Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/290

Thus the Bishop magnified his office, with a claim not of any official infallibility, but of that natural authority inherent in it, which indeed, as we have said, is its raison d'être, the chief and most worthy cause for its existence at all. It is very remarkable that the extreme members of the High Church party, with their very strong belief in the Church’s authority, should have unanimously denied and resisted this power of the Bishop, not even pretending to yield him any submission at all. “I must respectfully decline to obey this command, as I believe that in issuing it you have (unintentionally of course) transgressed the limits of that authority which the Church of England has committed to her bishops,” says the clergyman to whom the above letter was addressed. “And so say all of us,” might his brethren have repeated in chorus. It was perhaps an instance of the “Presbyterian mind,” and its simplicity, which made Bishop Tait believe that, having been set to rule in the Church, he had a right to be obeyed. His letters to the many recalcitrant clergy with whom in the course of his episcopate he was brought face to face, and who flatly refused to obey his commands or listen to his advice, are models of fine temper and anxiety for peace; but in no one single case do we find that his appeal to their judgment or their sense of dutiful subordination had the least success, which is an exceedingly curious subject of speculation and inquiry. For why should there be bishops in a Church if every man is to be a law to himself? and by what kind of strange self-contradiction is it that men who strongly oppose all right of private interpretation on the part of the people should thus maintain their own right to judge for themselves, in independence of all authority? Perhaps, however, Bishop Tait’s temperate appeal to their good sense and duty was not the best means of moving these hot spirits. A fulmination of imperious command might have suited the case better.

The legislation upon this subject, which was one of the crowning points of the Archbishop’s life, is explained, and, we must add, defended very clearly and with much moderation as well as force, in the chapter upon the Public Worship Regulation Act. To say that it is defended with great elaboration and carefulness is to allow that the Act in question did not fulfil the purpose which was intended, of securing an easy and inexpensive treatment of such practical questions as those of Ritual, and thus of bringing a comparatively powerful solution to one of the problems of the time. The most obnoxious thing in that Act was the creation of the aggrieved parishioner, that impious zealot who can steal a wafer from what even he allows to be the table of the Lord, in order to convict of illegal practices the clergyman who administers it to him, “in remembrance that Christ died for thee.” This monster was certainly never contemplated by Tait; and we should for our own part allow him no benefit of clergy should he fall into our hands. And the most curious thing in it is the passionate refusal of the clergymen of the Church of England to allow themselves to be judged by their own authorities. To the historical observer who is not ecclesiastically minded, and