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pursued by all the bishops in England, would issue in as many Churches as there are dioceses in the kingdom? And would you not quote with crushing power against the innovation, the language of the Royal Declaration prefixed to our Articles,-"We will that no man hereafter shall either print or preach to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof; and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense"?

The truth is, my lord, that you are wielding with dangerous dexterity a sword which has at least two edges; and it does not seem too much to say, that after the agitation which, in defiance of the Church's highest Court of Appeal, has been urged forward by your lordship, that sword will never again be sheathed; nor the armistice under which Churchmen in England have lived in peace ever be restored. But the agitation must go on, until some revision of our Book of Common Prayer shall be forced upon the Church as established in this realm, and one or other of the contending parties be driven from her pale.

The Judicial Committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council by and with the advice of the two Archbishops, have done their utmost to perpetuate among us that mutual forbearance without which it is manifest to every moderate man we cannot proceed in peace. Your lordship appears to be doing your utmost to banish such forbearance, as unfaithfulness to identify "your own sense and comment" with catholic truth, and at all risks of division and disruption to propagate your own private interpretation of our Church's language, to the excommunication of all who cannot or will not agree with you.

I believe, my lord, that instead of remaining patiently and quietly on the defensive against such an agitation carried on from such a vantage ground, it will soon become the duty of all sound Churchmen to raise a counter-agitation; and, if a change must take place in our comprehensive polity, to have it effected avowedly and above board, by authority, in the words of the Prayer-Book, and not indirectly, by the one-sided practical operation of an unscrupulous private judgment. The issue of such a struggle is not, I think, to be dreaded, however painful the process. Much that for a season was little more in the ears of our great community than the unintelligible jargon of a middle and dark age, has of late acquired a definite meaning. The defections from our clergy and aristocracy to the ranks of the everaggressive and intolerant Papacy, have made manifest the Romeward tendencies, to say no more, of the "Sacramental system," and awakened

the serious apprehensions of good men, both among clergy and laity. To my eye the prospect brightens, and it is more than possible we may have to thank your lordship as the instrument, however undesignedly, of helping forward a reformation in that Church, which, though vastly superior to anything else of the kind in Christendom, is not yet as absolutely faultless as to be incapable of improvement.-I have the honour to be, my lord, faithfully yours.

B.

CANON LAW.1

ADAM HODGSON, Esq., on taking the chair, called upon the Rev. Mr. RAWSON to open the proceedings with prayer, after which he addressed the meeting as follows:-It would, I am sure, ill accord with your wishes, as it would, I am sure, with my own inclination, to detain you by any long preliminary observations. I may, however, be permitted to remind you that this is not a public meetingthat it is not a meeting for discussion. It is a private meeting, to hear a lecture; and all persons who have entered this room have entered it on the implied, almost the express condition, that they will offer no interruption or opposition whatever to what may be stated here to-day. We are met together to hear from our reverend friend, Dr.. M'Neile, a lecture, at this important crisis, on one very important branch of that subject which is occupying and distracting the minds of this kingdom from one end to the other. And it is impossible to meet our esteemed and reverend friend on this occasion, and in this place, without being forcibly reminded of our deep obligation to him for his untiring services in the Protestant cause. I am not surprised at that response; for, with the fidelity of a Christian minister, and with the courage and constancy of a British patriot-with an utter disregard of every personal consideration-he has persevered, in season and out of season, through evil report and through good report, in the face of discouragement, misconception, misrepresentation, and opposition, in exposing to the country at large the insidious designs and I need not remind the ambitious policy of the Church of Rome.

A Lecture on the Canon Law of the Papacy. Ry the Rev. Hugh M'Neile, D.D. With the Speeches of the Chairman, Adam Hodgson, Esq., and the Rev. Chancellor Raikes.

this meeting of the confirmation his statements have received from recent events. I need not remind you how persons of every shade of opinion, and from every part of the kingdom, some of them the distinguished representatives of the old Whig families of the land, whose names have been associated for centuries with the principles of civil and religious liberty,-I need not remind you how these parties have re-echoed, from one end of the kingdom to the other, opinions which were denounced as bigoted and intolerant when uttered a few years ago, and in no stronger terms, by our friend Dr. M'Neile. And although the British people have, with an intuitive sagacity, detected the danger that lurks under the specious pretences under which the recent audacious aggression has been made, it is of the utmost importance that you should be well informed as to the precise nature and source of that danger, that you may be proof against the sophisms of Papal apologists on the one hand, and the fallacies of ultra-liberalists on the other. Both these parties will have shortly to be met in the House of Commons. The members of that House are to be told, and you must learn to tell them, that the British people understand this question, and that they will have no representatives who will not take the trouble to understand it also. The House of Commons are to be told, respectfully, but in a tone which no Minister can misunderstand, and which no foreign potentate will dare to mistake, that the British people are conscious that they have been forced into a contest from which there is no retreat a contest in which there is no intermediate stage between the security of entire victory and the ignominy and degradation of utter defeat. They know that the question is, whether Queen Victoria or the Pope of Rome--whether Lord John Russell or Dr. Wisemanwhether the British people or a conclave of cardinals, shall rule in this realm. They are determined that this question shall be settled— that they will not have it evaded for any ministerial conveniencethat they will not have it sacrificed in the collisions of party warfare, or over-ruled by precedents bad in themselves, and inapplicable to the present case. The House of Commons must be told that the people of this country venerate the sacred principles of civil and religious liberty with an enlightened devotion, but that they do not worship them with a blind and abject superstition-that in common with those great men, the lights of the world, the defenders of freedom, the enlightened advocates of toleration, to whose pages we still resort as to mines of political wisdom-in common with those eminent patriots who achieved, by their exertions in the cause of freedom,

