Phases of Faith | Page 7

with their own
doctrines and preaching. This was too obviously hollow. The last
gentleman whom I consulted, was the rector of a parish, who from
week to week baptized children with the prescribed formula: but to my
amazement, he told me that he did not like the Service, and did not
approve of Infant Baptism; to both of which things he submitted, solely
because, as an inferior minister of the Church, it was his duty to obey
established authority! The case was desperate. But I may here add, that
this clergyman, within a few years from that time, redeemed his
freedom and his conscience by the painful ordeal of abandoning his
position and his flock, against the remonstrances of his wife, to the
annoyance of his friends, and with a young family about him.
Let no reader accept the preceding paragraph as my testimony that the
Evangelical clergy are less simpleminded and less honourable in their
subscriptions than the High Church. I do not say, and I do not believe
this. All who subscribe, labour under a common difficulty, in having to
give an absolute assent to formulas that were made by a compromise
and are not homogeneous in character. To the High Churchman, the
Articles are a difficulty; to the Low Churchman, various parts of the
Liturgy. All have to do violence to some portion of the system; and
considering at how early an age they are entrapped into subscription,
they all deserve our sincere sympathy and very ample allowance, as
long as they are pleading for the rights of conscience: only when they
become overbearing, dictatorial, proud of their chains, and desirous of
ejecting others, does it seem right to press them with the topic of
inconsistency. There in, besides, in the ministry of the Established
Church a sprinkling of original minds, who cannot be included in either
of the two great divisions; and from these _à priori_ one might have
hoped much good to the Church. But such persons no sooner speak out,
than the two hostile parties hush their strife, in order the more
effectually to overwhelm with just and unjust imputations those who
dare to utter truth that has not yet been consecrated by Act of

Parliament or by Church Councils. Among those who have subscribed,
to attack others is easy, to defend oneself most arduous. Recrimination
is the only powerful weapon; and noble minds are ashamed to use this.
No hope, therefore, shows itself of Reform from within.--For myself, I
feel that nothing saved me from the infinite distresses which I should
have encountered, had I become a minister of the Episcopal Church,
but the very unusual prematureness of my religious development.
Besides the great subject of Baptismal Regeneration, the entire
Episcopal theory and practice offended me. How little favourably I was
impressed, when a boy, by the lawn sleeves, wig, artificial voice and
manner of the Bishop of London, I have already said: but in six years
more, reading and observation had intensely confirmed my first
auguries. It was clear beyond denial, that for a century after the death of
Edward VI. the bishops were the tools of court-bigotry, and often owed
their highest promotions to base subservience. After the Revolution, the
Episcopal order (on a rough and general view) might be described as a
body of supine persons, known to the public only as a dead weight
against all change that was distasteful to the Government. In the last
century and a half, the nation was often afflicted with sensual royalty,
bloody wars, venal statesmen, corrupt constituencies, bribery and
violence at elections, flagitious drunkenness pervading all ranks, and
insinuating itself into Colleges and Rectories. The prisons of the
country had been in a most disgraceful state; the fairs and waits were
scenes of rude debauchery, and the theatres were--still, in this
nineteenth century--whispered to be haunts of the most debasing
immorality. I could not learn that any bishop had ever taken the lead in
denouncing these iniquities; nor that when any man or class of men
rose to denounce them, the Episcopal Order failed to throw itself into
the breach to defend corruption by at least passive resistance. Neither
Howard, Wesley and Whitfield, nor yet Clarkson, Wilberforce, or
Romilly, could boast of the episcopal bench as an ally against inhuman
or immoral practices. Our oppressions in India, and our sanction to the
most cruel superstitions of the natives, led to no outcry from the
Bishops. Under their patronage the two old Societies of the Church had
gone to sleep until aroused by the Church Missionary and Bible
Societies, which were opposed by the Bishops. Their policy seemed to
be, to do nothing, until somebody else was likely to do it; upon which

they at last joined the movement in order to damp its energy,