The Sun.
London, England, 1850-12-14 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.
Tl.:4leS.—The pub :c have been requested to
suspend their judgment as to the merits of the con tro•
versy between the Bishop of London arid Mr.
Bennett, in a letter from Sir Jelin Ilariegton
charging the Bishop with an unfair statement of the
dispute. We have now the whole correspondence
befere us, and must coefise ourselves, in the absence
of any commentary from Mr. Bennett or his friends,
totally at a loss to conc ive in what material point
the correspendence in fall differs from the abridg.
rent of it as put forth by the Bishop of London.
The precise grounds of Mr. 13rinett's resignation—
namely, the not being permitted to introduce into the
church of St. Bernebes all the irregularities at once
which may be found scattered through all the parish
churches of E %laud ; the hardship of being
debarred front making the house of prayer
a kind of ecclesiastical album or scrap book, in
which, without the trouble of hunting fos isolated
anomalies, they might be found altogether like the
oln-ctionable passsges in an Index Explugatorius,
are left exactly the same as they were. The only
addition that we can find of any importance is
a prof esion of faith which, coupled with the one
contained in Mr. Ilsnnetets letter to Lord John
Russell, is curious as evidencing what a clergy-
man of the Church of Englund, whose earthly head
is the Queen, whose rule of faith is the Scrip-
ture, and the Scripture only, may believe, may
avow, and may still remain within her bounds.
Mr. Bennett, in these documents boldly as
serts the infallibility of the Church (which is
not the Church of England), whose servants,
kings and statesmen are ; he treats the Royal
supremacy as intolerable tyranny, sneers at the
Established Church as the tool, the instrument,
the creature, the food of statesmen, as Eras-
an in spirit, and barren and lukewarm in its care
of souls when compared with the Roman Catholic
Church, and declares that if the theory of an Act
of Parliament Church be carrried out by governing
her by a power external to herself, many more clergy
will follow the most holy and most learned among
them who have already gone to Rome. The man
who writes thus is no longer insidious, he is a bitter
and outspoken enemy to the Church and Consti-
tution of this land. He has withdrawn his allegi-
ance from our Crown and his obedience from our
laws, to confer it on a metaphysical abstraction, ex-
tending through all time, pervading all space, which
no one has seen, no one has heard, no one has touched,
but of which all we know is that he is its self-consti-
tuted and unhesitating expositor. The existence of
this impalpable essence, the duties which it requires
from us, and the precepts which it teaches, the laity
are not to presume to speculate on for themselves, but
to receive them with implicit faith from the sacer-
dotal body to whom their teaching is intrusted.
Theology, according to this school, is a matter with
which the laity have no right to meddle—they must
leave it to their betters, the sacerdotal mediators who
manage all these things for them. We agree with
Mr. Bennett that politicians have nothing to do with
theological controversy. The truth and soundness of
his opinions will therefore be unquestioned by us.
Whether the substitution of impalpable abstractions
for tangible realities, whether the placing the mitre
above the Crown, the Church above the Bible,
and the clergy above all, be or be not the real
essence of Christianity, we do not now discuss;
but we claim the right to give our opinion on a plain
question of morals, and to tell Mr. Bennett that
whatever be the place where he and his restless
coadjutors ought to take up their abode, that place is
most assuredly not the Church of England ; his own
argument is conclusive on this po int. le his opinion, the
infallible is sacrificed to the fallible, the spiritual to the
temporal, the heavenly to the earthly Church; why,
then, to use the expression of a more distinguished
convert, Dr. Newman, does he bear about with him
the body of this death ? Why does he cling to a
Church which speaks, according to the same writer,
with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies ?
Why, when he has discovered what is good, and what
is cell, does he range himself on the side of the evil,
if his heart, his principles, his feelings, his convic-
tions, are against ? Why is his name, his bodily
presence, his external seeming with us ? We can-
not even see, on his own principles, what part he
can clhiin in that infallible Church in which he be-
lieves, since it is only through the medium of that
Erastian, barren, lukewarm, Act of Parliament
Church of EngLnd that he claims connexion with
the infallible Church. The infallible, universal
Church is the essence, the Church of England is
the accident. flow, upon Mr. Bennett's principles,
can the latter give admission to the former—the slats-
dow to the substance, the nonentity to the reality?
