The bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America were invited to the English conference very much as country cousins are invited to tea, and that was all.
By way of asserting her right to a recognition as an equal with the Church of England, she—the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America—has established, or rather individuals have established and the act has received the sanction of the General Convention, certain rival congregations in a few foreign cities where the English service was already established. If she be of the same Catholic mould as the Church of England, why does she thus in a foreign city attempt to maintain an opposition service? The variations in the Prayer-Book are no answer to the question. If the English Church be Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, and the Protestant Episcopal Church be Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, the two are therefore one; for they both claim that there is but one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church.
She is in this case unmistakably uncatholic, or else the English Church is. In either case she falls to the ground.
Our attention is directed again to the many laws enacted against her bishops as compared with the laws enacted against the other members of the church. If Mosheim were to be restored to the flesh, and were to write the history of the Episcopal Church, and used as an authority the Digest of Canons, as he has been accustomed in his Ecclesiastical History to use ecclesiastical documents generally, he would style the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church a set of criminals of the deepest dye, and the priests and deacons not much better. The laity would be regarded as all that could be desired in lofty integrity and spotless morality. For why? A glance at their vade-mecum of law—the Digest of Canons—shows an immense bulk of its space to be devoted “to the trial of a bishop.” The laity go scot-free.
We question the propriety, as well as the Catholicity, of covering the higher clergy with laws till they are helpless, while the laity revel in a freedom that amounts, when they choose, to mob-license; but it is done, and the Episcopal Church is degraded to a level lower than any of the denominations around her.
With other bodies who call themselves Christian there is a certain amount of consistency. Their rulers are from among their own members. With the church under consideration, her rulers, in many cases, are any unbaptized heathen who may choose to work themselves into a temporary favor with the pew-holders. It is not necessary that they should even have ever attended church. We note an instance where the chief man of a small parish was a druggist, and kept in the rear of his drug-store a low drinking-room; and this man was elected treasurer year after year by a handful of interested parties, and, when elected, he managed all the finances of the parish according to his own notions of propriety. It was his habit to go to the church near the close of the sermon, and go away immediately after the collection.
We note another instance where a warden visited the rector of his parish, and threatened, with a polite oath, to give him something hotter than a section of the day of judgment if he did not ask his (the warden’s) advice a little more on parish matters. The parish grew so warm that at the end of three weeks the rector was candidating for another.
We note another instance where a warden was so overjoyed at having settled a rector according to his own liking that, on the arrival of the new incumbent, he not only did not go to hear him preach, but stayed at home with certain friends, and enjoyed, to use his own expression, a “dooced big drunk.” Out of consideration for the feelings of his family we use the word “dooced” instead of his stronger expression.
The rector of this happily-ruled parish was imprudent enough to incur the displeasure of his warden after a few months of arduous labor. He received a note while sitting at the bedside of his sick wife, saying that after the following Sunday his services would be dispensed with; that if he attempted to stay, the church would be closed for repairs.
We are well acquainted with a parish where a congregation wished to displace both the senior and junior wardens. These two gentlemen had been shrewd enough to foresee the event. They succeeded, by calculating management, in having vested in themselves the right of selling pews. When Easter Monday came, they sold for a dollar a pew to loafers on the streets, and swarmed the election with men who never had entered the place before. The laws of the parish were such that there was no redress. As a matter of course, the rector was soon candidating.