respective hands and seals in the Guardian of the present month.*

Lord Ebury writes to the Editor as follows :

"SIR, AS I perceive that you continue to designate the petition of the 460 clergymen presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Horsfall, and printed there, and subsequently, at the request of Mr. Gell, presented to the House of Lords by myself, as the Ebury Memorial,' I write to say that, although you have no just grounds for giving it such a designation, I am willing to take an indulgent view of the exigencies of editorial partisanship. As, however, it appears to have induced some worthy clergymen to enlarge upon the misrepresen. tation, and to assert, not only without a vestige of authority, but absolutely contrary to my own avowal, that I was going to found my motion entirely upon the allegations of this petition, it is time that I should declare, once for all, that I intend to base my motion neither on that petition, nor any other petition, nor upon the dictum of any party or person whatever.

I am conscious of the heavy responsibility I have undertaken. I presume no one intends to become answerable for me in this matter, so neither have I sought, nor do I seek, to shroud myself under the responsibility of any other. I think therefore I have a claim, in candour, to be judged, in regard to this question, solely by my own declarations.

If all be well, I shall, after Easter, again submit to Parliament, I trust in a becoming spirit, a motion for a ROYAL COMMISSION, upon no narrow or exclusive grounds, but upon considerations, both religious and political, of the deepest possible importance to our Church and country.

Moor Park, March 3, 1860."

EBURY."

The above cannot but be regarded as a distinct disclaimer upon the noble lord's part of any necessary connexion between his motion and the work now under our review; while the same paper, by an odd coincidence, contains the corroborative evidence of Mr. Gell himself to the like effect.

After remonstrating with the editor of that somewhat

* See letters of Lord Ebury and Rev. Philip Gell, in the Guardian of March 7, 1860. It will be borne in mind that the original form of Lord Ebury's motion was simply that of a demand for "a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Liturgy."

THE DERBY PETITION OF 1860.

59

one-sided publication for his paltry criticism upon a few of the signatures to the so-called "Derby petition (as if, forsooth, there should be no blots discoverable by a microscopic eye among the boasted 10,000 names attached to the Westminster manifesto),* Mr. Gell proceeds as follows:

"There is another point in your mode of speaking of us which I hope you will excuse me saying it is of considerable importance to have rightly understood. You give us the title of 'Lord Ebury's supporters,' or Lord Ebury's memorialists.' Now, the petition was set on foot without the slightest connexion with Lord Ebury's motion; and, though he was kind enough to present it in the House of Lords, he honestly declared that it was a petition he could not himself patronise; and we have always had to support our own cause, standing upon our own ground. Of a plan which stops so short of ours as Lord Ebury's does, we cannot of course be called the adherents or supporters, as subscribers to the petition referred to. When Lord Ebury has obtained all he asks his success is not ours; and we shall still have our own more important improvements to plead for. Had he undertaken to pursue them, and to stand or fall with our cause, there could be no mistake in our being taken for his supporters, ready to stand or fall with him; nor would this explanation have been necessary to ensure a right understanding of the objects and principles asserted in our petition. When Lord Ebury has done, as far as he has already declared himself, we have not, as a glance at the petition will show.

March, 3, 1860."

P. GELL."

We hold these two documents, taken together, to be an unanswerable reply to those timid legislators, whether episcopal or lay, in the House of Lords, who may be disposed to meet Lord Ebury's motion with a direct negative, on the ground of its complicity with the contents of "Mr. Fisher's book," "Mr. Gell's pamphlet," or "The Petition of the 460 clergymen."

For good or for evil, we have here the best possible authority for asserting that they have no necessary connexion whatever with one another. Nay, more, Mr. Gell expressly

* See our subsequent analysis of this much-overrated "demonstration" of clerical opinion. Letter LXXXI., pp. 71-4.

says, "When Lord Ebury has done, he has not." Let those, therefore, who oppose Mr. Gell and Mr. Fisher, reserve their opposition to such time as it is called for, and not wantonly provoke a fatal union (now disclaimed on both sides) between Lord Ebury's forces and those of the extreme Revisionists, by that most childish of all possible principles of resistance, "Let us not say A, lest we should have to say B."

*

I am, yours, &c.,

March 28, 1860.

"INGOLDSBY."

LETTER LXXXI.

وو

"THE LITURGY AND THE DISSENTERS (BY THE REV. ISAAC

TAYLOR, CURATE OF TROTTERSCLIFFE).

