ties, with the guardianship of the true de- | Such is Mr. Wilson's statement respecting posit, in his own diocese-feeling that it the fourth Gospel (p. 116); and that the was impossible for him to allow such chal- taking of Jerusalem by Shishak is for the lenges as these to pass unnoticed; and be- Hebrew history, that which the sacking of lieving that a necessity was laid upon him af persevering by action, even under our present most unsatisfactory system of ecclesiastical law, the people committed to his aversight from the authoritative teaching of errors, which he had deliberately combined with his brethren solemnly to censure. Rome by the Gauls is for the Roman (p. 170). This last assertion, wholly unsupported by argument, is, not only according to our humble belief but according to the whole tenor of the great work of Ewald, equally untenable in its negative and its positive aspect." In his diocese, and invested with the cure Certainly these "assertions," wholly at af souls, was one of the two essayists whom variance with any reverence whatever for the even the liberality of the "Edinburgh" re- Scriptures as the word of God, are a little viewer cannot wholly exculpate. "We can- difficult of acceptance to any one who is not not," he says, "avoid observing that the very distinctly in the reviewer's language flippant and contemptuous tone of the "learned and sceptical; " and we cannot reviewer (Dr. Rowland Williams) often wonder that the writer who has hazarded amounts to a direct breach of the compact them was also brought before the Ecclesiaswith which the volume opens, that the sub-tical Courts, especially as he goes on with a jects therein touched should be handled "in sort of "reading made easy" advertisement a becoming spirit." Anything more unbe- to show how men called upon to give, by coming than some of Dr. Williams's re- subscription to certain articles and formulamarks we never have read in writings pro- ries, a pledge of how and what they will fessing to be written seriously."* Against teach, as the condition of their receiving the him, under that form of the ecclesiastical authority and endowments of the preacher's law which is called "letters of request," and office, may subscribe these documents withwhich brings the matter in question imme-out believing them; and, in professing their diately before the Court of the Archbishop allowance of them, mean only that they enof the province, the Bishop of Salisbury dure their existence as necessary evils. proceeded. It was matter of public notori- Accordingly he, too (the age probably of ety that he took this step with the deepest venerable Bishop of Ely having prevented reluctance. That he did at last take it, no the suit proceeding in the name of the Dioone can wonder who remembers those sol- cesan), was brought before the court most emn words in the Consecration Service in appropriately by the Proctor in Convocation which he who undertakes the office then con- for the clergy of the diocese, who must needs ferred pledges himself, "to be ready with have a keen interest in wiping from their all faithful diligence to banish and drive body the deep and eating stain of allowed away all erroneous and strange doctrines heresy amongst themselves. Through the contrary to God's word; and both privately somewhat tedious stages of the Ecclesiasti and openly to call upon and encourage oth- cal Courts, relieved by speeches of no ordiers to the same."-Consecration Office. nary interest, especially by that of Mr. FitzDr. R. Williams shares with Mr. Wilson james Stephen for the defence, and the adthe special censures of the "Edinburgh "mirable arguments of the new Queen's Adreviewer; not so much, it is true, for what vocate, Dr. (now Sir Robert) Phillimore, he puts forth, as for his mode of doing it. "If he was minded to be a little sceptical, he should not at the same time have been scandalous; he had no business to "shake the red flag" of his unbelief in the "face of the mad bull" of Orthodoxy ;-he had dealt in "assertions which even the learned and sceptical" (let our readers mark the ominous The highest directly Ecclesiastical Court, conjunction)" would hesitate to receive." then, of the Church has now pronounced its Edinburgh Review, p. 479. these two causes have now travelled to a * Edinburgh Review, No. 230, p. 474. sentence upon two of these notorious essays, the judge. "First, then," he says, "to ascertain the real meaning of the passages extracted (p. 18); and I must say this is no easy task. If the author had studied to express his sentiments with ambiguity, I doubt if he could have been more successful. Having read and re-read the passage, I am not satisfied that I distinctly and accurately comprehend its import" (p. 14). Again: “It is very difficult, for me at least, to ascertain the true intent of this sentence." Again (p. 21): "I am not sure that I distinctly comprehend the meaning of the next sentence." Again (p. 33): "It is to be regretted that Mr. Wilson, in his essay, has frequently expressed himself in language so ambiguous as to admit of opposite constructions" (p. 24). "I proceed to the next passage. I will candidly say that I do not feel perfectly certain that I comprehend its true meaning." "The next part of the extract is still more difficult " (p. 34). "This sentence is open