The Sun.
London, England, 1868-11-06 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS,

Mr. Reverdy Johnson is, the Times hopes, the inaugu-
rator of a new school of diplomacy. He is accredited in
form to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. But
in fact he is accredited to the whole English people. By
this means a subject of dispute which at one time threatened
the peace of the entire Anglo-Saxon race has in his hands
become even a bond of union. It is certainly not in
accordance with the traditions of diplomacy to
publish to the country at large the fact, usually
reserved for the private ear of Secretaries of
State, and by them commonly not believed, that the
diplomatist's countrymen are friendly as well as
his Government. But where all the conditions of inter-
national friendliness are in existence, the personal testi-
mony of a foreigner invested with a public character to
the fact might dissipate many promising difficulties. This
country has never been an uninterested spectator of the
great political experiment in more or less successful pro-
gress on the other side of the Atlantic. The United
States, on the other hand, have always paid this country
the compliment of studying it socially as well as politi-
cally. It would have been well for the mutual good
feeling of the two Powers if more pains bad been
taken here also to learn the character of American
society. The absurd burlesques of fact would then have
been exposed which represented energy in America as
absolutely incompatible with intelligence or manners, and
a political career with honour or refinement. Mr.
Reverdy Johnson in his own person has confuted many
of these prejudices already. We hope still greater
effects from discourses like that of Wednesday towards
the assimilation of the public opinion of his own
country and this. The respect and sympathy excited by
Mr. Reverdy Johnson's frank expression of contempt for
the propositions in some quarters of the Union for pay-
ment of the debt in paper may react usefully there, and
shame into silence such essays at making political capital.
The tone in which he repudiated any tampering with
national credit as a fraud shews that the higher class of
American politicians recognise as inviolable the same
principles of political morality which are current in
English public life.
The Post remarks that General Grant had never she wn
bitterness or animosity against the South during the
whole of the struggle. He went about the work that duty
imposed upon him in a quiet, silent, business-like way,
never making grandiloquent, fire-eating speeches, and
only making himself heard of by winning battle after
battle, and taking town after town until he captured
Richmond, together with Leo and his army. The
SoVh are probably in their hearts as proud of
Gra .t as they are of Lee himself ; and Grant,
if we may judge from his straightforwardness
and honesty, will be as just a President—so far as
Southern interests are concerned—as the man who so long
struggled against him. In England men seldom attain
to the Premiership until they are some twenty years or so
older than General Grant. In the learned professions,
such as the law, for instance, a counsel is not considered
competent to lead, that is, he seldom obtains a silk
gown until about the age of 40. Nor is it until the
same period of life that a physician is supposed to
have acquired a properly ripe experience. Unless
a man possesses great wealth or high interest he
seldom succeeds in making a sufficient name fos
himself to aspire to a seat in the House of Commons
until about the like age. In short, mentally, and some-
times even bodily, a man may be considered in the prime
of life between forty and sixty. In professions which tax
the physical powers as well as the mental—as in the case
of men who may have to bear the fatigue of long marches
and be exposed to extremes of heat and cold—it is
different, and after fifty, perhaps, the bodily powers may
not keep up to a level with those of the mind ; but though
General Grant has seen service in the field, it may behoped
that he has yet a quarter of a century of good work in him.

The Herald commisserates with Mr. Gladstone. That it
his present position as the leader of the great Libera,
party, the chief who has restored the " rabble " to something
like discipline, the inventor of the policy which is to send
the Tories to the rightabout and restore his party once
more to office, he should be driven from the place of refuge
so chivalrously accorded him in 18(35, would be a Liberal
calamity. But that he should enter the House of Com.
mons as the not remote successor of Mr. Townsend would
be nothing less than a catastrophe. From a bad third at
Oxford to a fluke third for South Lancashire was a terrible
descent, but that it should be possible for the leader of the
Liberal party to be able to challenge the administration of
the present Government solely on the ground that he is
" the right bon. gentleman the member for—Greenwich"
is one of those appalling contingencies -which sensitive
minds shrink from contemplating. Yet people of stronger
nerves can brace themselves to face even more dire alter-
natives. 'We frankly confess that we are not quite equal
to realising an occasion upon which the First Lord of the
Treasury should find himself compelled, in deference to
the etiquette of the House of Commons, to address the
leader of the Opposition, the chief with "a working
majority of 120 at his back," as " the right hon..gentleman
the member for—Greenwich."

