the same capacity, officially declared in 1845, that the Church of England knew nothing of stone altars, or altars of any kind, and by consequence swept away "Priest" and "sacrifice," as well as "altar,"-(for they all must stand or fall together) from his Church's vocabulary. Anglicans, then, must either accept both decisions, or reject both. Which will they do? If they accept both, they have no altar, sacrifice, or priesthood; one of their "two only" Sacraments is taken from them. And if they reject both decisions, Baptism is robbed of all its efficacy as a Sacrament. Let them take whichever horn of the dilemma they please. And we must hazard another observation still-if Dr. Philpotts really believed that the Archbishop, in the case of Mr. Gorham, acted only in a ministerial capacity, in other words, as minister of the advisers of the Crown, how is it that he did not license a clergyman of his own nomination to the care of souls in the parish of Bampford Speke, and bid the parishioners, on peril of their souls, to communicate with him only? If, at least, he really believed his own doctrinal position to be essentially and solely true, and that each Bishop with his Clergy and people are a Church complete in themselves, independent of any accidental tie to a national community, how could he have omitted to take this line, the only one which could have brought matters to a crisis, and tested the inherent power of his own principles? Again, we cannot help pressing upon the attention of Anglicans, that the Bishop of Exeter (whatever might have been the cost, had he then adopted a different line,) cannot now plead that the English Church is not committed to the decision of the judicial committee; for he himself acknowledged the legitimate authority of that court by consenting to plead his case before it; the two Archbishops and the chief Bishop of the land sat in it as assessors, nay, the two former were "consentient, and even eager parties to the decision." (p. 9.) Deeply as Dr. Philpotts may lament it now, his grief has come too late. It cannot alter the past. What has been, is, and cannot be as though it never had been. Let us hear what the Bishop says concerning his own line of conduct; we cannot listen to his words without commiserating their author.

"I did not resist (as I was advised that I might successfully resist,) the appointment of such assessors to such judges.

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consequence has been most disastrous. Would that it affected me only! I should then be free from that self-reproach which I cannot altogether succeed in attempting to silence, that I rashly sacrificed the highest and most sacred interests of Catholic faith, to feelings too much akin to courtesy and delicacy to individuals.”—p. 10. (The Italics are ours.)

The Bishop, we observe, expresses no regret for having pleaded before such a court as that of the judicial committee, but only for not having resisted the appointment of two "such" Archbishops as assessors. It is clear too, that in spite of himself, Dr. Philpotts feels that some how or other he has compromised the Catholic faith, and that he is now doing all that lies in his power to stifle the reproaches of his conscience.

The following pages of his Pastoral show us by what means he at present contrives to do so. He palliates the matter to himself and to his friends, by "saying that that decision did not go the length which has been commonly supposed of pronouncing the clerk whom he had rejected, as fit and worthy to be instituted to the cure of souls." It only declared that "sufficient ground had not been laid by the Bishop for rejecting him; and that in consequence his own jurisdiction pro hac vice was null, and had passed to the Archbishop as superior ordinary." Now this may be, for all we know, a very nice distinction on paper; but really viewing it practically, we do think that it amounts to what in another case, and where his own opinions and interests were not concerned, the Bishop would pronounce a mere quibble: at all events we should like to know what he would say to a candidate for deacon's orders, who were to use a similar mode of explaining away the effects of infant Baptism; for, if he were clever enough, he might draw a hundred equally nice" distinctions without differences." In our opinion, two negatives cancel each other; and when the judicial committee pronounced that Mr. G. was not proved unworthy of the care of souls, they practically and to all intents and purposes pronounced him worthy, on the principle that every man is held innocent until he is proved guilty. We said that the Bishop nowhere expressess his regret at having allowed his case to be pleaded before a civil tribunal. We may further remark that, although several of the Anglican Bishops at the time objected,-in calm and temperate language, of course, as became their position,-against the

decision which was actually given, not one of the whole bench has ventured to grapple with the question in its widest bearings, by formally protesting against the right of such a court to meddle with the sacred truth of God. Nay, further, up to this time nobody, except a few visionary members of the Church Unions, have attempted to do so; the decision remains on record, and will remain to the end of time; and we may fairly say, that the silence of the English people on the subject proves that they thoroughly accept it. Silence' did we say? or must we not rather read their entire approbation of the state supremacy, and of that one decision in particular, in the mad outcry which has been raised against the Puseyites? Such is the result, the legitimate and necessary result, of three hundred years of Protestant ascendancy; and such will ever be the case with bodies who cut themselves off, or (what amounts to the same thing) allow others to cut them off, from the sole centre of unity, and life, and faith, the chair of St. Peter, the prince of the apostles. We repeat, that if she had really believed that she held God's truth in her hands to keep, the Anglican communion could never have allowed, we say not such a decision to be pronounced, but such a court to pronounce any opinion on the subject whatever: and we assert that the lesson which the Gorham case is intended by God to teach, can be no more nor less than this; how wicked and anti-christian a thing it is, for the Church of God to league itself with those worldly powers against which she was set up to wage unflinching warfare; and also how signally God punishes those who, like the Israelites of old, in the days of Samuel, forsake the appointment of the Lord their God, and choose for themselves an earthly monarch; or who cry out with the same people at a later period, "We will not have this man to reign over us,' We have no king but Cæsar!"

