Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

pire, including the Grand Duchy of Finland," for there has hitherto been no common legislation, as for two states there could not be, and these words for the first time treat Finland as part of the Empire. A single procedure is laid down for the enactment both of the laws of that new class and of "the laws which are applied only within the limits of the Grand Duchy, in case they touch the common interests of the Empire, or are connected with the legislation of the Empire." In this procedure provision is, indeed, made for obtaining the opinion of the Finnish Senate, and in some cases that of the Diet; but those opinions may be disregarded, and the enacting power is reserved for the State Council of Russia. And in the manifesto the Tsar says: "We have found it necessary to reserve to ourselves the ultimate decision as to which laws come within the scope of the general legislation of the Empire." Thus the necessary participation of the Diet in legislation is swept away, for every case in which the advisers of the Emperor may be able to find something which they can assert to touch the interests of Russia, a category so large that, if the manifesto and its statutes should be maintained, the remaining power of the Diet will probably be but small. And be it small or great, after the violation of the guarantees given during a century to the constitution, it can only be felt to be held on sufferance.

In pursuance of the manifesto and its statutes the Diet was expected merely to give an opinion on the military bills laid before it, but on 27th May it made the reply mentioned in the note at the beginning of this article, in which they were dealt with as in the exercise of its usual legislative functions. In this remarkable document the right of the estates to participate in legislation was vindicated in a manner which must command the entire and unhesitating assent

of every fairminded person who studies the historical facts, even in the summary of them which has here been presented, and still more in proportion to the greater detail in which he may investigate them. In the same reply the government bills were examined and rejected on their merits, while the views of the Diet on the particular subject were embodied in two other bills which were submitted for the Imperial sanction. The Tsar rejoined by a manifesto of 10–22 June, declaring the opinions of the Diet on the constitutional question to be unwarrantable, and announcing that its reply would be taken into consideration, in accordance with the February statutes, in the final drafting of the military bill.

The matter is said to be now before the State Council, presumably for such final drafting; but there is still room for hope that wiser counsels may prevail. There is room for sanctioning the bills sent up by the Diet without alteration, in which case they would become law in practical accordance with the constitution, or for sending them back for further consideration by the Diet. The Emperor is believed to have been most imperfectly enlightened on the real grounds of the pain and dismay caused by the February measures. When a memorial against them-in the spring of last year-received such a number of signatures, collected from every part of Finland by the most devoted exertions while in extensive districts the snow was still on the ground, the Emperor is said to have been moved to anger by the belief that he was personally mistrusted as a fair judge of what were questions of common interest, and what purely local questions to be reserved, as before, for the Diet. Surely it must now have been brought home to him that the objection to the February measures was not based on any personal mistrust, but on the fact that any such judgment as that which

they committed to him should have been deemed necessary, depriving the Finnish nation of their right as freemen to shape their own course. That right left them, there is no doubt that they will continue to co-operate sincerely in maintaining the international interests which they willingly leave to the determination of Russia, as they did when Finnish troops garrisoned St. Petersburg while the Russian troops were engaged in the Crimea. The Diet, in its reply, has offered to increase the active army from 5,600 to 12,000 non-commissioned officers and men, to extend the total length of service in the active army, and the reserve from five years to ten, and to sanction the employment outside of Finland, for the common defence, both of the army when not needed for such defence at home, and of the Landwehr for the defence of St. Petersburg. But if the right to shape their own course is denied them, the Emperor, even were he never misled in defining common interests, would be powerless, single-handed in the midst of his State Council, to save Finland from an injurious treatment of those interests. At the present moment Finland sees itself threatened by the government bills not only with an exorbitant levy of its youth, but with their being sent to perform their military service out of the country even in time of peace, with comrades whose language they will not understand, among a population whose habits and religion will be foreign to them, and without the influence of their own religious pastors to counteract the temptations incident to barrack life in The National Review.

such circumstances. The same bills limit the abridgement of the period of active service which is granted to those conscripts whose educational standard places them in the first class, by the condition that they shall present a certificate of their knowledge of the Russian language; a knowledge quite unnecessary for drill with Russian words of command, and to which nothing parallel is exacted in Austria-Hungary, where the difficulties connected with an army composed of several races have to be faced in a far graver form, but are faced without partiality. Thus military service would be made a means of compulsion for spreading the Russian language in Finland, while young men of education in Russia, being placed under no corresponding necessity of acquiring another language, would be in a favored situation. What more striking object-lesson could be given of the ignorance of Finnish interests or the indifference to them-the effect must be the same whichever alternative we choose-which must continue to characterize the management of the affairs of Finland, and to damage that country both materially and morally, if the February measures should be maintained! If the Emperor cannot be induced to withdraw from the February position while the attachment of the Finlanders to his throne is unimpaired, another example will be given in Europe of the baneful effects of overthrowing an ancient constitution, and trying to base a brandnew order on the proverbially unsafe seat of bayonets.

