happier fashion among us if, instead of the Privy Council, there had
been a tribunal of divines to give final judgment. The history of
appeals to Rome, from the days of the Jansenists and Fénelon to those
of Lamennais, may be no doubt satisfactory to those who believe it
necessary to ascribe to the Pope the highest wisdom and the most
consummate justice; but to those who venture to notice the real steps
of the process, and the collateral considerations, political and local,
which influenced the decision, the review is hardly calculated to make
those who are debarred from it regret the loss of this unalloyed purity
of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. And, as regards ourselves, it is true
that an ecclesiastical tribunal would hardly have been ingenious enough
to find the means of saying that Messrs. Wilson and Williams had not
taught in contradiction to the doctrines of the English Church, and
that they actually, under its present constitution, possessed the
liberty which, under a different--and, as some people think, a
better--constitution, they might possess. But it ought also to be borne
in mind what other judgments ecclesiastical tribunals might have given.
An ecclesiastical tribunal, unless it had been packed or accidentally
one-sided, would probably have condemned Mr. Gorham. An ecclesiastical
tribunal would almost certainly have expelled Archdeacon Denison from
his preferments. Indeed, the judgment of the Six Doctors on Dr. Pusey,
arbitrary and unconstitutional as it may be considered, was by no means
a doubtful foreshadowing of what a verdict upon him would have been
from any court that we can imagine formed of the high ecclesiastical
authorities of the time. It undoubtedly seems the most natural thing in
the world that a great religious body should settle, without hindrance,
its own doctrines and control its own ministers; but it is also some
compensation for the perversity with which the course of things has
interfered with ideal completeness, that our condition, if it had been
theoretically perfect, would have been perfectly intolerable.