SECOND LETTER TO ARCHDEACON SINGLETON.

MY DEAR SIR,

Ir is a long time since you heard from me, and in the mean time the poor Church of England has been trembling, from the bishop who sitteth upon the throne, to the curate who rideth upon the hackney horse. I began writing on the subject to avoid bursting from indignation; and, as it is not my habit to recede, I will go on till the Church of England is either up or down-semianimous on its back, or vigorous on its legs.

Two or three persons have said to me"Why, after writing an entertaining and successful letter to Archdeacon Singleton, do you venture upon another, in which you may probably fail, and be weak or stupid?" All this I utterly despise; I write upon these matters not to be entertaining, but because the subjects are very important, and because I have strong opinions upon them. If what I write is liked, so much the better; but liked or not liked, sold or not sold, Wilson Crockered or not Wilson Crockered, I will write. If you ask me who excites me, I answer you, it is that judge who stirs good thoughts in honest hearts-under whose warrant I impeach the wrong, and by whose help I hope to chastise it.

ence is known, their preferment coveted, and to get a stall, and to be preceded by men with silver rods, is the bait which the ambitious squire is perpetually holding out to his second son. What prebendary is next to come into residence, is as important a topic to the cathe dral town, and ten miles around it, as what the evening or morning star may be to the astronomer. I will venture to say, there is not a man of good humour, sense, and worth, within ten miles of Worcester, who does not hail the rising of Archdeacon Singleton in the horizon as one of the most agreeable events of the year. If such sort of preferments are extinguished, a very serious evil (as I have often said before) is done to the church-the service becomes unpopular, further spolation is dreaded, the whole system is considered to be altered and degraded, capital is withdrawn from the church, and no one enters into the profession but the sons of farmers and little tradesmen, who would be footmen if they were not vicars-or figure on the coach-box if they were not lecturing from the pulpit.

But what a practical rebuke to the commis sioners, after all their plans and consultations and carvings of cathedral preferment, to leave There are, in most cathedrals, two sorts of it integral, and untouched! It is some comprebendaries-the one resident, the other non-fort, however, to me, to think that the persons resident. It is proposed by the church commission to abolish all the prebendaries of the latter and many of the former class; and it is the prebendaries of the former class, the resident prebendaries, whom I wish to save.

The non-resident prebendaries never come near the cathedral; they are just like so many country gentlemen; the difference is, that their appointments are elective, not hereditary. They have houses, manors, lands, and every appendage of territorial wealth and importance. Their value is very different. I have one, Neasdon, near Willesdon, which consists of a quarter of an acre of land, worth a few shillings per annum, but animated by the burden of repairing a bridge, which sometimes costs the unfortunate prebendary fifty or sixty pounds. There are other non-resident prebendaries, however, of great value; and one, I believe, which would be worth, if the years or lives were run out, from 40,000l. to 60,000l. per annum.

of all others to whom this preservation of cathedral property would give the greatest pleasure, are the ecclesiastical commissioners themselves. Can any one believe that the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Bishop of London, really wishes for the confiscation of any cathedral property, or that they were driven to it by any thing but fear, mingled, perhaps, with a little vanity of playing the part of great reformers? They cannot, of course, say for themselves what I say for them; but of what is really passing in the ecclesiastical minds of these great personages, I have no more doubt than I have of what passes in the mind of the prisoner when the prosecutor recommends and relents, and the judge says he shall attend to the recommendation.

What harm does a prebend do, in a politicoeconomical point of view? The alienation of the property for three lives, or twenty-one years, and the almost certainty that the tenant has of renewing, give him sufficient interest in the soil for all purposes of cultivation,* and a long series of elected clergymen is rather

Not only do these prebendaries do nothing, and are never seen, but the existence of the preferment is hardly known; and the abolition of the preferment, therefore, would not in any degree lessen the temptation to enter into the church, while the mass of these preferments would make an important fund for the improvement of small livings. The residentiary prebendaries, on the contrary, perform all the services of the cathedral church; their exist-of a comparison."

