Canon Heurtley has been making rather a goose of himself.
It seems that at the late jubilee dinner of the Union Debating Society at Oxford, Archbishop Manning, though only a Roman Catholic Archbishop, was courteously given precedence over two of the English Bishops, the Bishop of Oxford and the Bishop of Chichester ; and that the worthy Canon, on observing the pre- cedence given to the Roman prelate, left the table. He had not, he says, thought of coming forward publicly in the matter ; but as public attention has since been drawn to this practical protest of his, he thinks it well to justify it, and he does so in a circular which the Times printed yesterday. After writing the names of the dignified persons who were postponed to the Roman Catholic Archbishop, Canon Heurtley says :—" Now I protest against an arrangement which gave precedence before these eminent persons, four of them Peers, to a Commoner who is indebted for his rank, whatever it may be, not to our Sovereign, but to a foreign Prince who "neither had nor ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence, or autho- rity within this realm." Further, I protest against an arrange- ment by which an ecclesiastic who, by submitting to be reordained, has repudiated the Orders of the English Church as heretical, and consequently null and void, had precedence given him before two bishops of that Church. And once more, I protest against an arrangement by which this said ecclesiastic had precedence given him before the bishop of this diocese in his cathedral city." Dr. Heurtley is indeed on his high horse. But what would he have said if a Conetantinopolitan patriarch had happened to have been an Oxford Union man, and had had this precedence conceded him? Should we have had any- thing of all this wonderful burst of eloquence? Would it not have seemed very natural to him that the foreign ecclesi- astic should by courtesy take precedence of our own people ? Of course, Archbishop Manning's legal rank is simply that of a doctor of divinity, but we do not know why the courteous recog- nition of foreign ecclesiastical rank should be forbidden, because a man has the misfortune to think English Church Orders null and void,—an opinion which the Archbishop shares with Mr. Miall and other Dissenters.
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