I remember telling the Archbishop of York at Penmaenmawr, when he was Bishop of Gloucester, that it seemed to me we had lived into a time when, speaking generally, penal proceedings for the maintenance of divine truth among the clergy would have to be abandoned, and moral means alone depended on.
Morley recalls a conversation about the need to abandon punitive measures for clergy and rely on moral persuasion instead.
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What I wish to insist upon is, not that that system was good, but that the statesman who undertook to overthrow it, should have had something to put in its place.
I think they will commit a great error if they take this course.
If the idea was the direct gift of heaven, the policy was due to the sagacity and mother-wit of the great ecclesiastical statesmen.
What I endeavoured to show was that King George III., without changing his opinion of the justice of his war against the colonies, was obliged to give it up on account of a change of public opinion, and was not open to blame for so doing.
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