The church, it has been urged, do not plant-they do not extend their woods; but almost all cathedrals possess woods, and regularly plant a succession, so as to keep them up.. A single evening of dice and hazard does not doom their woods to sudden destruction; a life tenant does not cut down all the timber to make the most of his estate; the woods of ecclesiastical bodies arc managed upon a fixed and settled plan, and considering the sudden prodigalities of laymen, I should not be afraic

Essay on the Dispersion of the Jews-takes orders-becomes a bishop's chaplain-has a young nobleman for his pupil-publishes an useless classic, and a serious call to the unconverted-and then goes through the Elysian translations of prebendary, dean, prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and power.

more likely to produce valuable members of goes to the University-gets a prize for a the community than a long series of begotten squires. Take, for instance, the cathedral of Bristol, the whole estates of which are about equal to keeping a pack of fox-hounds. If this had been in the hands of a country gentleman; instead of precentor, succentor, dean, and canons, and sexton, you would have had huntsman, whipper-in, dog-feeders, and stoppers of earths; the old squire full of foolish opinions, and fermented liquids, and a young gentleman of gloves, waistcoats and pantaloons: and how many generations might it be before the fortuitous concourse of noodles would produce such a man as Professor Lee, one of the prebendaries of Bristol, and by far the most eminent oriental scholar in Europe? The same argument might be applied to every cathedral in England. How many hundred coveys of squires would it take to supply as much knowledge as is condensed in the heads of Dr. Copplestone or Mr. Taite, of St. Paul's? and what a strange thing it is that such a man as Lord John Russell, the whig leader, should be so squirrel-minded as to wish for a movement without object or end! Saving there can be no e, for it is merely taking from one ecclesiastic to give it to another; public clamour, to which the best men must sometimes yield, does not require it: and so far from doing any good, it would be a source of infinite mischief to the establishment.

If you were to gather a parliament of curates on the hottest Sunday in the year, after all the services, sermons, burials, and baptisms of the day were over, and to offer them such increase of salary as would be produced by the confiscation of the cathedral property, I am convinced they would reject the measure, and prefer splendid hope, and the expectation of good fortune in advanced life, to the trifling improvement of poverty which such a fund could afford. Charles James, of London, was a curate; the Bishop of Winchester was a curate; almost every rose-and-shovel man has been a curate in his time. All curates hope to draw great prizes.

I am surprised it does not strike the mountaineers how very much the great emoluments of the church are flung open to the lowest ranks of the community. Butchers, bakers, publicans, schoolmasters, are perpetually seeing their children elevated to the mitre. Let a respectable baker drive through the city from the west end of the town, and let him cast an eye on the battlements of Northumberland House, has his little muffin-faced son the smallest chance of getting in among the Percies, enjoying a share of their luxury and splendour, and of chasing the deer with hound and horn upon the Cheviot Hills? But let him drive his alum-steeped loaves a little farther, till he reaches St. Paul's churchyard, and all his thoughts are changed when he sees that beautiful fabric; it is not impossible that his little penny roll may be introduced into that splendid oven. Young Crumpet is sent to school-takes to his books-spends the best years of his life, as all eminent Englishinen do, in making Latin verses-knows that the crum in crim-pet is long, and the pet short

It will not do to leave only four persons in each cathedral, upon the supposition that such a number will be sufficient for all the men of real merit who ought to enjoy such preferment; we ought to have a steady confidence that the men of real merit will always bear a small proportion to the whole number; and that in proportion as the whole number is lessened, the number of men of merit provided for will be lessened also. If it were quite certain that ninety persons would be selected, the most remarkable for conduct, piety, and learning, ninety offices might be sufficient; but out of these ninety are to be taken tutors to dukes and marquises, paid in this way by the public; bishop's chaplains, running tame about the palace; elegant clergymen, of small understanding, who have made themselves acceptable in the drawing-rooms of the mitre ? Billingsgate controversialists, who have tossed and gored an Unitarian. So that there remain but a few rewards for men of real merit-yet these rewards do infinite good; and in this mixed, checkered way, human affairs are conducted.