Mr. Bennett and the one thousand eight hundred
clergymen who, he says, have denied in writing the
supremacy of the Queen, are much deceived if they
thick they can palm off such doctrines, coupled with
such acts, upon the people of England as a mere ques-
tion of theology, and shelter themselves behind the
right of private judgment, which, in the same breath
that they claim it, they surrender at the feet of their
phantom Church. Whether their doctrine b 3 true
or not is a question of theology; whether their acts
be conformable to their doctrines is no question of
theology, nor yet of consistency, but of bare and ob-
vious morality. We do not say that they are
schismatic, for we do no t presume to dogmatize; we
do not say they are inconsequent, for their doc-
trines are coherent and systematic; but we assert
that by remaining in the Church of England,
which they have brought themselves to despise and
revile for being governed as she always has been
governed ever since the Reformation, they are guilty
of a moral obliquity which deprives them of all claim
to the respect and good opinion of honest men of any
sect. It is vain for Mr. Bennett to plead the right of
private judgment, in which he does not believe. That
right, like other rights, has its limits, and these ex-
tend not beyond the domain of speculative theology.
In matters of honesty we know no right of private
judgment-7n° allowance for diversity of opinion; the
law is precise and absolute, and an honest man as
little dreams of a deviation from it as from the
axioms of mathematical science. Nobody objects to
Mr. Bennett's private opinions, it would be a viola-
tion of the right of private judgment to do so; but
we do object, and without any infraction of the right
of private judgment, that he, holding these opi-
nions, should be the clergyman of any church of
the Establishment. Mr. Bennett threatens us with
secession a s well as resignation, and predicts that
when this process is complete the Church of
England will be little more than dry bones. We do
not participate in this alarm. It is a fearful thing,
no doubt, that any portion of the system should be-
come diseased, but when once the disease is fully es-
tablished the welfare of the sound part demands that
it should be eradicate.), and the excision is a cause,
not of danger, but of aafety. Mr. Bennett has shown
by his letter to. Lord John Russell how little he re-
spects the feelings or admits the judgment of the laity,
unless indeed those feelings take the form of a morbid
appetite for Roinanistn. Mr. Bennett has shown by
his letter to the Bishop of London how little he re-
spects that canonical obedience in which he is bound
to his bishop. A man who can neither treat his
superiors with deference, nor his inferiors with mo-
deration and fairness, may be fit for many things, but
is certainly rot fit for the ministry of a decorous and
well-ordered Church, whose ritual and doctrines are
part of the law of the land, receiving from the
State ample temporal endowments and a modified
spiritual pre-eminence only on condition of her ob-
serving that very moderation end temperance which
Mr. Bennett so superciliously discards. We do not
think that the lamentation of certain of his parishioners
will find an echo beyond the limits of his parish.
Touse who, ns Sir John Ilarington informs us, have
hitherto been kept from joining the Church of Ro,me,
by means of the " beautiful ceremonial of St.Peus, ,
will have little cause to regret a change which will
'place them at once in the third heaven of ceremonial
observances. Protestants will except to his doctrine;
consistent Tractarians to his insubordination ; all mo-
derate men to a resignation which seems rather to
have been dictated by the mortification of his taste in
ecclesiastical re ithetice thin by any attempted coercion
of his opinions in more weighty. matters.r
JOURNAL OF INDUS mi.-T HE Bunraos-
-IST THEORY OF M
ONEF.—This theory is based on the
assumption that money ought to possess intrinsic
value, and requires that it should be coined out of
gold, silver, and copper. The English system orders
al tender up to twelve pence ; that copper shall be lt,g
that silver shall be legal tender up to 403.; and
that for all sums beyond 40s. gold, of a definite
weight and definite fineness, shall. alone be legal
tender. Were this theory consistently acted upon,
not a single bank note could be circulated. The
currency would be exclusively metallic. As
such a system would arrest the future progress
of civilization, and probably throw
in back agricul-
ture, manufactures, trade, shipping and com-
merce, to the state which they existed
during the epoch of the Plantagenet or Nor-
man princes, the bullionists have been compella-1 to
compromi,e with their fundamental principle. Ac
cordingly, the Act of 1844 permits the Bank of Eng-
' land to issue notes to the extent of 14,000,000 of
pounds sterling against the permanent and floating
debt duo to it by the Government, without compelling
I that establishment to hold in its coffers an equivalent
14,000,000 in bullion ; the provincial banks of Eng-
land are allowed to issue 8,000,000; the banks of
Ireland, 6,000,000; and the banks of Scotland
3,000,000. Thus in the aggregate a paper circula-
tion of 31,000,000, without the guarantee of any
i metallic basis whatever, is authorised by the very
bullionist legislation which declares it to be a funda-
I mental principle that money ought to possess
intrinsic value. It should be noted that no debt
whatever is due to the provincial, Irish, or Scotch
theof England ; in the latter case thare
banks, so that the Act of 1844 extends to them
a privilege on totally. different grounds from
Bank
those which sanction the issue of 14,000,000 of' notes
from