reject the supremacy of the Roman See,) any more than the person who denies them, is thereby at once excluded from that most tolerant and comprehensive of all heretical bodies, the English Church. He has a right to shelter himself wherever he can find a sentence of her formal documents to throw its protection over him. But then, on the other hand, he has no right whatever to hold these same truths, except as matters of private opinion deduced by his own method of inference from Holy Scripture. And so, if he professes to hold them or to teach them on the authority of the English Church, he must be reminded that in other parts of its formularies that same "Church" teaches him the direct contrary of these truths; and what then becomes of his vision of an authoritative guide and leader? Like "fairy frost-work," it has melted away before his eyes; it has ceased to exist. But after all, this is no concern of ours; and so, dismissing for the present all consideration as to who are, and who are not, honest in their subscription to the formularies of the Protestant Establishment, let us proceed to examine at some further length the celebrated "Pastoral Letter" which their Bishop has addressed, "upon the present state of the Church, to the Clergy of the diocese of Exeter.

To sum up our opinion of this letter as a whole in a few words would be impossible; in one part it is so warlike and belligerent, in another so firm and dogmatic in its statements of positive truth; here it savours so strongly of the astute and crafty advocate, and there again it bursts forth into such fierce invective against the authors and abettors of the (so-called) wrong which (as High Churchmen declare,) was inflicted last year on the English Church by the judicial committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council. Two things there are which seem more especially to gall and wound the Bishop, as from page to page he recurs to his "Crambe repetita" of complaint-the Gorham decision, and the religious opinions of his own Metropolitan. We will only forewarn our readers of a fact which we think High-Anglicans will read with some astonishment, that if they acknowledge in his Lordship of Exeter a far nearer approximation to the one great system of Catholic doctrine which underlies, if we may so speak, the whole of the writings of the New Testament, and especially the inspired Epistles which the Holy Ghost dictated

by the mouth of God's own Apostles, still they will find his Grace of Canterbury more in keeping with the comprehensive and latitudinarian views of that gigantic compromise, the English Prayer Book. Would that Dr. Philpott could be led to see to how much of the Catholic faith the inferences of his own private judgment (for, after all, they are nothing more at present,) have compelled him to bear witness; and would that God's Holy Spirit, even at this late day, now that he has passed the threescore years and ten of man's allotted span, might lead him to submit his will, ere it be too late, to the living, speaking, and teaching authority which God has set up in His one holy Catholic Church; and so enable him to exchange the uncertainties of private opinion and human doctrines for a solid and substantial faith.

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The first subject on which his Lordship touches is one which, as he says, stands forth in glaring and disastrous prominence among the events of the last three years. This is, of course, the Gorham decision; in his own words, "the blow which has been dealt (unknowingly, doubtless, and unintentionally,) by the judicial committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council, against the Catholicity, and therefore the essential character of our Church, as a sound branch of the Church of Christ, by deciding that it does not hold, as of faith, one of the articles of the creed of Christendom." (p 2.) Against this decision, as is well known, his Lordship formally protested, on two grounds: 1. That Mr. Gorham's doctrines were not fairly stated in the report which the judicial committee presented to Her Majesty; and 2. That the Canons of the Church had been disregarded in the judgment pronounced upon the case. And this latter point he now endeavours very skilfully, but we think not very conclusively, to establish. For the subject is one which demands to be viewed as a whole. It will not do to take isolated quotations even from the very soundest lawyers, unless at the same time we take into consideration, not merely the abstract theory of what the Church ought to be, but the actual historical facts in their collective bearings. Now it is most certain that a community which wilfully resigns into other hands than its own the guardianship of those sacred truths which it believes itself alone commissioned to maintain and teach, has little or no right to complain if its unfaithfulness to so high a trust be turned against itself, and it

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fall wounded or slain by an arrow feathered from its own wing. If, as we are compelled by the facts of history to believe, the English Church, by the "Act of Submission,' sold away her own birthright to the Eighth Henry for a mess of pottage; if-forgetful of God, and of His most holy faith, which she was founded and endowed to maintain in this land, whether princes and kings and other earthly powers were willing or unwilling-she cut herself off from the rest of Christendom, and consented to have her synods convened only by the king's authority, and her Canons enacted in his name, and not in her own-if she thus "flung God's commission beneath the footstool of an earthly Sovereign," we do think that she has little or no ground of complaint, if she finds out, when it is too late, that the powers of this world regard her and use her freely as a tool in their own hands; and that henceforth she must speak with faltering accents, according to the ever-varying fashion of the age, and as a national institution, accommodate her creed to the sovereign people whose property, slave, and creature she has become. And hence it is of no use for the Bishop to plead on his side the Statute of Appeals," which after all goes no further than to deny to any exterior person or persons,"-(i. e., to the See of Rome,)—that "power to render and yield justice, and final determination in all cases," which it assigns in the same breath to "the one supreme head and king" of the English constitution. Hence, too, it is superfluous, or rather suicidal, to appeal, as his Lordship does, to Bracton; for, after all, he asserts no more than that the spiritual and civil sword ought to aid each other, a point which nobody denies; or to Coke, who, we really think, unless he was uttering the very grossest Erastianism, must have been intending a covert satire on the Post-Reformation Church of England, when he said, "certain it is that this kingdom hath best been governed, and peace and quiet preserved, when both parties, i. e., when the practice of the temporal courts, and the ecclesiastical judges, have kept themselves within their proper jurisdiction, without encroaching or usurping upon one another." Surely that great lawyer, when he wrote these words, must have been referring in memory to days when as yet the Reformers had not sacrilegiously given over the supremacy in things spiritual into the hands of an earthly monarch. For, let us ask, at what time, since those unhappy days, have the