to diverse interpretations, and some of its terms are self-contradictory" (p. 34). Who can read these reiterated groans of The ruling principle of the whole judgment baffled judicial sagacity without sympathy for is expressed in these few words. In pro- the sufferer who has to track out amidst nouncing the penalties of the law, the learned these "evasions," "self-contradictions," and judge repeatedly reminds us that he is con- "studied obscurities" the golden thread of demning not the errors or the evils of the thought? To demand a judgment on them document which has been brought before is really too like the requirement of the Babhim, but simply its transgression of the law; ylonian king, who bid the puzzled soothsaythat he is maintaining not truth, but the dec-ers recall the vanished dream, of which they laration of truth contained in the Articles were to furnish afterwards the interpretation. and Formularies of the Established Church. But there are deeper evils in such a style of This must be borne constantly in mind in writing than the agonies it causes to the considering this momentous judgment by judge who has to decide upon its criminalievery one who would understand its real ties. These obscurities of statement as to tenor and effect; and it is under the light of the Articles of the Faith are the readiest inthis guiding principle that we propose to struments of spreading error. Under such subject it to such an examination, as will, we clouds of thought and words, the whole body believe, make clear its true bearings. of the truth may be carried piecemeal away. The most marked outlines of the Christian scheme melt away amidst these mists into the undistinguished glimmering of the surrounding fog. Obscurity, therefore, in a teacher of the Faith is close akin to the deadly crime of pronounced heresy. First, then, we have to notice that, as a consequence of this construction of the judgment, besides the direct judicial sentence as to penalties incurred or avoided in these pages, there is a moral decision on them running through the whole legal utterance, couched often in language of singular force and clearness. Thus, for example, our own complaint of a studied obscurity and evasiveness of statement is continually repeated by * Judgment delivered on the 25th of June, 1862, by the Right Hon. S. Lushington, Dean of the Arches, i. 44. There is, too, another evil in obscurity of which this judgment supplies frequent instances. The Protean character of error so promulgated, whilst it is singularly favorable to the generation of doubts, eludes by its shadowy uncertainty the mocked grasp of justice. "I think," says the judge (p. 29), "there is a doubt as to the sense in which | tinction between the question the judge has .. Dr. Williams has expressed himself; and if there be a doubt, as this is a criminal case, he is entitled to the benefit of it." "Mr. Wilson's use of these contradictory terms might leave. . . . the impression that he doubted whether the Holy Scriptures had been supernaturally communicated, etc." "Without saying this impression of this passage is false, I cannot say it is necessarily the true one, especially considering this is a criminal case. On the whole, therefore, I come to the conclusion that as a criminal" "it cannot be supported" (p. 35). charge, "Whatever may be its meaning, it is much too vague to enable me to draw any conclusion from it." And so the teacher of error so far retains his place amongst the authorized declarers of the Church's doctrine. His offence (for obscurity or ambiguity upon such subjects is an offence) is his protection. This is a second and a great evil of such a style of writing in clergymen. As we said at first, we consider the evil done by the clergy being suffered to vent such speculations far greater than any evil likely to be done by the speculations themselves. There may be few who are sufficiently weak to have their faith shaken by such empty suggestions; but the weight of the whole Order may be shaken by the permitted presence in it of such cloudy heretics. The "Epistolæ" of these in this sense "obscurorum virorum are too dull to be very misleading, and might, so far as their intrinsic power of spreading error goes, have been left to perish as literary failures by their own ponderosity; but trust in all guidance may be fatally shaken if the dullest of misleaders are suffered to remain undisturbed on the roll of authorized guides, It is not, then, as it seems to us, easy to exaggerate this primary condemnation by Dr. Lushington of these obscure transmitters of the lights of revealed truth. But there is yet another class of censures which pervades the judgment, the full weight of which can only be estimated by those who know and bear fully in remembrance the great breadth of the judge's own long-expressed sympathies with all fair and honest intellectual speculation and inquiry as to revealed religion, even to the verge of what many might deem rationalism itself. These are contained in the perpetually recurring dis to decide-namely, whether "doctrines have been promulgated at variance with the doctrines of the Church, as declared in the Articles and Formularies"? (Judg. p. 5) and that which he has not to decide-namely, whether "they are inconsistent with the true doctrine of the Christian faith"? They