that if any one perceives “to how great an extent the origin itself of Christianity rests upon probable evidence, his principle will relieve him from many difficulties which might otherwise be very disturbing.  For relations which may repose on doubtful grounds as matters of history, and, as history, be incapable of being ascertained or verified, may yet be equally suggestive of true ideas with facts absolutely certain”—­that is, they may have a spiritual significance although they are historically false.

The most daring Essay was the Rev. Baden Powell’s Study of the Evidences of Christianity.  He was a believer in evolution, who accepted Darwinism, and considered miracles impossible.  The volume was denounced by the Bishops, and in 1862 two of the contributors, who were beneficed clergymen and thus open to a legal attack, were prosecuted and tried in the Ecclesiastical Court.  Condemned on

[207] certain points, acquitted on others, they were sentenced to be suspended for a year, and they appealed to the Privy Council.  Lord Westbury (Lord Chancellor) pronounced the judgment of the Judicial Committee of the Council, which reversed the decision of the Ecclesiastical Court.  The Committee held, among other things, that it is not essential for a clergyman to believe in eternal punishment.  This prompted the following epitaph on Lord Westbury:  “Towards the close of his earthly career he dismissed Hell with costs and took away from Orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of everlasting damnation.”

This was a great triumph for the Broad Church party, and it is an interesting event in the history of the English State-Church.  Laymen decided (overruling the opinion of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York) what theological doctrines are and are not binding on a clergyman, and granted within the Church a liberty of opinion which the majority of the Church’s representatives regarded as pernicious.  This liberty was formally established in 1865 by an Act of Parliament, which altered the form in which clergymen were required to subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles.  The episode of Essays and Reviews is a landmark in the history of religious thought in England.

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The liberal views of the Broad Churchmen and their attitude to the Bible gradually produced some effect upon those who differed most from them; and nowadays there is probably no one who would not admit, at least, that such a passage as Genesis, Chapter XIX, might have been composed without the direct inspiration of the Deity.

During the next few years orthodox public opinion was shocked or disturbed by the appearance of several remarkable books which criticized, ignored, or defied authority—­Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, Seeley’s Ecce Homo (which the pious Lord Shaftesbury said was “vomited from the jaws of hell"), Lecky’s History of Rationalism.  And a new poet of liberty arose who did not fear to sound the loudest notes of