The Sun.
London, England, 1844-02-26 00:00:00

helpless tool, not the vigorous controller, of events,
who is' carried along in the go-cart of expediency,
without presuming to make a movement of his own.
If this teazing, contemptible imbecility and vacillation
on the part of Sir R. PEEL continue much longer,we
do hope Mr. Husin will come forward in Parliament
with a proposal for abolishing the office of Premier,
as well as other sinecures ; for we do not see why the
country should pay six thousand a year for a Prime
Minister, who is no better than a mere cypher.

In the House of Lords, on Friday night, the Bishop
of EXETER took occasion,—after presenting petitions
from the clergy of Powderham, in Devon, and Pen-
ryn, in Cornwall, praying their Lordships to; cause
effectual means to be adopted with a view .to provide
spiritual instruction for 'the inmates of the different
workhouses in the several unions of the country ;—to
submit a motion for the appointment of a Select Com-
mittee on the same subject. But the keen-sighted
Prelate took care to incorporate into the terms of his
motion a gloss, to the effect that this spiritual instruc-
tion should be administered by chaplains of the Esta-
blished Church, one of whom he would have nominated
to every principal poor-house. This was the point
which the Bishop chiefly laboured • throughout
his very long and statistics-crowded speech. The
gravamen of his complaint—we shall use his own words
—was, that, in the union of St. Austell, as in others,
"-the Church was thiust out from her .place as the
instructress of the people." The remedy he proposed
for this state of things was the nomination of chap-
lains, as we have already stated. To corroborate
his statements, and to enforce the deduction he thus
drew from them, the Right Reverend Prelate read a
vast number of commanications which he had re-
ceived from numerous districts, both within and
beyond his own very extensive diocese,—from• the
north, as well as from the west and the south,—
all more or less illustrative of the condition
of spiritual destitution in which the pauper in-
mates of poor-houses were left, in • the locali-
ties specified, by the defective provisions of the
Poor-law Commissioners at the original crea-
tion of the particular union, or of the board of guar-
dians of the parish or district, on first entering upon
their duties under the administration of the amended
poor-law. Liskeard, St. Austell, Bodmin, St. Co-
lumb, St. Germain's, Penzance, and Redruth, all
came in, by turns, for a share of his Lordship's cen-
sure, touching their management of these matters.
He reflected pretty severely on the illiberality and
unorthodox indifference manifested by the Cornwall
boards of guardians especially, and by the Cornubian
public, in general. Thee( his Lordship moved on,
like a thunder-cloud, and passing over the county of
Devon, fulminated against Axminster and Axbridge,
Tavistock and Tiverton. Anon, as if caught in a sudden
flaw_of wind, he veered away with surprising velo-
city to discharge the remainder of his bolts over
" devoted York and Lancaster ;" from the city of the
Alinster, to the town of guilds and pageants. Finally,
leaving York and Preston, he rolled over Cheshire,
he re-appeared in the counties of Durham, North-
umberland, and Westmoreland, and expended his
last wrath upon the monotony of Cambridgeshire.
Thus, after muttering in the North Riding of York-
shire, his ominous denunciation became furious at Mac-
clesfield ; terrible throughout the.proud Palatinates of
his spiritual brothers of Durham and • Chester ; and
finally sank hissing—as a red-hot Oxford man will
ever do in such a locality—amidst the sedges of
the sluggish "Cam." In sober truth, the whole
effect -of this declamatory address was not so much
to bring under the _ eyes of their Lordships the un-
questionable evils of deficient spiritual instruction
among large bodies of the community—segregated
as the inmates of poor-houses are, from that active
communication with other classes of society, which
might, in some sort, supply this essential want—as to
show that those evils could only be grappled with
through the instrumentality of chaplains of the
Establishment.
To say that the debate, throughout, was only one
long, but involuntary exposition of the interested
championship of a High Church Prelate on the one
hand,—or of a
.heartless, sordid, calculating indif-
ference to the spiritual consolation of the poor, en the
;part of the framers of the new poor law, and of its more
responsible functionariwon the other,—would neither
be correct in fact, nor fair in construction. We:can
easily believe, objecting as we have ever done to much
'of the unnecessary hardships and stringency of the
amended poor-law, and to its want of flexibility
and adaptation to perpetually occurring combina-
tions of circumstances, which no anticipatory legis-
lation can meet even in the mass, but with which this
law affects to deal, categorically, even in their minutest
details; we can easily believe, that its enactments had
their origin in a spirit of the most unaffected and
comprehensive charity. In like manner, we can do
justice to.the sincerity of the Bishop of EXDTER'S zeal
on behalf of the Church, in whose hierarchy lie wears
a mitre, albeit that, on coming into contact with the
temporalities and influence attaching to expanded
patronage, he is apt to become a little purblind to the
connexion—so visible- to all the world beside—be-
tween his own orthodox affection to the " loving
mother," and the present advantages, and lively hopes
of benefits to come,' by which she excites and main-
tains that affection. This infirmity of the
Reverend Prelate's is occasional only, so
eccasional—and, truly, so convenient too,=--that it
reminds.us of the " night blindness" of European and
Asiatic soldiers in hot climates, and bad quarters.
Their disease is never• so aggravated, sa disabling, or
so epidemical, as-when they fancy they are about
to march from• an indifferent station to a worse one,
or to exchange a good fora bad one. If it were day
time they could, literally, " see their way." It is
but charity to suppose that the Bishop's solicitude,
touching the nomination of chaplains 'of the Es-
tablishment to 'poor union-houses, is not
all affected by the mere accident of the
.pa.
tronage that would attjtch to such appointments.
We dare wager that he has not the sight of half an eye
fir any such valuable results from theconsummation he
SO desires ! Only,, we could wish that he- had not
laid so much stress on the Liskeard Dissenters hav-
ing communicated to every board of guardians in the
kingdom,the fact of their having defeated the proposed
nomination of a Church of England clergyman to the
chaplaincy of their union. Again, when the Bishop
complains that a Dissenting minister officiates twice
every Sunday at St. Austell's poor-house, in the room
54 apart for a chapel, though not specially sent for by
any of the inmates,--does it not occur to him that
herein :consists the truest praise of the Christian.
teacher's voluntary devotion to the spiritual wants of

