eory of subscription be true, and the Articles
are articles 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 inquiry, 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, haft
languid, of the hopelessness of the subject has produced
a