Page:Church Politics and Church Prospects.djvu/20

 Disraeli. The other speakers, the Bishop included, confined themselves to a plain and earnest advocacy of the claims of the ill requited incumbents; Mr. Disraeli, however, had other objects in view. He has, for some years past, been accustomed to make an occasional rural appearance as a friend of the Church. His arena has, however, been the inn's public room or a national schoolroom, and his audience a ruri-decanal meeting. Now fortune had thrown in his way the Sheldonian Theatre, with the elite of a University and two or three counties as audience. Moreover, the University was the one whose more famous member was the orator who was at once most conspicuously pitted against Mr, Disraeli in public life, and who stands the most conspicuous negation of the absolute identity of Churchmanship and of political fealty to Mr. Disraeli's party. To beat Mr. Grladstone at Oxford would be the bonne bouche of a general election, to beat him on a Church cry would be sauce piquante to that bonne bouche. So Mr. Disraeli is not much to be blamed for having taken a very comprehensive view of the opportunity so luckily dropped into his mouth, while he left the poor clergy to the care of the remaining speakers, and made the Oxford Theatre ring with a manifesto of 'Church policy.' The policy itself is, in most particulars, that which we have ourselves consistently advocated, and its adoption by the English politician who, like Louis Napoleon, with all his astuteness, dreams when he thinks, is a proof how strongly the general atmosphere must be charged with the electricity of Church progress. The speech itself was very ingenious, almost eloquent in parts, and daringly shotted with personal epigram. But perhaps it reads, in passages, better than it sounded. There was a point in the speech where Mr. Disraeli found himself compelled at a sudden turn to inventory the party in the Church whose system is sacramental—the Anglo-Catholics, in a word. A brief but awkward moment of embarrassment resulted in 'there are some who are sustained by symbolical ceremonies, and feel that their soul is only adequately satisfied by ecclesiastical arrangements of that character.' This pronouncement was, on the testimony of the Guardian, received with cheers and laughter. The opposite party 'can only be sustained by the ecstasy of spiritual enthusiasm.' But, mildly remarks the statesman, 'as long as they who counsel or pursue these modes'—i.e. arrangements and ecstasy—'meet on the common platform of true, sound Church principle,' 'I do not think that such a course of conduct is to be regretted.' Which course of conduct, the arrangements or the ecstasy? We are not surprised that the advocates of decisive ceremonial are a little disconcerted at the unconscious evidence which this passage affords of Mr. Disraeli's complete, want of