Page:The Irish Church and its Formularies.djvu/18



Then all their labour will have been in vain—their Report, because it will have failed of an unanimous, or at least of a preponderating acceptance, will have been virtually rejected before it was put to the vote, and matters will be left just where they are at present, with the difference of much time lost and much ill-blood bred. Above all things, the Committee will have broken up the broad highway of conciliation. All those appeals to that higher Christian expediency, of which the root is charity, will hereafter be powerless if they are addressed to those whose cherished convictions have been tried—no matter with what result—in their personal absence by a secret tribunal, expounding laws of its own enacting by rules of court of its own invention.

A Report embodying the personal agreement to differ of the members of the Committee, and therefore proposing nothing, might not be a very dignified conclusion to its deliberations; but I believe—in face of the great difficulties of framing and the greater difficulties of carrying out any alterations, and of the discredit which could not fail to attach to counsels tendered only to be thrown aside—that such a conclusion, though not the most heroic, would be the safest, the wisest, and the happiest.

But let us assume that the Committee should have agreed upon what in its own opinion did or did not involve doctrine, and then upon such definition of its own framing should have recommended changes in the formularies adequate in its judgment to reach those whom it was intended to restrain, and yet in the belief of the framers so nicely tempered as not to hurt or to abash, not to aggrandise or inflate, any one man or any set of men beyond the doomed band; where then would the