No man at the beginning of the reform could tell to what excesses the new power conferred upon the multitude would carry them; it was not safe for a clergyman to appear in the streets. I bought a blue coat, and did not despair in time of looking like a layman. All this is passed over. Men are returned to their senses upon the subject of the church, and 1 utterly deny that there is any public feeling whatever which calls for the destruction of the resident prebends. Lord John Russell has pruned the two luxuriant bishoprics, and has abolished pluralities: he has made a very material alteration in the state of the church not enough to please Joseph Hume, and the tribunes of the people, but enough to satisfy every reasonable and moderate man, and, therefore, enough to satisfy himself. What another generation may choose to do, is another question: I am thoroughly convinced that enough has been done for the present.

Viscount Melbourne declared himself quite satisfied with the church as it is; but if the public had any desire to alter it, they might do as they pleased. He might have said the same thing of the monarchy, or of any other of our institutions; and there is in the declaration a permissiveness and good humour which, in public men, have seldom been exceeded. Carelessness, however, is but a poor imitation of genius, and the formation of a wise and well-reflected plan of reform conduces more to the lasting fame of a minister than that affected contempt of duty which every man secs to be mere vanity, and a vanity of no very high description.

But, if the truth must be told, our viscount is somewhat of an impostor. Every thing

about him seems to betoken careless desola- | harm than good. In the time of Lord Georg tion: any one would suppose from his man- Gordon's riots, the Guards said they did not ner that he was playing at chuck-farthing care for the mob, if the gentlemen volunteers with human happiness; that he was always behind would be so good as not to hold their on the heel of pastime; that he would giggle muskets in such a dangerous manner. I don't away the great charter, and decide by the care for popular clamour, and think it might method of tee-totum whether my lords the now be defied; but I confess the gentlemen bishops should or should not retain their seats volunteers alarm me. They have, unfortunately in the House of Lords. All this is the mere too, collected their addresses, and published vanity of surprising, and making us believe them in a single volume!!! that he can play with kingdoms as other men can with nine-pins. Instead of this lofty nebulo, this miracle of moral and intellectual felicities, he is nothing more than a sensible, honest man, who means to do his duty to the sovereign and to the country: instead of being the ignorant man he pretends to be, before he meets the deputation of tallow-chandlers in the morning, he sits up half the night talking with Thomas Young about melting and skimming, and then, though he has acquired knowledge enough to work off a whole vat of prime Leicester tallow, he pretends next morning not to know the difference between a dip and a mould. In the same way, when he has been employed in reading acts of Parliament, he would persuade you that he has been reading Cleghorn on the Beatitudes, or Pickler on the Nine Difficult Points. Neither can I allow to this minister (however he may be irritated by the denial) the extreme merit of indifference to the consequences of his measures. I believe him to be conscientiously alive to the good or evil that he is doing, and that his caution has more than once arrested the gigantic projects of the Lycurgus of the Lower House. I am sorry to hurt any man's feelings, and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared; but I accuse our minister of honesty and diligence; I deny that he is careless or rash: he is nothing more than a man of good understanding, and good principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political roué.

One of the most foolish circumstances attending this destruction of cathedral property, is the great sacrifice of the patronage of the crown; the crown gives up eight prebends of Westminster, two at Worcester, 1,500l. per annum at St. Paul's, two prebends at Bristol, and a great deal of other preferment all over the kingdom; and this at a moment when such extraordinary power has been suddenly conferred upon the people, and when every atom cf power and patronage ought to be husbanded for the crown. A prebend of Westminster for my second son would soften the Catos of Cornhill, and lull the Gracchi of the metropolitan boroughs. Lives there a man so absurd as to suppose that government can be carried on without those gentle allurements? You may as well attempt to poultice off the humps of a camel's back, as to cure mankind of these little corruptions.

I should like to know how many of our institutions at this moment, besides the cathedrals, are under notice of destruction. I will, before I finish my letter, endeavour to procure a list; in the mean time I will give you the bill of fare with which the last session opened, and I think that of 1838 will not be less copious. But at the opening of the session of 1837, when I addressed my first letter to you, this was the state of our intended changes:-The law of copyright was to be recreated by Serjeant Talfourd; church rates abolished by Lord John Russell, and imprisonment for debt by the attorney-general; the Archbishop of Canterbury kindly undertook to destroy all the cathedrals, and Mr. Grote was to arrange our voting by ballot; the septennial act was to be repealed by Mr. Williams, corn laws abolished by Mr Clay, and the House of Lords reformed by Mr. Ward; Mr. Hume remodelled county rates, Mr. Ewart put an end to primogeniture, and Mr. Tooke took away the exclusive privileges of Dublin, Oxford, and Cambridge; Thomas Duncombe was to put an end to the proxies of the lords, and Serjeant Prime to turn the universities topsy-turvy. Well may it be said that

"Man never continueth in one stay."

