Source.—The Times, April 14, 1868.

The following letter, addressed to the Rev. Arthur Baker, was sent to the “Times” for publication:

Hughenden Manor,
Maundy Thursday, 1868.

Reverend Sir,

I have just received your letter, in which, as one of my constituents, you justify your right to ask for some explanation of my alleged assertion that the High Church Ritualists had been long in secret combination, and were now in open confederacy with Irish Romanists for the destruction of the union between Church and State....

You are under a misapprehension if you suppose that I intended to cast any slur upon the High Church party. I have the highest respect for the High Church party; I believe there is no body of men in this country to which we have been more indebted, from the days of Queen Anne to the days of Queen Victoria, for the maintenance of the orthodox faith, the rights of the Crown, and the liberties of the people.

In saying this I have no wish to intimate that the obligations of the country to the other great party in the Church are not equally significant. I have never looked upon the existence of parties in the Church as a calamity; I look upon them as a necessity, and as a beneficent necessity. They are the natural and inevitable consequences of the mild and liberal principles of our ecclesiastical polity, and of the varying and opposite elements of the human mind and character.

When I spoke, I referred to an extreme faction in the Church, of very modern date, that does not conceal its ambition to destroy the connection between Church and State, and which I have reason to believe has been for some time in secret combination, and is now in open confederacy, with the Irish Romanists for the purpose.

The Liberation Society, with its shallow and short-sighted fanaticism, is a mere instrument in the hands of this confederacy, and will probably be the first victim of the spiritual despotism the Liberation Society is now blindly working to establish.

As I hold that the dissolution of the union between Church and State will cause permanently a greater revolution in this country than foreign conquest, I shall use my utmost energies to defeat these fatal machinations.

Believe me, Rev. Sir, your faithful member and servant,

B. Disraeli.

The Rev. Arthur Baker, A.M.,
Rector of Addington.