THE PEER AND THE PRELATE.

New Zealander, Volume 9, Issue 706, 19 January 1853, Page 2

THE PEER AND THE PRELATE.

[From the “ Watchman."] A lecture on decorum, an accusation of having ‘‘violated even common decorum,” penned by a Bishop, and directed against the Earl of Shaftesbury, would have created a slight surprise, and have excused a moment's mirth, it the prelate had been any other than Henry of Exeter, In his vagaries it is impossible any more lo find cause for astonishment or even amusement. “The marvellous feals of Bishop Phillpotts,” says a recent writer, “have been so long a part of the polemical varieties of our newspapers, that we look for them as regularly as for the Irish horror, or the railway accident. One week he is fulminating his denunciation against the Heads of the Church for founding a bishopric at Jerusalem; the next, he is inveighing against Scripture Readers, after all the rest of the Bench have sanctioned their employment. Now he is inditing a philippic against Lord John Russell ; now imprisoning Shore; now convulsing his diocese by the command to surplices ; now pursuing Gorham through all the courts of law’; now astounding the churchwardens of Brampton Speke; now exterminating Bishop Hampden;

now reviling Archdeacon Sinclair; now convokinga Synod ; now excommunicating an Archbishop.” Whal has such a man to do with decorum? Ihe special indecorum alleged against Lord Shaftesbury was his saying, at the annual meeting of the Protestant Alliance, that, if the diocesan would not exercise discipline over the minister, in such cases as that denounced by SitCulling Eardley, public opinion must be brought to exercise discipline over the diocesan. The Bishop of Exeter, always wrong, always foiled in every purpose except that of giving annoyance, by his angry letters to Lord Shaftesbury, only publishes more widely the scandals that deform the section of the Church which is under his episcopal superintendence. It would have been more prudent to blush and be silent respecting such a case as that exposed, unless the Bishop was prepared thoroughly to probe and then arrest the gangrene. Here was a clergyman in the practice of confessing females, connected with Miss Sellon’s institution, —not only grown-up young ladies, but mere girls from the lower grades of society, A little creature, about twelve years old, lold Sir Culling the whole proceeding. She was shown into the clergyman’s private study, then he locked the door, closed the windows, pulled down the blinds, pill on his surplice, and sal down. The poor child knelt and repealed, as a written lesson, her sins of the previous mouth. Then the man in the surplice, silling in the great chair within that darkened room, examined her, not only as to her acts, but as to her thoughts—thoughts of envy, thoughts of disobedience, thoughts of uncleanness! Yet the Bishop of Exeter says that Lord Shaftesbury’s manly indignation was a violation of even common decorum, and has the impudence to tell him that when persons of his rank lose decorum they lose everything. But it isnomatter whal he says. Theonly violation that a man with any soul would think of here, is that of the purity of a child’s heart, of an infant’s innocency, and when it has lost that, it has indeed lost everything. Alas for the hopes of the next generation, if the children of the present are to be thus educated! Traclarian Sunday-schools,—and Day-schools too, now that Government has allowed all questions concerning morals as well as religion to be taken out of the control of the laity,—will, if the practice of this kind of auricular confession becomes a little more common, bring up little girls fit for nothing but to be the wives of liberated convicts in the Australian gold-diggings. Let the National Society look to it, or it will become a national calamity. In a supplement to the correspondence, which Sir Culling Eardley has added, and published in the Times the day before yesterday, be shows, from a reference to Ihe case of Mr. Maskell, lately the Bishop of Exeter’s Chaplain, more lately still a Bomish pervert, how little encouragement there was to bring the above flagrant abuse of clerical influence under the notice of the Bishop. He condescends also to notice, by a calm self-justification, most damaging to the faulors of Traclarian heresy, an impertinence directed against himself. The Bishop of Exeter says—‘‘Sir Culling being a Dissenter , I do not deem it necessary to make any remark on anything -which he may have said.” As if neither Sir Culling Eardley nor any of Her Majesty's subjects who have been driven from their parishchurch by arrogant bigotry or Popish doctrine, were anything more than so many religious outlaws, not deserving of the slightest consideration from a High Church Prelate of the Establishment ! But is Sir Culling a Dissenter? and if so, whal made him one? Hear his explanation, “It is perfectly true,” he says, “ that erroneous leaching in the Establishment drove me, some years ago, from my parish church, and made me a communicant elsewhere.” Nevertheless, when at Torquay, Sir Culling still is seen almost invariably to attend the services of the Church of England once on the Sunday, and frequently to be a communicant. Were it even not so, we should join in his protest against the principle that “any baptized Englishman is precluded from forming and expressing his opinion, as a member by right of the national establishment, upon the principles, practices, and tendencies of any dignitary or any clergyman of the Church of England whatever.” The question now is—will the Government and the people of England sanction, foster, and develope this system of Traclarian education, with its auricular confessions in darkened parlours for little girls of twelve years of age ?