Sir Robert Phillimore's judgment in the case of "Jenkins Cook,"
to which we referred briefly last week, and on which we have written more fully to-day, has produced a startling effect on the public. Even the Guardian evidently regrets that the Judge went into the merits of the case, and did not leave the responsi- bility of the Rev. Flavel Cook's course with his Bishop, Dr. Ellicott, who had evidently countenanced it, while desiring also
receive a certain amount of credit for discouraging it. One of the most curious bits of the evidence, and a part of it to which we have not elsewhere alluded, is the evidence of the promoter's wife, Mrs. Jenkins. She tried to patch up matters between her husband and the clergyman by call- ing on Mr. Cook, with the following result :—" On her telling him that her husband did not believe in the personality of the Devil, he said, Then he shall not have the Sacrament in my church ; I shall hold him at arm's length ; be is a regular infidel.' The word 'infidel' he afterwards qualified. Mr. Cook subse- quently said to her, 'Let him write me a letter and say that he believes in the Devil, and I will give him the Sacrament." Evidently Mr. Cook does not use the word ' believe ' in the Scripture sense of "trust," or he would never propose a test of fitness for the Sacrament which only Judas Iscariot and his fellows could accept. But why is even intellectual belief in the Devil so essential to fellowship with Christ ? As far as we can see, even Mr. Arnold's formula,—" a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for" evil, would be quite adequate to the de- scription of the power of evil for all moral purposes. We must have belief for the purposes of trust, but we need not have belief for the purposes of distrust and repudiation. You might very adequately reject "a stream of evil tendency," even though you did not know that it was organised in a personal will. But Evangelicals have a weakness for Satan, and dislike heresy about him even more than heresy about God.
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