Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope

“ We are not so vain as to dream of bringing the clergy who use such observances, of which we have only given two examples, to a conviction of the peril of the game which they are playing. We do not flinch from the reproaches which may be cast upon us for warning them of it. When men are blind, daylight comes in vain, and the promoters of this ritual are blind to those elements of the actual character of the Englishman, which make him shrink from and fear the minute and the 'tinsel,' as he would call it, while willingly welcoming the stately and the reverential in the worship of Almighty God. ”

“ But the Irish Church, while specially vigilant when vigilance is most apparently needed, will not, I am sure, be negligent on the side where the danger from being less conspicuous may really be more pressing. Nothing short of a cataclysm could Romanise a Church such as that of Ireland, placed like a beleaguered garrison within a large and violent Roman Catholic population. The risk might rather be a party alliance with those who, like itself, resist Rome, but who do not, like our Church, wage their war of resistance with the weapons of Gospel truth and Christian antiquity. ”

“ The battle of Church life is incessant, and it covers a wide field, and so our pickets must be both numerous and vigilant. We are not for the moment discussing the accidents of the ceaseless conflict with the visible powers of evil; we are merely looking to those exertions which are destined to maintain the bene esse of the existing English Church, as a movement towards the most hopeful evangelization of our masses. The sustentation of a learned and well-trained, and therefore influential clergy, is not the least difficult or least needful of these endeavours. ”

“ The fact of such an institution, so voluntary and yet so regular in its self-responsibility, being so calmly conceived, and then launched with general acceptance into the orbit of an old ecclesiastical system, of which the members were already revolving in compliance with the law of their own attraction, proves, with a vividness of illustration, which it is impossible to embody in words, how young in physique, how fresh, how elastic, how sufficient, is the constitution of the hereditary and traditional Church of England. ”

“ Against all and any of these perversions of the Faith and polity of the Christian Church, I believe that the United Church of England of Ireland maintains a vigilant watch. Most naturally the Church of Ireland, thrown into local and immediate contact with a branch of the Roman Church, which, to the undisguised and truculent exhibition of the Papal system in its most repellent form, adds all the bitterness of an opposition blown up to white-heat by long antagonism of race, is peculiarly alive to dangers from the Papal side. ”

“ But we do so with our eyes open to the further facts that slavery is a colonial bequest, not a republican invention, introduced into regions where the white man is often as exotic by birth as the black, and more so by nature; that the South, while as yet blindly refusing to acknowledge its inherent indefensibility, has in many respects mitigated its practical evils, and that it has in the Confederate constitution prohibited the slave-trade as a portion of the constitution itself, instead of leaving the prohibition, as in the United States, to be a merely legislative provision. ”

“ Hook started the proceedings, was one of the most striking spectacles of popular Churchmanship which the Church in these latter days has beheld.
Bristol was Manchester over again, with a difference, and that just the difference which exists between the two places in their material aspect. Both are big, bustling towns, but Manchester is the bigger and more bustling. Manchester, beyond the old Collegiate Church, now a Cathedral, and the little knot of half-timbered houses that lie between it and the Irwell, is all modern, and in no part built for pleasure. ”

“ With all the discouragements and disappointments which we may have been suffering from of late years, we cannot honestly refuse to say that we have gained enormously. Convocation revived, a Colonial Church well-nigh created, religious institutions of all kinds set up, communions multiplied, occasions of worship infinitely increased, churches and the services in them beautified and rectified, in every district of the land, are some of the most salient items of the acknowledged gain. ”

“ The forces of indifferentism and worldliness are sometimes our unscrupulous foes, sometimes our damaging allies. The Church of England is bound, in face of the sacred treasures, of which it is the keeper and the dispenser, to hold its own, to assert its dignity, and to make its power felt in the busy mart and on the teeming thoroughfare. Towards this work of hallowed policy the Church Congress is a strong instrument ready to hand. ”

“ It is because we believe that ritualism is the natural law of the English Church's worship, and because we believe that Englishmen are coming round to that conviction far more extensively and far more completely than we could have thought possible some years since, that we regret the blindness of those who would drive back this happy tendency by overlaying the legitimate ritual of our Church with a mass of startling observances, which to the common mind speak nothing but Rome. ”

“ The old Church of England enjoys advantages which may not be at first sight evident, but which are most real and powerful, in the manner in which its formularies, its ancient Catholic prayers and canticles, its forcible versions, its baptismal, marriage, and burial services, have sunk into the hearts of the general people, and moulded their tone of thought, even at second hand with those who voluntarily hold off from public communion with the Church. In the long run, its appeal to popular instincts against popular passions would, we believe, be successful ”

“ I beg you to note the word expediency, for it does not require the precedents of Scotland and of the United States to prove the right of the Irish Church, as of any other independent Church, to frame its own formularies for itself. That right would exist with the same intrinsic vigour whether or not the Churches in those two lands had previously exercised it. But expediency, while drawing its teachings from precedent, ultimately rests upon the res nata; and so wherever the res nata finds itself illustrated by precedent, the argument of expediency is most strong and convincing. ”

“ In the meanwhile, as the first and foremost of personal duties, as the simplest and therefore the most efficacious of contributions towards unity, let us quit ourselves like men in that Church in which our own lot has been cast, working out its system in doctrine, in ritual, and in practical usefulness, according to the exemplar of that Prayer-book which, until we become very much better than we ever have been, is likely to continue a sufficient guide to lead us through our present difficulties to the quiet land of everlasting peace. ”

“ The unblessed attempt of New York to erect itself into the artificial condition of being the commercial capital of all the New, if not of the Old World also, was, as we have indicated, a great motive cause of disruption, and its defeat, we trust for ever, would in itself stamp the secession as a blessing to all civilized nations. Boston, the Northern city next in influence though not in population, differs widely from New York in every respect, and not the least in its far greater outward respectability. How far the real advantage equals the outside show, is a question we had rather not solve. ”

“ I shall proceed to treat of the influence of these Congresses on the Church movement according to an ascending scale, handling first the material, then the moral, and lastly the religious aspect of the Congress, conscious as I am that these various aspects must and ought not to be too rigidly kept separate during the discussion. In what I have to say I shall, of course, regard the question from the only point of view which I can occupy in honesty to my own convictions, that of a follower of the so-called High Church party. I am not ashamed at owning my side ”

“ I lament and I resent the wrongs and the misfortunes of the Irish Church, and I feel how natural it is that, while she is under the influence of such feelings, the community, acting by its Synods, might be inclined to courses of action from which it would shrink in more peaceful and prosperous times. ”