DICKENS ON RELIGIOUS QUARRELS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LIII, Issue 5952, 24 March 1880, Page 5

DICKENS ON RELIGIOUS QUARRELS.

As there is at present considerable discussion about Charles Dickens and his religious views, we may republish a brief extract from a letter of his on the subject, showing, too, what his opinions were on the subjects of ministers quarrelling. We find the extract in a London paper apropos to the proceedings which took place at St Alban’s Church : : —“ As- to the Church, my friend, I am sick of it. The spectacle presented by the indecent squabbles of priests of most denominations, and the exemplary unfairness and rancour with which they conduct their differences, utterly repel me. And the idea of the Protestant establishment, in the face of its own history, seeking to trample out discussion and private judgment, is an enormity so cool that I wonder the Bight Beverends, Very Beverends, and all other Eeverendswho commit it, can look in one another’s faces without laughing, as the old soothsayers did. How our sublime and so different Christian religion is to be administered in the future I cannot pretend to say, but that tho Church’s hand is at its own throat I am fully convinced. Here more Popery, there more Methodism ; as many forms of consignment to eternal damnation as there are articles, and all in one foreverquarrelling body—the Master of the Hew Testament put out of sight, and the rage and fuiy almost always turning on the letter of obscure parts of the Old Testament, which itself has been the subject of accommodation, adaptation, varying interpretation without end—these things cannot last. The Church that is to have its part in the coming time must be a more Christian one, with less arbitrary pretensions, and a stronger hold upon the mantle of our Saviour as He walked and talked upon this earth.”