J. Westlake.

FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF BISHOP WALSHAM HOW.

A High Churchman was practically an unknown quantity in those parts when Bishop Walsham How first went to be rector of Whittington in 1851. The smallest innovations or improvements in a service, such as are generally accepted nowadays in Evangelical Churches, raised a storm of protest, and the ignorance displayed by newspapers as well as by private individuals is almost past belief in these days when we have been satiated with articles and correspondence on "advanced prac

tices."

For instance:

A Wellington

paper, commenting severely on the supposed ritualistic practices at Welsh Hampton, spoke of the Vicar as "practising the most unblushing celibacy."

The same paper, describing an evening service at St. Mary's, Shrewsbury, spoke of the vicar as walking in procession with his curate from the vestry and then entering the desk and beginning the evening service, "or, as borrowing the language of these gentlemen we ought more correctly to say, evening matins."

A short time ago the Reverend James Hook, Vicar of Morton, was coming to see me by train. There were several women in the carriage, and one of them began to talk to the others about Whittington, asking them if they knew what shocking things were done in the church there. She then said she once went into Whittington Church and saw the host on the altar. There were great exclamations of horror, when Mr. Hook quietly looked up from his paper and said, "I beg your pardon, what did you see?" "The host on the altar, sir," she said. "Oh, and what was it like?" She hesitated and said she could not exactly describe it. He told her not to mind about being very exact, but would she tell him what sort of a thing it was? She then said she did not notice very

carefully. So he then said he would tell her what it meant, and having done so he told her how wicked it was to invent such stories. She was then frightened, and said with some alarm, "Well, sir, I am certain I saw two rows of candlesticks down the two sides of the church."

An advertisement copied from the Liverpool Courier, January, 1874. (N.B. This refers to a prosecution of Mr. Parnell, of St. Margaret's, for ritualistic practices,) "Parnell Prosecution. A gentleman who intends subscribing £10 to the St. Margaret's Defence Fund is desirous to pair with a gentleman about to subscribe the same sum towards the prosecution, in order to save the pockets of both. Address C. I., Courier Office."

A clergyman going into a very advanced church could not make out what they were doing, and said he tried various parts of the prayer-book in vain, and at last bethought him of "Prayers for those at sea." But this, too, failed, so he gave up trying.

A clergyman going to see a parish offered him, was shown it by a farmer churchwarden, who in the course of conversation said, "Are there many Puseyites, sir, where you come from?" He answered, "Not many; are there many here?" Farmer: "There used to be, but they are getting scarce now." "How do you account for that?" Farmer: "Well, sir, the boys have taken the eggs." This curious reason was explained when it turned out that the farmer meant "peewits." A lady friend of mine the other day wrote to say that their clergyman was accused of ritualistic tendencies. She could not herself discover them, but she said he certainly had something on the back of his neck which to her looked like a button, but which she was credibly informed was really the thin end of the wedge.

As may be supposed, a large number of the stories in Bishop Walsham How's note-books refer to curious in

cidents and awkward situations during divine service. The following are a selection of anecdotes of this class, and are in almost every case authentic.

My grandfather, the Reverend Peter How, was Rector of Workington in Cumberland, where there was (and is untouched to this day, 1878!) a large "three-decker" clerk's desk, readingdesk, and pulpit, one on the top of the other, blocking up the centre of the church and, of course, all facing west. My grandfather was reading the prayers one Sunday when his large black dog came into church and found him out, so he opened the door, to which is attached a small flight of steps, and the dog came in and lay down under the seat, unseen by the congregation (who were deeply ensconced in the high square pews), and at last was forgotten by his master. In due time the latter went to the vestry, put on his black gown, and ascended the pulpit, when, soon after, beginning his sermon, he became aware that the people were all convulsed with laughter, and looking down over the pulpit cushion he saw his dog with its hind legs on the seat and its forefeet on the cushion of the readingdesk gravely regarding the congregation.

Another story of the Bishop's grandfather follows:

My grandfather was once baptizing a small collier boy of three or four years old at Workington. Other children having been first baptized he proceeded to baptize this boy also, but when he put the water on his forehead the boy turned upon him fiercely, saying, "What did you do that for, ye great black dog? I did nothing to you!"