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temporal and spiritual elements ever worked, each in their separate sphere of action without encroaching on each other's province, unless both the one and the other be considered as merely subordinate departments of the constitution? And if this be the case, we suppose that upon the whole they have gone on with tolerable unanimity in their servility to the Crown. Still more unsuccessful is the Bishop in his allusion to the lay commission appointed under Henry, and again under Edward. For even granting, which we do not by any means grant, that they contemplated a Council of Provincial Bishops as the only proper tribunal of ultimate appeal in all cases strictly spiritual," yet let High-Anglicans tell us plainly whether Anglican Bishops could constitute such a tribunal under Post-Reformation enactments, save and except by the authority of the king, and without looking to him to confirm their decisions? And what is all this but, to use the Bishop's own emphatic words,-" to fling the commission of Christ under the footstool of an earthly throne?" Surely if the instituting of Mr. Gorham to his living without further enquiry at the bidding of Her Majesty, be, as the Bishop says, such "a surrender" a surrender" on the Archbishop's part, as "can be regarded only as the voluntary betrayal of a high and most sacred trust," the question naturally occurs to unprejudiced minds, cannot Dr. Sumner fairly plead that he is only acting "ministerially" as the agent of a system which is based and founded on a like surrender; and that if he, by his single act, has renounced any Divine authority inherent in his office and mission, the English Church itself has been doing the same for the whole three hundred years of her existence? "The servant, especially if he is well paid for his work,' His Grace may fairly argue, "must not be too scrupulous as to the character of his master's trade; and if he is only faithful in executing the commands of that master, be they honest or dishonest, he is simply doing his duty, and his master must look to the rest for himself." Let us suppose that a rich mill-owner has recently entered into a fraudulent speculation. Let us suppose that the thousand hands which he employs are well aware that the system on which their master trades is one which cannot be defended on abstract principles of justice, yet shall we blame the artizan who, without entering into the question of honesty or dishonesty, does his week's work, and receives

for it his week's pay? Just so the Archbishop may fairly plead, we think, that he is, after all, the honest servant of a flagrantly dishonest system, and must act accordingly. And this is just what he does in effect. We all remember the answer which he gave in the Hampden case to those Clergymen who requested him to decline to consecrate the Professor as Bishop. "Reverend Sirs, It is not within the bounds of any authority possessed by me to give you an opportunity of proving your objections; finding, therefore, nothing on which I could act in compliance with your remonstrance, I proceeded in the execution of my office, (the italics are ours,) to obey Her Majesty's mandate for Dr. Hampden's consecration in the usual form." And just in the same spirit, and fairly enough we think, the Archbishop answers some of the remonstrant Clergy of the diocese of Exeter, by saying that in the institution of Mr. Gorham to his living he acted not judicially, but ministerially. However heretical in the abstract Mr. Gorham's opinions may be, we say that the Archbishop could not have acted otherwise without violating the contract of servility to the Crown and people of England, on which he entered, when first he took possession of the See of Canterbury and the palace of Lambeth. The question, of course, arises, whose minister Dr. Sumner was when he did this thing? And we shall not disagree either with his Grace or his Lordship when we say that he was obviously acting as the minister of the Queen and people of England. Whose else could he be ?

We cannot leave the topic of this decision, without one or two further remarks, though they are not strictly relevant to our immediate subject.

High Churchmen of the English communion, are apt to defend themselves from the obvious consequences of the Gorham decision, by pleading that whatever may be the decision of the State, the Church Court, at the head of which sits Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, pronounced its judgment in favour of the Bishop of Exeter. And on this argument they rely, in order to prove that the Church of England is not committed to heresy. Now clearly, if Sir H. J. Fust's decision was the decision of the English Church in 1850, it was equally so in 1845. And if Anglicans will cast their minds back five years, they will remember that the same Sir H. J. Fust, in the same court, and acting in

VOL. XXXI.-No. LXI.

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