MISCELLANEOUS.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue VIII, 28 July 1849, Page 88

MISCELLANEOUS.

The Church. — It is not our intention to make the case of the Rev. Mr. Ingle, [who recently created a serious riot in St. Sid well's church, Exeter by persisting in wearing a surplice during the evening service] the subject of any remarks upon the thrice-killed surplice question. The public has heard enough of the doings of similar hot-headed boys, fresh from tbe reading of Durandus or Bingham, who do not hesitate to stir up a mass of violent passions amongst their friends and defenders in the very parishes solemnly committed to their charge, for the pleasure of wearing a garment of a peculiar colour. The feeling excited in our minds by tbe perusal of this and other cases bearing upon church discipline, is one of sorrow that such an institution as the Church of England, endowed with such potentialities for good, and connected so intimately and so gloriously with our national traditions', should betray such an accumulation of symptoms indicative of its gradual approximation to a state in which it will be almost powerless for good or evil, and this chiefly owing to its want of sympathy with the great mass of men and of events around it. The conclusion to be drawn from the great majority of incidents, in which the church has appeared as an actor during many years past, is, that our ecclesiastical system is capable of all kinds of variation within, but of none without. The spirit may be perpetually changing ; the form is as immovable as petrifaction. The chief ambition of its conductors seems to be to allow of no alteration in its organization, however painfully that organization may press upon its adherents, although the internal economy may be thoroughly changed. Within the memory of man the Church of England has been (by the confession of its most distinguished ornaments) a Socinian church, an Arminian church, a Calvinistic church, and events which "have lately happened, prove that it is not the fault of a large party within it that it is not in all things except actual profession of allegiance to the Pope, a Romanist church. But during all these changes, while the very essence of the church was altered, not the slightest alteration in the external form was allowed. It is this fearful rigidness in matters of form, careless whether the spirit evaporates or not, that is the bane of the Church of England. It ia per se perfectly immaterial whether Mr. Ingle preaches in bis surplice or sleeps in it ; but it ' i« not immaterial that no power should exist to interpose any adequate interference when the peace of tbe church has been disturbed. There was confessedly a grievous breach of decorum ; the whole purpose for which tbe lecture was instituted is rendered nought; the religious feelings of the parish in particular, and the church in general, were violated. But there is no remedy in the hands of the highest authority, because no formal ordinance has been broken. The whole purpose for which Mr. Ingle was ordained to his parish has been unfulfilled, and the fault is owing to his perseverance in a particular course, bnt the bishop is powerless to afford any help, because the course persued is not condemned by any positive enactment. Surely discipline and remedial authority ought to exist either above or below — in the bishop or the congregation. The same want of restorative power in the church is visible, where, perhaps, the defect is most manifest, viz., in republican America. At this moment the whole of the episcopalians of tbe diocese of New York are deprived of the ministrations of a bishop, because their own bishop has been suspended for immoral practices, and the authorities who have suspended him have no means of supplying the deficiency occasioned by their own act. The laity and inferior members of the clergy are crying out for episcopal superintendence, and the heads of the church reply, " we cannot help you." " Tbe whole spirit of the episcopal institution has evaporated amongst you, we confess, but you must be the sufferers; we have acted according to the letter of the law, and there is no remedy for our acts." Tbe

