seem to have been forgotten as soon as the particular case was disposed
of. The limits of supposed orthodox belief revived; but it was not the
action of judicial decisions which either narrowed or enlarged them.
Bishop Marsh's Calvinists never thought of having recourse to law. If
the Church did not do entirely without a Court of Final Appeal, it is
simply a matter of fact that the same weight and authority were not
attached to the proceedings of such a court which are attached to them
now. But since the Gorham case, the work of settling authoritatively,
if not the meaning of doctrines and of formularies, at any rate the
methods of interpreting and applying them, has been briskly going on in
the courts, and a law laid down by judges without appeal has been
insensibly fastening its hold upon us. The action of the courts is
extolled as being all in the direction of liberty. Whatever this praise
may be worth, it is to be observed that it is, after all, a wooden sort
of liberty, and shuts up quite as much as it opens. It may save, in
this case or that, individual liberty; but it does so by narrowing
artificially the natural and common-sense grounds of argument in
religious controversy, and abridging as much as possible the province
of theology. Before the Gorham case, the Formularies in general were
the standard and test, free to both sides, about baptismal
regeneration. Both parties had the ground open to them, to make what
they could of them by argument and reason. Discipline was limited by
the Articles and Formularies, and in part by the authority of great
divines and by the prevailing opinion of the Church, and by nothing
else; these were the means which each side had to convince and persuade
and silence the other, and each side might hope that in the course of
time its sounder and better supported view might prevail. But now upon
this state of things comes from without a dry, legal, narrow
stereotyping, officially and by authority, of the sense to be put upon
part of the documents in the controversy. You appeal to the