THE ATTACK ON THE BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH. T H F, Rev. Hugh
Price Hughes professes to think it a public scandal that any Bishop should regard the Sermon on the Mount as not in any sense intended to lay down the principles on which the legislation and adminis- tration of a State should be governed. So far as we can judge, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes insists on the State following out principles which he himself makes not the smallest attempt to follow out even in his own individual con- duct. He assured the world last Sunday, if the report in the Pall Mall Gazette of his speech at St. James's Hall may be trusted, that such a teacher as the Bishop of Peterborough " ought to be expelled from all decent society." Was that by wav of illustrating his reverence for the saying in the Sermon on theMount that " whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; whosoever shall say to his brother, Rua, shall be in danger of the council; and.whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hellfire" ? Certainly it is not stated what the danger of him shall be who shall say to his brother that he should be " expelled from all decent society ;" but, so far as we understand. the expressions so gravely condemned in our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, there was not one of them that conveyed as much rancour as that which the reverend gentleman who thinks that the State as a whole may safely act on the principles of the Sermon on the Mount has levelled, without apparently the smallest- compunction, against the Bishop of Peterborough. Yet it seems pretty clear that the Rev. Hugh Prise Hughes either has not seriously studied the Sermon on the Mount at all, or else that, having done so, he thinks that it requires the imme- diate and absolute dissolution of all State Governments, and all the tribunals and Courts.of Justice which they establish. If the very first duty of States were to follow out the injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount, the mere appointment of a Judge would itself become an offence of .the first magnitude. For how could there be any Judge under the sanction of the law " Judge not, that ye be not judged" ? And how could taxation be possible in a State of which it was the first principle to " give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow. of thee turn not thou away" ? Even if a Judge under such a law were not himself an offence and a transgression, con ceive how far it would be possible for him to act upon the principle that when any suitor accused another of stealing his coat, the Judge ought to inquire whether he had at once offered his cloak to the accuser, and if not, to cot- demn the suitor in costs, and direct that he should at once transfer to the accused another garment that did not belong to him. Though it is hard to lay down the limits of what fanatics may believe, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes cannot possibly hold any doctrine of this kind ; and as he doubtless knows his New Testament by heart, we can only infer that he thinks the ordinary organisation of Courts of Justice in every Christian State intrinsically wrong and inconsistent with our Lord's injunctions. But even if that is his view, he must stand so much alone amongst Dissenters, that it is surely rather rash in him to declare that for not agreeing with him, the Bishop of Peterborough should be " expelled from all decent society," even if the reverend gentleman has some secret interpretation of his own of the command against passionate language, which makes it appear quite consistent with this vehe- ment moral invective. The particular dictum of the Bishop of Peterborough which gave rise to all this spiritual vapouring seems to have been that he saw uo absolute sin in saying : "I bet you five shillings that it will not rain to-morrow." We should be very sorry to hold any different view from that of the Bishop of Peterborough, though we do not think it would be at all a praiseworthy mode of spending money, to risk anything with any frequency on one's own supposed weather-wisdom. Still, a mat many ways of spending money which are by no means specially praiseworthy, are not sinful. If the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes ever spends anything on tobacco, —we have not the least guess whether he does or does not,— we should not regard that mode of spending money as especially praiseworthy any more than as especially blame- worthy. If he ever buys himself a bun when he could get plain bread at a cheaper rate, and with less disadvantage to his digestion, we should not call, the purchase of the bun especially praiseworthy any more than especially blameworthy. Nor can we conceive that, even though it is not especially praiseworthy for a man to test his sup- posed insight into the causation of events by a bet, it- is at all more sinful than to spend money on any other small excitement which he might more wisely forego. Gambling, as we understand it, is paying more than a man can pro- perly afford for the purposes of any mere amusement, for a particular kind of exciting amusement which is more dangerous than others only because it is, to those who enjoy it, so much more absorbing. And the more conscious a man is of either his own or any one else's liability to the temptations of such excitement, the more on his guard he should be against yielding to the temptation, or throwing it in the way of another who is thus liable. But it is fanatic nonsense to call it wicked for any man to risk a few sixpences on a rubber at whist when there is no danger of tempting anybody into such an excitement, at least in cases-where the same man would feel it perfectly 'legitimate and innocent to risk precisely the same sum on buying an excursion ticket which he only intended to use in case of fine weather, and which would be wasted if the day turned out wet. Even the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes might possibly, we suppose, purchase such a chance as that, with all the risk that would attach to it, and would not think it particularly charitable in any brother-minister to assure him that for so doing he ought to be expelled from all decent society.
It is true, we believe, that Mr. Cobden once spoke of his politics as the politics of the Sermon on the Mount. But even in his mouth the phrase must have been purely rhetorical, and must simply have meant that States, like individuals, ought not to be vindictive, and ought, so far as it is safe and possible, to do good to the unthankful and the evil, no less than to the good. Mr. Cobden certainly never advocated the abolition of prisons in deference to the saying, " Resist not evil," nor the passing of a- law compelling the robbed to impoverish himself farther for the benefit of the robber, in deference to the saying about the coat and cloak. Mr. Cobden was a very shrewd as well as a very good man, and if he had once attempted to interpret for himself the inner meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, he would have seen at once that it was a code of principles directed to the government of individual feeling, not to the regulation of jurispru- dence or the policy of States. In point of fact, no State has ever attempted to embody the higher spiritual prin- ciples in the requirements of its criminal code without doing infinitely more harm than good, as Calvin's govern- ment of Geneva and the strict Puritan government of Massachusetts have from time to time shown. As the Bishop of Peterborough justly said, both Christ and his Apostles pointedly disclaimed the wish to say, under any given circumstances, what men ought to do. They endea- voured to show their disciples what they ought to love, and left it to the dictates of that love, when fairly excited, to teach them how they ought to act. There is no fanaticism more mischievous than that which proposes to " expel from all decent society " those who boldly deny the culpability of any act which a single strait-laced conscience con- demns ;—for the result must be that we should soon find ourselves plunged into an atmosphere of hypocrisy worse than the Pharisaism of our Lord's time,—more ostentatious, more inquisitorial, more cruel. We hold that public men, and especially ecclesiastics, who have the courage to denounce such narrow nonsense, do the best possible service to the State.
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