same improbability as to external regulations is visible in every important feature of tbe working of the church at home. At this moment the loudest cry amongst the members of the church is for " church extension," the loudest lamentation is that over the {want of funds. And yet a person who counts the steeples of the city churches from the top of St. Paul'e might divide the number by ten, and thereby obtain an account of the churches where there were actual congregational |The great majority of the clergymen in the City are paid for doing nothing, vast sums are expended for which no services aro returned, and yet the cry in that tbe church wants funds. The church, however, has no power to apply a remedy here. What is done cannot be undone. We may reform a rotten borough which has lost its burghers by lapse of time ; but there is no reforming a rotten parish which is deprived of parishioners. Again, there are the large sums paid to tbe lecturers who preach to no congregations. We could point to one church, not many miles from Guildhall, in which there ate as many as five lecturers appointed who preach to congregations varying in nnmber from five to thirteen 1 The church is powerless to avail herself of the funds appointed for these lectures, although it is but a few years back that there were 60,000 persons in Bethnalgreen who had no clergyman or church accommodation appointed for them. These are but for a few examples of the crying evil of the church, the want of any expansive power from within to adapt itself \o the varying condition of tbe country ; the professed inability to retrace a false step or remodel ancient customs. If the same impotence had been manifested in the other professions, the military at the Horse Guards would be doing duty with lance, and buckler, and crossbow, and the surgeon 8 would be healing the wounds of the said military with the cautery. These professions have, however, acted up to the spirit of the times, and have preserved their station; the church must do the same, or she will fall in spite of her wealth, her association with the national traditions, and her position, which is still strong, in spite of all short-comings from within and attacks from without. — Daily News. Often, very often, there is deep misery, untold and unsuspected, in the great house where only elegance and luxury are seen by the world at large ; very often the beggar at the door would not exchange conditions with the Lord of the lofty hall, if he could know his real condition. "Thb Sea-Serpent Controversy. — Captain M'Quhae is very sensitive about the sea-serpent ; a very natural state of mind in a man who has dined with Lords of the Admiralty on the strength of having discovered the undiscoverable, and, by establishing one more " great fact," by so much contracted the domain of Pyrrho. Captain M'Quhae was in a fair way of going down to posterity, like another Perseus, gracefully seated on the back of his monster, or of being immortalized withPdntoppidan, as the Leverjier 6r the Halley of the much-misdoubted comet of the seas. But he was not destined to enjoy unmolested so glorious a pre-eminence. The waving hair on the neck of the monster, which, more like a sea spaniel than a sea-serpent, followed so closely in the wake of the Daedalus, was too much for the antedeluvian faith of Professor Owen, who evidently would keep the discovery of monsters all to himself—a wish for which we will not blame him if his future services to science be at all in proportion to his past ones. Professor Owen's letter might have been a model in Archbishop Whateley's book on Logic, because, by a similar process of reasoning, scarcely any extraordinary fact but might be doubted and ridiculed away. Yet his argument was ingenious in tbe extreme ; not Oldbuck himself could have been more earnest or pertinacious about his "Phoca." But Captain M'Quhae is not to be put down by a professor. He mounts his serpent once more, and flies to rescue the Andromeda— his fair fame and pure honour. He challeges the Professor to single combat, and bids him bring with him all the monsters he can conjure up either before or after Noah. He rests upon his facts — stands there immovable as on a rock. He gives the Professor plainly enough td understand that he knows snakes from seals as well as he, and that although the sea serpenj: might seem to the Professor " very like a whale," it was not to Captain M'Quhae, and the officers of the Daedalus, very like a seal. He repeats the statements that the animal was unmistakeably a serpent, and " that it was pronounced to be so by all who saw it, and who are too well accustomed to judge of the lengths and breadths of objects in the sea to mistake a real substance and an actual living body coolly and dispassionately contemplated, at so short a distance, too, for the eddy caused by the motion of a large seal," as had been ingeniously assumed by Professor Owen. Captain M'Quhae gives the Professor rather a hard rub at parting. He had been anxious to furnish "eminent naturalists, like the Professor" with accurate facts, and he is naturally very much hurt at being supposed to have exercised his creative and imaginative faculties. Repeating his facts emphatically, he flings them at the Professor "as data whereupon the learned and scientific may exercise the pleasures of imagination." Whatever may be the value of Professor Owen's ingenious doubts, the public have to thank him for having drawn from Captain M'Quhae thi« emphatic personal confirmation of his official report to the Admiralty, upon a subject which, authenticated as it had been, is too important to be treated with flippancy, even by an eminent naturalist — Atlas.