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and the headship and supremacy of the Queen over the Church in England means that the Crown, in its capacity of superior Appellate Judge, is the head and source of the law which pervades the whole ecclesiastical body. In the remarkable correspondence between the Bishop of Exeter and Lord Macaulay on certain statements affecting the Church of England, that prelate (himself no mean authority) quoted from "Bonner's Commission' the declaration that all jurisdiction, spiritual as well as temporal, is derived from the king alone. Why so the Church of England,' he adds, as well as the Statute Law of England, says likewise; so I say, so every ⚫ Church of England man (not Presbyterian nor Congregationalist) says. But what is the meaning of jurisdiction in this place? It is, as the document itself calls it, jurisdicendi autoritas: in other words, the power of pronouncing judgment in 'foro exteriori, coactive judgments, having effects recognised by temporal law. This depends always on the temporal power.' We are happy to agree with so able and uncompromising a Churchman in this principle which is the basis of our argument. Nevertheless a cry has been raised by a party or fraction of the clergy, dissatisfied with a recent decision of the Supreme Court of Appeal in Ecclesiastical causes, and eager to make that decision the ground of an attack upon the constitution of the tribunal. This cry has been reechoed by a party in the State, excited apparently by the Tory influence of Oxford, and not less eager to find a pretext for a demonstration against the Queen's Government. The injustice and absurdity of this complaint are the more striking inasmuch as the same tribunal has within the last few years, in the administration of the high powers confided to it, shown no favour whatever to any particular set of opinions. In causing Mr. Gorham to be instituted to his benefice, it conceded a much-desired liberty of opinion to the Evangelical clergy. In restoring most of the ecclesiastical decorations, and especially the Cross, to the Church of St. Barnabas, it indulged the ecclesiological tastes of high churchmen. It condemned Mr. Heath and deprived him of his living for advisedly maintaining doctrines repugnant to the Book of Common Prayer; but it reversed the sentence suspending Mr. Wilson and Dr. Williams for a year from their clerical functions, because it failed to discover in their writings those violations of the Law of the Church which were charged against them. It is evident that in these decisions no man can fairly trace any disposition to exalt one set of opinions at the expense of another set; and that the only principle common

to all these decisions is that the LAW is in this country and in the Church of England paramount to all opinions whatsoever, and that all opinions may be freely entertained and professed unless they are repugnant to the positive law of the Church in its Formularies and its Articles. Dr. Manning expresses astonishment in one of his recent letters at a passage, conceived in this spirit, in an article lately published in this Journal, and suspects us of concealed irony. But Dr. Manning seems to have forgotten the first principles of the Church to which he once belonged, in his zeal for that which he has adopted. He desires, and thinks he has found, a Church of absolute infallibility and unity, which he affirms to be inhabited by a Divine Person;' and he adds, my faith depends upon the veracity of a Divine Person guiding me with his presence.' (Second Letter, p. 37.) The Church of England, on the contrary, holding that divers Churches have erred, and that General Councils (being assemblies of men) are liable to error, claims no infallibility, and therefore no absolute certainty, on nice and disputable points. She has avowedly and designedly left these open by her Articles, and she looks to the authority of her Courts, not to decide them peremptorily in one sense or another, but to secure to the members of the Church the greatest latitude of interpretation and opinion consistent with union in essentials. The theory of the Church of England being in this respect opposed to the theory of the Church of Rome, it is idle in Dr. Manning to taunt the Church of England with her inability to apply a strict rule of faith, which it is the essence of Protestantism to deny and repudiate. Unhappily, this notion of freedom of opinion bounded only by law, and by law framed in a comprehensive and liberal spirit, is extremely unpalateable to the clerical mind. Every sect in the Church lays claim to the possession of absolute truth, and supports with impatience the latitude of construction conceded to its antagonists, even though it stand in need of an equal breadth of interpretation to support its own doctrines.

The great fact remains that the English Reformation consisted before all things in the transfer of the highest judicial authority in the Church from the sacerdotal order to the Crown of England. If we are not greatly mistaken this is the true subject of complaint against which these numerous pastorals, pamphlets, circulars, and petitions are directed. The Crown exercises and has exercised its undoubted ecclesiastical authority as it exercises all its other powers, by the advice of a certain number of its sworn councillors, some being the chief dignitaries of the Church, others the great luminaries of the

law. But when it is found that the result of this inquiry is not to procure the condemnation of one or two obnoxious persons, but to secure a larger amount of liberty to all, the constitution of the tribunal itself is assailed, the nature of its proceedings is misrepresented, and, to our inexpressible astonishment, a claim is put forward to transfer the superior judicial authority over ecclesiastical questions from civil to spiritual judges, from lawyers to priests, and from the Crown to the Church. It is scarcely necessary to do more than to state this proposition to show its flagrant inconsistency with the principles of the Church of England for three centuries. If the people of England required a spiritual judge of their opinions and writings, they had one in the Pope, who boasts of infallibility; but when they threw off the Papal yoke, they placed themselves and their Church under the protection of the law. It is no slight praise of the wisdom of those laws that for three hundred years they have undergone no important change, and that even now it may well be questioned whether any change could be made in them with advantage. So jealous were the founders of our ecclesiastical polity of anything like an exclusive ecclesiastical jurisdiction, that they deprived Convocation of the power of legislating for the Church by canons without the express license of the king; and when Wentworth was asked by Archbishop Parker why the House of Commons of Elizabeth had put out of the book the Articles for the homilies, consecration of bishops, and suchlike, the prelate adding, Surely you mistake the matter; you will ' refer yourselves wholly to us therein,' Wentworth replied, in the true spirit of an English layman, No, by the faith I bear to God, we will pass nothing before we understand what it is; for that were but to make you Popes; make you Popes who list, for we will make you none. And sure, Mr. Speaker,' added the fearless orator, the speech seemed to me to be a 'prophetic speech, and I fear least our bishops do attribute this of the Pope's canons unto themselves, Papa non potest

