May 31. 1834
Sir C. Wetherell’s Speech — National Church — Dissenters — Papacy — — Universities
I think Sir Charles Wetherell’s speech before the Privy Council very effective. I doubt if any other lawyer in Westminster Hall could have done the thing so well.
The National Church requires, and is required by, the Christian Church, for the perfection of each. For if there were no national Church, the mere spiritual Church would either become, like the Papacy, a dreadful tyranny over mind and body;—or else would fall abroad into a multitude of enthusiastic sects, as in England in the seventeenth century. It is my deep conviction that, in a country of any religion at all, liberty of conscience can only be permanently preserved by means and under the shadow of a national church—a political establishment connected with, but distinct from, the spiritual Church.
I sometimes hope that the undisguised despotism of temper of the Dissenters may at last awaken a jealousy in the laity of the Church of England. But the apathy and inertness are, I fear, too profound—too providential.
Whatever the Papacy may have been on the Continent, it was always an unqualified evil to this country. It destroyed what was rising of good, and introduced a thousand evils of its own. The Papacy was and still is essentially extra-national;—it affects, temporally, to do that which the spiritual Church of Christ can alone do—to break down the natural distinctions of nations. Now, as the Roman Papacy is in itself local and peculiar, of course this attempt is nothing but a direct attack on the political independence of other nations.
The institution of Universities was the single check on the Papacy. The Pope always hated and maligned the Universities. The old coenobitic establishments of England were converted—perverted, rather—into monasteries and other monking receptacles. You see it was at Oxford that Wicliffe alone found protection and encouragement.