are couched in such words as these: "There may be much that in the private opinion of the court excites deep regret, and is deserving of censure or severest reprobation (p. 17), and yet that the law of the Church may not reach" (p. 9). Though I think Dr. Williams's opinion militates against one of the most important doctrines held by the most venerated divines of the Church, I cannot come to the conclusion that the Articles, etc., have been violated" (p. 22). "This may be wholly irreconcilable with that which is generally esteemed to be the orthodox teaching of the Church, but is not struck by the Sixth and Seventh Articles of Religion " (p. 26). But perhaps the severest of all these censures, as expressing the moral estimate formed by the judge of the dishonesty of writings which yet just escaped the hold of the law, is contained in the passages which deal with Mr. Wilson's new theory of subscription. "Mr. Wilson draws some very fine distinctions as to how the Articles of Religion may, in truth, be attacked and censured." "There is rather a long discussion upon the meaning of the words 'allowing' and acknowledging the Articles to be agreeable to the Word of God.' Mr. Wilson goes the length of saying' many acquiesce in or submit to a law as it operates upon themselves, which they would be horror-struck to have enacted.' The plain meaning of this is, that a man may allow that which he disbelieves to be true and right, or, rather, that which he deems to be wholly wrong. The effect of this doctrine enunciated by any clergyman of the Church of England may be comprised in a few words: it is to affirm that a clergyman may subscribe to the Articles *It may be well to remind our renders of the fact which we have already pointed out (vol. cix. P. 276), that the word "allow" in the 36th Canon does not mean, as Mr. Wilson supposes, to acquiesce in, but to "approve." This is not only shown by the general language of the age in which the Canons were framed, but is placed beyond all doubt by the fact that in the Latin Canon, which is of co-ordinate authority with the English, "alloweth " Synodalia, i. 186. is expressed by "omnino comprobat."-Cardwell's without any regard to the plain literal mean- With our old-fashioned English notions of what honesty is, and what it is worth, we can scarcely conceive of censure more biting than that which is contained in all these passages, which, so far as actual legal condemnation is concerned, are exculpatory of the accused. Surely this condemnation from the aged judge-known through a long life for opinions verging, if to either extreme, certainly not to that of excessive orthodoxy -and whom a knowledge of the excitement the volume had created only "induced to exercise all care and vigilance, and to preserve a perfectly equal and dispassionate mind" (p. 6)-surely such a moral condemnation from such a man would justify all our former notes of warning. "inconsistent with and contrary to the Thirty-first Article " (p. 27). Thirdly. As to Justification by Faith, he is condemned for teaching it to be peace of mind, instead of Justification for the merit of our Lord by faith-an explanation "wholly inconsistent with and repugnant to the Eleventh Article" (p. 31). Thus, in fine, after all ambiguities and obscurations; after striking out all the contradictions of Holy Scripture as it has al been understood by the pious and de ways vout; after subtracting all passages in which the writer is rather retailing Baron Bunsen's views than stating his own, and giving him the benefit of every doubt, he is condemned for no lighter errors than deny ing Holy Scripture to be the Word of God, and explaining away or contradicting the doctrine of the Propitiation wrought out for us by our Lord, and our own justification in God's sight for the only merits of our Saviour. Can there be any doubt in the mind of a reasonable man, whether the Bishop of Salisbury could honestly allow the poor parishioners of Broad Chalke to be the subjects of clerical teaching which would rob them of their Bible, of propitiation through the death of Christ, and justification by his merits ? Nor does the mode in which this judg ment has been received by Dr. Williams, eminently characteristic as it is of the man, in any degree mend his case. It has led to the publication of a sermon preached at Lampeter, and put forth with an appendix, from which we must cull for our readers a few of the peculiar flowers. It contains, we venture to think, more self-praise and more abuse, direct and implied, of all who differ from him-implying a habit of mind richly furnished with two of the most eminent qualities for making an heretic, conceit and bitterness-than, perhaps, any similar production of any other writer has ever exhibHere are a few of the specimens from But this moral condemnation is not all, or anything like all. With all their sepialike power of obscuring plain truths, and escaping in the troubled waters of controversy, the accused were far from escaping direct legal censure. The points on which they are condemned are the following: Dr. Rowland Williams, for declaring the Bible to be "an expression of devout reason, and the written voice of the congregation "-one of the special errors to which we called attention,*-is adjudged to have violated the Sixth and Seventh