1869.

of these preposterous claims Mr. Sumner referred to the hostile tone of English clubs and drawingrooms at the time of the Civil War. Mr. Forster reminded him, in a manly speech at Bradford, that there was another side of the picture. "Is it come to this," he exclaimed, "that Republican Americans are to judge of England by her fashionable clubs and her drawing-rooms? If they wanted to know what England felt, they, the Republicans, the men of the people, ought to have gone to the workshops of the people, and the hearths of the people. There they would have found in that workshop in Lancashire which was no longer a workshop because of their war, by that hearthstone which was cold and dreary, where there was hardly a meal that could be cooked because of that war- there they would have found their friends; and it is not fair for Mr. Sumner, or for any American, to forget those friends, and merely to remember those fashionable men who after all did not direct the destinies of England." Mr. Forster's spirited and patriotic remonstrance, though it proceeded from one who had been a true friend of the North in time of need, would not have saved the Treaty, even if it had come in time. The principal reason for the rejection was the extreme unpopularity of Andrew Johnson's Administration. The result was to postpone the settlement of the claims for an indefinite period, and greatly to embitter public feeling in England.

1

1 Times, May 22, 1869.

CHAPTER IV

PARTIES IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

1866.

of Keble.

THE death of Keble in his seventy-fifth year left 1866. Dr. Pusey undisputed leader of the sacerdotal party March 29, in the Church of England. Although Keble, with The death all his austere and rigid dogmatism, had none of Pusey's pugnacity, or controversial zeal, the beauty of his character, the simplicity of his life, and, above all, the singular influence of his ecclesiastical poems, gave him a commanding position with those who thought as he did of the Church, and there were pious souls who resorted to his vicarage at Hursley as to the oracle of God. Mr. Gladstone, whom Keble always supported in politics, pronounced him to be not merely a poet, a scholar, and a saint, as he certainly was, but a philosopher, and "a person of most liberal mind." 1 This is going altogether beyond the mark. Keble was a man of the highest literary cultivation, and of exquisite natural taste. But he was no more a philosopher than Mr. Gladstone himself, and though he could see the political injustice of a purely Erastian institution, such as the Established Church of Ireland, he was not liberal enough to separate doctrinal error from moral obliquity. His loyal devotion to the Church of England was never shaken, and his indifference to all earthly rewards was at that time more conspicuous than it should have been in 1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. ii. pp. 181-182. VOL. III

177

N

1866.

Bishop Colenso's position.

his sacred profession. Except the chair of Poetry at Oxford, he held no public post, and he died, as he had lived, a country clergyman. The Oxford Movement has often been traced to his Assize Sermon on National Apostasy in 1833. But it is his Christian Year, published six years earlier, when, as he would have said, the note of the Church was anything rather than spiritual, that keeps his memory green. Neither John Donne, nor Henry Vaughan, nor yet George Herbert, though poets of a far higher order than Keble, and quite as devout, have ever attained the popularity of his metrical companion to the Book of Common Prayer. There are men for whom the Church of England is too large, and others for whom it is too small. It was exactly the right size for Mr. Keble, and he characteristically declared that it should be kept alive in his parish, if it died out everywhere else.

At this time the bugbear of High Churchmen was Bishop Colenso of Natal. We have seen 1 how his so-called "Metropolitan," Bishop Gray of Capetown, tried to turn him out of his See, and how this manœuvre was foiled by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The next step was taken by the Council of the Colonial Bishoprics' Fund, including Mr. Gladstone and Vice-Chancellor Page Wood, who refused to pay Colenso his modest salary of six hundred a year. "We," wrote Mr.

Gladstone to Miss Burdett-Coutts, who had, however, too much sense to take any part in the proceedings, "founding ourselves on the judgment [of the Judicial Committee] say there is no See of Natal in the sense of the founders of the fund, and therefore, of course, no Bishop of such a See." Mr. Gladstone and his co-trustees were soon undeceived. Colenso, who had a thoroughly English tenacity in maintaining his rights, filed a Bill in Chancery 1 Vol. ii. p. 401.

calling upon the Council to keep the bargain they 1866. had made with him on his appointment. The case was argued in June 1866 by Mr. James,1 for the Bishops, and by the Attorney-General' for the trustees. People find ecclesiastical cases dull, because they read what the clergy say about them, and not what is said by the lawyers. Nothing can be more tiresome in this case than the comments of Mr. Gladstone, who in such matters was rather a clergyman than a layman. Few things, on the other hand, could be racier than Mr. James's reply to the arguments of Sir Roundell Palmer. "I have," he said, "to maintain against the Bishops and Archbishops that the Church may be extended to the Colonies without coercive jurisdiction; against the first Law Officer of the Crown, the rights of the Crown as to patronage; and against the trustees of this fund, that they have not been guilty of a breach of trust." Lord Romilly, Master of the Rolls, who heard the case, had been a member of the Court that refused to acknowledge the metropolitan jurisdiction of Bishop Gray. He now delivered an elaborate judgment, in which the position Nov. 6. of Colonial Bishops and of Colonial Churches was fully and exhaustively considered. The decision Lord of the Judicial Committee had, he said, been in judgment. some respects misunderstood. Colenso, like Gray, was a Bishop of the Church of England, though, like Gray, he had no coercive powers. He had been appointed by the Crown, and the Royal license had been obtained for his consecration. He was duly qualified to perform all episcopal functions, not only in Natal, but in any part of the world. But he had no legal authority. If resistance were offered to his directions in Natal, he must resort to the civil tribunals of the Colony, who 1 Afterwards Lord Justice of Appeal. 2 Sir Roundell Palmer.

Romilly's

1866.

would enforce them if they were in harmony with ecclesiastical law, and not otherwise.1

Lord Romilly emphatically denied that there was any such thing as a South African Church. The bishops, clergy, and laity of the Church in Cape Colony and in Natal belonged to the Church of England as much and as completely as the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. Collectively they were an integral part of the National Church, although in these and other constitutional Colonies no ecclesiastical body had been established by law. "A bishop in England," said the Master of the Rolls, "is bishop over all the inhabitants within the diocese; a bishop in the Colonies is bishop only over all the members of the Church of England resident within the Colony." He proceeded to lay down in uncompromising terms the doctrine that the Sovereign, as head of the State, was head also of the Church, and that no man could be consecrated a bishop of the Church of England without the licence of the Crown. That licence having been obtained in Colenso's case, he answered the requirements necessary for enabling him to demand his salary from the Council for Colonial Bishoprics, which had acted hitherto in concert with the Government of the Queen. If, indeed, the defendants had alleged Colenso's heresy as a ground of their refusal to fulfil their agreement, Lord Romilly would have felt bound either to determine that issue himself or to provide for its

1 Before he purported to depose Colenso, Gray had gone through the form of depriving a clergyman named Long for refusing to obey the decrees of a local "Synod." Upon that occasion the Judicial Committee, which was supreme over all colonial courts, held that the Church of England in South Africa was a voluntary association, and that by joining it Mr. Long had contracted to fulfil all the obligations of a priest in the United Church of Great Britain and Ireland. Inasmuch, however, as the acknowldgment of Bishop Gray's synod was not one of them, the sentence of deprivation was set aside.