Mr. Spurgeon has answered the Bishop of Oxford's silly attack
upon him for at once preferring Voluntaryism to Establishment, and at the same time lamenting the miserable salaries of many dissenting ministers. His letter to the Times of this day week upon Dr. Wilberforce's argument, was admitted to the temporal honours of large type, and the rejoinder was certainly con- clusive enough if also a little redundant. If the Bishop of Oxford should, at some future day, says Mr. Spurgeon, he found preaching for starving curates, "or even preach ing for the excellent society which relieves distressed clerks in holy orders with pecuniary grants and bundles of cast- off clothing, or if we should hear him deploring that a clergyman should, according to an advertisement in the Rock, be subsisting on buttermilk and potatoes, would his Lordship be charged with inconsistency, and would it be commendable for some humorous member of the venerable Bench in tones of mimicry to make him the subject of public ridicule ?" That was quite enough to answer a very silly argument, and Mr. Spurgeon would have done better not to enlarge, and better still not to refuse Dr. Wilberforce his ordinary title at the close of the letter, and speak of him as " Mr. Samuel Wilberforce." There was something like pique there, and Mr. Spurgeon, having so good a rejoinder, should not have felt pique, much less shown it.
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