See how men accustom themselves to large and perilous changes. Ten years ago, if a cassock or a hassock had been taken from the establishment, the current of human affairs would have been stopped till restitution had been made. In a fortnight's time, Lord John Russell is to take possession of, and to re-partition all the cathedrals in England; and what a prelude for the young queen's coronation! what a medal for the august ceremony!-the fallen Gothic buildings on one side of the gold, the young Protestant queen on the other:

"Victoria Ecclesiæ Victrix."

And then, when she is full of noble devices, and of all sorts enchantingly beloved, and amid the solemn swell of music, when her heart beats happily, and her eyes look majesty, she turns them on the degraded ministers of the Gospel, and shudders to see she is stalking to the throne of her Protestant ancestors over the broken altars of God.

Now, remember, I hate to overstate my case. I do not say that the destruction of cathedrals will put an end to railroads: I believe that good mustard and cress, sown after Lord John's bill I am terribly alarmed by a committee of is passed, will, if duly watered, continue to cathedrals now sitting in London, and plan- grow. I do not say that the country has no ning a petition to the legislature to be heard right, after the death of individual incumbents, by counsel. They will take such high ground, to do what they propose to do;-I merely say and talk a language so utterly at variance with that it is inexpedient, uncalled for, and misthe feelings of the age about church pro-chievous-that the lower clergy, for whose erty, that I am much afraid they will do more sake it is proposed to be done, do rot desire

it that the bishop commissioners, who proposed it, would be heartily glad if it was put an end to that it will lower the character of those who enter into the church, and accustom the English people to large and dangerous confiscations: and I would not have gentlemen of the money-bags, and of wheat and bean land, forget that the church means many other things than Thirty-nine Articles, and a discourse of five-and-twenty minutes' duration on the Sabbath. It means a check to the conceited rashness of experimental reasoners-an adhesion to old moral landmarks-an attachment to the happiness we have gained from tried institutions, greater than the expectation of that which is promised by novelty and change. The loud cry of ten thousand teachers of justice and worship, that cry which masters the Borgias and Catilines of the world, and guards from devastation the best works of God

Magna testantur voce per orbem Discite justitiam moniti et non temnere divos. In spite of his uplifted chess-board, I cannot let my old school-fellow, the Archbishop of Canterbury, off, without harping a little upon his oath, which he has taken to preserve the rights and property of the church of Canterbury: I am quite sure so truly good a man, as from the bottom of my heart I believe him to be, has some line of argument by which he defends himself; but till I know it, I cannot of course say I am convinced by it. The common defence for breaking oaths is, that they are contracts made with another party, which the Creator is called to witness, and from

believe it to have been long established in the church, surprised me, I confess, not a little. A proxy to vote, if you please-a proxy to consent to arrangements of estates, if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury fly, to take the Creator to witness that the archbishop, detained in town by business or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of piety over which he presides-all this seems to me an act of the most extraordinary indolence ever recorded in history. If an ecclesiastic, not a bishop, may express any opinion on the reforms of the church, I recommend that archbishops and bishops should take no more oaths by proxy; but as they do not wait upon the sovereign or the prime minister, or even any of the cabinet, by proxy, that they should also perform all religious acts in their own person. This practice would have been abolished in Lord John's first bill, if other grades of churchmen as well as bishops had been made commissioners. But the motto was

"Peace to the palaces-war to the manses." I have been informed, though I will not answer for the accuracy of the information, that this vicarious oath is like.y to produce a scene which would have puzzled the Ductor Dubitantium. The attorney who took the oath for the archbishop, is, they say, seized with reliof Canterbury property, and has in vain tengious horrors at the approaching confiscation dered back his 6s. 8d. for taking the oath. The archbishop refuses to accept it; and feeling himself light and disencumbered, wisely keeps the saddle upon the back of the writhing and agonized scrivener. I have talked it over with several clergymen, and the general opinion is,

that the scrivener will suffer.

