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the present publication will prove to be only the first-fruits of a rich and plentiful harvest soon to be gathered in; and that the deficiency in our historical literature to which we have called attention will soon be supplied by those who alone have the power of supplying it,—the representatives of some of our old English Catholic families.

DR. PHILLPOTTS AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. The Edinburgh Review. No. 193, January 1852. Long

mans.

A Letter to Sir Robert Inglis, Bart., M.P., on certain Statements in an Article of the Edinburgh Review, No. 193, entitled "Bishop Phillpotts." By Henry, Lord Bishop of Exeter. Murray, London.

A Rejoinder to the Bishop of Exeter's Reply to the Edinburgh Review. By the Edinburgh Reviewer. Longmans. A Letter to the Archdeacon of Totnes on the Necessity of Episcopal Ordination. By Henry, Lord Bishop of Exeter. 1852. Murray, London.

THERE are many amiable persons, ministers of the Establishment and others, belonging to what is called the High-Church party, who are in the habit of looking upon the Protestant Bishop of Exeter as a confessor, if not a doctor also, of the "Anglican branch of the Catholic Church;" or, to borrow the language of the Edinburgh Reviewer, as "the Athanasius of the West, the champion of the faith, the pillar of the tottering Church, alone among the faithless faithful found."'" Out of

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a feeling of pure compassion for these estimable individualssuch at least is the motive put forward by the writer himself -a contributor to the Whig Quarterly has lately undertaken to dispel all such pleasing delusions by presenting his readers with what he considers to be a true and faithful portrait of that dignitary's character, as far at least as it may be gathered from his actions as a politician and as the administrator (under her Majesty) of the ecclesiastical affairs of his diocese. The general object and character of the article in which this portrait is exhibited will be best understood by the following brief extracts, which are a very fair sample of the whole. Dr. Phillpotts is described as

"a shrewd and worldly churchman, violent by calculation, intemperate by policy, selfish in his ends, and unscrupulous in his means."

The writer undertakes to prove that "every act of his administration may be referred to one of three motives,-love of power, love of family, or love of notoriety;" and, finally, he accuses him of "adopting intolerance as a cloak for self-interest; mixing the most exalted spiritual pretensions with the most tortuous secular intrigues; exaggerating the sanctity of the clerical office, yet violating it by the most scandalous acts of nepotism; assuming the loftiest tone of an apostle, to mask the sharpest practice of an attorney; stirring up a tempest of agitation, only that the turbid atmosphere may veil his transgressions from the public eye."

Such is the nature of the charges brought against the dignitary who presides over her Majesty's clergy in the western extremity of this island; and if we may trust the very strong internal evidence of the article and its rejoinder, they are brought by one of his own subordinate officers. It is scarcely to be wondered at, perhaps, that his lordship should have felt himself called upon to take some public notice of them; not, of course, in the vague general form in which we have here exhibited them, but in the way of a reply to certain specific examples by which the reviewer had endeavoured to substantiate them. Nobody, however, but Henry of Exeter himself would ever have conducted his defence in the way in which he has done it he declares, and of course we are bound to believe him, that he has not read the article which he undertakes to answer, but only received an account of its principal contents from a trustworthy friend; "the Review contains, I am told, the following passage;" "I am informed that the reviewer has inserted the following note," &c. &c. This very peculiar mode of replying to an attack is eminently characteristic. Of course it gives his adversaries the advantage of asserting, that to all those charges of which he has not made express mention he pleads guilty; and of this advantage they have (naturally and justly) not been slow to avail themselves. On the other hand, it gives his lordship the advantage of being able to retort, with the same literal truthfulness at least, if not with the same real justice, "How unwarrantable a conclusion! how illogical and immoral an inference! Did I not most distinctly say that I had never read the whole article, that I confined myself to certain important extracts communicated to me by a friend?" and a great deal more in the same strain, which we do not care to repeat, but which any one familiar with the Exonian style of controversy will very readily supply.

We have no intention, however, of entering into all the details of this unseemly quarrel, nor of awarding the palm of victory to either disputant. It matters little to us whether Dr. Phillpotts became possessed of the temporalities of the see

of Exeter because he ratted at a critical moment upon a great political question; since, if his right reverend predecessors and brethren upon "the bench" be not strangely slandered, individuals have been before now promoted to that coveted post for transactions of a still less priestly character. Neither does it concern us to know how his lordship tried to jockey his brother of Worcester out of the presentation to a living, and how his brother of Worcester now takes ample revenge for the unsuccessful attempt by telling the story to all his neighbours. We have no curiosity to ascertain how many livings his lordship has given to his sons and daughters (we mean, of course, to his daughters' husbands); neither do we feel called upon to decide whether Lord Seymour spoke the truth when he told his constituents at Totnes, in 1847, that his diocesan had been guilty" of a deliberate and direct contradiction of the truth;" or whether that diocesan himself speaks truly now, when he accuses Lord Seymour, in his own peculiar style, of having been guilty of conduct "inconsistent with any principle of action which an honourable man would not blush to avow." Matters such as these, though by no means unimportant to the prelate himself, nor to the individual who has thus publicly alleged them against him, are happily no concern of ours; and, to confess the truth, we do not think that they are much calculated to promote the end which the writer professes to have in view. That end, as we have already stated, was to disabuse the minds of certain Anglo-Catholics, who look up to Dr. Phillpotts as to a very mirror of orthodoxy, a pillar of the Church; and a most praiseworthy end it is: we would gladly contribute something towards it ourselves, for we are convinced that a more thorough theological sham could with difficulty be found than the creed of this pseudo-Athanasius; but we conceive that such an end would be far better answered by an exposure of his lordship's theological eccentricities and inconsistencies, than by an attack, however just and truthful, upon his private life and character. We wish, indeed, that some able pen might, ere it is too late, take up this most fruitful subject, and write the "History of the Variations" of the Anglican bishops, and of Dr. Phillpotts in particular, during the rise, progress, and decay of the Tractarian party in the Establishment. There would be some rare curiosities in such a history; and the see of Exeter, we believe, would be far from behind the rest in contributing its quota.

