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Church Politics and Church Prospects.
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The audacity of the Essayists was left far behind by the reckless and obtrusive Jacobinism of Bishop Colenso. Happily, the preface with which, after the manner of the 'Arabian Nights,' he produced his intelligent Zulu, as the cause of the subsequent narrative, went far, by its naive absurdity, to counteract much of the possible mischief of the ponderous lucubration. Still, the book was a scandal and an outrage, as well as a misfortune to the whole Christian Church, and the Bishop of Capetown deserves the thanks of all honest people for having taken energetic steps, in concert with his comprovincials, to release the diocese of Natal from the superintendence of its bewildered Bishop. The adequate cause, all things considered, existed there, in that centre of missionary work among the heathen, as it hardly did in the case of the two country incumbents who are resting under Lord Westbury's regis. But he had more than one way of acting. He has adopted the one which leaves the question at this moment to be solved by the always recurring Judicial Committee. This, of course, leads us anxiously to inquire how far Bishop Gray has been careful to maintain the due distinction between those spiritual attributes which Dr. Colenso was very certain never to get any court in England to reimpose upon Natalese or Zulus, and that tenure of his freehold in a queen-given bishopric, considered as a mere property, irrespective of ecclesiastical considerations, of which the court might naturally constitute itself the guardian. The Bishop had himself, not long before, sustained a defeat under rather similar circumstances, at the hands of Mr. Long. Mr. Long might have been to any extent contumacious, but the Judicial Committee held that the Bishop was not within his powers in interfering with his incumbency. It would have been dexterous policy in the Bishop of Capetown to have swung himself round into the position which Mr. Long had himself made for him, and left Dr. Colenso on the pavement of Whitehall, enjoying the temporalities of a despiritualised office. Had the Bishop, with his assessors, declared that Bishop Colenso's aberrations had rendered him unfit to exercise his duties until he had repented of those heresies, and had in consequence released his clergy from their allegiance to him, and delegated himself, as metropolitan, to undertake the supervision of the diocese of Natal until Dr. Colenso had made his recantation, we believe that he would have placed himself and the Church in that colony in a position, which might perhaps be, technically speaking, a little irregular, but which would be unassailable by any court, colonial or imperial. Of course we assume (as facts have since shown to be the case) that the metropolitan could rely on the Clergy of Natal to go with him. The fact that the Colonial