The Sun.
London, England, 1857-06-08 00:00:00

Qrs.

longer to exert them ? A Bishop or a rector does
not, as a rule, favour an active, learned, and enthu-
siastic subordinate. " There is a daily beauty ie
his life which make theirs ugly." Tney do not
like to be poked up from behind, or that Jack
should be reckoned beau than his master. "A
saint in silk is twice a saint in lawn." It won't do
that the stuff-gown should carry off the cause from
the coif. We have scarcely ever known a curate
retained who drew better congregations than the
rector. We here known many dismissed for the
simple offence of being popular. A blockhead has
an instinctive antipathy to a genius. The drone in
the rectory does not want a honey-bee in the
curate's lodge. A fool in power always thinks
talent dangerous.
Feed a greyhound too high, and where will be
his wind ? Give cats as much liver as they can
eat, and what will they care for catching mice ?
"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,"
was the providential sentence that set mankind
to useful industry. Aye, but what if men can eat
bread without any brow-sweat ? will they work if
they can come by provender without it ? John
Bull stands amazed that he should riot get a thing
when he honestly pays for it. "What !" he ex-
'claims, "do I give some eight millions in meal or
in malt to the Established Church to make the
people religious and the clergy attractive, and still
are the Dissenters, to whom I give nothing, pros-
perous, while the Church decays ? Are the Non-
conformists to have the ears and hearts of the
nation, while State clergy are only to retain the
loaves and the fishes ? Why have we no Spurgeons
with twenty thousand disciples ? Where are the
Wesleys and Whitfields, the Halls, the Channings,
the Deweys, the Guthries of the Establishment ?"
Why, the answer is not far to seek. The ecclesi-
astical economy of the State Church is ingeniously
contrived to withhdraw every motivefrommen either
to faithfulness, zeal, or the exercise of genius. The
very bishops are taxed in the Senate itself when-
ever they betray the least earnestness in their sa-
cred calling. They actually have to apologise for
doing their duty. They have to stand upon the
defensive whenever they presume to follow the ex-
ample of that Divine Master who was meek and
lowly of heart, whose sermon was on a mount, who
prayed in the wilderness, and who taught his im-
mortal prayer to a mob at the corner of a street.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the very father of
the faithful, has actually to throw the aegis of his
authority around ecclesiastics who offend in the di-
rection of condescending to imitate the devotedness
of the Apostles, the self-forgetfulness of Paul, and
the pure-m'nded lowliness of the fathers. Nay, if
the truth were known, it would turn out that Lord
Dungannon was put up to reproaching the Low
Church Bishops for being of any use by their own
brethren of the episcopal bench, and that nobody
is more alarmed and disgusted at the prospect of
any revival of an apostolical spirit of devotedness
and evangelism in the Church than the Church
itself. The very Act of Parliament which alone
saved the offence of preaching to the poor where the
poor would listen from being illegal was smuggled
through the Legislature. Ministers of religion
were only permitted to follow the express injunc-
tions of their Master by stealing a march upon
their own Church.

Another ineffable stupidity of our ecclesiastical
system is the nature of the conditions and qualifi-
cations without which the great Author of Christia-
nity himself could not have entered what is face-
tiously termed his own. Church. Let genius be ever
so great, and the call to the work of the ministry
be ever so clear, the most gifted cin rarely enter the
Church, if by tl3e accid en ts of society they have never
happened to be se n t to two particular Universities out
of nine that flourish in the United Kingdom. If we
have any faith whateverin the religion we profesß, we
cannot doubt that its founders were ignorant in
every particular save in those intuitions of evan-
gelism which in the work of the redemption of the
world from wickedness are of more efficacy than
all the learning of this world ; and we cannot but
know that mere gentility and classical proficiency,
" Shakspeare and the musical glasses," are not
qualifications which form the foundation of a call
for the work of the ministry. In fact, if we read
the Gospels and the Acts, and compare them with
the wretched worldliness and the lifeless rigidity
of Church of Englandism, it is impossible to es-
cape the conclusion that the whole economy of the
Establishment is a huge trap to catch money and
power—a hypocritical pretext for pocketing wages
without earning them, a prostitution of religion
to mere creature comfort and social respectability,
and the snug ease of fashionable miserable sinners,
who keep clergymen to comfort them, and never
to " mention Hell to. ears polite."—Examincr.

HONOURS TO MILITARY SURGEONS.