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The discussions which have recently taken place on the constitution of the Court of Final Appeal clearly disclose similar pretensions. Mr. Keble, who may be taken as a representative of the clerical party, does not pretend that the laws or articles of the Church of England have either defined the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures or condemned the

*Strype's Life of Parker, p. 394. Hallam's Constitutional History, vol. i. p. 192, ed. 1846.

opinion of the ultimate salvation of mankind. He admits, therefore, implicitly that a Court professing only to administer the existing law of the Church of England could only arrive at the conclusions adopted by the Judicial Committee. But he adds that the Church is governed by common as well as by statute law, to be gathered, as the common law of the realm is gathered, 'from diligent study of its records, from the proceedings of its Courts, &c.;' and by this common law of the universal Church Mr. Keble holds that the canonical Scriptures are not only to a word but to a jot or tittle all equally true, because 'they are all alike God's word;' and he further holds that the doctrine of never-ending punishment was the doctrine of the universal Church from the beginning, re-affirmed by the Fifth General Council, which condemned the opinions of Origen.*

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Is it possible that Mr. Keble and the estimable but unreasoning enthusiasts who think with him do not perceive that they are drifting entirely from the ground of law to the quicksands of theological opinion? The common law of England is the definite, unbroken, and undisputed tradition of the Courts of Record, from the earliest dawn of legal memory; but that which Mr. Keble calls the common law of the Church has been, and is, the subject of fierce and never-ending contentions in every council, in every state, in every schism, in every age, from the time of the Apostles to this day. Nowhere,' says Dean Milman, is Christianity less attractive, and if we look to the 'ordinary tone and character of the proceedings, less authori

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tative, than in the Councils of the Church: and there is nothing which a true son of the Church of Christ may look on with more regret, than those tumultuous and intolerant assemblies of priests which claimed to fix the rule of faith. If there be in the world any definite representative of the common law of the Church it is the Pope, and the essence of the Roman Catholic faith is to believe that he is so. But by that

*This last point may, of itself, suffice to demonstrate the utter futility of such legal rules as those on which Mr. Keble and his friends rely. The Church of England admits the decisions of the Four first Councils, but not of the fifth; and this decision of the Fifth Council has been shown by high ecclesiastical authority to be wrong and inconclusive. (See Hefele, Concilien-Geschichte, vol. ii. pp. 764-835.) Would Mr. Keble suspend or deprive an English rector on such common law' as he may extract from the decrees of the Fifth General Council, and does he imagine that the law of England would sanction or tolerate such an act? Yet if he does not mean this, he means nothing.

common law Mr. Keble, Dr. Pusey, and every one of their allies, would equally be condemned. If they cease to stand on the terra firma of the Articles of the Church of England, there is no room for the sole of their foot between the rock of Rome and the precipice of dissent.

How then are these men to sit in judgment in the Church? What law are they to administer? Their own theological notions (on which probably no two of them do strictly agree) would become the test of orthodoxy; and the clergy of the Church of England would find themselves bound, not to the definite terms and conditions they have accepted at their ordination and institution, but to a vague power called the 'common law of the Church,' by virtue of which they might be called upon to accept any construction to be placed on the Articles by the dominant theological school of the day.

But, as Lord Harrowby said in his excellent speech on the Bishop of London's bill in 1850,—

'Bishops cannot be mere judges, mere interpreters. The more zealous, the more earnest in upholding what they believe to be the truth, the less are they fitted for such a function; and their opinions would become practically the law of the Church. Under such a system our Church might have been nailed to Calvinism under Whitgift, to semi-Popery under Laud, and to I know not what under the latitudinarian tendencies of the early part of the last century. To such a condition I, at least, am not prepared to bring my Church, as long as I can help it.' (Hansard, vol. iii. p. 658.)

The Lords of the Privy Council, as the expounders of the law, have guarded themselves, and sought to guard the Church, from this danger; and have studiously disclaimed the dangerous pretension of defining the tenets of the Church and the truths of religion otherwise than in the words of her own legalised formularies. That is precisely the reason for which this tribunal is now assailed by the whole strength of clerical fanaticism. The promoters of this strange agitation are seeking to transfer to the decision of minds, rendered subtle and intolerant by the exercise of their faculties on mysterious and indeterminate subjects of inquiry, that jurisdiction which is now exercised by the Queen on the advice of the first judges of the realm-to substitute the unknown for the known-the unwritten for the written the traditions of the Church in dark ages for the laws of this kingdom-and the mysteries of the faith for the letter of the Articles. Such a proposition is worse than unreasonable, it is audacious; and when the nature of it is thoroughly understood, we doubt not that it will be condemned and rejected as