Page:Church Politics and Church Prospects.djvu/27

Rh Dr. Rowland Williams and Mr. Wilson were brought into court. In the Arches Court they were condemned to a penalty so trivial, in comparison with the reason for it, as to render justice a mockery and orthodoxy a bye-word. They appealed to the Judicial Committee, and, on appeal, the subject-matter of the contestation was so thoroughly rasped down, as at last to have assumed the shape, not of a judicial inquiry into the doctrines contained in the Essays of the two impugned writers, but of the bald question, whether Dr. Williams' and Mr. Wilson's views upon the inspiration of Scripture and the eternity of punishment were so 'economical' as to be beyond the elastic limits of the Articles, interpreted in all the literality of their vagueness. So handicapped, the Cambridge and the Oxford neologian easily won, and their winning was, without doubt, a grievous offence and misfortune to the Church, although the assertion of the alleged truth of Holy Scripture, and of the alleged measure of God's vengeance for sin, dropped from the lips of Lord Chancellor Westbury.

We do not say that those who were responsible for the suit ought to have foreseen this result. It was, as we have stated, a game of double or quits, and quits won. The indignation of Churchmen took a threefold form: Synodical action, a popular movement, and practical reform. The Synodical action, as all know, determined in a condemnation of 'Essays and Reviews' by the Convocation of Canterbury. It is open to those who demurred at the first to judicial proceedings, to regret that the attempt should have been made to counterbalance the formal, though unsatisfactory, sentence of the Judicial Committee by the indeterminate gravity of a Convocational censure. The Bishop of Ely had the courage, in the Upper House of Convocation, to raise his warning voice against the Committee on whose report the censure was based—a voice in which no one would pretend to find an unorthodox ring—while he protested against the attempt to fight erroneous opinion by inoperative authority. Convocation has not so securely made good its position—it has not so completely proved its equitable right to speak out in its unreformed condition—as to entitle it, without misgiving, to enter on proceedings which could not affect Dr. Williams' or Mr. Wilson's legal status, and could not stop the sale of one copy of these Essays, but which might bring down upon Convocation, yet struggling into position, the enmity of powers mightier, if not more righteous, than itself. The Committee of Inquiry was named, their report duly presented, and then the censure founded on that report passed both Houses of Convocation, although the division in the Lower House showed, out of a minority of twenty, such names as those of Archdeacons Thorp, Sandford, Allen,