The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-02-15 00:00:00

I THE BISHOP OF OXFORD AND DR. HAMPDEN

The following correspondence has taken place between
Dr. Wilberforce and Dr. Hampden, in reference to the
postscript of a letter to the Rev. Dr. Faulkner, of Cam-
bridge, in which Dr. Hampden denied that he had made
any such concessions to the Bishop of Oxford as the
Bishop of Oxford had implied in a letter which appeared
some time since :

" Cuddesdon Palace, Jan. 23.
" My Lord Bishop (Elect),—My attention has been called to
a letter bearing your signature and addressed to Mr. Faulkner,
which has appeared in the newspapers. As no contradiction of
its authorshiphas to my knowledge been made public, I imagine
that I am not wrong (notwithstanding its unusual language) in
attributing it to you. I beg, therefore, to call your attention
to its postscript, and to request from you an answer to my con-
cicOing question.
_

" I withdrew the 'letters of request' against yon in conse-
quence of an assurance from your own pen, that you were not,
during the two years to which the Clergy Discipline Bill limits
your responsibility, answerable for any circulation of the
`Observations on Religious Dissent,' the only work which, in
my:Judgment, could have subjected you to ecclesiastical penal-
ties for uttering false doctrine. I must therefore beg you to
inform me whether the words to which I have called your at-
tention are intended to deny the truth of that assurance, which
was conveyed to me in the following words as your own :
" It is with no sanction of mine, and, indeed against my
wish, that any copies of the first edition of my Observations
on Religious Dissent,' are now sold and circulated ; in fact, I
have not put forth any copies even of the second edition, since
the time of its publication, and this is out of print so far as
my knowledge goes. Some one, therefore, must have been
giving, I conceive, a fresh publication of that also without my
leave. —I am, my Lord Bishop (elect), most faithfully yours,

S. OXON

'The Lord Bishop of Hereford (elect)."
" Hyde-park-gate, Kensington, Jan. 26.
"My Lord,—l did not authorise Mr. Faulkner to publish my
letter to him, nor the Provost of Oriel to communicate to your
Lordship the note to him, from which you have extracted the
passage contained in your letter of the 24th inst.
"Each was intended only for the person to whom it was ad-
dressed. I regret that either has gone further.
" The statements contained in my note to the Provost, and
extracted from it by your Lordship, are of course perfectly true;
I never denied or wished to deny them, but I never desired or
even contemplated their communication to your Lordship.
" I have the honour to be, my lord,
" Your lordship's faithful servant,
"R. D. HEREFORD.

"The Lord Bishop of Oxford.'7 ---
The Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, the " common
friend" of the Bishop of Oxford and Dr. Hampden, has
published two letters in which he shows that Dr. Hamp-
den never intended such a revision of his Bampton lec-
tures as would imply a recantation of any statement, but
simply " a readiness to remove any obscure language
which might have given rise to an impression that they
contained unsound doctrines which he had not intended
to put perth."