tained in subjection only by a standing army and a
military government which would render free in-
stitutions a nullity.
The truth is, when once the slaveholders had
persuaded the entire South to join them in seces-
sion, the North had but the alternative of a war
for emancipation, or separation. They had
not ono statesman among them who clearly
saw and urged this fact, so obvious to
impartial observers elsewhere. The North
desired slavery to remain in the South, for its sons
reaped handsome profits from it ; it wished, there-
fore, to recover the Southern States as slave States.
This was simply impossible. The slaves knew the
mean policy of the North ; thought they were as
well off if the North were beaten as if it won, and
went on working, and enabling their masters to
leave their homes, and to take and keep the field.
They thus became the strength instead of the weak-
ness of the South. Had the declaration of war, in
April last year, been accompanied by a declaration
of emancipation for all slaves, with compensation for
loyal masters, in all probability the present April
would have seen the Republic restored, war ended,
millions of dollars saved, and the United States, a
Republic based on the principle of their own
Declaration of Independence, instead of resting on
their odious constitution-
—the only one in Christen-
dom—whichright of property in
recognises the

man.

There are, indeed, symptoms in the. PRESIDENT'S
resolution, and the bill for emancipating the dis-
trict of Columbia. of the North opening i..;8 eyes a
little—but unless it opens them quickly and, widely,
it will not save itself from a war of years, to end,
quite possibly, in an irrevocable separation.

In less than a week from the present time the
Great International Exhibition will have been
opened. We know now by what ceremonial. The
order of the arrangements has at length been duly
announced. Elsewhere in our columns of this even-
ing may be found the official programme. Not by
the QUEEN herself will the last Intellectural Gift of
her departed husband to the Nation be inaugurated.
lAat at any rate we knew long since. It was felt
instinctively by all alike that the remembrance
would be altogether too poignant to admit of the
widowed Sovereign in person presiding over the
opening day's pageantry. The very splendour of
that gorgeous ceremony would—it was instantly
felt on all hands—be in no way in unison with the
grief still weighing heavily at the heart of VIC-
TORIA : that the very harmonies of the inaugural
hymns of prayer and praise would jar discordantly
upon the senses of the royal mourner. Even it has
been deemed too painfully suggestive in its way of
the greatness of the national bereavement, this
inauguration of the PRINCE CONSORT'S posthumous
masterpiece, his Royal Highness's second Inter-
national Exhibition, the one not of 1851 but of 1862,
not in Hyde-park but at South Kensington—to ad-
mit of her MAJESTY being represented on the occasion I
by the personage nearest to the throne of these
realms, its next occupant, the future King of Eng-
land. So that matters have been gracefully and
tenderly so arranged, that while the Great Exhibi-
tion is being opened solemnly by Royal Commission
on the afternoon of Thursday next, the first of May,
her MAJESTY will be far away in the north of her
island realm, and the Prince of WALES yet further
removed from the scene, his Royal Highness being
still in the midst of his Oriental wanderings.
Darkened though the occasion will be, however, by
the inevitable thought of the loss of which it must
at every turn so vividly remind every individual
spectator saddened though the ceremonial
necessarily must be by the recollection of its re-
splendent predecessor of eleven years ago, when
side by side under the glittering arch of glass
stood the QUEEN Regnant and her Princely Hus-
band, now no more—still the afternoon of this next
Thursday, the Ist of May, down at South Kensing-
ton, will not to any appreciable extent be shorn of
its magnificence, The Royal Commissioners by
whom the Great Exhibition, in the absence of the
SOVEREIGN, will be opened, we now know, will be
his Grace the Archbishop of CANTERBURY, the
Lurd High Chancellor, the Earl of DERBY, K.G.,
the Lord Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Eng-
land, and the Speaker of the House of Commons—
the whole of those distinguished personages being
presided over, or marshalled, by his Royal High-
ness the Commander-in-Chief. The mere proces-
sion, as it streams before our imagination while
glancing down the printed programme of the regu-
lations, gives promise of the stately character of the
mere mechanism of the inauguration. And the
diversity of that procession serves to illustrate in no
nnbefitting manner the wonderful and bewildering
diversity of t'ie Exhibition itself. Trumpeters of
the Life Guards in their state uniforms, leading
forth the contractors, the decorators, and the archi-
tect—these soon afterwards followed by the one
great intellectual songster of the age—the Poet
Laureate ! Around these, as the procession advances
through the building,—

