thrust from the ministry "vi et armis," as the tender regard for the law which prevails on every question in this country, cannot be fully comprehended by people, long subject, more or less, to arbitrary government.

WITHOUT A BISHOP NO CHURCH.

The next point to which I must advert, before coming to the main question, is the dogmatical assertion which we meet with in page 61-" Without a Bishop there is no Church. That certainly is an axiom well recognised by all who maintain a church at all." This is just an example of those bold, sweeping, and positive declarations so common with Mr. Bennett and his party, which, however it may impose on the unreflecting or the ill informed reader, will only create a smile in even the tyro-student of divinity. He will remember the XXIII Article of his Church, which confines within no such narrow limits him who has "the office of public preaching," but requires only that he should be "chosen and called to this work by men who have public authority given to them in the congregation to call and send ministers into the Lord's vineyard." Let us hear a portion of Bishop Burnet's exposition on this article. He says, "Finally, if a company of Christians find the public worship where they live to be so defiled that they cannot with a good conscience join in it, and if they do not know of any place to which they can conveniently go, where they may worship God purely, and in a regular way". . . . . . they may, as an extreme case, appoint their own ministers yet we are very sure that not only those who penned the Articles, but the body of this Church for above half an age after, did, notwithstanding those irregularities, acknowledge the foreign churches so constituted, to be true churches, as to all the essentials of a church, though they had been at first irregularly formed, and continued still to be in an imperfect state. And therefore the general words in which this part of the Article is framed, seem to have been designed on purpose not to exclude them."* * Bishop Burnet in loco.

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66

The student refers to the LV Canon, and there finds that preachers are directed, before their sermons, to pray for Christ's Holy Catholic Church, that is, for the whole congregation of Christian people dispersed throughout the whole world, and especially for the Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland,”—when it is a fact clearly established that the Ministers of the Church of Scotland, at that very time, (1603,) had none but Presbyterian orders, and consequently, that our Church did not consider Episcopal ordination as vitally necessary to constitute a church. His reading also in the works of the Fathers of our Reformation must have afforded him repeated proofs of the same truth; and the hardihood of such a wrong statement as the one we are considering, is the more glaring since the publication of the Zurich Letters by the Parker Society. We here find Archbishops Grindal and Sandys, and Bishops Parkhurst, Cox, Pilkington, Horn, Jewel, and other eminent divines, writing to the ministers of the foreign non-episcopal churches, as fully recognised and valued ministers of Christ's church. Thus Bishop Cox writing to Rodolph Gualter, subscribes himself "the attached friend of your piety and most holy function." Bishop Horn subscribes himself to the same, "Your very affectionate brother in Christ and fellow Minister." Bishop Sandys signs himself in a letter to Bullinger, "Your most loving brother," &c., &c.*

The student will also remember that the question has been often raised, whether Bishops and Presbyters were separate orders in the church, or only of the same order, with a higher office imposed upon the Bishops, as Dean Field says in his standard work on the Church, "Hereunto agree all the best learned amongst the Romanists themselves, freely confessing that wherein a Bishop excelleth a Presbyter, is not a distinct and higher order, or power of order, but a kind of dignity and office or employment only." He may also read in Hooker that "there may be sometimes very just and sufficient reason to allow ordination without a Bishop." (7 book, ch. 14.) And if he possesses Keble's edition of the works of this

* See Zurich Letters.

standard divine, he may find him making, in his preface, (p. 76,) an admission which comes with double force from him, that "nearly up to the time when he (Hooker) wrote, numbers had been admitted to the ministry of the Church of England with no better than Presbyterian ordination; and it appears by Travers's supplication to the Council that such was the construction not unfrequently put upon the statute of the 13th Elizabeth, permitting those who had received orders in any other form than that of the English Service Book, on giving certain securities, to exercise their calling in England." Nor has this opinion become obsolete since the time of these great luminaries of our Church; witness the correspondence between Archbishop Wake-no low Churchman -and the Lutheran and Calvinistic divines of the Continent, to be found in the appendixes to Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History. Thus, (No. 19,) Archbishop Wake writes to Mr. Le Clerc, the German Presbyterian, as follows. "April, 1719. "De rebus adiaphoris cum nemine contendendum puto. Ecclesias reformatas, etsi in aliquibus a nostra Anglicana dissentientes, libenter amplector. Optarem equidum regimen Episcopale bene temperatum, et ab omni injusta dominatione sejunctum, quale apud nos obtinet, et, siquid ego in his rebus sapiam, ab ipso Apostolorum ævo in Ecclesia receptum fuerit, et ab iis omnibus fuisset retentum; nec despero quin aliquando restitutum, si non ipse videam, at posteri videbunt. Interim absit ut ego tam ferrei pectoris sim, ut ob ejusmodi defectum (sic mihi absque omni invidia appellare liceat) aliquas earum a communione nostra abscindendas credam; aut cum quibusdam furiosis inter nos scriptoribus, eas nulla vera ac valida sacramenta habere, adeoque vix Christianos esse pronuntiem."

