The entire article is of value both for its historical information as to the history of Tests in the English Church, and for its mode of advocating the retention of subscription to the Articles, as at present enforced.

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[Subscription came with the English Reformation.]

The Report of the Royal Commission of 1864, on Subscription in the English Church, supplied a complete account of all the changes in subscription from the Reformation downwards.  Reference may also be made to Stoughton’s “History of Religion in England,” for the incidents in greater detail.

Perhaps the most remarkable defence of Liberty, as against the prevailing view in the English Church, is Dean Milman’s speech before the Clerical Subscription Commission, of which he was a member.  It is printed in Fraser’s Magazine, March, 1865, and is included in the criticism of the Quarterly Review article, already quoted.

The Dean’s Resolution submitted to the Commission was as follows:—­

“Conformity to the Liturgy of the Church of England being the best and the surest attainable security for ’the declared agreement of the Clergy with the doctrines of the Church’; with many the daily, with all the weekly public reading of the services of the Church of England (containing, as they do, the ancient creeds of the Church Catholic), and the constant use of the Sacramental offices and other formularies in the Book of Common Prayer, being a solemn and reiterated pledge of their belief in those doctrines, the Subscription to the thirty-nine Articles is unnecessary.  Such Subscription adds no further guarantee for the clergyman’s faithfulness to the doctrines of the Church; while the peculiar form and controversial tone in which the Articles were compiled is the cause of much perplexity, embarrassment, and difficulty, especially to the younger clergy and to those about to enter into Holy Orders.”

Much doubt was entertained, whether this motion came within the terms of the Commission.  It was not pressed by the Dean.

I give the following quotation from the speech:—­

...  “And if I venture to question the expediency, the wisdom, I will say the righteousness of retaining subscription to the thirty-nine Articles as obligatory on all clergymen, I do so, not from any difficulty in reconciling with my own conscience what, during my life, I have done more than once, but from the deep and deliberate conviction that such subscription is altogether unnecessary as a safeguard for the essential doctrines of Christianity, which are more safely and fully protected by other means.  It never has been, is not, and never will be a solid security for its professed object, the reconciling or removing religious differences, which it tends rather to create and keep alive; is embarrassing to many men who might be of the most valuable service in the ministry of the Church; is objectionable as concentrating and enforcing the attention of the youngest clergy on questions, some abstruse, some antiquated, and in themselves at once so minute and comprehensive as to harass less instructed and profound thinkers, to perplex and tax the sagacity of the most able lawyers and the most learned divines....