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178 for matters of opinion; but these cases have been very rare, and the tendency to give liberty has been even-handed. The Gorham case gave a similar liberty to those who denied abnormal or supernatural power to one of the sacraments; the Bennett case gave liberty to those who asserted a similar power in the other. Even in cases of ritual, which stand on a different ground, being matters of formal regulation, there has been great unwillingness to press hardly on conscientious men, even when palpably defying the law; and the bishops have vindicated for themselves a power of stopping suits which they consider vexatious.

This action of the Privy Council corresponds with the general feeling. The different sections of the clergy and their adherents who made some outcry against the judgments, have gradually adopted more and more of the spirit of toleration which characterizes the law. To a large extent the judgments in doctrinal matters have preluded an actual change of opinion. The stringent doctrine of substitution as the essence of the atonement, the notion of inspiration as consisting in verbal accuracy rather than in the general spirit of the book, the belief in the everlasting perpetuation of sin and suffering, are alike strange to the present generation. They may still be held in some form, but probably in all cases with modifications, and they are certainly not insisted on as marks of true religion.

It may be partly the ill-success of past prosecutions for heresy, or it may be a consciousness that we are none of us in such literal conformity with the standards as to warrant us in casting stones at one another, or it may be some other consideration, which is the cause of the present aversion from an appeal to the courts. At all events, such an aversion exists. A striking proof of it has lately been furnished at Oxford. The rector of the City Church, Mr. Carteret Fletcher, was "delated" to the vice-chancellor for a sermon preached before the university, which contained the following passages:

1. Not long ago it was the general belief that man had been created perfect, but that he had fallen from perfection into an abyss of doom, whence only an elect fragment of the race would emerge; but it is now dawning on us that man was created in an undeveloped state, with a splendid potential wealth of faculty, and that he has advanced through long ages to his present stage, whence he is destined to rise higher than imagination can follow him. In him we see a rough-hewed block in course of being molded into perfect shape, and not the reconstruction of the shattered pieces of a faultless image.

2. The historical evidence of Christ's resurrection, after traversing a gulf of eighteen centuries, loses much of its convincing force in a scientific age which takes its stand on the uniformity of law. But this failing of the external evidence is more than compensated by our deeper realization of the inward proofs of human immortality; by our faith in the eternity of Christ's character, as well as by our consciousness of the high capacities and affections which he has called forth in us, and which are "mocked by the brevity of life, and are totally incapable of exhaustion here."