of belief, a
reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to
a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt--never to allow his mind
to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to
bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has
a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament,
precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of
a Council.

If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he
has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science
with the established formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he
ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the
sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant
cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which
life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is
forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.

So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and
Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said--and said by men who had no
professional antipathy to them--that the writers had broken their faith.
Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen
were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed
to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were
enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a
particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an
independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no
part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent
upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine,
physicians may have nothing to say to it.

These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free
enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a
determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had
preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with
which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a
sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject
has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has
been a c