The Sun.
London, England, 1850-12-04 00:00:00

be infallible; and we must believe tLe Church to be in,
fallible in order to give certainty to the Bible. Such is
the absurd, the vicious circle upon which Mr. Bennet
builds his church. This is nct to be converted to Popery,
but to surpass and to transcend it. Tile creed of Roman
Catholics is reason and common sense compared with
this. Infallibility draws after it omnipotence. If know-
ledge be power, the perfection and the irrefragibility of
knowledge imply supreme power. Since the Church
possesses these, where is its organ, its chief ? Shall a
council be called of the universal Church? Mr. Bennet
knows that it would be a bear-garden. In despair of
any result from a council, shall all decision and authority
be referred to a supreme head, foreign and antagonistic
to all lay and domestic rule? Mr. Bennet durst not say
this, but he points to it, and all his arguments lead to
that great conclusion—Popery. But for the present
this is not prudent to announce. For him the time of
•
absolutist restoration on matters of religion has
not come, and therefore Mr. Bennet recommends
anarchy. His desire is that every priest shall
do what he likes, preach what tenets, and practise
what ceremonies, he fancies. He will not admit the
Queen's supremacy, because it is the Prime Minister's
—nor the Prime Minister's, because it is after all the
people's supremacy. Queen, Parliament, Government,
and people shall have nothing to do with their religion.
Laymen shall not meddle with it. It is a sacerdotal
affair altogether, infallibility being confined to the priest-
hood. And as the people must not elect their priests,
nor the State be allowed to appoint them either, it follows
that religion is to be altogether a Levitical institution,
handed dawn in a tribe or corporation, self-electing and
self-rearing, sacred in their persons and infallible in their
judgments. If we couple this scheme of religious faith,
and church government, with tho worship of the saints,
the adoration of the cross, the auricular confession, pe-
nance and absolution, all insisted on by the theologian of
Brompton, it makes up something considerably more
than Popery. It is rank Ilindooism, with its castes, its
rites, its Brahmins, and its pagodas. It is bringing
back society, not to the middle ages, as Catholicism
would do, but to the remotest ages of barbarism. We
can conceive no greater outrage to common sense than
the attempt to place a sect, which has such aims and
principles as these, by the side of the great Dissenting
denominations of this country, in order to claim kindred
and support. Every single characteristic that Dissent
objects to in the Church, sacerdotal supremacy with
repudiation of lay influence, and all the consequences of
these opinions and pretensions, are exaggerated by the
Puseyites. The Queen's supremacy, which the laymen
of the Established Church prize as their safeguard
against sacerdotal tyranny and extravagance, is objected
to by Dissenters as insufficient. Dissent worships no
Pope, and believes in no infallible church ; for the Rev.
Mr. Bennet, therefore, to creep under the gaberdine of
the Rev. Baptist Noel, is but a piece of Jesuitry worthy
of his school. Into the great and important ques-
tion of whether there shall be a State Church
or no State Church we need not enter.
But of this we are confident, that in any
country where churches are divorced from 'and
unrecognised by the State, those churches with infallible
and dominant pretensions, with a hierarchy, with corpo •
rate property, advancing their influence as much by the
argument of wealth and power as by argument, must be
subjected to rigid restrictions, if not successfully com-
batted by education and by great worldly and industrial
activity. The idea of allowing such a Church as the
Anglican in England to separate from the State, and
constitute itself with all its property and privileges into a
separate corporation, re-electing itself, disciplining and
rearing its sons in the creed and qualities requisite fer
domination—this would be the e§lablishing of a yoke so
much more intolerable than thaiof any State Church,
that it would infallibly lead at no distant day to an in-
surrection of the laity for the sure and set purpose of
getting rid of it; unless indeed the success of the Indian
jugglers of the Church had succeeded in prostrating the
people and reducing them to the state of the low castes of
India, condemned to labour and prohibited to think, and
bidden to save their souls with the mummery of unintel-
ligible orisons and fanatical asceticism.