Now if the Subscription is still to be made to the same form of words, it is very difficult to see how the authority of the Church can impart to them a meaning, to which without that authority truth and honesty would forbid you to subscribe. If you do not take care, the Editors of the Oxford Tracts will mark you for their own, in spite of yourself.
But in what position do you now stand? You have done what you informed the Bishop of London, you could “not be comfortable without doing.” You have made known to the world, and that by the means you proposed to yourself, namely, a petition to parliament, what your opinions are, and the world interferes not with them, nor does the Church condemn them; you have only therefore to arrange the matter with your own conscience—if that condemns you, your course is a clear one. But why should it condemn you more for the next fourteen years, than it would seem to have done for the last fourteen? During that time you have held your preferment with your opinions, and why should you not continue to hold your opinions with your preferment?
You tell us that your object was eleven years ago to “ascertain with certainty whether you held any opinion which the Church condemned.” [13] You were informed that the authoritative sense of the Church on the points you wished for information could not in the abeyance of Convocation be obtained; but you were at the same time told, and that, by many whose opinions probably would have had great weight in Convocation had it been immediately convened for your satisfaction, that they considered your opinions allowable, that the Church did not condemn them; and I think it would have been a reasonable inference with which to have quieted your conscience, that had the Convocation been assembled, the authoritative sense of the Church would not have been against you.
And certain passages in your ministerial career had led us to hope and to infer that you had come to that conclusion, that having unburthened your mind, you were at rest. For in 1836, you presented a second petition to the House of Lords, but from that time, as far at least as we could judge from your proceedings, you seemed to have given up your pursuit, at all events, it appears that you rested upon your oars till 1840. And in the interim, in the year 1837, after having abstained for some years, and in consequence as it was supposed of your scruples, we saw you again voluntarily coming forward, and in your character of a Presbyter, officiating at the ceremony of the Imposition of Hands, co-operating with the Bishop during the recital of the very words at which your conscience had taken such alarm, and with respect to which in your former petition, “you had humbly and earnestly prayed that such steps might be taken as should seem good to their Lordships, in order to effect those alterations in the Liturgy which would relieve the conscience of their petitioner.” [14a] And we had also subsequently read the resolution you had come to, and deliberately published in 1838. In a note to a sermon which you published in that year, you say, “In the absence of all authoritative censure, I conclude as many others do, that a silent change has taken place, ‘from the diversity of times and men’s manners.’ In that conclusion I abide, repeating what I have often said, that whenever I am pronounced wrong on authority, I am ready to meet the consequences.” [14b]
I can myself say, and I am sure that all who have had any opportunity of knowing you, will say it with the same sincerity, in that conclusion we most heartily wish that you would abide—that you would continue to discharge your pastoral duties, your deliberate and solemnly accepted engagements to the “Chief Shepherd” in the same exemplary manner that has marked your hitherto career, until you are pronounced wrong on authority—or called from your stewardship to render up your account with joy. In what estimation you may hold the opinions of your brother petitioners, the Messrs. Hull, I know not, but they say, “Our clergy cannot leave the Church—their ordination vows are upon them.” And besides, my dear sir, to rush upon martyrdom in the absence of all persecution, or, as far as the public can see, any apparent necessity, will at best obtain for you but an Empedoclean sort of fame. And as nothing has occurred since you published your resolution in 1838, to affect your situation differently from what it had been for nine or ten years before, save the failure of another petition; should you resign in consequence of that circumstance, it would look almost as if you resigned merely to spite the Archbishop.
But under the little difficulty that exists of ascertaining with any certainty what your intentions have been, or even now are, we earnestly trust they may not result in the alternative of a resignation, to which in the course of your correspondence you have made such frequent allusions. “An alternative,” which as Bishop Heber says, “it is easy to suggest in the case of a brother, but which every man in his own case receives with difficulty.” [15a]
A few days before the presentation of the last petition you wrote to his Grace thus, “If I fail on this occasion . . . I consider myself pledged to resign my preferment.” [15b] The result of that petition was unfavourable. But ten months afterwards, that is, in your last publication, you call upon his Grace to pronounce that judgment which he had told you he “was unwilling to pronounce on scruples which he hoped time might remove,” [15c]—“and should that judgment require such a step, you will with God’s permission resign next December, unless a clear expression of public opinion should intervene appealing against the judgment pronounced.” [15d]
Let us hope then that you will abide in this your latest resolution, for I think from the evidence with which you have furnished us, we may venture to conclude that no such judgment will be pronounced as shall call for any expression of public opinion.
I shall now proceed to hazard a few observations on the reasons assigned by the Bishop of Norwich in favour of an Expansion of Subscription, seeing that they are considered by many so strongly to confirm the correctness of your own views, and as you have told us that you cannot consistently with truth and honesty make the required Subscription, we cannot but apprehend that in the proportion that those views are believed to be substantial and correct, the character of the clergy must be prejudiced, at all events in the eyes of those, who unwilling or unable to investigate the matter for themselves, take up the opinions of others, and arriving through them at a corollary of their own, hesitate not to go as far as to declare that “all the clergy are perjured.”
As I can devise no better, I shall pursue the plan you have adopted with respect to the speech of the Bishop of London, that is, giving such extracts from his Lordship’s speech as bear upon the subject of Subscription, with a running comment of my own. I will not however, introduce my remarks with the preface you have affixed to your “plain story,”—giving us to understand that it is intended to be “a refutation of almost every statement in the Bishop of London’s speech.” [16] Lest having led my readers to exclaim