Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Altogether, the Church at home and in the Colonies appears for the present to be safe. Present safety would a few years since have seemed a very slight object of congratulation; but, in the whirl and crash of mundane things, in this age of revolutions, stability is progress. Yet it is a safeness which must be guaranteed by the labourer going to his work with his weapon in his girdle. ”

“ As little can we shut our eyes to the fact that, with the exception of this knot of sincere abolitionists, the North is in reality more deeply involved in all the guilt of which slavery may be the fount than South Carolina or Georgia. ”

“ Materialism is the palpable form of evil in New York. The Church there, as we have shown, is powerful comparatively, and yet seems impotent to grapple with the rampant vice about it. In respectable Boston the Church is weak and Puritanised, compulsory secular education has had full swing, and the ground is divided between intellectual infidelity, and all those last, most hopeless, phases of superstition, which are engendered not of blind faith, but of sated scepticism. ”

“ The union of feeling and corporate self-devotion which distinguishes the millions of the Southern States under the heavy privations of their isolated condition, may be laid to war excitement; their singular moderation and modesty cannot be. Ameliorations, like these, of language, and tone, and constitution so suddenly revealed, indicate an under-seam of goodness of which we must hitherto have been ignorant, while New York and Boston had constituted themselves the intermediaries of England and the South, mutually aggravating and misrepresenting the one and the other. ”

“ There are, as we shall proceed further on to detail, some very interesting incidents of a strictly ecclesiastical nature which have grown out of the American secession. But, irrespective of these, the whole history of the sudden disruption of that menacing colossus of yesterday, which first came into existence four years after the birth, in the still British Boston, of the living Nestor of Parliament, is so full of teaching of a moral character, bearing upon the Church's mission in the world, that we beg no pardon for a short digression on its aspects. ”

“ This work was the preservation, through a very anxious period, of that spirit of genuine Churchmanship which has become the habitual nature of so many persons of various stations and differing accomplishments, to which, under Providence, we owe our preservation from calamities which might otherwise have overwhelmed the English Church. We are now, we repeat, living in quieter times. Points that we used to fight about, with a half-unconscious pride in their partizan character, are now the rule of action of persons then most strongly antagonistic to us. ”

“ In that refined and intellectual city which, be it always recollected, holds up its head in such lofty contempt at the rowdyism of New York, a magazine is published by a gentleman universally esteemed the most respectable publisher in all the United States, called the Atlantic Monthly, and the November number commences with an article on George Sand in that fast style of moral sensualism, ill-copied from French models, which has invaded so much of our own periodical literature. ”

“ It is a fact, however much we may wish to blind our eyes to it, that although the Church may be stronger in New York than in any other city of the ex-Union, all the powers of evil are also preponderatingly more strong in that colluvies gentium. We could fill pages with proofs of the vice, the luxury, the infidelity, the materialism, and the rowdyism of that degraded city, but the painful recital would carry us away too far from our immediate object. ”

“ Choir gatherings have become a national institution—in one word, cathedral bodies have met the people half way, and the people accept their advances. We do not yet see more than the first glimmerings of what may come from this all-important event. Even in regard to external worship, the spectacle of Lichfield cathedral, so sumptuously and so correctly fitted, is a standing contradiction to the assertions of those who would degrade our churches to the type of the conventicle, on the pretext that dignified ritual is contrary to English feelings. ”

“ The political reasons connected with the balance of power in the two Houses of the old Federal Legislature, which induced the South not only to maintain slavery in the older States, but to force it on new States and territories whose climate repudiates the institution, have disappeared with the secession, and so the system is left to find its level, while the free trade, which the Confederacy proclaims, will every year open it more and more to English ways of thought and English influences. ”

“ The Church movement at one moment ran the risk of being an 'ism,' and being guided by 'ites.' It has escaped this danger, and it may now confidently, in spite of multiplying Peel districts, expect to pass on the English Church, to a coming generation, as—if not all, or by a great deal all, that the most moderate yet steadfast Churchman might wish it to be—at all events, a national institution, standing on a higher general level, doctrinal, practical, and national, than it did in our fathers' and grandfathers' days ”

