e him, not merely as an unsound divine, but as a dishonest
man teaching others to palter with their engagements, the crisis drew
forth strong support and sympathy where they were not perhaps to be
expected. It rallied to him, at least for the time, some of the friends
who had begun to hold aloof. Mr. Palmer, of Worcester, Mr. Perceval, Dr.
Hook, with reserves according to each man's point of view, yet came
forward in his defence. The Board was made to feel that they had been
driven by violent and partisan instigations to commit themselves to a
very foolish as well as a very passionate and impotent step; that they
had by very questionable authority simply thrown an ill-sounding and
ill-mannered word at an argument on a very difficult question, to which
they themselves certainly were not prepared with a clear and
satisfactory answer; that they had made the double mistake of declaring
war against a formidable antagonist, and of beginning it by creating the
impression that they had treated him shabbily, and were really afraid to
come to close quarters with him. As the excitement of hasty counsels
subsided, the sense of this began to awake in some of them; they tried
to represent the off-hand and ambiguous words of the condemnation as not
meaning all that they had been taken to mean. But the seed of bitterness
had been sown. Very little light was thrown, in the strife of pamphlets
which ensued, on the main subject dealt with in No. 90, the authority
and interpretation of such formularies as our Articles. The easier and
more tempting and very fertile topic of debate was the honesty and good
faith of the various disputants. Of the four Tutors, only one, Mr. H.B.
Wilson, published an explanation of their part in the matter; it was a
clumsy, ill-written and laboured pamphlet, which hardly gave promise of
the intellectual vigour subsequently displayed by Mr. Wilson, when he
appeared, not as the defender, but the assailant of received opinions.
The more distinguished of the combatants were Mr. Ward and Mr. R. Lowe.
Mr. Ward, with his usual dialectical skill, not only defended the Tract,
but pushed its argument yet further, in claiming tolerance for doctrines
alleged to be Roman. Mr. Lowe, not troubling himself either with
theological history or the relation of other parties in the Church to
the formularies, threw his strength into the popular and plausible topic
of dishonesty, and into a bitter and unqualified invective against the