BOOKS.
BISHOP THIRLWALL'S LETTERS.*
IF Bishop Thirlwall's Letters, Literary and Theological, had been published without the accompanying volume of Letters to aFriend, they would probably have been read with a certain sense of disappointment. The Letters to a Friend show a side of Thirl: wall's character of which there is hardly a trace in the Letters, Literary and Theological ; and what is more remarkable, they show the more usually seen sides in a pleasanter light. The friend was a young lady, and whether it was that the Bishop was one of that large class of men who, in the society of women, have an ease and versatility which are wanting to them in men's society, or that the strong affection which Thirlwall evidently bore to his correspondent made him especially anxious to interest her, there can be no question as to the greater pleasantness of the impression which the letters in the Letters, Literary and Theological, of Connor Thirlwall. Edited by the Very Rev. d. J. Stewart Perowne, D.D. ; and the Rev. L. Stokes, B.A. Letters to a Friend. By Connop Thirlwall. Edited by the Very Rev. A. P. Stank', D.D. London: Bentley. 1881.
second volume leave on the reader. If the letters in the first volume are a fair sample of his correspondence, Thirlwall took but little interest in the ecclesiastical controversies of his time.. They entered into his charges as a matter of professional duty, but in his letters they scarcely find a place. Even the Epis- copal condemnation of Essays and Reviews, for signing which Thirlwall was, at the time, blamed, is mentioned only once.. This solitary occasion, however, shows how genuine Thirlwall's dislike of the book was. "I was reading," he says, "the other day old Chubb's True Gospel of Jester Christ. The whole substance of it might have been inserted in the volume without additional scandal, and would not have been thought the most heterodox portion of it. He seems to me to come nearest to R. Williams. The chief difference between them is that Chubb speaks plainly and bluntly, and does not affect to use the technical terms of a theology which he rejects, and that he was not a clergyman." The strangest thing in this first volume, perhaps, judging it by the light of later events, is Thirlwall's substantial approval of the Public Worship Regula- tion Act. It is plain that he was altogether deceived by its reception in the House of Commons. That reception, he thought, had " brought to light something which, antecedently to experience, could hardly have been believed," and which he regarded as " in the highest degree cheerful and hopeful." This. incredible " something" is " the practically universal sense of the need of such a measure ; the unanimity of the country in its favour ; and, what is most important of all, the continued attachment of the great mass of the intelligent laity to the Church, as a Reformed Church, and the deep interest they feel in its welfare." It should be said, however, that the Bishop looked forward to further legislation of the same kind. "The Bill," he writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury, " will not and cannot stand by itself, but, I hope and trust, will be so supplemented as to render your primacy an ever memorable and happy epoch in the history of the Church of England." If Thirlwall were alive now, he would not find his hope realised. So far as it is associated with the Public Worship Regulation Act, Archbishop Tait's primacy seems destined to be only memorable for the impossibility of getting Mr. Green out of prison. This, and one or two other passages in the letters which relate to the Ritualist controversy, show very clearly the nature and limits of that breadth which has been so commonly attributed to Thirlwall. It was the breadth of a judge, not of a statesman ; the breadth of a man who is eminently con- scientious and painstaking in weighing the evidence for and against a particular conclusion, not that of a man who, having arrived at a conclusion, and entertaining no doubt of its sound- ness, is yet tolerant of those who do not accept it. Thus in the Ritualist controversy, the really practical question to Thirlwall's mind was, " Shall any section of the Church, or any clergyman, be permitted to conduct the public services of the Church in such a way as to make it appear that the Church gives its sanction to a doctrine which the greater part of her members reject as false and mischievous ?" This doctrine Thirlwall defines to be " that of the Sacrifice in the Romish and Tractarian sense." His charge on the subject shows how perfectly just he could be to another side of Eucharistic doctrine, even when he himself dissented from it. The difference was that, in his opinion, the framers of the Anglican formularies had designedly left the Real Presence an open question,—a doctrine which members of the Church of England might believe or not, at their pleasure; whereas he could find no trace of any such intention on their part as re- gards the sacrifice. His toleration of the Ritualists in the character of believers in the real presence was the toleration of a judge who scrupulously weighs every tittle of evidence and gives the defendant the benefit of the doubt. As rcgards the sacrifice, the Bishop had no doubt; consequently, he un- hesitatingly gave judgment for the plaintiff. The toleration of the statesman, at least so we understand it, accepts facts as they are, and makes the best of them. The doctrine of a sacrifice may or may not have been, in the intention• of certain divines who lived three centuries ago, a permitted opinion in the Church of England. But whatever it was in the sixteenth century, it is a doctrine actually held in the Church of England in the nineteenth century, and the business of the prudent legislator is to make the best provision he can to ensure that it shall be held without violence to those who do not hold it.