Workington was also the scene of an awkward situation in which, when a very young man, the Bishop found himself.

When I was a deacon, and naturally shy, I was visiting my aunts in WorkLIVING AGE. VOL. VII. 355

ington, where my grandfather had been Rector, and was asked to preach on Sunday evening in St. John's, a wretched modern church-a plain oblong with galleries and a pulpit like a very tall wineglass, with a very narrow little straight staircase leading up to it in the middle of the east part of the church. When the hymn before the sermon was given out I went as usual to the vestry to put on the black gown. Not knowing that the clergyman generally stayed there till the end of the hymn, 1 emerged as soon as I had thus vested myself and walked to the pulpit and ascended the stairs. When nearly at the summit to my horror I discovered a very fat beadle in the pulpit lighting the candles. We could not possibly pass on the stairs and the eyes of the whole congregation were upon me. It would be ignominious to retreat. So after a few minutes' reflection I saw my way out of the difficulty, which I overcame by a very simple mechanical contrivance. I entered the pulpit, which exactly fitted the beadle and myself, and then face to face we executed a rotatory movement to the extent of a semicircle, when the beadle, finding himself next the door of the pulpit, was enabled to descend, and I remained master of the situation.

When curate at Kidderminster, I had on one occasion to baptize nine children at once. The ninth was a boy of nearly two years of age, and was taken up and put into my arms. This he stoutly resisted, beginning immediately to kick with all his might. His clothes being very loose and very short, he very soon kicked himself all but out of them, but I had got him fast by his clothes and his head, and was repeating the words of reception into the Church with as much gravity as I could command, when his mother, possessing a strong maternal appreciation of the fair proportions of her lively offspring, and a relatively weak appreciation of the solemnity of the occasion, remarked aloud to me, with a gratified smile, "He's a nice little lump, sir, isn't he?"

The Earl of Powis, among his many acts of generous kindness, has given

substantial aid to the Rev. C. F. Lowder's very poor district of St. Peter's, London Docks. He went to the laying of the stone of the church there, and just as the ceremony was about to begin a bottle was handed by some one to Mr. Lowder. He could not make it out, and consulted Lord Powis, who at last ingeniously suggested that, as it looked like oil, it was probably intended for the anointing of the stone. So they agreed to pour it quietly on the stone then and there. The smell that arose was dreadful, but the service began, and very few had noticed the bottle. In the evening an old woman, a former parishioner, came up to Mr. Lowder, and asked after his rheumatism, and said she hoped he got the bottle. On his saying, “Oh, yes, it reached me quite safely," she a wonderful explained that it was cure for rheumatism, which she had manufactured herself.

If an ingenious way was, on this occasion, found out of a difficulty, what about the next?

Longley was When Archbishop Bishop of Durham, he was one day obliged to absent himself from the prayers in his chapel, and asked an old clergyman who happened to be there to read the prayers. It happened that the first lesson was Judges v, and in reading verse 17 the poor old the presence clergyman, mindful of of Mrs. and the Miss Longleys, modestly altered the last word and read, "Asher continued on the sea-shore, garments." and abode in his was told me by a daughter of Archbishop Longley.

This

A former vicar of Newbiggin received a message one Sunday morning from a neighboring clergyman, who had been taken ill, to ask if he could provide for his duty. So he sent to his curate (my brother-in-law) to tell him he should not be at church that

morning, ordered his carriage, and put an old sermon, which he had no time to look at, in his pocket. When he began to preach he soon found out that the sermon was one which he had preached on bidding farewell to his

first curacy. For a page or two he tried to omit the more pointed allusions to the occasion of its previous use (which must have been many years before), but, to quote his own account, "I soon found that wouldn't do, as it was all about it, so I spoke boldly of the close of my twelve years' ministry among them, and I do assure you, sir, I left many of the congregation in tears."

A somewhat similar story comes a little later in the book, but must be placed here:

A shy, nervous clergyman near Bradford was about to help a friend by reading the prayers when a message came to say that a neighboring incumbent was taken ill and to ask for help. The rector could not go, so the friend had to be sent, but, having no sermon with him he borrowed one from the rector, who wrote a clear good hand. He selected one well written, of which the subject was "the value of time," and meant to read it over on the way, but eventually did not like to do so as he sat beside a servant who drove him over. So it happened that he had to read it for the first time in the pulpit. He got on very well till he came the to a sentence saying that, as parish possessed no church clock, it He was his intention to present one. was too nervous to omit the sentence, and (I was assured at Bradford) did actually present the promised clock, which cost £70."

[blocks in formation]
« AnteriorContinua »