302 EARLY REMINISCENCES called together the clergy of his archdeaconry, and all, with a solitary exception, repudiated the Judgment. Had the Episcopate of England followed the lead, all might have been well ; but they were too timorous to make the smallest stand against the Law, and they accordingly did nothing. As to the English Church being compromised by the action of John Bird Sumner, it was no more compromised than was the Gallican Church when, at the Revolution, the Constitutional Archbishop of Paris denied the Faith, and Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, threw aside his Orders and became an atheist. But a shoal of Churchmen did not see the Judgment, and the conduct of the Archbishop, in this light, and there was a landslide into the Roman Communion, which with all its faults and errors did hold fast the Apostolic Faith. At this juncture a remarkable man stood forward with words of comfort and encouragement, and this man was John Mason Neale, Warden of Sackville College, Sussex. Neale was perhaps the most widely learned ecclesiastic in the Anglican Communion. He was more than learned, he was a poet, an historian, an organizer, and a Christian novelist.1 He was unflinchingly loyal to the English Church, which treated him cruelly. He owed his Warden-ship to lay appointment; at Lewes, he was all but killed by a Protestant mob ; he was suspended from his sacred functions for sixteen years by Bishop Gilbert of Chichester. He never received other promotion than the Wardenship of Sackville College, worth £28 per annum ; his very title of Doctor he owed not to any English University, but to one in America. Who now has heard of Bishop Gilbert, of any good that he either said or did ? whereas there is not a congregation in the English Church that does not sing the hymns composed by Neale, and he it was along with Mr. Carter, of Clewer, and Mr. Butler, of Wantage, who founded the Sisterhoods in the English Church ; that of East Grinstead by Neale is one for nursing the sick poor in their own homes. I myself owe more that I can express to J. M. Neale. I received my first Church principles, mentally, from Christopher Wordsworth's Theophilus Anglicanus, but spiritually I owe everything to the Warden of Sackville College, whose learning, ecclesiology, 1 Theodora Phranza, and Duchenier.