Articles of Religion, and to have advanced "positions sub-ited. stantially inconsistent with the all-important the Hortus Siccus of Lampeter. It is doctrine imposed by law that the Bible is God's word written" (p. 20). Secondly. On the cardinal doctrine of Propitiation, which "by the Thirty-first Article of Religion is declared to be the Oblation by Christ finished upon the Cross for sin," Dr. Williams is condemned for a declaration of it Quarterly Review, vol. 109, p. 288. thus that the general protest of laity and clergy against the " Essays" is handled. No presumption against the religious tendencies of a book arises from its vehement condemnation by persons influential in Church and State, but rather the contrary. There is a time to convince gainsayers, and a time to awaken formalists. If our eyes were purged to see as Heaven sees, we might find that the Jewish victims of the Middle Ages were nearer to the God of Abraham than the vicious idolaters who murdered them for gold in the name of Christ... their worst errors [the Albigenses] were less injurious to mankind than the crimes of the hierarchy by whom they were massacred." tian honestly possible, my principles full of that truth for which Christ died suffering, and the policy of my detractors animated by a spirit neither religious nor just," etc. (p. 19.) Was there ever a more perfect echo of the old self-sufficiency, "Wisdom shall die with us-we are they that ought to speak"? These last words give a promise of how Having dealt thus with those who con- those who differ from him are to be treated; demned, he thus endorses many of his for- and undoubtedly that "promise," at least, mer views. As for the Bible, his views, he" of his life" is not belied. When he finds tells us, would leave it "a relative sanctity that the judge condemns him, he explains, for its subject's sake," when there had been" with no great discourtesy, the miscarriage made the "deductions from supposed infal- of justice" (p. 62). Reflecting on the ignolibility which the truth of letters requires rance which filled the seat of judgment, he (p. 6). What these deductions may amount concludes that "with no literary light, there to we can a little understand when we find could be no ecclesiastical justice" (p. 62). that "the conscience of mankind revolts not whilst the general administration of the only often against inhumanities and passions court is thus sneered at with his usual " unin ancient Jewry," but "sometimes against surpassed courtesy." "If we imagine an precepts or tone of narrative, by which those apostle-and it is easier to conceive all the crimes are justified or not condemned " (p. apostles-indicted in the Court of Arches, 8); that "allowance" is to be made "with than sanctioning the proceedings of their respect to the story of the sun arrested in successors there," etc. (p. 60). It is, inhis course, in order to prolong a day of deed, against these " successors " that he bloodshed" (p. 13); in that "the mode of seems to rage the most angrily. He is himshowing a sceptical astronomer that his self the " offspring of God, trampled into prejudices about the sun should yield to the the grave by the policy of Caiaphas" (p. contemporaneousness of the Book of Joshua 48). "Evasion has been on the same side has not yet been denied" (p. 24); and that as violence" (p. 47). "It is equally dan"the vulgar theory of prediction" (p. 11) gerous," he avers, "to suffer a bishop's is to be got rid of; and that "the Gospels" injuries silently, or to refute them triare to be "esteemed" a memorial of the umphantly" (p. 31). What his personal spiritual impulse propogated from the life of experience of the first alternative may have Christ, rather than a code of legalized pre- been we cannot undertake to say, but his cepts (p. 10). correspondence with the Bishop of St. David's makes it quite certain that from that peculiar form of danger which waits upon " refuting a bishop triumphantly " Dr. Rowland Williams was never otherwise than in the most entire security. Lastly, let us set side by side his estimate of himself and of those who have the misfortune to be opposed to him. Of himself and of his teaching he supplies us with the following sketches, some lines of which may, we think, at least awaken a smile on the episcopal features in Abergwili Palace : We will give our readers but two more specimens of Dr. Rowland Williams. The one, his mode of referring to the volume called " Aids to Faith," the general charac "To you, my friends, who... have observed the unsurpassed patience and courtesy to men of all ranks with which forter of which we have noted above. Having, as he conceives, silenced some of its reasoneleven years I have occupied a highly complicated position, let me say that on the car-ing, he refers in his note to the passage he dinal question of prophetic interpretation is dealing with as being contained in the my performance has not belied the promise" Aids to Tradition" (pp. 34, 422). The of my life; and when hereafter every cita- last specimen of this writer shall be his gention of mine shall be proved substantially eral character of the trial in which he has correct, my interpretations the most Chris-been so justly condemned. What," he says, "will be the result of this suit, under "Persecution for the Word," pp. 2, 3. 66 |