A general feeling prevails amongst medical offi-
cers of the army, and in the civil department of our
profession, that in meting out the honours and
rewards incident to the late war, military surgeons
have not been treated with impartial justice. This
feeling is also very generally shared in by all classes
in the army. The principle established by the
Commander-in-Chief hasbeen, that honours should
bib awarded only to those medical officers who were
present at the battles of Alma and Inkerman. This
principle excludes many military surgeons who were
with the army the whole of the campaign previous
to these actions, and who served subsequently during
the whole of the siege of Sebastopol. Their absence
on these occasions was caused either by illness con-
tracted during their attendance upon the cholera
patients in Bulgaria, as mentioned some time since
by Sir Edward Codrington, in the House of Com-
mons or by serving with the army elsewhere.
But the duties of the army medical officers through-
out the siege, and especially during the trying
winter of 1854, were far more dangerous and
arduous than any services rendered during the
battles mentioned. In fact, the sick were sent
away to Scutari to the hospitals immediately after
those actions. During the siege minor sorties were
of constant occurrence, and the night attacks upon
the Redan and other batteries were amongst the
most desperate encounters of the war. Military
medical officers were exposed to the dangers of shot
and shell during these assaults, and afterwards spent
whole Lights in operating upon, and attending to
the wounded. Yet these services have been alto-
gether ignored in the adjudication of honours. One
very sore point is, that the principle thus laid
down by his Royal Highness the Commander-in-
Chief, has been departed from in favour of the
other officers of the army. Many have been deco-
rated who wore not present either at Alma or In-
kerman, and who did not, in fact, join the army
until after these battles had been fought. This
bears with particular hardship upon some of the
most meritorious surgeons of the war, and has
led to the docoration of a comparatively small
number of military medical officers, and
particularly of the regimental surgeons. We
may mention, for instance, the cases of Mr.
Blenkins, surgeon of the Grenadier Guards ; Mr.
Lawrence, assistant-surgeon in the same corps,
and Mr. Trotter of the Coldstreams. Mr. Blenkins
was absent from Alma and Inkerman only from
sickness through duty, and Mr. Lawrence and
Mr. Trotter were absent from these actions because
they were selected, as seniors of their rank, to re
main at Varna in charge of the sick. The same
thing happened to many others. Yet such men
have received no step whatever of promotion for
their services during the whole war ; some, indee 1,
have narrowly escaped being put on the retired
list, and all are omitted from the list of those se-
lected to receive military honours. Others have had
decorations who were presen t atAlma and Inkerman,
but who were absent for a whole year subsequently,
during the most trying period of the siege. As al-
ready mentioned, the principle has been broken
through with reference to other military officers,
but adhered to most stringently in the case of mili-
tary surgeons. In the French army, if a selection
were made at all, the preference would, according.
to the rules and practice of the French service, be
given to the medical officer. In France a large num-
ber of the medical officers have been decorated. It
would, indeed, be a rare sight tosee a French surgeon,
who had passed through the Russian war, without a
decoration. But inthis country the case is widely dif-
ferent, and deep dissatisfaction naturally prevails.
The injustice has been done not only as regards our
own honours, but in the case of the Legion of
Honour presented by the Emperor of the French to
our Government, for distribution in the British
army. We trust, however, it is not too late to
remedy the mistake which has been committed,
awl from the known liberality of the Duke of Cam-
bridge, who would have lost his own life but for an
assistant-surgeon of the 7th Hussars, we hope a sup-
plemental list of decorations may yet be issued. It is
not only as regards honours that the military surgeon
is placed at a disadvantage. Many a youth who
left Eton or Harrow at sixteen or seventeen, to join
the army in the Crimea, without any previous

military education, has acquired his captaincy or
his majority; but an assistaut-surgeon, joining the
army after a special education of several years, at
the age of twenty-one, and serving through the
whole of the war, could, by the rules of the ser-
vice, be nothing more than an assisstant-surgeon at
the end of it. There is the more need for libera

lay in the distribution of honours.—Lancet,

MALT AND HOPS.—In the year ended the 31st of
March last 38,127,378 bushels of malt were brought to
ch„rge, against 33,524,494 bushels in 1855, 35,208,563
in 1854, and 41,020,381 in 1853. The average price of
barley was 435. 2d. per quarter. The amount in "
ola
duty" charged on English hops was 267,7051. The
quantity of foreign hops imported into the United
Kingdom W£6.9 11,261 cwt.