which the swearer is absolved, if those for whom the oath is taken choose to release him from his obligation. With whom, then, is the contract made by the archbishop? Is it with I cannot help thinking that a great opportu the community at large? If so, nothing but an act of Parliament (as the community at of the church, by means of those chapters nity opens itself for improving the discipline large have no other organ) could absolve him which Lord John Russell is so anxious to defrom his oath; but three years before any act is passed, he puts his name to a plan for of the chapter, and make them responsible for stroy; divide the diocese among the members taking away two-thirds of the property of the the superintendence and inspection of the church of Canterbury. If the contract is not inade with the community at large, but with clergy in their various divisions under the suthe church of Canterbury, every member of it preme control of the bishop; by a few addiis in decided hostility to his scheme. O'Con- tions they might be made the bishops' council nell takes an oath that he will not injure nor might be made a kind of college for the genefor the trial of delinquent clergymen. They destroy the Protestant church; but in promoting the destruction of some of the Irish bish-ral care of education in the diocese, and apoprics, he may plead that he is sacrificing a part to preserve the whole, and benefiting, not injuring, the Protestant establishment. But the archbishop does not swear to a general truth, where the principle may be preserved, though there is an apparent deviation from the words; but he swears to a very narrow and limited oath, that he will not alienate the possessions of the church of Canterbury. A friend of mine has suggested to me that his grace has, perhaps, forgotten the oath ; but this cannot be, for the first Protestant in Europe of course makes a memorandum in his pocket-book of all the oaths he takes to do, or to abstain. The oath, however, may be less present to the arch-try-the Duke of Wellington, Lord John Russell, Lord bishop's memory, from the fact of his not naving taken the oath in person, but by the medium of a gentleman sent down by the coach to take it for him-a practice which, though I

* I only mention Lord John Russell's name so often, because the management of the church measures devolves upon him. He is, beyond all comparison, the ablest man in the whole administration, and to such a degree is he superior, that the government conid not exíst a moment without him. If the foreign secretary were to retire, we should no longer be nibbling ourselves into disgrace on the coast of Spain. If the amiable Lord Glenelg were to leave us, we should feel secure in our colonial possessions. If Mr. Spring Rice were to go into holy orders, great would be the joy of the three per cents. easily enough be found in lieu of Viscount Melbourne; A decent, good-looking head of the government might but in five minutes after the departure of Lord John, the whole whig government would be dissolved into sparks markable men, who, in different methods and in different of liberality and splinters of reform. There are six redegrees, are now affecting the interests of this counBrougham, Lord Lyndhurst, Sir Robert Peel, and O'Connell. Greater powers than all these are the phlegm of the English people-the great mass of good sense and intelligence diffused among them-and the number of those who have something to lose, and have ot the slightest intention of losing it.

ied to a thousand useful purposes, which would have occurred to the commissioners, if uney had not been so dreadfully frightened, and to the government, if their object had been, uot to please the dissenters, but to improve the church.

"The plan of taxation, therefore," says the bishop, "being abandoned, it was evident that the funds for the augmentation of poor livings and for the supply of the spiritual wants of populous districts, must be drawn from the episcopal and cathedral revenues; that is, from the revenues from which the legislature seems to have a peculiar right to draw the funds for the general supply of the religious wants of the people; because they arise from benefices, of which the patronage is either actually in the crown, or is derivative from the crown." In the case of the episcopal revenues, the commissioners had already carried the principle of redistribution as far as they thought that it could, with due allowance for the various demands upon the incomes of the bishops, be carried. The only remaining source, therefore, was to be found in the cathedral revenues; and the commissioners proceeded, in the execution of the duties prescribed to them, to consider in what manner

general instructions to me that I should do so in all

cases.

"To whatever extent, therefore, the statement may be true, or whatever may be its value, it is clear that it cannot attach to the commissioners, but that I alone am responsible.