The Times has a satirical leader upon the vacant livings,
or combination of livings, Doddington., March, and Ben-
wick. It has probably been more valuable than the Arch-
bishopric of Canterbury, and though it will now be
divided, even after division its fragments will be, in point
of emolument, of almost antediluvian bulk ; and their
incumbents, with the duties of commonplace parishes, will
still be better off than most bishops. But the expectations
raised in this instance will be felt within a very limited
circle. In whose hands would the reader guess that the
gift of the richest preferment in England is placed ? Simply
in those of Sir A. W. Peyton, a relative, of course,
of the clergyman just deceased. A small circle of his rela-
tions and acquaintances includes all the persons who can
entertain any curiosity as to his selections. A clergy.
man can scarcely be said to enter a profession ; he is
absorbed into an organism, the life of which is in the
past, and which draws only its materials from the
persons and things of the day. There is no ex-
planation, therefore, or reason to be given, or, at
least, that is worth giving, for any particular arrange-
ment. It grew so ; and that is all that can be said.
Doddington, therefore, and the state of things of which
Doddington and its fellow livings are a type, will long
remain in all the glories of antiquity. The system has,
at all events, one great advantage. The Church is identi-
fied with the life of the nation in a degree that has never
been attained by any other scheme that has yet been
devised. Start afresh, and transform the clergy into a strict
profession, and, if experience and reason may be trusted,
they would soon develope into the narrowest and most,
purely professional of castes. Abstract theology has creates
a concrete Church ; and unless you fasten the clergy to their
native soil by some powerful bonds, an overwhelming
attraction draws them wholly into the service of an inde-
pendent mistress. Systems of what are called " lay
co-operation " have all failed. The. laity, as a rule, will
not take the trouble to attend synods and conferences, and
those who do are wholly under the influence of the greater
learning and the more definite purposes of the clergy.
But when such a mass of appointments is in the hands of
laymen or of lay authorities, the clergy are subjected by
the most effectual of all means to lay control.
The Daily News says :—The day has passed when
county meetings meant very much. An attempt to revive
them as instruments of political conflict is like bringing
out the old matchlock or the captured cannon of forgotten
wars, less to do execution among the enemy than to make
a demonstration against them. The fens of Cambridge-
shire have been summoned to the rescue of the Irish
branch of the English Church. Lord Hardwicke, who i•s
lord-lieutenant of the county, and has a disposition to
rally round every threatened institution, though he if,
singularly unfortunate in his efforts to get anybody t(•
rally with him, was in the chair at the meeting held in.
Cambridge on Tuesday. His lordship seems t(;
have been somewhat in doubt as to the character
of the assembly over which lie presided. Thi I
idea of fair controversy seems to be a discussion i 4
which his own friends should have the right of speakir
and his opponents the liberty of hearing. If this view hed
been acquiesced in, we should, doubtless, have been tole
before to-clay that the county of Cambridge had declared
in favour of the Irish Church Establishment. The advo-
cates of its separation from the State appear to have
mustered in as great force of numbers, and in greater force
of reason, than its supporters. We thank Lord Hard-
wick° and his friends for the proof they have given of the
difficulty of getting an unequivocal declaration in favour
of the Irish Church, even by the strongest pressure of
authority and influence, in any meeting which partakes of
a public or open character.
The Stamford answers the question as to whether there
shall be a Protestant State Church in these islands or not.
Its answer has always been the same. There shall and
must. The answer of the Times of late has in effect been
—There will riot be much longer, and there really is no
reason why there should be. Of course this has
not been said in so many words of the Church
in England ; but what has been said and is
being said at this very moment amounts to that.
The Church disestablished would have to enter upon a
conflict with relentless antagonists, whom it would not be
able to encounter upon anything like fair terms, unless it
assumed their very worst and fiercest characteristics, and
fought them with their own unsparing weapons. First and
foremost, it would have to transform itself from the tole-
rant, comprehensive, patient Church it is, to a Church
militant awl aggressive. A position of large-
minded " immobility " has comprehended, and can
still comprehend, High Church, Low Church,
and Broad Church, and together they have lived
in Christian char-ty. But, as our contemporary reminds
us, "it seems but a silken thread, or an unseen spell,
that holds it all together." A silken thread, indeed,
it is - a thread which no one feels or ought to feel,
yet its binding capacity has lasted for three hun-
dred years. An unseen spell it may likewise fitly
be called, for it acts efficiently, yet invisibly. But
the thread and the spell are the union of Church
and .te, which it is now proposed to dissever. Three—
nay, three hundred—sects might be made out of the now
ce:nparatively trifling differences in the Church of
Eug!and ; sects that would rage against each other with a
fury too often seen in such small fanateal bodies, to the
infinite scandal of Christendom. At present, the mild
emnplusion of law, which presses equally in all direction;
and ti erefore severely in none, is suffie'ent to keep
elements together that; "once disswered, cAD344