making good their position.  But it seems by no means unlikely that in the working of the Court of Final Appeal there will be found a means of evading the substance of questions, and of disposing of very important issues by a side wind, to the prejudice of what have hitherto been recognised as rightful claims.  An arrangement which bears hard upon the Church theoretically, as a controversial argument in the hands of Dr. Manning or Mr. Binney, and as an additional proof of its Erastian subjection to the State, and which also works ill and threatens serious mischief, may fairly be regarded by Churchmen with jealousy and dislike, and be denounced as injurious to interests for which they have a right to claim respect.  The complaint that the State is going to force new senses on theological terms, or to change by an unavowed process the meaning of acknowledged formularies in such a body as the English Church, is at least as deserving of attention as the reluctance of conscientious Dissenters to pay Church-rates.

Mr. Joyce’s book shows comprehensively and succinctly the history of the changes which have brought matters to their present point, and the look which they wear in the eyes of a zealous Churchman, disturbed both by the shock given to his ideas of fitness and consistency, and by the prospect of practical evils.  It is a clergyman’s view of the subject, but it is not disposed of by saying that it is a clergyman’s view.  It is incomplete and one-sided, and leaves out considerations of great importance which ought to be attended to in forming a judgment on the whole question; but it is difficult to say that, regarded simply in itself, the claim that the Church should settle her own controversies, and that Church doctrine should be judged of in Church courts, is not a reasonable one.  The truth is that the present arrangement, if we think only of its abstract suitableness and its direct and ostensible claims to our respect, would need Swift himself to do justice to its exquisite unreasonableness.  It is absurd to assume, as it is assumed in the whole of our ecclesiastical legislation, that the Church is bound to watch most jealously over doctrine, and then at the last moment to refuse her the natural means of guarding it.  It is absurd to assume that the “spiritualty” are the only proper persons to teach doctrine, and then to act as if they were unfit to judge of doctrine.  It is not easy, in the abstract, to see why articles which were trusted to clergymen to draw up may not be trusted to clergymen to explain, and why what there was learning and wisdom enough to do in the violent party times and comparative inexperience of the Reformation, cannot be safely left to the learning and wisdom of our day for correction or completion.  If Churchmen and ecclesiastics may care too much for the things about which they dispute, it seems undeniable that lawyers who need not even be Christians, may care for them too little; and if the Churchmen make a mistake in the matter, at least it is their own affair, and they may be more fairly made to take the consequences of their own acts than of other people’s.  A strong case, if a strong case were all that was wanted, might be made out for a change in the authority which at present pronounces in the last resort on Church of England doctrine.