as it is
generally understood throughout Protestant Europe, to be a monstrous
abuse. He declares himself favourable, indeed, to the exercise of
private judgment, after a fashion of his own. We have, according to him,
a right to judge all the doctrines of the Church of England to be sound,
but not to judge any of them to be unsound. He has no objection, he
assures us, to active inquiry into religious questions. On the contrary,
he thinks such inquiry highly desirable, as long as it does not lead to
diversity of opinion; which is much the same thing as if he were to
recommend the use of fire that will not burn down houses, or of brandy
that will not make men drunk. He conceives it to be perfectly possible
for mankind to exercise their intellects vigorously and freely on
theological subjects, and yet to come to exactly the same conclusions
with each other and with the Church of England. And for this opinion he
gives, as far as we have been able to discover, no reason whatever,
except that everybody who vigorously and freely exercises his
understanding on Euclid's Theorems assents to them. "The activity of
private judgment," he truly observes, "and the unity and strength of
conviction in mathematics vary directly as each other." On this
unquestionable fact he constructs a somewhat questionable argument.
Everybody who freely inquires agrees, he says, with Euclid. But the
Church is as much in the right as Euclid. Why, then, should not every
free inquirer agree with the Church? We could put many similar
questions. Either the affirmative or the negative of the proposition
that King Charles wrote the _Icon Basilike_ is as true as that two sides
of a triangle are greater than the third side. Why, then, do Dr.
Wordsworth and Mr. Hallam agree in thinking two sides of a triangle
greater than the third side, and yet differ about the genuineness of the
_Icon Basilike?_ The state of the exact sciences proves, says Mr.
Gladstone, that, as respects religion, "the association of these two
ideas, activity of inquiry, and variety of conclusion, is a fallacious
one." We might just as well turn the argument the other way, and infer
from the variety of religious opinions that there must necessarily be
hostile mathematical sects, some affirming, and some denying, that the
square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the sides. But we
do not think either the one analogy or the other of the smallest value.
Our way of ascertaining the tend