them was severely imputed a sinister
design. They were styled "the Septem contra Christum"--six ministers of
religion combining to assail the faith they outwardly professed--seven
authors of an immoral rationalistic conspiracy. Two of them were haled
into the courts, one for casting doubt upon the inspiration of the Bible,
the other for impugning the eternity of the future punishment of the
wicked. The Queen in council upon appeal was advised to reverse a hostile
judgment in the court below (1864), and Lord Chancellor Westbury delivered
the decision in a tone described in the irreverent epigram of the day as
"dismissing eternal punishment with costs." This carried further, or
completed, the principle of the Gorham judgment fourteen years before, and
just as that memorable case determined that neither the evangelical nor
the high anglican school should drive out the other, so the judgment in
the case of _Essays and Reviews_ determined that neither should those two
powerful sections drive out the new critical, rationalistic, liberal, or
latitudinarian school. "It appears to me," Mr. Gladstone wrote to the
Bishop of London (April 26, 1864), "that the spirit of this judgment has
but to be consistently and cautiously followed up, in order to establish,
as far as the court can establish it, a complete indifference between the
Christian faith and the denial of it. I do not believe it is in the power
of human language to bind the understanding and conscience of man with any
theological obligations, which the mode of argument used and the
principles assumed [in the judgment] would not effectually unloose." To
Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury, who had taken part in one of the two cases,
he wrote:--

_Feb. 8, 1864._--This new and grave occurrence appertains to a
transition state through which the Christian faith is passing. The
ship is at sea far from the shore she left, far from the shore she
is making for. This or that deflection from her course, from this
or that wind of heaven, we cannot tell what it is, or whether
favourable or adverse to her true work and destination, unless we
know all the stages of the experience through which she has yet to
pass. It seems to me that these judgments are most important in
their character as illustrations of a system, or I should rather
say, of the failure of a system, parts of a vast scheme of forces
and events in the midst of which we stand, which s