as this is a kind of game at which, when once started,
both parties can play, the policy of setting the law in motion to
silence theological opponents has become a natural and favourite one.
But it may be some excuse for the legislators who, in 1833, in
constructing a new Court of Appeal, so completely forgot or underrated
the functions which it would be called to discharge in the decision of
momentous doctrinal questions, that at the time no one thought much of
carrying theological controversies to legal arbitrament. The experiment
is a natural one to have been made in times of strong and earnest
religious contention; but, now that it has had its course, it is not
difficult to see that it was a mistaken one. There seems something
almost ludicrously incongruous in bringing a theological question into
the atmosphere and within the technical handling of a law court, and in
submitting delicate and subtle attempts to grasp the mysteries of the
unseen and the infinite, of God and the soul, of grace and redemption,
to the hard logic and intentionally confined and limited view of
forensic debate. Theological truth, in the view of all who believe in
it, must always remain independent of a legal decision; and, therefore,
as regards any real settlement, a theological question must come out of
a legal sentence in a totally different condition from any others where
the true and indisputable law of the case is, for the time at least,
what the supreme tribunal has pronounced it to be. People chafed at not
getting what they thought the plain broad conclusions from facts and
documents accepted; they appealed to law from the uncertainty of
controversy, and found law still more uncertain, and a good deal more
dangerous. They thought that they were going to condemn crimes and
expel wrongdoers; they found that these prosecutions inevitably assumed
the character of the old political trials, which were but an indirect
and very mischievous form of the struggle between two avowed parties,
and in which, though the technical question was whether the accused had
committed the crime, the real one was whether the alleged crime were a
crime at all. Accordingly, wider considerations than those arising out
of the strict merits of the case told upon the decision; and the
negative judgment, and resolute evasion of a condemnation, in each of
the cases which were of wide and serious importance, were proofs of the
same tendency in English opinion which has