Hale, Hony, Moore, and Lord Artliur Hervey, and of Canons Blakesley, Harvey, and Selwyn; none, surely, men tainted with suspicion of unbelief. Happily for the credit of the Church, Convocation was not long left in the wrong, if in the wrong it ever was. A few days only elapsed, and it found itself reinstated on the pedestal of moral dignity, strong enough to despise or to forgive the ribald buffoonery with which, from the woolsack, the Lord High Chancellor attacked that venerable institution through its most brilliant member.
A popular movement, which we counted as the second element in the opposition provoked by Lord Westbury's report, on which the Judicial Committee's Judgment was founded, had simultaneously come into play. The first form it took was that of a declaration affirmatory of the doctrines impugned by the Chancellor, which was signed by eleven thousand of the clergy. All that we desire to say of this declaration is, that we are very glad that each signer was not called upon to give his own gloss on the declaration, and that all these glosses were not published in the brochure which recorded the signatures. The idea which undoubtedly underlay a vast number, perhaps a preponderating majority, of the signatures, was one which merited all respect—the notion that whereas the Faith of the Church had sustained damage by the pronouncement of the Judicial Committee, therefore a vast, albeit informal, counter assertion would purge the offence and neutralise the damage. Our own impression is, either that the Church of England cannot have so deeply sinned the sin of Jeroboam as these excellent people believe, or that the remedy which they propose is inadequate to the ill. Either the Essay upon the Essays, delivered by the Chancellor, is parasitical to the Church, or else if it be the formal voice of the Church, informal protests cannot neutralise its venom. We derive our confidence from holding the first position. Openly since the Gorham judgment, implicitly long before, the Church of England has lived a double life. Her ordinal and her formularies insure her orders and sacraments. The Catholic Creeds are hers, and the language of Catholic tradition overflows in her ritual and symbolic writings. This is her inward life. Her outward one, the life of the 'Established Church,' has, to say the least, been a tangle of inextricable inconsistencies; yet the inward life has not been submerged by this complication, but, on the contrary, all adown the times of the greatest entanglement, it has, for the last thirty years, manifested itself in more and more salient demonstrations of tender yet strong vitality.
After all, the theory of this double life is not a greater difficulty, we should be almost inclined to say that it was a less one, than that of Anglicanism itself, viewed in its most cha-