Something of the same temper may be seen in Thirlwall's remarks upon the Vatican decree. His attitude towards Ireful- libility is that of a judge, tracing out to its extremest possible • consequences a mischievous opinion advanced by one of the -counsel employed in the case. As a matter of fact, none of these consequences have happened, and if the Bishop had been better acquainted with the practical working of a great bureaucracy, he would have known that none of them
• could have happened. It seems strange that only ten years ago Thirlwall could gravely hold that a Roman Catholic Member of Parliament was bound in honour to resign his seat after the promulgation of the decree, because the Roman Catholic Bishops of England and Ireland had declared in 1829 that the infallibility of the Pope was not a dogma of their Church. Thirlwall mistook a possible danger for an inevitable result. He thought that the Pope claimed " absolute power over all persons, reserving entirely to his own discretion the way in which he may think fit to exercise it." It may be deduced, perhaps, from the doctrine that under certain conditions the Pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals, and that it rests with him to decide what are matters of faith and morals. But the spiritual tyranny which Thirlwall thought inseparable from this view is only inseparable from it in the sense in which the opposite doctrine that the civil power is supreme in all poli- tical matters, and that it is further the judge of what constitutes a political matter, leads to temporal tyranny. What, for example, prevents the State from saying that the education of children is a political matter, and consequently must be undertaken by the Government, not by the parent ? M. Paul Bert very pos- sibly holds this, and may, some day, try to give effect to it. Yet Thirlwall would hardly have been willing to deprive the State of the right of saying where politics end and religion begins. He would have said that two powers which have no common superior must be content to give and take, and seek, by all the means at their disposal, to minimise, instead of -exaggerating, their mutual antagonism. How far Thirlwall's deductions follow necessarily from the acceptance of the dogma may be seen by the teaching of Leo XIII The Pope who, according to Thirlwall, held, and had just compelled every consistent Roman Catholic to hold, that " our Queen, and every heretical Sovereign, is a mere usurper, who has no right to the Crown," has been succeeded by a Pope who has especially addressed himself to the conciliation of heretical Sovereigns, and has done more, perhaps, than any of his predecessors to disarm any suspicion they may entertain of him. If Thirlwall had been an English Minister, he might easily have involved this country in a Kvitio•kanify; out of sheer alarm at the supposed logical results of the Vatican decree. He would have done this after the most careful examination of historical and other evid- ence as to the meaning of the dogma ; yet, as the result shows, he would all the time have been making laws against a bogey. Roman Catholicism seems, indeed, to have had an unfortunate .effect on Thirlwall. The characteristic that most strikes him in the Irish Roman Catholic clergy is their "impudent hypocrisy," and he will admit no more *decent motive for their refusal of a State endowment than a desire "to continue sucking the blood of the poor," in order " to gratify their cupidity and ambition." If a Roman Catholic had said this of the clergy of auy Pro- testant Church, Thirlwall would have been genuinely shocked at the rashness of passing so sweeping a censure on a whole class.
The letters on the Vatican decree are included among those addressed to a friend. But the greater part of the second volume deals with matters of a lighter and more interesting kind. Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between the genial and childlike old age which these letters present to us, and the precocious and priggish boyhood, some traces of which are preserved in the first volume. At thirteen, we find Thirlwall remarking that " it is extremely convenient for a Minister, when attacked by a strong Opposition, to be able to purchase votes at an easy rate, and for a profligate debauchee who has exhausted the whole of his patrimony to bid defiance, for some years at least, to the fangs of the bailiffs, and to defraud honest industry of its dues ;" pitying " the man who had ex- pected happiness in retiring from the busy scenes which -once occupied his sole attention, and who, in view of the repose he had anticipated, finds himself the slave of the hideous mon- ster for which—because, perhaps, it is a stranger to us—we have invented no title, but have been compelled to borrow the foreign one—Ennui ;" or wishing for " a school which should be only the place of assemblage for the students, who on their .departure thence should immediately separate," on the ground
that " such a plan would embrace all the advantages attendant upon a spirit of emulation, while it avoided the pernicious effects of the boarding-houses, the common appendages of a. public school." Half a century later, his letters are full of the animals he loves, and the novels he reads. Upon the latter point, especially, Thirlwall was an enthusiast. The "most sensible ex- cuse that anybody can give for voluntarily coming to town " in summer, is the fact that the creatures at the Zoological Gardens " can only be thoroughly enjoyed in what we call hot weather, though most of them would refuse it the name." He begs his correspondent not hastily to decide on having a favour- ite horse killed, " on the supposition, so very difficult to verify, that his life has become a burden to him. It must be remembered that, though so much less happy than at the outset, it is his only one." He will not "venture to introduce a second cat into the family, without the express consent of the one now reigning, which I do not expect him to give." He " longs for a world in which colossal robins, armed with bow and arrow, shall shoot murdering farmers." At a reception at the India Office, he notices that " the scene was animated by a dear little cat, who glided through the throng with perfect composure, though not an Indian, or even a Persian, but a simple English tabby." He bears no malice against his peacock, even though " he has never let three minutes pass between morning and night, without delivering himself of a series of notes which people who do not enjoy them call screams." Why should he, indeed, when the peacock himself " is clearly unconscious of any absurdity or impropriety " It would be easy to quote one passage after another from this second volume, as examples of the many attractive elements which went to the making of Bishop Thirlwall's character. But when this had been done, the reader who did not know him per- sonally would still feel that there was a certain disparity between what the Bishop has left behind him and the impression he made on his contemporaries. As in the case of Dean Stanley, the man was something more than either the writer or the ecclesiastic. Whether it was that the habits of the student indisposed him to literary production ; or that striking as the intellectual side of his character was, the moral side was yet more striking; or that though habit and Lord Melbourne had made him a Bishop, his natural temperament had meant him for a different destiny, and he was to the last not in the place which would best have suited him, it is hard to say. But of the fact that he seemed to all who came in contact with him a greater man than he appears in this published correspondence, there can, we take it, be no doubt. In his case, his letters will not he his best monument. To his friends, his memory will still be invested with an incommunicable charm.
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