A Bishop on Church Reform.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 130, 26 February 1887, Page 1

A Bishop on Church Reform.

The Bi«hop cf Rochester, in his annual letter to the diocese, s>ays : Church Reform is in the air. It is about time that it was. It is also time foy each of us to discover and sob about that particular duty with ivepect to it which i* especially our own. People who have been to sea in the tropic* w ell know the ominous calni which sometimes intervenes between the bursts ot a cyclone, and residents there know how to use it. We are in a calm now. Not becauee our pdvereariea relent ot their purpose - of that they will, never relent. Not because the solid arguments against Church Establishment of any kind (there are such) are already dissolved in the air. Not even because the good and augmenting work the Church is doing softens the prejudices of her loligious adversaries. There are irnplacableß on the other wide, and they can wait Do not for a moment suppose the claims and criticisms of the Liberation Society to be either coincident or commensurate with the settled opinion of that lar^re macs of the people which, neither foy the Church nor against her, wait to see how things go, wish to ascertain if she will prefer a wise reform to a eerious involution Of course, some changes are proposed po wild and so revolutionary that they would destroy the Chuich, instead of improving her. Sooner than let one of her principles be forfeited, one of her doctrines denied, one of her characteristic features obliterated, lot us consent to be stripped of any dignity, privilege, and emolument we possess, and go out into the wilderness, rich with our unimpaired conscience and iv the company of our Lord. But we need not just yet protest against what may never happen. What I feel moat stroDgly about mw if, a more stringent discipline of critninous clerks, a limitation of the freehold character of a benefice, the right of parishioners to be heard before an institution, prevention of sale of next presentation, and the abolition of donatives. Could those immense changes be effected, a generation would see an im provement in the Church of England which we can hardly Imagine.