all that gives Great Britain her place among the nations, we venerate the rights of conscience-we shrink from the impiety of intruding into the sanctity of the human breast, where man holds intercourse with his God. We are anxious to extend as far as possible to every class of our fellow-subjects, equality of civil rights and religious. privileges. But, in common with those great men, we maintain that, in the exigencies of human society, and the complication of human relations, cases will arise where the paramount interests of society demand that a limit should be placed to the application of these abstract principles. And we maintain that it is neither bigotry nor intolerance to say, as these great men have emphatically said, that allegiance to a foreign power, however defined, however modified, however qualified, establishes pre-eminently such a case. And when that foreign power is one that pretends to universal dominionthat endeavours to establish universally a system-shall I call it a system of persecution?—a system which, if successful, would crush the rights of conscience, prostrate your altars, invade your hearths, violate the sanctity of your homes, poison your domestic relations, stop the circulation of the Holy Scriptures, extinguish your civil and religious liberties, and corrupt the simplicity of your Protestant faith; I think we are justified in stating that the necessity which must sometimes occur-rarely, indeed, and always to be deploredof placing a check on the application of the abstract principles referred to, pre-eminently exists in the case of the Romish Church. It would accord alike with the justice and the generosity of this kingdom, that in no instance should the restriction exceed the necessities of the But, at the same time, the theory of this ecclesiastical system has taught us-all history has taught us-the events of the last few weeks have taught us-that, for the sake of society, that restriction must be equal to those necessities, and co-extensive with them. I speak not of past legislation—it is not necessary that I should do so now. Our immediate business is with the crisis we are at present involved in. And when you become acquainted, as you shortly will, with the nature of the Canon Law, and when you are told by our reverend friend that the recent aggression involves the introduction of that law into this kingdom, I think you will join your voice to that of the whole country, and say that it is imperative it should be met, not by letters, however resolute, nor by protests, however indignant, but by some overt act of the government, prompt, unequivocal, decided, and effectual.

case.

The Rev. Dr. M'NEILE,-Mr. Chairman, our subject, as you have heard, is the Canon Law of the Church of Rome; under the government of which we allege that Papal jurisdiction in spiritual things becomes an engine for coercion and oppression in temporal things. The reason for a special discussion of this subject at this time is obvious. All the moderate apologists of the recent aggression of the Pope in this country-that is, all the writers, from Dr. Wiseman down-ground their defence mainly, if not exclusively, on this, that the authority to be exercised by the Pope and the Romish bishops in England is entirely spiritual-that it is not calculated, and not intended, to interfere in any way with the temporal affairs of British subjects, or the temporal supremacy of the British sovereign. Now, if this were so—if, as they say, the division of England into dioceses by the Pope threatened no more interference with the liberties of England than the division of England into districts by the Wesleyans (one of their favourite similitudes)—if a Popish bishop, however his oath may be modified to suit a purpose, were under no obligations to his superiors essentially different from the obligations of a Wesleyan minister to his conference-if the government of a Papal bishop in his diocese consisted as exclusively in the teaching of religious doctrines as does the mission of the Wesleyan minister-what then? Why, then, Englishmen, who are cordially attached, and who, we trust, will always be cordially attached, to the full and free enjoyment of civil and religious liberty by every class and every individual— Englishmen, who have confidence, and not without cause, in the triumph of their scriptural faith in any contest where the only weapons are reason and argument-Englishmen would make no more objection to a cardinal archbishop than they do to an itinerant preacher. But this is not the case. I hope to prove to you that this is not the case. And, in the meantime, I may allude to what the Chairman has properly called the intuitive sagacity of Englishmen. England protests by instinct against the vain pretence-hundreds and thousands, of all grades and professions, habits and opinions, without waiting to argue the question, but feeling secretly and surely persuaded that sound argument is on their side, are quickened by this instinct as by the vibration of one national string; and a loud, long, unanimous determination is heard from hill and dale, from town and country, from steeple and tower, from peer and peasant, from Churchman and Dissenter, sounding in the ears of priest and bishop and cardinal, that, not in opposition to our love of civil and religious liberty, but because of that love, and because we are determined to keep down the strong

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