a legal sentence in a totally different condition from any others where
the true and indisputable law of the case is, for the time at least,
what the supreme tribunal has pronounced it to be. People chafed at not
getting what they thought the plain broad conclusions from facts and
documents accepted; they appealed to law from the uncertainty of
controversy, and found law still more uncertain, and a good deal more
dangerous. They thought that they were going to condemn crimes and
expel wrongdoers; they found that these prosecutions inevitably assumed
the character of the old political trials, which were but an indirect
and very mischievous form of the struggle between two avowed parties,
and in which, though the technical question was whether the accused had
committed the crime, the real one was whether the alleged crime were a
crime at all. Accordingly, wider considerations than those arising out
of the strict merits of the case told upon the decision; and the
negative judgment, and resolute evasion of a condemnation, in each of
the cases which were of wide and serious importance, were proofs of the
same tendency in English opinion which has made political trials,
except in the most extreme cases, almost inconceivable. They mean that
the questions raised must be fought out and settled in a different and
more genuine way, and that law feels itself out of place when called to
interfere in them. As all parties have failed in turning the law into a
weapon, and yet as all parties have really gained much more than they
have lost by the odd anomalies of our ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the
wisest course would seem to be for those who feel the deep importance
of doctrinal questions to leave the law alone, either as to employing
it or attempting to change it. Controversy, argument, the display of
the intrinsic and inherent strength of a great and varied system, are
what all causes must in the last resort trust to. Lord Westbury will
have done the Church of England more good than perhaps he thought of
doing, if his _dicta_ make theologians see that they can be much better