Bishop was driving was baptismal regeneration, at this time the prominent note of distinction between the two Church parties. The one took regeneration in baptism literally and absolutely, the other took it figuratively or conditionally. Gorham did not connect grace with baptism, but maintained the necessity of a prevenient act of grace to make those who were to be baptised worthy recipients. Grace might be before or after baptism, and was conditional on the fulfilment of certain promises: the regeneration was hypothetical. This did not satisfy the Bishop, who took the words of the baptismal service in what seems to be their literal meaning. He supported his case from such words in Scripture as 'born of water,' 'baptism for the remission of sins,' and 'the laver of regeneration.' The Court of Arches decided in the Bishop's favour. On appeal to the Privy Council, the decision was for Gorham, not indeed in favour of Gorham's interpretation, but that the Bishop and he were free to take the baptismal service in their own sense. The question was left open. This decision has been called the charter of freedom in the Church of England.

Henry Phillpotts, the prosecutor of Gorham, was a typical High Churchman of the old school. He hailed the 'Tracts for the Times' as a revival of High Church doctrines, yet he lamented the extremes to which they went. He did not approve of prayer for the dead, nor of absolution by the clergy, and he expressed a special disapprobation of the doctrine of reserve in religious teaching. He believed that the literal and grammatical sense of the Articles was Catholic, but that they were incompatible with the doctrines of the Church of Rome. He was a strong Protestant as well as High Churchman, as much opposed to the Roman Catholic as to the Dissenter. In his public life he opposed every measure which liberal men would call progressive, such as granting civil rights to Roman Catholics, and educating Roman Catholic children in Ireland without requiring them to be taught the Bible. He also opposed secular education in England, or even religious education if limited to the general principles on which all Christians are agreed. He was great in such questions as that children baptised by Nonconformists,

baptism conveyed grace. He dreaded the influence of the Evangelical clergy, saying that they required vigilance on the part of the bishops. He opposed the Registration Act as robbing children of baptism, and he was the only bishop who in 1836 opposed the commutation of tithes, recommending to abide by the stuff.'

Phillpotts, as we might expect, was dissatisfied with the decision in the Gorham case. It was a judgment of the Privy Council, who were not competent judges in matters ecclesiastical, and it was against the catholicity, and therefore ,the essential character of our Church as a sound branch of the the Church of Christ by declaring that it does not hold as of faith one of the articles of the creed of Christendom.' He unchurched all foreign Protestants who had no bishops, and the Church of Scotland which we are commanded to pray for by the Canon of 1603, could only be prayed for as we pray for our enemies, persecutors and slanderers' and 'that it may please God to turn their hearts.' 2

In his Charge of 1842, Phillpotts criticised the 'Tracts for the Times,' spoke of the great good they had done in calling attention to the claims of the Church as a divine institution, and to the efficacy of the Sacraments. But as a consistent Protestant he denounced Tract XC as attempting an impossibility. The XXXIX Articles could not be reconciled with the decrees of Trent. A few instances are given of what he called the absolute incompatibility.' The sixth Article makes Holy Scripture the only ground of faith, while the decrees of Trent say that the 'written word and the unwritten tradition are to have equal pious affection and veneration.' The Apocryphal books are excluded by the Article, while the Council of Trent pronounces an anathema on all who deny that any of them is canonical. The ninth Article says that the infection of nature doth remain in them that are regenerate,' and that it 'hath of itself the nature of sin.' The Council of Trent, while admitting that St Paul says of concupiscence that it is sin, explains that 'it proceeds from sin,' and that everything which had the true and proper nature of sin is taken away in baptism.' The thirty-fifth Article admits

1 Pastoral Letter 1851.

only two sacraments and says that 'the other five are not sacraments of the Gospel.' Trent, on the other hand, has an anathema for every one who says 'that any of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament.' The twenty-eighth Article pronounces Transubstantiation 'repugnant to the plain words of Scripture,' while the Council of Trent teaches that our Lord Jesus Christ is 'truly, really and substantially contained in the sacrament,' and not only after a heavenly and spiritual manner.' There are anathemas for those who say that the sacrament is 'not to be solemnly carried about that it may be adored.' The twenty-second Article calls 'Purgatory' a 'fond thing vainly invented.' The Council of Trent has an anathema for all who deny Purgatory as 'a place for punishment after the forgiveness of sin before the sinner can be admitted to heaven.'

CHAPTER XIII

HARE, MAURICE, KINGSLEY, F. W. ROBERTSON

THERE is a class of churchmen who might be described as on the side of rational theology, but who, instead of promoting destructive criticism, seek rather to emphasise the imperishable truth contained in the Scriptures. Their genealogy might be traced even directly to Coleridge and Erskine.

The first is Julius Charles Hare. He was descended from an old bishop of Chichester who wrote on the difficulties and dangers of interpreting Scripture with a view to inculcating the value of tradition. He was also related to Jonathan Shipley, the liberal Bishop of St Asaph, and was one of the first to whom the appellation 'Broad Church,' was applied. As a theologian he strove to prevent the divorce of the spiritual from the intellectual, and to restore the true relation of the Tree of Knowledge to the Tree of Life.1 He combined the results of German criticism with the fervour of Evangelicalism. Though a strong Protestant, he was yet a teacher of development. This does not mean that we are to add to the Scriptures or take away from them, but that 'truth in Scripture is set before us by example, by the utterance of principles in the germ, not by the enumeration of a formal dogmatic system, according to which the thoughts of men were to be cast and rubricated for ever after." "Theology is progressive just as science is, and the progress is the work of the Spirit showing the things of Christ.

To the work of the Holy Spirit, Hare devoted a volume of sermons, preached in Cambridge, with elaborate notes. He thought the old divines of the school of Hammond limited the gift of the Holy Spirit to the baptised. This was a meagre theology, but they were sober men compared with 'the air-blown phantoms which have recently dazzled and bewildered so many.' Of all of them it may be said that they appear to concentrate and condense the operations of the Spirit into a single magical movement, an electric transmuting flash, and continually disregard the perpetual abiding influences and operations.' The rivers of living water are the inward gifts of the Spirit, not the outward. They are not even the miraculous, which some of our divines wrongly suppose to be the highest, a supposition which would make the Jewish Church have more of the Spirit than the Christian. Since Arminianism began to prevail in the Church of England very few have believed in an abiding Spirit. Bishop Bull is mentioned as an exception. Of South it is said that he scarcely admitted any Holy Ghost 'since the miraculous gifts' till the restoration of Charles II. Stillingfleet and Warburton thought that the prophecies of the Spirit in Isaiah were fulfilled in the Apostles, and that the fountain then opened is the source of the rivers which have been preserved in Holy Scripture. The dread of Puritanism and enthusiasm tends to ignore or deny the existence of a living present Spirit.

The writers against enthusiasm in the last century spoke often, in spite of themselves, of a Holy Ghost. As members of the Church of England they could scarcely fail to do otherwise. The Liturgy continually speaks of a Holy Ghost, not merely in the inspiration of Scripture, but in the Sacraments, and in governing and sanctifying the whole body of the Church. Those who openly proclaimed their faith in a present Comforter were treated as men full of new wine. They were mocked, persecuted, and even cast out of the Church. Bishop Lavington wrote a book against enthusiasm as a quality fit only for Methodists and Papists. No severer sentence could have been pronounced on the Church of England. Even Heber, who made the promise of the Holy