out
should be deferred to some more opportune season, when minds were more
tranquil and the Church more united. The effect of the 'Disquisitions'
was also seriously injured by the warm advocacy they received from
Blackburne and others, who were anxious for far greater changes than any
which were then proposed. Blackburne, in the violence of his
Protestantism, insisted that in the Reformed Church of England there
ought not to be 'one circumstance in her constitution borrowed from the
Creeds, Ritual, and Ordinaries of the Popish system.'[412] A little of
the same tendency may be discovered in the proposals put forward in the
Disquisitions. In truth, in the eighteenth, as in the seventeenth
century, there was always some just cause for fear that a work of
revision, however desirable in itself, might be marred by some unworthy
concessions to a timid and ignorant Protestantism.

Revision of the Liturgy, although occasionally discussed, cannot be
said to have been an eighteenth-century question. Subscription, on the
other hand, as required by law to the Thirty-nine Articles, received a
great deal of anxious attention. This was quite inevitable. Much had
been said and written on the subject in the two previous centuries; but
until law, or usage so well established and so well understood as to
take the place of law, had interpreted with sufficient plainness the
force and meaning of subscription, the subject was necessarily
encompassed with much uneasiness and perplexity. Through a material
alteration in the law of the English Church, the consciences of the
clergy have at last been relieved of what could scarcely fail to be a
stumbling-block. By an Act passed by Parliament in 1865, and confirmed
by both Houses of Convocation, an important change was made in the
wording of the declaration required. Before that time the subscriber had
to 'acknowledge all and every the Articles ... to be agreeable to the
word of God.'[413] He now has to assent to the Articles, the Book of
Common Prayer, and of the ordering of priests and deacons, and to
believe the doctrine therein set forth to be agreeable to the Word of
God. The omission of the 'all and every,' and the insertion of the word
'doctrine' in the singular, constituted a substantial improvement, as
distinctly recognising that general adhesion and that liberty of
criticism, which had long been practically admitted, and in fact
authorised, by competent legal decisions, but which scarcel