“ If there is no great hope of any abnormal amelioration of the Church of England in our time, so there is no great fear of any hopeless deterioration. We are neither likely to hear the call to assemble in universal council, nor yet the warning voice to go hence and abandon our desecrated altars. ”

“ If we turn to the States which own the sway of Jefferson Davis, those who are living at a distance, and who only appreciate matters across the Atlantic by the lights which the American columns of their favourite newspaper may shed, must have noticed a remarkable intellectual, if not moral phenomenon. ”

“ If, as a recent writer, who uses five years' residence in New York as the foundation of an appeal to High Churchmen to side with the North, alleges, there are only 400 Episcopal clergymen in the South to 1,600 in the North, with only twice as large a population, then all we can say is, that the Southern clergy seem to have been beyond proportion successful in the way in which they have leavened their population. Of course it must not be forgotten that in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South, our Church has had to contend with the antecedent establishment of the Roman communion. ”

“ We believe it will be better for the orthodox party in the North to be so in a general convention of an exclusively Northern National Church. We shall give proofs that the prospects of Church progress in the 'councils,' general and diocesan, of a Southern National Church have been improved, and are likely still more to improve, by the separation. We believe, irrespective of the special accidents of either Republic, that the characteristics of the overgrown, ill-compacted old Federation were making themselves felt through the Church, which aped the civil organization in its constitution. ”

“ It is sufficient to say, in one word, that everything which is disgraceful to the great capitals of the Old World, is found reproduced in a deteriorated form on Manhattan Island. The ill influence of New York spreads over the entire Union, as that of Paris pervades all France. The preternatural mendacity which has come to the surface in all which the North has said and written on the present war, finds its head-quarters in that 'sensation' town of turmoil and cabal. ”

“ We are every day confronted by fresh instances of its neglect for laws, municipal, constitutional, or international; its determined purpose to win its end, in the words of one of its most popular generals, Butler of Boston, 'by the light of their smoking and rebellious cities.' The Church may be, as we have often been told, and are willing to believe, the most important denomination among the Northern 'upper ten thousand,' the men and women of refinement, wealth, and social culture. But in the Northern States the upper ten thousand are the disfranchised class of the community ”

“ We are accordingly convinced, that there is better hope for the truth in two homogeneous National Churches, keeping each other in check, and stimulating each other to exertion, than in a body which would, in each successive reunion of the triennial Convention, have had to swallow world-wide differences of social feeling, reflected, whether the Bishops and delegates wished it or not, in its ecclesiastical action, or else be ever standing on the brink of a dissolution in most admired disorder. ”

“ Bright and the bigoted backers of the Liberation Society, Englishmen in general acquiesce in the Church of England, along with Queen, Lords, and Commons, and the judges in their scarlet gowns, as an institution of which it is the right thing to be proud. They may not, many of them, be very expert in the doctrines of that Church, but as long as the Church is there with its doctrines under its own keeping, it occupies the vantage ground. ”

“ The air in one place may be so much thicker than in another, that a gaslight in the one may not show the traveller his path half so well as a candle in the other. As in theology there are theological virtues, so in politics and in social life there are political and social virtues, which act upon as they are reacted on by Christ's Church, with all the advantage which the comparative strength of the Church gives to the mutual influence. ”

“ Keeping things well at home has been acknowledged as an aim not unworthy even of unspotted holiness, high intellect, and practical indefatigability. There are those who will attack this open acceptance of a more confined sphere of activity, this abdication of a lively hope of ever beholding in the flesh any extraordinary manifestation of the long prayed-for salutare Israel in our generation, as a proof of blunted faith, debased motives of action, or even of incipient worldliness. ”

“ The influence of the Church Institution has, of course, its concomitant disadvantages, as it can only be worked at the expense of a perpetual compromise within the Society's own Committee-room, where many questions of vital interest, in various ways, to different members of the body, are never allowed to be broached. ”