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20 did not care a rush for authority, and who were actively looking out to catch authority making itself unpopular by passing from the censure of opinions to the oppression (as they would say) of men. So much for success. Failure, on the other hand, might involve the 'rehabilitation' of the Essayists in the eyes of public opinion, as men who had not, after all, acted unhandsomely to the Church in and on which they lived, not to talk of the extent to which the Church itself might or might not be corporately implicated in their false doctrines, if the voice of the Church's tribunal pronounced them 'not guilty.' Moreover, as we have hinted, orthodox men were bound to consider that the weapons which they were preparing to employ had been forged for quite another conflict. It was not clear that the courts could let them fight on the ground of the general conformity of Anglicanism to the Catholic faith. If kept to Anglican formularies, they would have to make the best of certain specific formularies drawn up to meet quite another class of errors in a totally different condition of things.

The analogy of the Gorham case might undoubtedly have been brought as, at least, a plausible argumentum ad hominem. But the analogy would really have been worth nothing. In the first place, it must not be forgotten that the Gorham suit was the crucial experiment as to the reliance which the Church had a right to put in the temporal courts when the sustentation of the Catholic Faith was in question. The experiment was fairly tried, and fairly broke down; and we do not see why a burnt Church may not allowably feel as a burnt child is known to do. But the Gorham case, at the stage in which it became a public question, was the direct reverse of that of 'Essays and Reviews.' The original examination and rejection of Mr. Gorham was a matter of private import between the Ordinary and the presentee to Bramford Speke. When the curtain rose, Mr. Gorham was plaintiff, and the Bishop of Exeter defendant, and the summons to the Church party was to rally to the support of the impugned side. In the more modern case, the Essayists (the two, we mean, against whom proceedings were taken) were living upon their incumbencies when the law was invoked to bring them to punishment for their writings. In the Gorham case, at its public stage, the Bishop was defendant, and Mr. Gorham plaintiff. Yet the Bishop failed. In all the subsequent Church causes celèbres, with the single exception of the anomalous Heath case, the assailant (whether High Church or Low Church) most impartially broke down. Mr. Westerton broke down against Mr. Liddell, Mr. Ditcher against Archdeacon Denison, and finally (though at a date subsequent to the commencement of the Essays case), the Bishop of Capetown against Mr. Long. Under these conditions