"Bold is the task when Curates, grown too wise,
Instruct the Prelates where their error lies;

For though we deem the short-lived fury past,
Be sure the mighty will revenge at last."

POPE (Travesty).

SIR, Our only knowledge of the writer of the above tract† is obtained from Crockford's Clerical Directory for 1860, where he is thus described :

:

"TAYLOR, Isaac, Trotterscliffe, Maidstone. Trin. Coll. Camb.; 19th Wrangl.; B.A., 1853; M.A., 1857; Deacon, 1857; Pr. 1858; both by Archbp. of Cant. Curate of Trotterscliffe."

Now, supposing this description to be correct, we must confess it strikes us forcibly, as a great anomaly in our

*If this union afterwards took place, let the blame justly rest with those who opposed the noble lord in his original demand, which demand was subsequently, though somewhat clumsily, yielded, in the appointment of the Rubrical Commission of 1867-70.

† London: Hatchard and Co., Piccadilly, 1860. Second Edition.

THE LITURGY AND THE DISSENTERS.

61

profession, that talents which at the Bar, in a counting-house, or in an office of civil engineers, would have secured for their possessor an independence, with sure prospect of advancement, should, after seven years from his taking a good degree at Cambridge, be still rewarded with only the miserable curacy of a poor village in Kent.* There is clearly something wrong here, whatever there may be in the Canons, Rubric, and Liturgy of the Church; and the more so, in the particular case before us, if we are rightly informed that the Amphitryon in question is son of the veritable Amphitryon of Ongar, so well known to fame in the ranks of the Dissenters. The accession to the Church of the scion of such a house ought surely, before his thirtieth year, to have been marked by some other token than a curate's salary, amounting perchance to £25 a quarter.

But Mr. Isaac Taylor has unfortunately "written a book;" and, more unfortunately still, the object of that book is to prove and he has done it too, with the precision of a Cambridge mathematician-that the comprehension of certain classes of Nonconformists within the pale of the Establishment (by means of some modification in our Book of Common Prayer) would be the most useful thing that could be done for the Church-yes, for the CHURCH-" at this present time."

We are aware that this is a statement so unpalatable to ears polite, that we should not have been the least surprised to find Mr. Isaac Taylor still curate of Trotterscliffe had he made it when he took his Wrangler's degree seven years ago. But seeing "the book" was written in 1860, whereas Mr. T. graduated in 1853, we cannot understand this anticipatory

Mr. Taylor is now in receipt of gross £1,530 per annum ! thanks to a lay patron, Earl Brownlow-to his credit be it spoken (see Crockford's Clerical Directory for 1878); but we have not heard of "the Curate of Trotterscliffe " writing any more books on the Revision of the Liturgy!

"Thus Whigs on places settle, and grow dumb."

condemnation, and can only explain it by supposing that though he may not have earlier printed his thoughts, he may have been rash enough to

"Speak what wisdom would conceal,

And truths invidious to the great reveal."

These "truths," as they appear in the forty pages of Mr. Taylor's pamphlet, amount simply to this, that whereas the population of England and Wales may be reckoned at about eighteen millions, the Established Church only retains any effectual hold upon one-third of that number; that some five millions systematically absent themselves from every place of public worship; and that about five or six millions have forsaken the Church, and joined the ranks of the Protestant Dissenters.

Mr. Taylor bases these unpleasant calculations on the Census of 1851, and Mr. Mann's tables, the accuracy of which we are in no condition to disprove, however much we may question it. We should have been better satisfied had Mr.

*The following remarks on Census Sunday were addressed by the Rev. C. Girdlestone, of Kingswinford, to the Editor of the Clerical Journal, March, 1854

"In reference to Census Sunday, and to any conclusions drawn from the information then collected, I beg to observe :

1. That the numbers attending divine service were in most cases not accurately counted, but loosely guessed, so that the returns ill deserve the name of statistics.

2. That if the numbers had been counted ever so accurately, they would have been no valid criterion from which to estimate the proportionate numbers of the members of each communion, for two obvious reasons; one, because attendance at divine service on the Sunday is not held to be of the same importance in all communions alike, or practised in all to the like extent; the other, because, owing to difference of organisation, it was much more practicable in some than in others to secure a full attendance on the day in question.

3. That if the Registrar-General aimed at obtaining the true statistics of religious denominations, he had but to require each head of a family to note this point for each inmate, just as was done in a matter far from being so easy to ascertain-the age of each. We should then have had not