THE JUDGMENT IN THE PRIVY COUNCIL AND THE' COMPREHENSION OF

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."

SIR,--LY011 expressed a hope in your last number that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council would " greatly stretch the range of dogmatic meanings by which the narrow school of theologians wish to limit the comprehension of our formularies." The judgment of Monday has abundantly fulfilled your anticipation. It has done an act of justice to Dr. Williams and Mr. Wilson. It has relieved the consciences of many who do not in the least sympathize with their opinions. It will, I trust, be a great blessing, especially to• the younger clergy. After the letter which I wrote to you some weeks ago on one of the topics which the judgment handles, you will not suspect me of feeling less gratitude for it than any other member of my profession.

But there is a sense sometimes given to your phrase "stretching the range of dogmatic meanings" against which I should protest, and which I believe you will disclaim. It is supposed to be an advantage to the laity that the clergy should use sacred words— words to which they pretend that great importance attaches—with no meaning at all, or with the least possible meaning. An able contemporary of yours, in commenting on the case of Bishop Colenso, intimated very distinctly that if the language of the National Church could be reduced to absolute indefiniteness, emi- nent scientific men—Mr. Huxley and Sir Charles Lyell were named —who are now inclined to regard it as a foe might be induced to look upon it with great complacency, as a very harmless, perhaps useful, institution. I believe that the men thus spoken of, being honest and brave men, as I hold them to be, would regard a body putting forth the pretensions which the English Church puts forth, possessing the revenues which it possesses, and existing under the condition of meaning nothing, with the most utter con- tempt and loathing. These distinguished thinkers mean some- thing themselves. They are righteously indignant with a portion of the clergy for wishing to stifle or contract their meaning. They may welcome Bishop Colenso, or any one else who they suppose is asserting for them the liberty to think manfully, and to express manfully what they think. They cannot honour him, or any member of the clerical order whom they suspect of using language either to hide thought or the absence of thought. They must spurn any institution, call it National Church or what you will, which • counts that a privilege for those who are admitted to its offices or partake of its emoluments.

No, Sir This privilege is not one which the laity ought to desire for us, or we for ourselves. If it were, the judgment of the Privy Council was not wanted to confer it. We have used it. without appealing to Lord Westbury or Lord Kingsdown. Vague- ness indefiteness, unreality in the use of words, these are not such novelties in the pulpits of our own land that we need a new charter to establish them. I should rather say that they had increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished. I suspect that the bitterest complaints of laymen who listen to our sermons or read our books are caused by the presence of these qualities, not by the want of them. Read in one way the judgment of Monday is certainly a confession—a frank, manly confession-AA the impotency of prosecutors and tribunals to check those evils. " We Bishops and Lawyers cannot make you think distinctly or speak distinctly by any arts that we possess ; you had better not ask us for that help, we have it not to give." That is one intellig,ible and very useful issue of these trials, just as every enlargement of the liberty of the press is, in its negative aspect, an admission that laws have failed in the attempt to hinder men from publishing nonsense. But there is another view of this judgment, and I think a far more encouraging one. The efforts of the " narrow school of theologians " to whom you alluded have been most effectual in cultivating the uncertainty, the vague- ness, and the unreality which these prosecutions were clumsy attempts to withstand, and into which some Liberals seem to desire that we should plunge more deeply than ever. By insisting that all clergymen should accept certain current market values of the phrases which must occur most frequently in their discourses, and by training congregations to watch the lips of their preacher, when he is pronouncing, any given Shibboleth, the religious guides of the day have done their best to convert words from the expressions of thought into substitutes for thought. The preacher is in peril of the judgment of his hearers and of the newspapers, if he tries to test the force of a word, if he discovers any clearer stamp upon it than that which it retains after it has been subjected to the attrition of a circle of lay and ecclesiastical male and female fingers. It does not signify whether he appeals to Scripture, or to our own formularies, or to the writings of eminent men, for the purpose of recruiting its strength and vitality. He risks his popularity, his reputation for orthodoxy, if the result of the inquiry should be to displace a hollow no-meaning, which has become sanctified in the usage of the religious public, and to bring forth one which speaks to the heart and conscience of human beings.

I am not speaking at random. I could go through every sub- ject which is discussed in the lucid and beautiful judgment of Monday and find an illustration of what I am saying. What clergyman is not hindered from really inquiring into that awful significance which St. John gives to the title " Word of God " by the necessity which public opinion imposes upon him of identifying that title with the Scriptures—of thinking that every other applica- tion of it must be a secondary or metaphorical one ? What clergy- man is not hindered from examining the full import of the words " justify " and " justification," as they stand in the writings of St. Paul,—as they were felt in their living power by Luther,—through the dread of transgressing the " range of dogmatic meaning " which has been fixed by those who wind up periods at Exeter Hall with the "glorious doctrine of justification by faith alone ? "

What clergyman, trembling lest he should incur the sentence which Dr. Wordsworth has pronounced on Dean Stanley, would dare to use the word " inspiration " in the sense in which it is used in the Thirteenth Article, although that is one of the Articles on which we are especially bound to meditate,—one of those which were the ex- press product of the Reformation? If I were not repeating my- self, I should ask, further, what clergyman would venture to examine the sense which is given to the words " eternal life " by St. John, or the sense in which the Father is said to be eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal, in the Athanasian Creed, whilst he is tied and bound by the notion that eternity must, in its most characteristic, most religious sense, be applied to an end- less future ?