"All of beauty, all of use,
That one fair planet can produce,
Brought from under every star,
Blown from over every main,
And rnixt, as life is mixt with pain,
Tito works of peace with works of war."
How world-wide the gathering together of
treasures, whether of art or of nature, brought
to that one amazing point of centralization
or accumulation—the mere catalogue of the coun-
tries contributing to the display serves the most
readily and the most vividly to illustrate ! Com-
missioners—among other foreign lands—coming to
us from Austria, Baden, Bavaria; Belgium, Bolivia,
Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, Hanover, Hayti,
Italy, Peru, Portugal,Prussia, Rome,Russia,Saxony,
Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Turkey,
the United States (!) and Wurtemburg. These,
all of them observe, besides others unnamed, being
exclusively foreigners. Prior to these appearing in
the long and majestic procession, the following
array of acting Commissioners, is still from the
ends of the earth it is true, but all of them from our
colonies and dependencies, Australia (West), Aus-
tralia (South), Bahamas, Bermuda, British Columbia,
British Guiana, Canada, Cape Colony, Ceylon,
Grenada, Hong Kong, Jamaica, India, lonian
Islands, Malta, Mauritius, Natal, New Brunswick,
Newfoundland, New South Wales, New Zealand,
Nova Scotia, Prince Edward's Island, Queensland,
St. Helena, St. Vincent, Tasmania, Trinidad, Van-
couver's Island, and Victoria.

It is as well, surely, that our beloved QUEEN
should take no part in this inaugural pageantry, if
"17 that her heart might not be torn with anguish,
while the vaulted root, the aisles, and naves of the
gigantic building
vibrate the choral chant of Pro-
fessor Bxli,TT'S music to the noble words of
ALFRED TENNIsoN

cc 0, silent father of our Kings to be,
ourn'd in this golden hour of jubilee,
For of!, for
weep our thanks to thee r
We talk St
ill et our intended monument to

" ALBERT the Good ;" yet there, down at South
Kensington—not in the building itself unhappily,
but in its contents—we have for the time being at
least a memorial of him ! If but the structure were
worthier of the treasures of arts, and sciences, and
nature accumulated together within it ! It might
then be perpetuated Qs a store of machinery and
design, constituting the PRINCE CONSORT'S most
appropriate memorial. Un happily, thanks to the
hideous result of Captain FovigEs's ingenuity, that,
of course, is not for one instant to he thought of. The
sooner we make a clearance of that abominable dis.
play of ingenious audacity in the way of
piling together a mass of architectural
solecisms the better. Hard by, however, further
north upon the green sward in Ilyde-park, where
once stood for a while the Fairy Halls of glass,
containing the glories of the First Great Exhibition
—there we cannot possibly do better in the way
of honouring the memory of our lamented PRINCE
than by so combining sculpture with architecture
in an appropriate memorial, that London may,
as we suggested the other day, thenceforth rival
Edinburgh in the possession of a work of art
worthy of comparison with the SCOTT Monument.

We hope the clergy will attend to Mr. GLAD -
STONE'S speech at Manchester, for it may do them
more good than half a dozen Episcopal charges;
and we hope, too, they will visit him with signal and
appropriate retribution, for that would be an unspeak-
able boon to us poor miserable sermon-hearers.
What in the world our clerical, and perhaps our
lay hearers may ask, has Mr. GLADSTONE'S speech
at a distribution of educational prizes to do with
sermons ? We will tell them. But, the unfortunate
preliminary is, the confession, that of all the penances
poor laymen are called to endure, that of hearing a
sermon, if we do not happen to be drowsy, is about
the worst. We mean no disrespect to the clergy ;
but we may appeal to our neighbours pretty gene-
rally whether this weekly social infliction is not
one from which we always most thankfully escape.
We do not call it a religious infliction, because it is
no more a part of either natural or revealed religion
than fasting on Good Friday. That which makes
the sermon a bore, is the very opposite of religion.
It is its conformity to an artificial 'standard of
Anglican propriety—about as remote from that
furnished by the sermons we read in the New
Testament—those of the Great Master or of his
Apostles—the sermon on the Mount, or the sermons
of PAUL and PETER—as a modern bishop or deacon
is from any resemblance to primitive apostles and
the primitive men in holy orders.
When, then, we had read the first column of Mr.
GLADSTONE'S speech, the first thing which struck us
was—why, surely we have been reading a sermon ;
the next, why, no, a sermon, it cannot be, for we
read it with deep interest—again we glanced back
and were compelled to see that it was a sermon and
nothing else; and, of course, the last thought,
which we dare but whisper to our reader's ear, was,
—Heaven send us such sermons every Sunday morn-
' ing, and we shall not be often wanting in our bodily
and wakeful presence.
We then, naturally, asked ourselves a few ques-
tions about the cause of the difference between a
Chancellor of the Exchequer's sermon and that of
a dean, or a doctor of divinity, or of the regular
parish priests. We set aside the genius of Mr.
GLADSTONE—of which some exquisite touches ap-
peared in this introductory part of his address. All
clergymen, cannot, more than all gentlemen in
other professions, be geniuses. But we thought we
saw in Mr. GLADSTONE'S speech—indeed, it is
generally to be seen in his speeches—some quali-
ties which would change the style of nine-tenths
of the sermons in the kingdom, and make them
always bearable, often attractive. Mr. GLADSTONE
always speaks from conviction, and almost always
because he really has something to say, and he lets
his manner show it, Now nothing can make up
for these qualities. Why do we listen so coolly to
the polished, well poised sentences of Sir BULWER
LYTTON, or to the elaborated sarcasms and ingenui-
ties of Mr. DISRAELI—in their public speeches we
mean ? Because it is impossible to believe that
there is anything like conviction beneath them.
We admire the feat, indeed ; and we could attend
to such feats, on pulpit topics in the pulpit ; but
all clergymen could no more rival this, than they
could the performances of BLONDIN. But Mr. GLAD-
STONE'S ingenuities, and touching sentiments, and
eloquent illustrations, are as much the product of his
heart, as of his intellect—we may say of him what
the highest authority would have said of a good
man—that out of the abundance of his heart his
mouth speaketh.

