Page:The Irish Church and its Formularies.djvu/17

 the deliberations of a body, called out of nothingness to declare what are the doctrines of the Church, in order—without confessedly changing those doctrines, while it handles the documents in which the doctrine is enshrined—to restrain, by alterations in the Prayer Book, practices and teachings which are admissible if they accord with those doctrines, and inadmissible if they deviate from their standard. Observe how the difficulties are multiplied from the fact that the Committee has not been empanelled to try any one specific allegation, nor even any one specific list of allegations. It will have, in the first instance, mero motu to make out a primâ facie list of assumed "novel doctrines and practices opposed to the principles of our Reformed Church," and when it has succeeded in this task it will have to take the cases one by one, and to try each of them upon its own merits at the bar of the existing "Liturgy and Formularies." Then if these are brought in guilty upon their personal opinion, their next step must be so to "change" that "Liturgy and Formularies" without changing the "doctrines" of which those documents are the conservators, as in the opinion of the wide Church public, before whom their resolutions will come for final ratification, to have effectually checked the novelties, and yet to have left the Liturgy and the Formularies effectively just where they found them.

The achievement, if successful, is one which will redound to the immortal credit of the band of gentlemen who had bravely undertaken so delicate and so perilous a task, and who had in the accomplishment of their voluntary work brought to bear such high intelligence, such sensitive tact, such pellucid fairness, such minute and accurate learning. But if the result should be that, in the opinion of any considerable section of the Church, they had disarranged the balance of the Church's doctrine— 4