Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2

Excerpt

CHAPTER XVIII.

1841-1842.

Mr. Hope's Pamphlet on the Jerusalem Bishopric—His Value for the Canon
Law—Continued Correspondence of Mr. Hope and Mr. Newman on the Jerusalem
Bishopric—Mr. Newman's Idea of a Monastery—Mr. Newman writes from
Littlemore, April 22, 1842—Dr. Pusey consults Mr. Hope on his Letter to
the Archbishop of Canterbury—Dr. Pusey and the Jerusalem Bishopric—
Letters of Archdeacon Manning, Mr. W. Palmer, Sir John T. Coleridge, Sir F.
Palgrave, Bishop Philpotts, and Count Senfft, on Mr. Hope's Pamphlet.

Two days after the date of the letter to Lady Henry Kerr, given in the preceding chapter (Dec. 20, 1841), took place the publication of Mr. Hope's pamphlet on the Anglo-Prussian Bishopric of Jerusalem. It may be described as a learned and very closely reasoned argument against the measure; and a dry (even if correct) analysis of it would be of little biographical interest, especially as Mr. Hope's views on the question have already been abundantly illustrated from unpublished materials. I therefore refer those of my readers who wish for more extended information to the pamphlet itself, but shall quote from the Postscript to the second edition [Footnote: The Bishopric of the United Church of England and Ireland at Jerusalem, considered in a Letter to a Friend, by James R. Hope, B.C.L., Scholar of Merton, and Chancellor of the Diocese of Salisbury. Second edition, revised, with a Postscript. London: C.J. Stewart. 1842.] an eloquent passage on Canon Law, which is as characteristic of the writer as anything I have yet been able to produce, and exhibits, I think, in a striking manner how singularly this austere subject constituted at the time the poetry of his life, and how largely the conflict between the principles of Catholic jurisprudence and Anglicanism must have influenced the reflections which ended in his conversion. Mr. Hope here refers to some remarks on his pamphlet which had appeared in one by the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, entitled 'Three Letters to the Rev. W. Palmer, &c.' (Rivington: 1842).

Value of the Science of Canon Law.

[Mr. Maurice] sets all lawyers at nought, and canonists he utterly despises. Hastily, indeed, I think, and for the purpose of the moment only, can he have given way to such feelings, for he needs not that I should tell him that the Church of Christ rests not upon speculative truth alone, but upon the positive institutions of our Lord and His Apostles. Surely, then, to trace those institutions from the lowest point at which they come into contact with human existence, up to the highest to which our eye can follow them, the point of union with the unseen world in which they take their rise, and from which they are the channels of grace and truth and authority to the souls of men—to trace, I say, the outward and the visible signs of sacraments, of polity, of discipline, up to the inward spiritual realities upon which they depend, which they impart and represent to faith, or shelter from profanation; to study the workings of the hidden life of the Church by those developments which, in all ages and countries, have been its necessary modes of access to human feeling and apprehension; to systematise the end gained; to learn what is universal, what partial, what temporary, what eternal, what presently obligatory, and wherefore; surely a science such as this, so noble in its object, so important in its practical bearings upon the unity and purity of the Church, and upon her relations to the temporal power, is not one of which Mr....