The Sun.
London, England, 1836-03-14 00:00:00

Wxuitcit ItA'Vg;

TO ARCHPEACONACOVEIi, 14dIsLREgIDENT
PERPETUAL CURATE OF BUNGAY, SAINT
MARY,
THE REV. R. COBB, HIS SUB-CURATE, AND
TO SAMUEL SCOTT,
and HIS CHURCHWARDENS-
JAMES GOWER„, 3

So! Venerable and iteverend Sirs; and Worsbiaul Chum

wardens, you are nursing again ; the rustling has reached
me. 1 address myself td yeti all; becadse yoit are all
a actors—though three you are but toots in the great work
of undermining, under the pretence of propping, the Old
House—whose larder has so long sheltered and fed the
sleek and downy Venerables and Hierarchs of your cheese..
devouring- band. You have all shared in the glory of
causing the seizure of chairs and tables, you were afraid to
sell—you have all been wise enough to proclaim that the
injustice of church-rates had so raised the indignation of
your parishioners, that you were fearful of popular tumult ;
and that therefore, you ware compelled to seize and send to
gaol, Mr. John Childs, one of your principal parishioners.
You thought, I wist, that the excess of oppression might
subdue the sense of justice, and induce submission to
church exactions. You knew not—l am aware that three
of you were too unreflecting t 3 know—that twenty years of
peace, and an active local Press, had taught your townsmen
and the surrounding mass of the people, to read, to write,
and to do more—to think. You did not know that thought
and the Scriptures invariably lead to a clearer perception of
religious truth ; and that God, in his goodness, has so con-
stituted the human intellect, that knowledge and reflection
invariably lead man to a perception of justice, and wean
him, in religious matters, from blind idolatry to wordly
authority.
The people have learned, but you did not know it, and
therefore we have winked at your ignorance—they have
learned that the union of church and state, and the attempt
to make the Dissenters pay for new pewing your churches—
for providing surplices for your clergy—choristers for your
psalmody, and bread and wine for your communicants—
forms no part of religious duty, and is plainly unjust ; and
that if you want clean vestments for your bonzes, and
cushions to sit easy upon, the least you can do is to pay
yourselves for the washing and the horse-hair ; but I leave
you, the three subordinate actors—the slaves and tools of a
bad system—the one the victim of the circumstances in
which he is placed, and the others of the ignorance under
which they labour,—and I direct my attention to your
Venerable Leader—venerable by courtesy.
As a professed Reformer, he has, you know, disavowed
participation in your jail-invoking propensity. He says he
loves not oppression—of course he loves not oppressors—
and he has recently written in the public papers, though a
pluralist, and discharging his cure of souls by deputy, a
letter in which he has had the boldness to use this language,
and to give to the gainsayers the advice which so distinctly
conveys his own condemnation :

" What can be a shorter or more simple mode of dealing
with an idle and non-resident clergyman than to tell him
plainly, You must faithfully labour in your vineyard, or
the grapes will riot be yours ?' Is not this the mode in
which you deal with every other department in society ;
and is it not found to be the best and most effective stimu-
lus to exertion ? You may properly tell the poor man, that
if he refuse to labour, neither shall he eat."
Now, Venerable Sir—Archdeacon of the Diocese, and
perpetual curate, pluralist, and non-resident—the last para-
graph is your language. You, being always a professed
Reformer, have taken especial care to place yourself dis-
tinctly to before the mind's eye of the public. I acquit you
of having an eye to his Majesty's Whig Ministers, though
it so happened that you seized a very critical occasion for
putting yourself forward to rebuke Tory parsons, particu-
larly when you wrote to Dean Pellew the letter from which
I have above given an extract.

