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on to those which affect doctrine; and first, we have to consider the case of that pernicious volume, the 'Essays and Reviews.' Speaking, in this instance, the individual opinion of the writer of the present article, we must own that we have never felt quite clear and satisfied in our own mind as to the expediency of having made any portion of the book the subject of a judicial prosecution, unless it could have been made abundantly clear before starting that the actual courts would accept and act upon the common law of the Catholic Church. What we mean is that a prosecution under civil common law, is a very different thing from a prosecution contravening the XXXIX. Articles. We owned to the uttermost the scandal and the mischief of that ill-starred and discreditable publication; but, when we had done so, we were driven back to the question with which we started—'Is it needful, and is it expedient, to take up rather than to ignore the offensive publication?' Ignored, it would probably have taken its unconspicuous place in the unnumbered host of clever literary failures. Ignored, it will have been sufficiently judged by the gentlemanly common-sense of the world, which has pronounced, in mess-rooms and in clubs not less than in combination-rooms and in rural deans' parlours, that the men who could have written the obnoxious 'Essays' ought not to have been reckoned among the clergy of the Church of England. Ignored by authority, the 'Essays' might have been crushed by antagonistic logic and learning. No censure was passed, for no censure could have been passed, on Boyle for setting up Phalaris, and yet, by the mere polemical force of Bentley's argument, Boyle stands to all time a literary heretic, condemned past extenuation. In days when either side equally accepted authority, and the only controversy was which authority—Athanasius or Arius, Nicholas or Photius, Tetzel or Luther, Luther or Zwingle—was to prevail, there was no alternative as to fighting out every question. Now that authority is not universally received, while opinion is everywhere respected, as much by those who revere authority into the bargain as by those who do not care for it, it might have been right to ask whether the side which had hitherto been victorious against 'Essays and Reviews' in the equitable court of opinion, was wise to appeal from their own success to the law court of authority. At best, it was a game of double or quits. The judicial condemnation of 'Essays and Reviews' would not make the British public like them worse than they already did; while the punishment of their writers would only evoke that sympathy for the weak man which is so general as well as so generous, though often illogical, a characteristic of the Briton. On the other hand, those that sympathised with the book were just the people who