The Bishop of Lincoln has lately published pamphlet on the church question. His lordship is certainly not a man full of felicities and facilities, imitating none, and inimitable of any; nor does he work with infinite agitaon of wit. His creation has blood without head, bones without marrow, eyes without speculation. He has the art of saying nothing n many words beyond any man that ever existed; and when he seems to have made a proposition, he is so dreadfully frightened at t, that he proceeds as quickly as possible, in the ensuing sentence, to disconnect the subject and the predicate, and to avert the dangers he has incurred:-but as he is a bishop, and will be therefore more read than I am, I cannot pass him over. His lordship tells us, that it was at one time under consideration of the commissioners whether they should not tax all benefices above a certain value, in order to raise a fund for the improvement of smaller livings; and his lordship adds, with the great"In the execution of my office, I have endeavoured, est innocence, that the considerations which in the midst of my other duties, to conduct an extensive principally weighed with the commissioners correspondence in accordance to what I knew to be the in inducing them not to adopt the plan of taxa-feelings and wishes of the commissioners, and to treat every party in communication with them with attention tion, was that they understood the clergy in and respect. general to be decidedly averse to it; so that the plan of the commission was, that the greater benefices should pay to the little, while the bishops themselves-the Archbishop of Canterbury with his 15,000l. a year, and the Bishop of London with his 10,000l. a yearwere not to subscribe a single farthing for that purpose. Why does John, Bishop of Lincoln, mention these distressing schemes of the commission, which we are certain would have been met with a general yell of indignation from one end of the kingdom to another? Surely it must have occurred to this excellent prelate that the bishops would have been compelled, by mere shame, to have contributed to the fund which they were about to put upon the backs of the more opulent parochial clergy; surely a moment's reflection must have taught them that the safer method by far was to confiscate cathedral property.

The idea of abandoning this taxation, because it was displeasing to the clergy at large, is not unentertaining as applied to a commission who treated the clergy with the greatest contempt, and did not even notice the communications from cathedral bodies upon the subject of the most serious and extensive confiscations.*

Upon this subject I think it right to introduce the following letters, the first of which was published Jan. 13, 1838:

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. "Sir, I feel it to be consistent with my duty, as secretary to the church commissioners, to notice a statement manating from a quarter which would seem to give it authenticity-that, of seven chapter memorials addressed to the board, the receipt of one was only acknowledged. "It is strictly within my province to acknowledge communications made to the commissioners as a body, ither directly or through me; and it is part of their

"If, at some period of more than usual pressure, any accidental omission may have occurred, or may hereafter occur, involving an appearance of discourtesy, it is for me to offer, as I now do, explanation and apology. "I am, sir, your obedient humble servant, "C. K. MURRAY. "Whitehall Place, Jan. 21."

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. "Sir,-A more indiscreet and extraordinary communication than that which appears in your own paper of the 23d instant, signed by Mr. C. K. Murray, I never read Apparet domus intus." It is now clear how the commission has been worked. Where communications from the oldest ecclesiastical bodies, upon the most important of all subjects to them and to the kingdom, were received by the greatest prelates and noblemen of the land, acting under the king's commission, I should have thought that answers suitable to the occasion would, in each case, have been dictated by the commission; that such answers would have been entered on the minutes, and read on the board-day next ensuing. done at all boards on the most trifling subjects, was not

"Is Mr. C. K. Murray quite sure that this, which is

done at his board, in the most awful confiscation ever known in England? Is he certain that spoliation was in no instance sweetened by civility, and injustice never vanished by forms? Were all the decencies and proprieties, which ought to regulate the intercourse of such great bodies, left without a single inquiry from the comwith six distinct fits of oblivion on six separate occasions, missioner, to a gentleman who seems to have been seized any one of which required all that attention to decorum and that accuracy of memory for which secretaries are selected and paid?

"According to Mr. C. K. Murray's account, the only order he received from the board was, 'If any prebendary calls, or any cathedral writes, desiring not to be destroyed, just say the communication has een received;' and even this, Mr. Murray tells us, he nas not done, and that no one of the king's commissioners-archbishops, bishops, marquises, earls-ever asked him whether he had done it or not-though any one of these great people would have swooned away at the idea of not answering the most trifling communication from any other of these great people.

"Whatever else these commissioners do, they had better not bring their secretary forward again. They may feel wind-bound by public opinion, but they must choose, as a sacrifice, a better Iphigenia than Mr. C. K. Murray.

"SYDNEY SMITH "