We do not profess to be very intimately acquainted with all the details of the civil strife that has been so happily raging in every quarter of the Establishment during the past twenty years; numerous incidents, however, which have from time to

time become public through the medium of the newspapers, or in separate pamphlets, or which have obtained private circulation, have betrayed an amount of theological ignorance, and consequently of eccentricities and vacillations in ecclesias tical conduct, on the part of the (so-called) Protestant bishops, which is truly amazing. Nor has it always happened that the inconsistencies in argument and in conduct, by which these dignitaries have distinguished themselves, have been proportioned to their ignorance of theology, or the apparent distance of their opinions from the dogmas of the Catholic faith; on the contrary, an evangelical prelate, even though his ignorance of theology may have been supreme, and his belief the very contradictory of the Catholic creed, yet has had far less difficulty in maintaining a straightforward and consistent line of conduct during these troublous times than any of the HighChurch party, whose misfortune it has been to occupy positions of authority during the same period. These last have been hopelessly hampered by the very anomalies of their creed. From the days of Laud downwards, this has always been the one "damning spot" in their vaunted Via Media, namely, that the arguments by which it is supported are available for so much more than its advocates desire. They began by using these arguments against Puritans, Methodists, and Latitudinarians, and for this purpose they prove most effective; but by and by some amongst their disciples, more eager or more thoughtful than the rest, boldly pursue these principles to their legitimate and only true conclusions, and by the grace of God are led to take refuge in the Catholic Church. Then the untenableness of the original High-Church position becomes patent to all but its unfortunate occupants. These proceed to argue with their rebellious disciples who have dared to be consistent and to embrace the conclusions of their admitted premisses, and soon find to their cost that the weapons which have done them such good service in previous engagements against another foe now fall powerless from their hands, or rather recoil with fatal force against themselves. They have been using weapons pilfered from the armory of the Church, and those weapons have a double edge; they cannot be handled safely by any but the soldiers of the Church. Before any "defections" (as they were called) had taken place, we may suppose that the combatants had been unconscious of this dangerous characteristic of their weapons; they had used them in good faith against their Low-Church adversaries, and were blameless. But henceforward the case was materially altered: it was necessary to be more cautious; new weapons must be forged, or the old ones carefully altered, or the position must

be abandoned altogether. Some had recourse to one of these devices, others to another; but there were others again, not a few, who chose rather, at all risks, to continue the ancient mode of warfare, dangerous as it had always been, dishonest as it had now been proved to be.

Amongst this latter number was Dr. Phillpotts; it was a mode of warfare peculiarly suited as well to his intellectual capacities as to his theological attainments. Keen without being deep, ignorant of theology, but gifted with powers of energy and understanding that would always enable him to get up as much of it as was necessary for the particular matter in hand, he was just the man to rest contented with an inconsistent, inchoate, and utterly disproportionate form of religious belief and of ecclesiastical polity. A busy, active politician by inclination and by habit, he has never applied himself to the study of theology as a real and perfect science, but has been led to pick up one truth (or falsehood) after another, here a bit and there a bit, as accident has forced it upon his notice, without stopping to inquire how far each new addition harmonised with what had gone before, or what further consequences necessarily followed from its adoption. The result is, as might have been expected, unsatisfactory and self-contradictory in the extreme; and without any intentional dishonesty, perhaps even without being really conscious of the fact, he argues on one side of a question to-day, and on the other to-morrow, with equal confidence and ability, though not, of course, with equal success. In fact, it is impossible not to see that Henry of Exeter has decidedly missed his vocation; he was born for the woolsack, not for the episcopal bench; his letters, charges, and all other semi-personal, semitheological productions of which his pen has been so prolific a parent, bear a far closer resemblance to the special pleadings of some eminent lawyer than to the sober exposition of a theological thesis by a learned dignitary of the Church. He deals with questions of divinity just as a barrister is obliged to deal with questions in any particular branch of the arts and sciences that happen to come across him in the course of his professional practice. A. B. brings an action against C. D. for having infringed the patent which he had obtained for some improvement in the manufacture of a particular kind of cloth. The party who is proceeded against pleads that he has not infringed any existing patent, but introduced a substantially new invention: and he retains the Attorney-general to defend him. Of the art of cloth-making the Attorneygeneral probably knows absolutely nothing; but he sets to work with admirable energy, and by dint of steady, patient

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