A SPEECH THAT STARTLES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 3, 17 May 1873, Page 12

A SPEECH THAT STARTLES.

A correspondent in London writes to an American paper as follows :—: — . "The new Bishop of Salford has startled us not a little. The discourse pronounced by his lordship, lately, on the occasion of the foundation of a new society, to be called the Academy of Catholic Religion, has already thrown tremendous consternation into the Protestant camp. The Protestant bishops are taken aback, the deans, the vicars, and curates -are to expect a summons to conference to con* suit upon the best means of averting the danger with which Bishop Vaughan has so openly threatened their establishment." The London Daily News says of the Bishop's speech : " The Koman Catholic Bishop of Salfotd took advantage of the inauguration of a Central Catholic Association for his diocese to deliver a sort of manifesto on the position and prospects of his ChurcH in this couatrj . We have no fault to find with the speech. It was moderate and temperate enough in tone, however unreasonable and startling some of it i assumptions seem to be. It had, too, the peculiarity rare indeed in polemical controversy, that it showed an occasional willingness to admit and allow for an opponent's point of view. If we remember rightly, Professor Huxley once acknowledged, with some surprise and much satisfaction, that he found the divines of Maynooth quite willing to argue scientific questions with him from a strictly scientific point of view, instead of meeting the heresy about protoplasm by a simple reference to the pangs of punishment beyond the grave. We find in the speech of the Catholic Bishop of Salford a good deal of the same reasonable and manly . spirit of controversy. The Bishop does not accost his Protestant brethren as Launcelot Gobbo does Jessica, the Jew's daughter, and tell them ' to be of good cheer, for truly I think you are damned.' He tells them, however, that they are doomed in another sense, or at least their Church is. The purport of his discourse is to show that Anglicanism as & definite religion and school of intellectual thought is already devoted to extinction, already past praying for, and that in a hundred years it will be read of in the luV tory of the past only as we now read of Pelagianisra and Donatism. The fact that lends peculiar interest .to this argument now is, that it is based on the very principles which Mr Gladstone seemed to adopt when he warned his young listeners against ,the intellectual temptations of Strauss."