have expressed opinions about it, know pretty well the nature of the
Court and the result of its working, and whatever variations there may
be in the judgment passed upon it arise not from any serious
imperfection of knowledge but from differences of principle. It was
hardly suitable in a work like this to assume a mystery and obscurity
about the subject where there is really none, and to claim superior
exactness and authenticity of information about a matter which in all
its substantial points is open to all the world. And we could conceive
the design, well-intentioned as it is, carried out in a way more
fitting to the gravity of the occasion which has suggested it. The
Bishop says truly enough that the questions involved in the
constitution of such a court are some of the most difficult with which
statesmen have to deal. Therefore it seems to us that a collection of
the decisions of such a court, put forth for the use of the Church and
nation under the authority of the Bishop of London, ought to have had
the dignity and the reserve of a work meant for permanence and for the
use of men of various opinions, and ought not to have had even the
semblance, as this book has, of an _ex parte_ pamphlet. The Bishop of
London is, of course, quite right to let the Church know what he thinks
about the Court of Final Appeal; and he is perfectly justified in
recommending us, in forming our opinion, to study carefully the facts
of the existing state of things; but it seems hardly becoming to make
the facts a vehicle for indirectly forcing on us, in the shape of
comments, a very definite and one-sided view of them, which is the very
subject of vehement contradiction and dispute. It would have been
better to have committed what was necessary in the way of explanation
and illustration to some one of greater weight and experience than two
clever young men of strong bias and manifest indisposition to respect
or attend to, or even to be patient with, any aspect of the subject but
their own in this complicated and eventful question, and who, partly