The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-09-20 00:00:00

a summoned fro;

that two should be sum:

He had spo]

with the

he convocation of the province

should remain a mere Official ceremony, it would be much
to• be regretted that any uncertainty as to the rule of elec-
tion should prove a cause of dissatisfaction and disunion,
when the whole matter would be, as it was, a form ; but
if, on the other hand, the convocation of the province

)e called upon by royal authority to exercise
active powers, then it was really important in the highest
degree that there should not be any doubt remaining as to
any part of the clergy being adequately represented. In
the meantime, he confessed that nothing was further from
the wish of the archbishop, and most certainly nothing
could be further from his own, than to curtail or abridge
any rights the clergy of this diocese might be shown to have
possessed in this matter, either by law or custom. Those
doubtful points he had referred to affected the composition
of the house of convocation, not its functions. They were
entirely independent of another question which had re-
cently been much agitated ; he meant the expediency of
reviving the exercise of the long dormant powers of con-
vocation. That appeared to him to be a question of prac-
tical prudence, on which men who were equally faithful,
and equally friendly to the church, might possibly come to
opposite opinions. He thought himself that in this, as in
many other cases, the importance of the question, great
as it was, had been exaggerated, both by those who desired
and by some of those who deprecated, the revival. If
convocation were regarded theoretically as the Church of
England by representation, then no doubt it was possessed
27th, 1 with attributes of high authority ; but then the royal writ

should ever

was necessary for its assembling, and the exercise of its
powers was limited and restrained by law. It was not
permitted to enact, promulgate, or execute any canons,

constitutions, or ordinances, unless it had the royal
assent and license so to do. That restriction gave it
but a narrow sphere of spontaneous action. Its power

scarcely extended beyond addressing to the crown a
respectful representation of any grievances, or a peti-
tion for a license to transact business. Within a range
so circumscribed, if on the one hand there was little
effectual good to be expected, yet on the other he thought
there was but little evil to be apprehended, provided only
that the proceedings be conducted in a spirit of modera-
tion, and mutual forbearance, and comprehensive charity.
Those restraints of which he had spoken as to the convo-
cation might at first sight appear to place the church in
an anomalous and disadvantageous pcsition ; but they

were in realit,

to a great extent, at least a necessary con-
sequence inevitably flowing from the connection that
subsists between the church and the state. The church
was established by law as a national institution. The
state secured to it extensive rights, and privileges, and
endowments. It was the guardian of its interests, the
trustee of its funds. That relation necessarily required
that the internal constitution of the church, as to its doc-
trines and discipline, should be so defined as to charac-
terise and identify it. They possessed such characteristics
in their articles, their liturgy, their canons. Those were
at once the rules by which the church regulated itself as
a religious society, and they were at the same time the
marks of identity by which the state recognised it as esta-
blished. Any alteration or modification, therefore, in its
internal laws and formularies, could only be made with
the assent and sanction of the state, either of the Sove-
reign or of the legislature, according to the nature and
magnitude of the change. To this extent the indepen-
dence of the church was necessarily abridged, and its free-
dom of action limited by its connection with the civil
power. Now this might happen to be a disadvantage, but
it was far more than compensated by the reciprocal benefits
the church and state derived from their connection with
each other, and it was, he ventured respectfully to express
his opinion, a disadvantage in appearance rather than in
reality. The affairs of the world, they knew, were subject
to perpetual change. Improvements in art and science, new
forms of productive industry, new developments of power,
new combinations of materials—these and such things
called continually for new legislation, in the incessant
progress of society; but affairs of religion were placed
above these mutations by a fixity and permanence of
thei

'eat truths of the Gosr

-esterday

and fo-day and for ever. It was one of the great princi-
ples of the Reformed Church that Holy Scripture contains
all things necessary for salvation, and that it is the one
immutable, infallible, and sufficient standard of Divine
truth ; but such, we knew, was the imperfection of the

human mind, .that men had deduced different doctrines
from the same written Word. To guard against those
diversities of opinion, the church had exhibited in its ar-
ticles a full and clear statement of Christian doctrine,—

not as presumptuously substituting a creed of its own in-
stead of the written Word of God, but as a foundation in
fixing the sense in which the Scripture was interpreted by
those within its pale. Now, the manner in which that
delicate task had been executed bore indications of great
wisdom, and, what always accompanied it, great modera-
tion. The framers of their articles had drawn a broad
line of demarcation between their own church and that of
Rome. It was aline so plainly and broadly marked that
no disingenuous sophistry could ever obliterate or disguise
it. But while the reformers firmly disapproved of those
parts of the Church of Rome in which human inventions
and traditions had been allowed to supersede and eclipse
the Word of God, they knew at the same time that
the work in which they were engaged was a work
not of innovation but of restoration ' • and they,
therefore, as firmly retained whatever else in the
doctrine and discipline of antecedent times was ac-
.

to the tenor of Scripture and the simplicity of
evangelical truth. His lordship then spoke of the liturgy
as a popular body of doctrine. There were in this country
great numbers of good men who dissented from their
church. Some of those differed from them on grounds so
broad as to preclude the hope of a unity ; but there were
others who were separated from them by lighter shades of
opinion, and did not so much object to any of the doctrines
of .their church, as to the particular form of language in
which they were in some few places expressed. It might
be said, and he-admitted it might be said with truth, that
the severance of those persons from their communion by
their own act might be regretted as an indication of un-
willingness on their part to allow to the formularies of the
church that " favourable construction " which the preface
to the liturgy spoke of; but, on the other hand, they must
remember that it might also be said, that if it were possible
to bring such persons back to the communion of the church
without any compromise of its doctrinal truths, and merely
by the substitution in some places of terms less liable to
misconception, the result would be a matter of great joy to
all who were animated by the spirit of true Christian
charity, —at least let charity be an excuse for the
thaeck laity
expression of that passing sentiment. His lordship, in
aelnolnesnaitd
terms,
had responded by unequivocal
the zeal of the clergy,
proofs of increasing attachment to the church, which
they had shown an equal readiness to defend, both against
encroachments from without and betrayal from within.
New churches had been erected, additional ministers had
been employed, new schools had been built for the edu-
cation of the poor, a superior class of instructors had been
introduced into those schools ; there was a vast improve-
ment, he would venture to say, in the character of the
rising generation, and even in the religious impressions
of those of riper years. Now, these were signs of vitality,
unceasingly
of en and
thurch had been gradually and
of progress. His lordship then observed,
that
enlarging its operations ; and he looked for a continuance
of its well-doing, not so much to a revival of convocation,
to a reconstruction of its forms, or the resumption of its
long thsueed and seldom exercised functions, as W the

cordin