Nor are the opinions of our own venerated Primate at variance with these and many other authorities which might be cited,* to confute the uncharitable as well as erroneous dogmatism of Mr. Bennett. In the letter so disingenuously

* See the Doctrine of the Church of England on Non-Episcopal Ordinations, by the Rev. W. Goode, where the whole subject is fully and ably discussed. Hatchard. 1852.

obtained, as your Lordship may remember, from the Archbishop, in the summer of 1851, his Grace says "that our Church does not deny the validity of the orders of the foreign Protestant Churches solely on account of their wanting the imposition of episcopal hands;" while, quite in sympathy with the extract already given from the letter of Archbishop Wake, our Primate declares his opinion "that episcopal government, and therefore that episcopal ordination is most agreeable to Scripture, and most in accordance with primitive practice, and is in itself the more excellent way.'

The connection which has long been maintained between the Church of the Vaudois, in Piedmont, and our Prelates, and the grants which the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge has made to it from time to time, shows that this ancient community, though not under episcopal government, has been regarded as a branch of the Church of Christ. I may mention also, that there is, on the part of the Lutheran Church, a reciprocity of feeling in this respect, as evidenced by the permission granted in so many foreign places for the performance of the English service in their churches-a kindness, which to our shame, we cannot easily return.

CONFESSION.

ABIIT, EXCESSIT, EVASIT, ERUPIT."

We come now to Mr. Bennett's confession of his attendance at the Roman Catholic worship when abroad; and there is something so startling in the full avowal, and so unprecedented in the arguments by which he would justify his conduct, that the well-known words which Cicero used in the senate, when Cataline threw off the mask of a good citizen, and by his flight from Rome openly avowed his conspiracy, appear not inapplicable as a motto for the present chapter. Mr. Bennett's confession is as follows: "I am ready, then, at once to admit, first, that I never did attend the English place of worship at Kissingen; and secondly, that I did attend the services of the Roman Catholic *Letter to Mr. Palmer.

church, and very frequently, the mass. I am also ready to admit that it was my habit so to do all through Germany and Italy, with the exception of Frankfort and at Nuremberg, where I occasionally attended a Lutheran form of worship, for the purpose of learning what it was. And so admitting the facts, I am ready to join issue on the reasons which justify those facts" (p. 34, 35). Again, p. 37, he says, "I argued from this, that while I claimed the right for myself in England to conform to the traditions and ceremonies of England, I was bound, when not in England, to conform to the traditions and ceremonies of the country wherein I might be, on the very principle which this Article (34th) sets forth, namely, that they are "not in all places one or utterly like:" and I thought that if traditions and ceremonies “may be changed according to the diversity of countries," so I myself, as a traveller changing the country in which I dwelt, ought to change in conformity with that country, my traditions and ceremonies."

As I have before remarked, it would have been far better for Mr. Bennett's friends, and I may add, more creditable to himself, if he had earlier made this avowal. A neighbouring clergyman twice addressed him on the subject, as may be seen by reading the debate in the House of Commons on the 8th of June, when these letters were read, without obtaining any reply. Sir John Harrington, his travelling companion, and late churchwarden at St. Barnabas, was asked to say whether the report was true or false, and he declined. The public press was clamorous for satisfaction on the subject, but none was vouchsafed. Still his friends here professed to disbelieve the story; and after some little time were satisfied that it was incorrect, as his Curate, who had quitted St. Barnabas when Mr. Bennett was ejected, and re-joined him on his appointment to Frome, contradicted in the old-established bookseller's shop here, the account of his Vicar's conduct at Kissingen, as stated in the letter dated the 12th of January, which appeared in the Achill Herald. The denial made by this gentleman was familiar to most of us at the time, and whilst I have been writing these pages, I have received an