Dean Pellew had simply invited you, as one of the clergy
of the diocese, to meet your brethren, to consider of an ad-
dress to his Majesty, beseeching him to take the Church
under his especial care ; and on that occasion, though the
Dean might have expected a quiet reply, you rushed into
print, very unadvisedly as you will find, BECAUSE YOU
HAVE NOT ACTED UP TO YOUR PROFESSIONS. You have
sought to herd with the sheep and hold with the dogs, and
the sheep are no longer So ignorant as not to know that
they have more to fear from false friends than open ene-
mies, or so timid as not to rebuke them.
You have been struggling to combine inconsistencies,
you refuse to join your brethren in addressing the King,
and seized the occasion to launch a just Phillipic against
the Irish church, and the oppression and injustice of which
the Irish church was the cause. Yet, when notice was
forwarded to you of meeting of your own parishioners to
impose a church-rate upon the Dissenters of that parish
(perhaps a non-resident pluralist may be the cause of that
dissent), you abstain from attending, though you took care
to be present at a previous meeting, when your claim to ap-
, point one of the churchwardens was to be exercised. I inform
you that your churchwardens have , given notice for " a
Vestry Meeting on Tuesday next, the 15th instant, to take
into consideration the several assessments of Church-rates
iii arrear." Now, venerable Sir, pray go to this consulta-
tion ; don't absent yourself. When a Reformer, particu-
larly a venerable and reverend Archdeacon, who has been
so many years within one step of a Bishopric, addresses his
flock in accents of mercy, they will listen. Pray go, and
perhaps when you, like Paul, whose disinterestedness it
should be your ambition to imitate—when you reason, as
he reasoned, "of righteousness, temperance, and judgment
to come," they may tremble to commit iniquity, and turn
from the error and evil of their ways. Pray go as the minister
of peace, pour oil over the troubled waters—assuage the
heart-burnings which you well know exist amongst those
whose souls are committed to your care—tell them not to
send men to gaol for not raising an altar at which they
think it sinful to worship,—for not adorning a shrine before
which they dare not kneel, is unjust, irreligious and wicked;
—above all things, as you know you have Catholics in your
flock (not one of whom have your personal and holy efforts,
yet won over to the pure faith which you hold), tell your
vestry, who look up to you for spiritual food, for the illus-
tration of that which you and I know to be indisputable truth
—that your sect took by force from the Catholics, only three
centuries ago, those noble buildings in which your meek-
spirited, rate-levying sect now assemble to worship ;—tell
them it is peculiarly unjust to compel Catholics to repair
the buildings which their clergy, when, they were in power,
BUILT AND REPAIRED OUT OF THEIR OWN INCOMES. Tell
them that which you know is true, though it may not be
very pleasant to own it, that the shepherds of the esta-
blished Church—the teachers of your sect, of which you
are a venerable ornament—took also the loaves and fishes
which were by the Catholic clergy applied to building, re-
pairing, and keeping those noble piles, AND TO FEEDING
THE POOR ; but that you keep the- funds, and neither mi-
nister to the wants of the wretched, nor repair the effects
of time upon the beautiful structures raised by Catholic
piety.
Remember that when the rate was imposed, the arrears
of which your churchwardens and flock are now aboukto
consider ; that is, TO DEBATE WHETHER THEY SHALL SEND
MORE VICTIMS TO PRISON, OR MORE CHAIRS OR BEDS TO
THE BROKER—the Rev. Joseph Wilson, Catholic priest
attended, and though himself compelled to bear this, to
him, peculiarly unjust yoke, proposed, in order to allay the
irritation occasioned by the refusal of your purer church to
bear the expenses of its own worship, to make a voluntary
subscription in the town to remove the necessity of this
rate : and that Mr. John Cuddon, another Catholic, pub-
licly offered in vestry to those men who received through
your deputy your spiritual instruction, to pay a voluntary
subscription twice the amount of his proportion of this
church-rate.

Remember this, venerable Sir ; and pray, impress it on
tour flock—will you ? I know you will ; because I have

before me your letter to Dean Pellcw on the subject of
Church reform, in which you advocate the necessity of a

reform of the Irish Church, and in which you urge the ne-
cessity of his yielding to the voice of the people, and tell
the Dean that it is from the State, i.c., the people (for you
know that it is the people which constitute a State) from

whom all the Church revenues are derived.
Let me not be supposed to be mis-stating you—l will
give you your own language from that letter :
" It is from the State that our Church revenues, as Pro-
testants, were derived—it is under the sanction and pro-
tection of the State that they are continued to us; and
the same authority has a full right to see that those endow-
ments answer the intent for, which they were conferred : it

has an unquestioned right to regulate them as the changes
of times and circumstances may require ; for if not, all

the title we derive from the reformation is worth nothing
beyond what we derive from the Statute of Limitations.
But I have full confidence in its justice, and am ready to
bow with submission to the wisdom of its decrees. It will

not, and cannot oppose the will and voice of those for
whom it legislates, and that will and that voice will be
with us, so long as we are careful to deserve them."
I know you wil do what I have here asked you to do, be-
cause you are doubtless entitled to credit for honesty and

consistency—because in that letter you advocate the cause
of policy and justice ably and powerfully. "If conversion
be our object, can any means more unlikely be adopted—
can any project be marked by a more signal failure? Has
not the present system been pursued long enough to answer
every purpose of experiment ? It has gone on for about
three hundred years ; and that wretched country, so far
from becoming more Protestant or more reconciled to their
yoke of spiritual bondage, has gone on in one unvaried
course of discontent, rebellion, and bloodshed—a burden
instead of a benefit to Great Britain ; and that Gospel,
which should have been the harbinger of peace, has been
used as the source and watchword of the most savage bar-
barities and the most relentless discord." In this letter you
speak of the Irish Church, but the English and Irish
Churches are one and indivisible, and tbbse who will seize