Page:Letters on Church Matters Vol 1.djvu/91

 I am not decIaiming—I am not scene-painting. Such wiII, without fail, be the result of any attempt to obliterate by act of Parliament the Catholic character of the English Prayer Book. Will the ministers, will Lord Ashley and his party, be bold enough to run such risks? I cannot think so, if once they are taught that such are the risks which they will have to run to win success.

High Churchmen differ very widely from Lord Ashley and his followers. It is absolutely a mystery to them how honest men with ordinary faculties can read the Prayer Book as the latter do. But as these accept the Prayer Book, the "large party" has never attempted to assail them; and as they find no difficulty in living under the actual Prayer Book, they cannot say that they are hardly used. High Churchmen trust their cause to truth, to that truth which they know to be enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer, and they go on amid many difficulties to do the work of the Church of England with quiet confidence. But on the other side we hear the voice of hatred, and the broil of angry passion—"Out with them, out with them." Well, let the Ministry and their new allies turn us out; I have warned them what they will bring about by that act of desperate madness!

XV.

MR. BENNETT AND THE BISHOP OF LONDON.

JAN. 21, 1851.

YOUR paper of Saturday contains, so far as the principals are mutually concerned, the ultimatum of the Bennett affair. It is true that Mr. Bennett is still incumbent of St. Paul's, but, with the self-denying determination which marks his character to a fault (for it was a fault, though one of a generous nature, to abdicate his constitutional position by conferring upon the bishop and patron of the living a summary power of dismissal), he has refused even to think of any course but the literal fulfilment — irrespective of the conditions under which he tendered it, or of the legal dilemma which may be involved in it—of his promise to the Bishop. The Bishop, on the other hand, has refused to tell the parishioners the grounds upon which he holds Mr. Bennett unfaithful to the Church of England; for upon these grounds only Mr. Bennett put it