It is from the hope which I see dawning through the deci- sion of this week, that theologians may be led_ into a braver investigation of their own language, and so into a more manly, more distinct, less rhetorical employment of it in their teaching of the people, that I hail that vigorous and courageous application of the legal intellect to our controversies.

Talk of this judgment giving us an excuse for vagueness ! Why, what a contrast does its precise, intelligible, English offer to the

loose phraseology, formed on the model of Berlin diplomacy, if it steers ever so clear of Berlin divinity, into which ecclesiastics con- tinually fall ! How many possible " eventualities " and " complies.

tions " mingle with our preaching of the Divine Redemption, and reduce all that it promises and performs to zero, or to a negative quantity below zero ! Surely the language, if it is the language of lay judges—disclaimed by our highest ecclesiastical rulers— which acquits Dr. Williams of necessarily impugning the inspira- tion of the Scriptures, breathes the atmosphere of a divinity not more mundane, but far more lofty, than that to which our lungs are ordinarily attempered.

I cannot, then, persuade myself that the freedom which this decision guarantees to the English Church will at all tend to bring it into that condition of innocent fatuity which your contemporary appears to covet for it. The argument of Hume for an Esta- blished Church, that it kills enthusiasm, has been obsolete &ore than half a century. The Utilitarians, able inheritors of some

of Hume's philosophical opinions, utterly discarded this. The Scotchman who has had most influence iu our time and ,least sympathy with the Church has made belief his watchword ; those who are without vehement belief of some kind he regards'as good for nothing. That which led Hume to patronize national Churches makes them odious to the most energetic, hopeful, generous spirits of this age. The Churches are suspected of a plot against the enthusiasm of artists, the enthusiasm of men of science, the enthusiasm of patriots ; in that which is considered their special sphere against the enthusiasm of men and women of one school or another, who are not content to accept the galvanic movements of a corpse for life. Enthusiasm, it is said, national Churches leaves to narrow sects, in which it soon becomes concentrated about a set of opinions, and turns into mere attacks upon all other opinions. Then (the complainants go on) the Church is forced to mimic the zeal of its powerful rivals. It makes some experiments on the mass of moral evil which surrounds it, at last it finds the best and most healthful exercise of its new quality, the best and happiest imitation of the sects, to be the suppression of inquiry in whatever direction that inquiry happens to be most earnest.

If the late judgment of the Privy Council utterly discourages and makes hopeless this kind of zeal, it may give the other much freer scope. Prosecutions, whatever their authors may pretend, never stopped the spread of negative opinions. Under the terror of them, such opinions grew silently in the timid, burst forth into defiance in the bold. It is over real, positive convictions, which might expand into full and free faith, that they cast their dark and malignant influence,—these are converted (how often !) into sullen denials; the man who entertains them into a feeble utterer of that which he only half believes.

The direct fear of losing income or position alone would not have this effect. It mingles with a vague impression that what is felt to be the divined, most inward belief, may, after all, be at variance with some established formula which ought to be heeded. Di me terrent et Jupiter hostis is iu very deed the sentiment of the Christian divine. He trembles at some gods—at a dark Jupiter in the heavens ; trust in the living God, the God of truth, the God in whom saints and martyrs believed, where is that gone ? Prosecutors, what have you done to nourish that/

But it lives on. A better than they keep it alive. And the national Church may yet be shown to be no compromise between opposing opinions, but the cherisher of all those different convic- tions which the sects have torn apart. Each man may feel that under 'its protection he can speak that which he has known, he can testify that which he has seen. He may understand that if he does that work faithfully, if he abstains from any other, and if he is careful never to testify against that which others may have seen and known, clearer light will be vouchsafed to him day by day. He may find the formularies which have seemed only to frown him into a forced acquiescence, friendly instruments in guiding him to that truth of which he is in want. And the people, instead of being exposed, as many fear, to a multitude of strange and contradictory teachings, will be far less in that peril than

they are now. Each will give them that which he has to give— something which has been actually taught Whim, something which

can, therefore, find its way to another's beast ; not phrases which he has learnt by rote, and which, be they delivered ever so vehe- mently and oratorically, be they ever so strictly orthodox, can be only the sound of brass, the tinkling of a cymbal.—Faithfully