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

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—The public have been requested to
suspend their judgment as to the merits of the contro-
versy between the Bishep of London and Mr.
Bennett, in a letter Clem Sir John Harlington
charging the Bishop with on unfair statement of the
dispute. We have now the whole correspondence
before us, and must confess ourselves, in the absence
of any commentary from Mr. Bennett or his friends,
totally at a loss to conceive in what material point
the correspondence in full differs from the abridg•
sent of it as put forth by the Bishop of London.
The precise grounds of Mr. Bennett's resignation—
namely, the not being permitted to introduce into the
church of St. Barnabas all the irregularities at once
which may be found scattered through all the parish
churches of England ; the hardship of being
debarred from making the house of prayer
a kind of ecclesiastical album or scrap book, in
which, without the trouble of hunting for isolated
anomalies, they might be found altogether like the
objectionable passages in an Index Expurgatorius,
are left exactly the seine as they were. The only
addition that we can find of am importance is
a profession of faith which, coupled with the one
contained in Mr. Bennett's letter to Lord John
Russell, is curious as evidencing what a clergy-
man of the Church of England, 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 ford of statesmen, as Eras-
tian 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 He has withdrawn his allegi-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 ;t 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 point. In 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 is
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 evil, does he range himself on the side of the evil,
if his heart, his principles, his feelings, his convic-
tions, are against us ? 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 claim 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 England that he claims connexion with
the infallible Church. The infallible, universal
Church is the essence, the Church of England is
the accident. How, upon Mr. Bennett's principles,
can the latter give admission to the former—the sha-
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 be 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—no 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 as 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 eradicated, 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 tlae judgment of the laity,
unless indeed those feelings take the form of a morbid
appetite for Romanism. Mr. Bennett has shown by
his letter to the Bishop of London how little be re-
spects that canonical obedience in which be 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 not 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 and 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.
Those who, as Sir John Harington informs us, hays
hitherto been kept from joining the Church of Rome
by means of the " beautiful ceremonial of St. Paul's,"
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 esthetics than by any attempted coercion
of his opinions in more weighty matters.
JOURNAL OF INDS .
TRBU-
-This theory is basedLLION on the
IST THEORY 01' MONEY.
assumption that money ought to possess intrinsic
_
U
value, and requires that it should be coined out of
gold, silver, and copper. The English system orders
that copper shall be legal tender up to twelve pence ;
thatlegal tender up to 405.; and
that f
beyond 40s. gold, of a definite
silveror
all shall
sums
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
would arrest the future progress
suchof
civilization,system mand probably throw back agricul-
ture, manufactures, trade, shipping and com-
merce, to the state in which they existed
during the epoch of the Plantagenet or Nor-
man princes, the bullionists have been compelled to
compromise 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 due to it by the Government, without compelling
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
metallic basis whatever, is authorised by the very
bullionist legislation which declares it to be a funda-
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
banks, so that the Act of 1844 extends to them
a privilege on totally differeut grounds from
those which sanction the issue of 14,000,000 of notes
from the Bank of Lngland ; in the latter case there