There is much here from which I cannot do other than express most strongly my dissent; for—
1. Why should the rabid violence of all that is uncatholic and unbelieving in the country be taken to be the voice of the country to which heed is to be given? The Canon before quoted, when it speaks of offending the minds of men, is careful to say “the minds of sober men;” but here it seems that all which is most violent, unreasoning, and intemperate, is to be accepted as the mind of the country from which there is no appeal. Nay, more, as is evident, this temper is hounded on to be even more violent and rabid, by such unseemly deference to its clamour, and by the pusillanimous assertion that law and order must be overridden because the impatience of such minds will not be content even to wait till the law courts have spoken.
2. Why should we not wait, if it be needful to wait, in order to determine with all due care and deliberation what the law is upon the main points brought into controversy—what it allows and what it disallows? This tremendous impatience, this overwhelming desire for exterminating obnoxious Ritual and Ritualists, this awe-struck terror that if these men, and their practices, and their teaching be only given fair play, their opponents of the uncatholic school will be defeated, and be found to have clamoured for illegal restraints—all this is surely the most wonderful admission against themselves and their cause, which men even pretending to seek truth and right could possibly make, and one least likely to commend their cause and mode of action to any just and honest mind. Hear a few words upon this head from a venerable Archdeacon (_venerabilis_ not merely by station and age, but by learning and Christian wisdom also), one of whom England may well be proud. In the _Guardian_ of November 6 you will find a letter from Archdeacon Churton, enforcing with very great weight Gamaliel’s advice, “Let these men alone,” at the present momentous crisis. Allow me to read a few lines from it. He says:—“The advice which alone can save the Church from a new schism is plainly Gamaliel’s advice. I am very sorry that so many of our present bishops, younger men than myself, are averse from it, or uttering uncertain sounds which I could never adopt without suspecting my own magnanimity. It is to be regretted that they do not rather seek to guide a movement which has in it too many elements of good to be rudely condemned; and that they do not speak first of vindicating the law before they alter it. On the contrary, however, they seem to contemplate a new statute to establish, as if of perpetual obligation, certain vestments invented by clerical tailors of the last century, at which S. Ambrose would have stood aghast. . . . One of our sacred legislators has declared himself above all things anxious not to allow the Ritualists time to plead their cause with the public. It was the praise of Bishop Henry Spencer in King Richard’s time, according to Walsingham, that he gave the Lollards the shortest possible shrift-time for coming to their senses.”