Notes of My Life, 1805-1878

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1879 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII. East Brent. 1845--1852. A FEW weeks after my induction into the Vicarage of East Brent Bishop Law died, and Sir Robert Peel offered Bath and Wells to my dear friend Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford. The Bishop sent for me, and asked me what I thought I told him that I was an interested adviser in the matter, because I was just gone into the diocese myself. Oh, he said, that's all nonsense; what do you think I told him I thought he had better accept. Then you must be Examining Chaplain. I agreed to be Examining Chaplain. I found at East Brent a schoolroom built by my predecessor, Hon. W. T. Law; he had also rebuilt the chancel. The Trust-deed of the school places the management in the Vicar only. I found also the germ of Ritual, in preaching in the surplice; this may seem a small thing; but as it was quite enough then to almost convulse the country, it seems reasonable to conclude that parts of Ritual, however trifling they may appear to the untaught and ignorant, are not the small things which anti-Church policy, Episcopal policy, aye, and a great deal of High Church policy too, are busy in representing them to be. If it were not painful, it would be ludicrous; and, indeed, all the pain notwithstanding, it is ludicrous; to see and hear the same man, Bishop, Priest, Layman, saying that things are so trifling as to be unworthy of a moment's thought; and at the same moment struggling and striving unceasingly, fiercely, furiously, per fas et nefas, to put those things down. It shews how incorrect it is to consider the differentia of the human animal as sufficiently expressed by the word reasoning. For ignorance so clouds the reasoningpower, and passion and worldliness so pervert it, as to make it perpetually contradict and nullify i...