THE BISHOP OF OXFORD ON CHRISTIANITY.
A great meeting of the friends of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts took place in St. George's Hall, Bradford, on Friday last week. At least 4000 persons were assembled within the body of the Hall, while a vast number were congregated outside, greatly dis- appointed by a printed notice which conveyed the intelligence that all the tickets for the evening had been sold. There had been much excite- ment in the town for many days previously, in fact a " row " was ex- pected in St. George's Hall. on account of the part which one of the leading speakers, the Bishop of Oxford, had taken in the Boyne Hill affair. The town walls had been placarded with bills calling upon the " men and women of Bradford" to " assemble in their thousands in St. George's Hall, to resist, in a voice of thunder, these Tractarian con- fessionals." On the platform were some eighty clergymen of the Es- tablished Church, with several magistrates of the borough and riding, and a number of Dissenting ministers, including the Independent, Baptist, and Unitarian denominations. Mr. Wickham, M.P. for Brad- ford, presided. After drawing the attention of the meeting to the fact that the Society was the first Missionary Society that ever existed in con- nexion with the Church of England, and that it had silently and quietly persisted in its course for upwards of a hundred and fifty years, the chairman said, in answer to objections which have been made to the Society, that it has no peculiar doctrines ; it professes the doctrines of the Church of England which are those of the Bible, and that its object is to proclaim "Peace on earth and good will towards men." The Vene- rable Archdeacon Bickersteth moved the first resolution, to the effect that the meeting desired to impress upon all members of the Church of England their great responsibility to provide for the spread of the Gos- pel in our colonial possessions.
The Bishop of Oxford rose to second the motion and was received with mingled applause and hisses. He faced this rough opposition man- fully. "I rise," he said,as soon as he could make himself heard, "to second the resolution which has just been moved and I rise in spite of these trumpery interruptions, with the greatest possible pleasure to plead for a great cause—to plead for a great cause with brother Englishmen, and to plead, I will say to you, with brother Yorkshiremen." And on this text the Bishop enlarged, insisting on the peculiarity of the Society in the total absence of party. Referring to the religious duty of England, he said, "what is the reason that we are hemmed in by the four seas which surround the shores of this our land ? What is the meaning of it but this, that God has intended us as we increase and multiply— To swarm forth from this land amid to go forth and possess other Englands in other parts of the world. And mark how it has gone forth. Most re- markable—most wonderful were the dealings of God's Providence which produced the beginning of that stream of emigration, for it led to those persons in whom the 'principles of Christianity had asserted an absolute su- premacy becoming the first settlers from Great Britain in the great colony of America. ("Hear, Hear !") Now, I differ in many respects from those Pilgrim Fathers ; I don't want to deceive any of you about my opin- ions—I have nothing to hide. (Loud cheers and hisses.) The Pilgrim Fathers were Puritans, I am a Church of England man ; they were Pres- byterians, I am to the backbone a son of the Reformed Church of England —(Cheers); I have not another thought in my heart but this, that so long as God gives me life, intellect, and voice, I am ready to bear being abused, to be laughed at, to be anything you like—(Loud cheers)—so that I can help forward what I believe to be the purest form of the Christian religion on earth—the hearty, true, undiluted, unmingled, uncorrupted religion of the Church of England. (Loud Cheering.) Well now, mark you, I differ therefore very materially from the Pilgrim Fathers, because they were not members of the Church of England, but I honour them deeply for that deep Christianity which had laid hold of those manly hearts of theirs, and which led them to say, "Let us worship Christ according to what we believe to be the purity of the faith in distant lands rather than be obliged here in Eng- land to dissemble our convictions or to conceal our faith." In those days the doctrine, the true, honest, hearty doctrine of thorough and entire to- leration, was not understood, as' thank God, it is now. Now, the absence of toleration confines itself to a few nasty articles in newspapers,—(Cheers and laughter' followed by a storm of hisses.) Yes, I am going to say, if yoe will wait a moment—(11188e8 and interraption)—to a few, very few- (Interruption)—and to a few nasty hisses from nasty mouths. (Laughter, cheers, and hisses.) Well, I tell you that every one of such persons (and there may be some such here now) would burn us if they could. But they cannot, thank God! they cannot,. they must tolerate us. ("Bear, lacer! " and a voice, "Boyne Bill! ") Now, I say, these Pilgrim Fathers went forth and planted the faith of Christ in the far wilderness ; and herein we may mark God's marvellous dealing with our land. They were the only people who could be got at that time to plant that far-off land, and ever since there has been flowing forth from this country a stream of the heart's blood of our population. The Bishop concluded by expressing his belief that the outbreak in India was attributable to our cowardice in not avowing ourselves as Christians, which made our conduct unintelligible to the Hindoo popu- lation, who, "always afraid of trickery, regarded the forbearance ex- tended to them by their rules in regard to their religion as some deeper treachery than usual, and as a scheme to bring them by some unper- ceived turn to a profession of Christianity." The whole world is before us, he said, India with its waiting multitudes ; China to which we have so long done such deep wrong by the iniquities of the opium trade ; and Africa, where we perpetrated unnumbered wrongs before we turned round and cast off the abominations of the slave-trade.
After the meeting the Bishop of Oxford was presented with an address from the members of the Central Short-time Committee, conveying an expression of their gratitude for his Lordship's services in the House of Lords in securing the passing of the Ten Hours Bill.
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