SPIRITUAL COURTS OF APPEAL.

To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR." SIR,—Since the appearance of Dr. Pusey's pamphlet on which you commented last Saturday, we have had a charge from the Bishop of Salisbury and a leading article in the Guardian point- ing in the same direction towards a reform of the final Court of Appeal. The ground of complaint is the same with all,—that a secular tribunal cannot fairly decide because it cannot rightly understand theological questions.

Dr. Pusey thinks also that the lay mind is likely to be immo- rally biassed against the truth, the Guardian contenting itself with fearing that it may lack the true bias for the truth, or as the writer puts it, speaking of the recent decision of the Privy Council, "men feel that other consideration were present besides the simple desire to express the mind of the Church, and they believe that its constitution and mode of procedure are in some respects unfavourable to the attainment of theological truth."

Here, then, we have the gist of the whole matter ;—let us look for a moment at the principles on which this agitation is being raised.

"Other considerations than a simple desire to express the mind of the Church," we are told, weighed with the Privy Council, and this is probable, otherwise that august tribunal was motiveless, for certainly this " consideration " was not present at all.

When will High Churchmen learn that the Ecclesiastical Courts have to express primarily the mind not of the Church but of the State? Again and again has this been asserted by the Courts themselves. The assertion may be extremely distasteful to the High Church School, may lead them to seek a severance of Church and State altogether ; but so long as the union is main- tained it is difficult to conceive that any fitter experience of the mind of the State could be found than the Court as at present constituted.

What, then, becomes of the argument about the abstruseness and difficulty of theology which no lay mind can deal with ?

What the State says is this :—However you theologians may differ, whatever difficulties may beset your subject, there are some doctrines which seem to us so clear and so certain that we the Legislature will take them out of the sphere of free discussion, and forbid their contravention at least by the clergy.

That the State is wise in so saying I am not affirming, but that this is the attitude in which it stands towards Church doc-

trine can admit of no doubt. As a proof we have only to recall the fact that the Parliament of 1582 distinctly refused its sanction to certain of the Articles drawn up by Convocation on the ground that it was not convinced of their truth.

I quote from a speech of Mr. Westworth, as given in Hallam : —" I was sent for," he says, "amongst others the last Parliament, into the Archbishop of Canterbury, for the Articles of Religion that then passed this House. He asked us why we did put out of the book the Articles for the Homilies, Consecration of Bishops, and such like. Surely, Sir,' I said, because we were so occupied in other matters that we had no time to examine them, how they agreed with the Word of God." What !' said he, ' surely you mistake the matter : you will refer yourselves wholly to ns therein ?" No ; by the faith I bear to God,' said I, we will pass nothing before we understand what it is ; for that were but to make you popes. Make you popes who list,' said I, for we will make you none."

And now we are to be told that the State is incapable of ascertaining its own mind and enforcing judicially its legislative enactments Again, the Guardian tells us that the Privy Council is con- stituted in a way not ‘' favourable to the attainment of theo- logical truth."

But who seeks theological truth in a law court ? Who would seek it in the most clerical court that could be instituted ?

We have, I suppose, such a Court in Convocation ; does any one believe a doctrine less or more for its decisions ? Dr. Manning retorts triumphantly on his Anglican friends, " You have condemned Essays and Reviews' synodically. Is the view of any single Englishman changed by your condemnation?"

The only means towards the attainment of theological truth are the labours and studies of theologians ; whether they attain that end will, so far as man can secure it, depend on the moral and intellectual qualities they bring to the task, not on the legal restrictions to which they are subjected. Those restrictions, if necessary, are necessary not in the interests of truth but for the practical working of the Church, because the public mind is not yet prepared for teaching which should appeal for authority only to free conviction.

Meanwhile it has moved for ever passed the point to which Dr. Pusey would return, at which the Guardian affects to believe that we really stand, taking the fossil forms embedded in the constitution of the Church for its organic laws.

The National Church has a work to do in the intellectual movement of the age as mediating between the old and the new, the many and the few, reason and tradition. Its overthrow would only result in a sharper antagonism. Yet no one who reads Dr. Pusey's pamphlet can well doubt that the English Church could not exist for a year if the fierce fanaticism which it breathes were not controlled by an authority raised high above the influence of panic and passion.

What Dr. Posey would destroy is the English Church as it actually exists, as it has existed from its foundation, resting on the common religious feeling of the nation, the " mixed modes" of common religious thought, to set up in its place an Anglican Church, the organ of an infallible authority, a Church having no root in the national life, but depending wholly on its logical connection with a system against which the Reformation was a revolt, from which the whole thought and sympathy of England

has for ever ebbed away.—I remain, &c., W. B.