BISHOP-MAK ING.
[To max EDITOR Of TMZ "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Has not the lately expressed will of the community, registered in the Clergy Discipline Act of 1892, afforded evidence of a desire to avoid such controversies as your article under the above heading (January 2nd) proposes, in reference to the orthodoxy of a Bishop-Elect? In the Clergy Dis- cipline Act all questions of doctrine are excluded from the jurisdiction of the Court. The clergy are thereby expressly protected from being worried as to their orthodoxy. Would not such proceedings as you propose in an Episcopal Con- firmation Bill lead to endless controversy, and hasten the already looming inevitable Disestablishment The shell of orthodoxy must expand to correspond with mental development. If witchcraft had been an orthodox dogma of the Established Church, as it was of the Roman Church, the common-sense of educated people would lung since have outgrown it. The only chance of keeping many of the old dogmas alive is to treat them as Gibbon tells us the Proctors treated the Twelve Tables of Rome :—" Subtleties and fictions were invented to defeat the plainest meaning of the decemvirs, and where the end was salutary the means were frequently absurd."* To define too clearly what is, or what is not, exact orthodoxy, would, I believe, be certain to rend the Establishment by the conflict of forces from within. Orthodoxy is what the law for the time being declares it to be. Stephen lays down the following rule : —" It -would seem that upon this enactment" (25 Henry VIII. chap. 19) "depends the authority of the Canon Law in England, the limitation of which appears upon the whole to be as follows,—that no canon contrary to the common or statute law, or the prerogative Royal, is of any validity!'t Orthodoxy in the Established Church, then, being inextricably bound up with the law, goes through the same stages as the law. With progressive societies, says Sir Henry Maine, it • Gibbon's Roman Empire. Vol. W., p. 16 (Bolitee Edition, 1851).
41. Stephen's Commentaries of the Laws of England. Vol. I., p. 44, Eleventh Zdition.
may be laid down that social necessities and social opinions are always more or less in advance of law. Law is brought into harmony with society by legal fictions, equity, and legis- lation. Orthodoxy at present appears to be in what Sir Henry Maine calls the equity stages.
Many of us can remember the old controversies with the geologists as to the six days of creation ; with the antiquarians as to the antiquity of man ; with Colenso and his writings. A still greater number can recall the explosion of clerical anger when Darwin first published "The Origin of Species." Yet in 1896 the Court did not even listen to Mr. Brownjohn's objection to Archbishop Temple's orthodoxy. So much the better for the Court, if it hoped to retain its jurisdiction. If the laws of the Established Church will not expand with the ideas of the age, they will simply be broken through.—I am, Vicar of Middlewich.
The Vicarage, Middlewich, January 5lit.
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