TO THE VENERABLE

HENRY EDWARD MANNING,

ARCHDEACON OF CHICHESTER.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

IN dedicating this Sermon to you, I am not influenced solely by the desire of giving utterance to my esteem and affection, and of connecting my name with yours, as it has pleased God in His lovingkindness to associate us, by ordaining that we should be the two eyes of the spiritual Father of this Diocese. Both the occasion when this Sermon was preacht, and the subject treated in it, almost constrain me to inscribe it with your name.

For to you, far more than to any other man,—after him who was its founder, and the instrument of this as well as of so many other blessings to his Diocese,does our Association owe its original establishment, and whatever prosperity it may since have enjoyed. Your wisdom, under God, has been our chief guide; your eloquence has stirred our hearts; your loving spirit has checkt and healed the first outbreaks of anything like division. Thus since he, whom we both loved and revered as a father, was called to his reward, before our Annual Meeting was hallowed, as he had purpost that it should

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be, for the first time with a religious service, the little offering, which would otherwise have belonged to him, falls by a sort of inheritance to you.

Moreover the very subject seems to mark it as rightfully yours. Unity, the Unity of the Church, is of all things the dearest to your heart, at least only subordinate to, or rather coordinate with Truth, without which, you well know, all Unity must be fallacious. And as that which fills the heart will overflow from the lips, you yourself, several times since this Sermon was preacht, have poured out your earnest thoughts and desires for the Unity of the Church. Your sermon at the next Anniversary of our Association was devoted in great part to setting forth the spiritual principle of Unity, how it is by putting on the Mind of Christ that we shall best seek Unity and ensue it, and how our dissensions and divisions arise from our want of that mind, and from our sins against it. More recently you have made the Unity of the Church the subject of an elaborate Treatise, in which, as in all your writings, the spirit of love speaks, but in the argumentative part of which, I grieve to say, there is much I am unable to go along with. A Dedication however would be a place ill-suited for discussing the differences between us: indeed to do so effectually might require a volume scarcely inferior in bulk to your own; and the following Sermon may suggest certain points at which we diverge. In your first Charge on the other hand, where you also speak of Unity, there are half a dozen sentences on which I would crave your permission to offer some remarks. For they give a brief, summary expression to an opinion which is very dominant in these days, but which I cannot hold to be other than erroneous, and which,

whenever it has been allowed to display itself in action, has been hurtful to all true living Unity.

In the latter part of that Charge, having spoken of the manner in which the Annual Meetings of the Clergy at Visitations may serve to produce uniformity in our practice, you proceed thus: "I am prepared to hear it said that uniformity without unity is a hollow and lifeless thing. This is granted as soon as said. But will not a thoughtful, much more a philosophical mind detect something trivial and unmeaning in this rhetorical way of opposing unity and uniformity, as if they were two ideas, almost two repugnant things, instead of the outward and inward, the visible and invisible form of one and the same reality? But even though they were things separable, uniformity even without unity is at least better than discrepancy added to disunion. If we were indeed so shorn of the spirit of grace as to lack inward unity among ourselves, still there is no reason why we should inflict the visible tokens of our disunion upon the flocks committed to our charge. But after all, is it not certain that uniformity is the silent and symbolical language of unity? Is there any law in God's works, which has not its own invariable form? What is the variety of nature but the uniform expression of a variety of laws, not a various expression of any one law? Do not laws of relation, and proportion, and symmetrical figure pervade all the works of God with a severe and unerring uniformity? It is absolutely certain that, wheresoever there is unity in the idea, there will also be uniformity in the expression; and in all things which have life, the converse is also true. Dissolution of parts will break up the uniformity of organized bodies; but it is only after the

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life is fled. It will linger a while in testimony of what it was, and then dissolve into multitude and variety. there is no such thing as unity of life without a uniformity of structure and a harmony of operations: and in all moral action uniformity of practice is not only a symbol but a means to unity of will."

Now in the first place I would beg you to consider, why is it "trivial and unmeaning" to speak of Unity and Uniformity as two totally distinct and separate ideas, seeing that people are so prone to confound them, and that such evils have resulted from the confusion. Of course, if the opposition be merely "rhetorical," it may then be trivial and unmeaning. But even if uniformity were the only outward expression in which unity can manifest itself, still it is not necessarily trivial and unmeaning to urge men to meditate on the distinction between the form and the spirit; since our idolatrous fancy and understanding are so apt to mix and mistake them, and to cleave in all things mainly, if not solely, to that which is outward. Hence those persons in all ages, who have lifted up their voices against the superstitious observance of the letter which killeth, and have called men to the reasonable worship of the lifegiving spirit, are rightly honoured among the benefactors of mankind. Nay, did not our Divine Master Himself reprove those who were scrupulous in tithing mint and anise and cummin, while they neglected judgement and mercy and faith? those who made clean the outside of the cup and platter, but within were full of ravening and wickedness? At the same time I readily allow that the antiformalists also often run into excess, forgetting that, though the empty cup is sorry refreshment, the wine without the cup would