getting a supplementary set of legal
limitations and glosses, claiming to regulate theological argument if
not teaching, and imposed upon us by the authority not of the Church or
even of Parliament but of the Judges of the Privy Council. This, it
strikes us, is a new position of things in the Church, a new
understanding and a changed set of conditions on which to carry on
controversies of doctrine; and it seems to us to have a serious
influence not only on the responsibility of the Church for her own
doctrine, but on the freedom and genuineness with which questions as to
that doctrine are discussed. The Court is not to blame for this result;
to do it justice, it has generally sought to decide as little as it
could; and the interference of law with the province of pure theology
is to be rather attributed to that mania for deciding, which of late
has taken possession pretty equally of all parties. But the
indisputable result is seen to be, after the experience of fifteen
years, that law is taking a place in our theological disputes and our
theological system which is new to it in our theological history; law,
not laid down prospectively in general provisions, but emerging
indirectly and incidentally out of constructions and judicial rulings
on cases of pressing and hazardous exigency; law, applying its
technical and deliberately narrow processes to questions which of
course it cannot solve, but can only throw into formal and inadequate,
if not unreal, terms; and laying down the limits of belief and
assertion on matters about which hearts burn and souls tremble, by the
mouth of judges whose consummate calmness and ability is only equalled
by their profound and avowed want of sympathy for the theology of which
their position makes them the expounders and final arbiters. A system
has begun with respect to English Church doctrine, analogous to that by
which Lord Stowell made the recent law of the sea, or that by which on
a larger scale the rescripts and decrees of the Popes moulded the great
system of the canon law.

This is the first thing that strikes us on a comparative survey of this
set of decisions. The second point is one which at first sight seems
greatly to diminish the importance of this new condition of things, but
which on further consideration is seen to have a more serious bearing
than might have been thought. This is, the odd haphazard way in which
points have come up for decision; the sort of apparent chance w