The Sun.
London, England, 1845-06-20 00:00:00

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LONDON, FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 1845.

The House of Lords met at Five o'clock.

The Earl of LIVERPOOL brought down her MAJESTY'S
answer to the address on the subject of the provision for
Sir H. POTTINGER, which was ordered to be entered on
the journals of the House.
The Schoolmasters (Scotland) Bill was read a third
time and passed.
Lord BROUGHAM brought in a new Bill to facilitate
the recovery of small debts, which was read a first time.

On the motion of Lord CAMPBELL, a Select Committee
was appointed to search the Commons Journals on the
subject of the Common Law Process Bills.
The Archbishop of DUBLIN moved the second reading
of the Bishops Patronage (Ireland) Bill.
The motion was opposed by the Marquis of CLANRI-
CARDE and supported by the Earl of WicELow, and, on
a division, was carried by a majority of 16, the
numbers being—for the second reading, 35 ; against
it, 19. The Bills on the table having been forwarded a
stage, their Lordships adjourned.

The House of Commons met at Four.
The Commons Enclosure and Drainage of Lands Bills
were read a second time.

Monday was fixed by Sir J. GRAHAM for the Com-
mittees on the Irish Colleges Bill.
'The adjourned debate on the subject of New Zealand
was then resumed by Mr. ELLIcE, who urged the Gu-
vernment to state distinctly what was the course they
intended to pursue with regard to the Colony. He was
decidedly opposed to any attempt to take it from the
Company.
The House was subsequently addressed by Mr. CARD.
WELL, Mr. MANGLES, Mr. COLQUHOUN, Mr. SHEIL,
Sir J. GRAHAM, Lord J. RUSSELL, and Sir R. PEEL,
when the House divided, and the resolutions were nega-
tived by a majority of 51.

The charge delivered by the Bishop of EXETER, at his
triennial visitation on Monday last, to the clergy of his
diocese, is one of the most characteristic it has ever been
our fortune to peruse. Whether because in his own
cathedral the Right Reverend Prelate finds himself par-
ticularly "at home," or that after exchanging the
turmoils in which his public life is passed on the
banks of the Thames, for the more calm and pastoral
shores of the Exe, his militant spirit—invigorated by
the change—becomes impatient of the quiescent atmo-
sphere by which it is surrounded, and re-assumes all its
energies for new conflicts ; we must do this meek
Churchman the bare justice of acknowledging that his
"charge " smacks of the fierce, vituperative, impas-
sioned zeal of a very much younger polemical champion.
The "charge" is distinguished by one feature of family
resemblance to all the elaborate invectives of which
this forbearing and forgiving prelate has been, at
various times, the author, namely, its extravagant
extent. It is in this property as remarkable
as if it were the inaugural message of a Right
Reverend President to a Congress ecclesiastical.
But it is not the greeting of an ancient man, well
stricken in years, and bending beneath the cares and
honours of his station, but rather the manifesto of a
leader still in the vigour of his purpose and the hey-day
of his vaulting ambition. If this be the language of a
dignified priest, it is that neither of the self-denying
LATIMER nor the lowly FENELON. It is rather the war-
cry of some Pontiff, like Jumus 11., shouting from the
trenches against the enemy, whom he has invested but
cannot vanquish. Of course, the general theme of this
remarkable " charge" is a defence of those Puseyite in-
novations on the ceremonial of the Estabiished Church,
which have been nowhere more notorious, offensive, or
contumaciously obstinate than in the diocese which rejoices
in the Christian pastoral superintendence of HENRY of
Exeter. His Lordship adverts to these scandals—not
in terms of regret, but of exultation ; not with any
view to palliate, but with the avowed intention to vindi-
cate them. And we must, ourselves, take heed how we
designate the Puseyite rubric purisms as " innovations,"
for the worthy Bishop is furious and somewhat insolent
in his denunciations of the ignorant presumption of those
laymen who first of all commit a stupendous error, as
he maintains, and then a sin of enormous presumption in
demurring to the decrees of Mother-Church.
Bishops, themselves, preach from texts, as do the
humblest deacons ; and our Right Reverend Prelate
adopted for his, the general purport of the discourse
with which the Rev. Mr. BARTHOLOMEW opened the
business of the day. That discourse was a stern denial
of the rights of private judgment, and a strenuous main-
tenance of the Apostolic succession of the Hierarchy.
The witty authors of the famous quiz on Bishop
BURNET, entitled " Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this
Parish," never devised, as a vehicle for their waggery, a
strain of more amusing simplicity than that is which
the egotistical bishop thus recurs to the (Puseyite)
squabble, about the obtrusive exhibitions of some of his
clergy last winter. They were, says he, " incidents
which had given to that diocese, and especially to that
city, an unhappy notoriety—extended not only through-
out England but to the remotest regions of Christendom."
He then falls to that special pleading which we have
already alluded to, as to the solecism of any layman's
,calling a return to the ancient usages of the Church,
as established and settled by the Rubric, " innovation ;"
and he contends that the real innovation is not of above
twenty years' standing, or so, during which the minis-
ters of the Church have been gradually departing from
those ancient usages. It never occurs to the Right Rev.
Prelate, wrapped up in the infallibility of his own
hierarchical position (derived, not from the ca-
pricious accident of a royal conge d'elire, but,
as he will have it, from the indefeasible
authority of the Apostolic succession), that if
the members of a Church, in the proportion of 99 to 1,
prefer and sanction particular forms of celebration to
which a succession of their own Ministers have accus-
tomed successive generations of their forefathers, and
themselves down to the present day, they cannot be
said to uphold an innovation in stedfastly insisting on
the maintenance of those forms. When the Bishop of
EXETER defends the Puseyite parsons by saying " they
revert to the practice of the Church in its best days," we
may make him a present of the argument. It only
follows that, with Bishop PHILLPOTT'S, the Church must
have fallen on evil days. We should wonder if it had
not, with such a servant. But when he talks of the
forms, that the 99 out of every 100 members of the
Established Church persist in contending for, being but
the practice of thirty years, we must say that PHILL-
POTTS the Bishop is about as intrepid in his assertions
as PHILLPOTTS the pamphleteer. Can we say more ?
The Bishop of EXETER is, as it were, savagely
facetious on the inconsistency he attributes to
such as quarrel with the use of the white
surplice in the pulpit, whilst they tolerate it readily
in the reading desk. Upon this head he exhibits all
the pride of pedantry and grim sarcasm, such as that
with which TORQUEMADA. might have rebuked KING
FERDINAND on the portentous folly of mercy to a Moor.
Then he comes to the offertory question, and on the
plea that it is declared by contemporary authority that
the collections shall be for the use of the poor " and other
pious purposes," he attempts to overthrow the judg-
ments, ancient and modern, of our law Ccurts as to its
ilteg ti, sup,-n 1.,t,, by ru:..s.,h of the Siti.-
tutable compulsory provision now made for the poor—as
toits being an absolute offence against the law except in