Some of the Present Phenomena of the Church.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XII, Issue 257, 30 October 1877, Page 6

Some of the Present Phenomena of the Church.

It is sometimes made a matter of demand that a Clergyman coming out to New Zealand has a kind of vested right to reproduce out here, with a certain authority and prestige, any teaching or practice which, in the crowd of 20,000 Clergy of England or in some one or two of its many and varied churches, he may have been successful, owing to lack of discipline, in adopting or getting some few others to adopt, without being proceeded against by the arm of the law. The great costliness of maintaining anything like discipline in such matters in England has made it almost impossible to arrest such proceedings, aud they have in many cases gone on altogether unreproved, or where they have been reproved by law, the perpetrators of the illegal acts have persuaded themselves it was their duty to continue such practices. We know what it has resulted in. But much as we admire the Church of England, its liberties, its variety, its breadth, its value to the nation, much aa wo believe it would be an ill day for religion all over the world were its position altered, yet we should be unworthy of our connection with it if we blindly were so enamoured of the position as to follow its blemished qualities as well as its and to reproduce, or to be willing to allow to be reprocfuced out here, the anomalies and the evils which are discoverable in its present position, resulting chiefly from the disloyalty of those who wish the Church of England aud all its Branches or offshoots to revert to the state in which it was before the Reformation, minqs the abuses. Men put up with much in England because of the position of tho Church of England. There the Clergy have had it much their own way as to services and introduction of novelties. The Laity have had little or no voice in the matter, but when they have spoken, their views have been unmistakeable, and the voice of the nation by its representatives, its press, and even the majorities in its conferences and its congresses has pronounced against many of the practices carried on by men still holding preferment in the Church of England, and yet it is asked and almost demanded as a right that the Church here should allow these imperfections to be reproduced out here. An established Church can afford to allow much that an unestablishcd Church cannot. The very fact of establishment by law gives at least an ultimate limit, beyond which <reat offenders may not pass. ° Not, however, that I wish to make the Church a whit narrower in New Zealand than iv England, far from it. I should be the last to wish that. I desire to see the Church here as broad and as narrow as the Church of England has been made up to this

time by the present recognised law as declared by the authorities in Church and State. New Zealand is not a place for either ecclesiastical or political outlaws, and the time has gone by when ifc could be said with impunity by any one who in doctrine or practice has overstepped the law, the declared law of England (for whether good or bad it is still the law), Let him go out to Australasia and he will be welcomed there. Not so ; certainly not within the limits of that Church which, if any representative of the Church of England can exist in the colony, is the Representative of the Church of England morally if not legally.