Surely the establishment of a system of "Séminaires" among ourselves, a course of close and effective moral discipline for the candidates for orders, and the inculcation of one uniform dogma, must precede any real change for the better among us. God grant that such a change may come!
Another evil has arisen from this absence of a fixed type in the clergy, and of a dogmatic standard in our Church. Both in France and England the State has seized upon that most precious prerogative of the Church--the nomination of her chief pastors: both in France and England the State has ceased to be either Catholic or Christian. Perilous then at the best it is, that a power not necessarily religious should take to itself the choice of those who are to fill the Apostolic Chairs. But this peril is so far lessened in France that the State must at least appoint one who has had a priest's education, has been moulded by the great Christian mother into the character first of her child and then of her minister, and, whatever his other qualifications be, will acknowledge her in her true unearthly character of the spouse of Christ, and defend her privileges before all things. This is the Church's guarantee in France,--not a sufficient one--but something. And, moreover, lest this character should by possibility be wanting in any nominee, power is reserved to the Apostolic See to refuse institution to such a one. But in England,--in this miserable diversity of belief in the bosom of the Church herself, this utter absence of dogmatic teaching,--the State may select at its pleasure the Erastian, the Latitudinarian, the Sabellian, the Low Churchman--the man, in short, that it wants for its own evil designs against the Church, and place him in a position where he commands the obedience of the Church's children. A fatal power, of which we are suffering the results.
On one more point there is a striking contrast. In the French Church there are special communities, as we have seen, (les Pères Lazaristes, les Missions Etrangères, &c.) for instructing those who are willing to give themselves to missionary work. In their institutions the bent of the mind, the special aptitude for so pre-eminently difficult a work, the vocation, in short, of these candidates is carefully attended to: those who have been themselves engaged in missionary work, and have the advantage of experience, direct their studies and discipline: none but those who are most single-minded and unreserved in their devotion are allowed to undertake the work of an apostle. On our part, what sort of labourers,--how grounded, disciplined, and tried,--have we been sending forth to be the Church's forlorn hope in her assaults on the strongholds of heathenism? Men who found difficulty in being employed in England from defective education or other causes: men who looked to get their 300_l._ a-year, and marry upon their missionaryship: or again, Lutherans from Basle, smuggled into the garb of English churchmen through the Church Missionary Society: nay, till very lately, a number of our missionaries have had no orders!!