the poor ? or, that it may suggest an unfavourable
comparison with other parties who do not go to such
abodes, nor among such forlorn ones, until they are
sent for, and then not voluntarily? And what are
the Bishop's notions of the moral guilt of what we
must call the "ecclesiastical" apostacy of which he
speaks, in the case of an individual who had cast off
the office he once held in our Church, and whose
subsequent delinquencies the Bishop conducts, in this
extraordinary manner, to what he obviously assumes
to be their climax That this "apostate" attached
himself to a lady who was the daughter of a rigid
Dissenter, a banker in Penzance ; 2d, that he
went so far as to attend her chapel, and
have his children baptized there ; ad, that
he took away the prefix of "Reverend" from his

name ;" and 4th, that he actually (proh pudor),
"went so far as to appear in a blue coat, and other
coloured unmentionables ?" Let us finally ask the
Bishop how he can suppose the public will sympathise
with his indignation, that at Redrnth the Dissenters
were not willing that the chaplain appointed should
perform the two services ; and so the consequence
was that one of the two services was performed by a
Dissenting minister ? Very good, say we. Just as
it should he. The members of the Established
Church had the advantage of one service in
conformity with their own opinions ; the mem-
bers of the Disienting denomination heard
another service, in conformity with their opinions.
If the same arrangement could only be carried out
universally, we should hear of no more complaints of
deficient spiritual instruction for the inhabitants of
poor-houses.

We are, however, glad to perceive that this defi-
ciency of instruction will be attended to in the pro-
gress of the pending Bill through the House of Com-
mons. What the Bishop stated of the voluntary
offers of clergymen to officiate gratuitously in
several cases being rejected, on account of a trum-
pery, ill-considered, and brutal enactment of ,

the present pocr-Lrm which requires the the