Altogether reversing this, our Sunday preachers
have contracted with few exceptions—a manner
dignified enough it is true—and an utterance ro-
tund, so far as vocal organs permit, monotonous, or
cadential, starched as their cravats and bands, and
authoritative, as if they swore to renounce the '
POPE'S authority, only to become Popes themselves.
Such a manner might be endured, if high genius
atoned for it, just as we tolerate for this reason the
intolerable manner of the two Tory orators above-
mentioned ; but it is death to all attention when
the speaker has no such claims on us. Nearly all
the really popular preachers we hear of, have a
manner just the reverse. Their theological senti-
ments may be as diverse as possible ; their educa-
tion and the polish of their style different; they
may be popular, so to speak, with the thinking few,
or in the more proper use of the word, with the
plebeian many;—bat they all feel that they have
something to say—something of which, be they
right or wrong, they, at least, are thoroughly con-
vinced—and as the corollary, they cannot use the
humdrum style clerical. Four more different
speakers, and with very diverse creeds also, there
can hardly be than the half-heretical Churchman
111AutucE, the popular Baptist SPURGEON, the
almost equally popular, in his own country, Pres-
byterian, Dr. GUTHRIE, and he who has so often
foretold the date of the world's down, Dr. CUMMING.
Their creeds are no concern of ours, but the
common quality which all of them possess as
attractive preachers, is a great concern of
all of us. If we are to hear a sermon
once a week, or to be elassed by the Bishop of Os
FORD amongst the godless, then in the name of
mercy to our ears, let it be one resembling the
speeches of mortals on other occasions. We do not
ask for one with all whose notions we shall agree,
any more than ask for that in political speeches.
We do not ask for no slip—no deviation from per-
fect literary or oratorical taste, any more than
we do in other public addresses ; we only ask that
we shall have something said because the speeker
wants to say something, and with the unchecked
manner of one who so feels.

As to reading sermons, who ever thinks of such a
thing P We recollect reading a set of sermons when
we were lads—horreseimus references—they were by
WILLIAM COBBETT. Now we do not want the
clergy to become politicians—that might spoil our
trade, and according to the old adage respecting two
of a trade—editors and clergymen might then be
likely to disagree. But we are not likely to forget
the substance of Mr, COI3BETT'S sermons, though
we have never read them since, and clergymen must
aonfess that it would be something gained in their
vocation, if they could produce such lifelong ina.
prosiops, Now W 4. CoppETT's sermons/ which?

for this reason, we commend to the attention
of our clergy, possess those essential qualifications
for securing attention to which we have just ad-
verted, in an eminent degree. He has something to
say, and he is determined that you sb,all understand
what it is. Totally different in style and subject as
were Mr. GLADSTONE'S touching remarks on Lan-
cashire distress, on the sorrows of our Widowed
QUEEN in relation to it, and on the loss of PRINCE
ALBERT in regard to education, we have no doubt
that many will remember this admirable lay
sermon, as long as he would a sermon of WILLIAM
COBBETT. All now we ask of Sunday pulpit per-
formers, is that they become Sunday speakers, and
that thus they retaliate on Mr. GLADSTONE for in-
vading their province, by entering also on his. Let
them forget they are "priests"—and remember that
they are men ; and we and they shall be all the
better for the change.