His Lordship, as our readers may remember, closed his celebrated letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury last year, by formally declaring that, on account of the heresy with which His Grace was infected, he could no longer hold communion with him. Dr. Philpotts still not only maintains that in so doing he was fully justified, but confesses that if he himself was wrong, and "if the Archbishop had not, by instituting Mr. Gorham, become a fautor of heretical tenets," and so "forfeited his right to Catholic communion" -then "any one of his com-provincial Bishops who there

upon renounced communion with him, would himself, by so doing, have deserved to be put out of the pale of the Church." (p. 14.) He then proceeds to justify himself, by expressing a "wish that subsequent consideration and experience had weakened his confidence in the fitness and necessity of the step taken by him. But," he adds, "it has been far otherwise." In spite of the powerful attack, which nine years ago the Bishop of Exeter thought fit to make upon his Grace's opinions, it seems that the Archbishop has again, in 1851, brought to light the charge which he delivered to the clergy of Chester in 1841, appealing to it as a prophetic warning as to the Romeward tendencies of the Oxford school of opinion. And this it is, as we said above, which gives his Lordship an opportunity of again attacking the obnoxious charge, part of the contents of which we have already laid open to our readers.

In that charge, the present Archbishop had selected two main objects of attack in the Oxford Tract writers-the doctrine of Justification, and that of the Church. It was not wonderful, he thought, that men who preached the atonement with reserve, should go wrong upon the question, "how sinful man becomes just in the sight of God," and according to their view of this cardinal matter, attribute a greater share in the work of man's salvation to the Church and its outward ordinances, than he and his school of opinion were disposed to allow. Accordingly, in the true spirit and almost in the phraseology of the thirty-nine articles, he declares that the Church is not a Divine institution, or a life-giving ordinance, not the visible authority ordained of God to dispense His gifts to man, not "the only way to eternal life," (though by the way Bishop Pearson, a former occupant of the See of Chester, thinks differently,)—but simply" the company of believers:" and by consequence he asserts, that "it ought not to be so put forward as to be interposed instead of Christ as the mediator between God and man." His Grace then insists that it is by an individual act of faith in Christ, and by it alone, that we are brought near to Him: "I examine the word of God, and there I find all its promises annexed to individual faith. Can I venture," he asks, to turn aside from this, and claim the promises as a member of the Church?" And again," so dangerous is that system of religious teaching, which places salvation (though it may be only virtually) in the Church; makes the

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[Sept. Church the prominent object, and would lead us in practice to depend upon a supposed union with Christ through the Church; instead of those evidences by which scripture teaches us to examine ourselves whether we be in the faith." "The Church," he complains, "has been made by the Oxford school, first an abstraction, and then a person, and then a Saviour." Now, believing as his Grace does in the rationalistic theory, according to which the soul gains access to its Maker by an act of its own individual faith, of course we are prepared to find that he also subscribes most heartily to that unholy statement which, as he says, came fresh from our Reformers," to the effect that "we are justified in the sight of God by faith only." We shall not now wade through the pages which Dr. Philpotts employs in showing the unscriptural nature and the evil tendency of that "articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiæ." We will only remark, as in effect we have already remarked, that if the Bishop finds his own view supported by the liturgy, the Archbishop has as certainly the articles on his side: to these he can safely retire and entrench himself behind them: for he knows that they expressly say, that "we are justified by faith only," and declare that such a doctrine is "very full of comfort,"-as of course it is to the careless and the worldling, or it would never have been broached by the Anglican Reformers. After this, how can the Bishop of Exeter allow Priests and Deacons to go on subscribing the articles before him, when he expressly states that, "the apostles often speak of our being justified by faith, but never by faith only, much less by faith alone: in other words they were not solifidians? One of them says, that "a man is justified by works, and not by faith only;" the same apostle ...... says, that "faith is dead, being alone." (Letter, p. 21, 22.) Here, however, are two prelates of the same Establishment at open issue, the one stigmatizing the union of works with faith towards man's justification as a departure from the articles, nay, as Popish, and "by implication, devilish;" while the other as plainly avows, that if "to speak of forgiveness or works of mercy, as availing to obtain remission of sins before God," be a departure from the spirit of the articles, he "would never more, by the grace of God, permit himself to act as Bishop in a Church which so openly contradicts the plain teaching of our Lord." (p. 27.) Need we further proof to shew us that the Anglican Establishment