Prayer-book; your opponent tells you, Oh, the Court of Appeal has ruled
against you there: and that part of your case is withdrawn from you,
and he need give himself no trouble to argue the matter with you.
Against certain theological positions, perhaps of great weight, and
theological evidence, comes, not only the doctrine of theological
opponents, but the objection that they are bad law. The interpretation
which, it may be, we have assumed all our lives, and which we know to
be that of Fathers and divines, is suddenly pronounced not to be legal.
The decision does not close the controversy, which goes on as keenly
and with perhaps a little more exasperation than before; it simply
stops off, by virtue of a legal construction, a portion of the field of
argument for one party, which was, perhaps, supposed to have the
strongest claim to it. The Gorham case bred others; and now, at last,
after fifteen years, we have got, as may be seen in Messrs. Brodrick
and Fremantle's book, a body of judicial _dicta_, interpretations,
rules of exposition, and theological propositions, which have grown up
in the course of these cases, and which in various ways force a meaning
and construction on the theological standards and language of the
Church, which in some instances they were never thought to have, and
which they certainly never had authoritatively before. Besides her
Articles and Prayer-hook, speaking the language of divines and open to
each party to interpret according to the strength and soundness of
their theological ground, we are getting a supplementary set of legal
limitations and glosses, claiming to regulate theological argument if
not teaching, and imposed upon us by the authority not of the Church or
even of Parliament but of the Judges of the Privy Council. This, it
strikes us, is a new position of things in the Church, a new
understanding and a changed set of conditions on which to carry on
controversies of doctrine; and it seems to us to have a serious
influence not only on the responsibility of the Church for her own