hich has
finally governed the issue of the various contentions; and the
infinitesimally fine character of the few propositions of doctrine to
which the Court has given the sanction of its ruling. Knowing what we
all of us cannot help knowing, and seeing things which lawyers and
judges are bound not to allow themselves to see or take account of, we
find it difficult to repress the feeling of amazement, as we travel
through the volume, to see Mr. Gorham let off, Mr. Heath deprived, then
Dr. Williams and Mr. Wilson let off, and to notice the delicate
technical point which brought to nought the laborious and at one time
hopeful efforts of the worthy persons who tried to turn out Archdeacon
Denison. And as to the matter of the decisions, though undoubtedly
_dicta_ of great importance are laid down in the course of them, yet it
is curious to observe the extremely minute and insignificant statements
on which in the more important cases judgment is actually pronounced.
The Gorham case was held to affect the position of a great party; but
the language and theory actually examined and allowed would hardly, in
legal strictness, authorise much more than the very peculiar views of
Mr. Gorham himself. And in the last case, the outside lay world has
hardly yet done wondering at the consummate feat of legal subtlety by
which the issue whether the English Church teaches that the Bible is
inspired was transmuted into the question whether it teaches that every
single part of every single book is inspired. It might seem that
rulings, of which the actual product in the way of doctrinal
propositions was so small, were hardly subjects for any keen interest.
But it would be shortsighted to regard the matter in this way. In the
first place, whatever may have happened as yet, it is manifestly a
serious thing for Church of England doctrine to have been thrown, on a
scale which is quite new, into the domain of a court of law, to lie at
the mercy of the confessed chances and uncertainties of legal
interpretation, with nothing really effective to correct and remedy
what may possibly be, without any fault in the judges, a fatally
mischievous construction of the text and letter of her authoritative
documents. In the next place, no one can fail to see, no one in fact
affects to deny, that the general result of these recent decisions,
capricious as their conclusions look at first sight, has been to make
the Formularies mean much less than they were suppo