blished articles, which were themselves a variation from former professions. She did so, when she cut off three articles from her original forty-two, and reduced them to the present thirty-nine; and she certainly would not lose her corporate identity, nor subvert her fundamental principles, though she were to leave ten of the thirty-nine which remain, out of any future confession of her faith. She would limit her corporate powers on the contrary, and she would oppose her fundamental principles, if she were to deny herself the prudential exercise of such capacity of reformation. This, therefore, can be no objection to your receiving the petition.

When, after making this important admission, Burke proceeded to overturn Sir Roger Newdegate's argument, based on the Act of Union, against receiving the petition, the hopes of the petitioners in the gallery may have been raised. If so, they were soon disappointed. The great orator went on to pronounce himself strongly adverse to the prayer of the petition and to giving it the slightest encouragement. 'Nothing,' he said, 'but the expressed wishes of a majority of the nation could warrant the change proposed, and it was not pretended that a majority called for it.' And then the subscription to Scripture, proposed by the petitioners in lieu of the subscription to the Articles— what did it amount to? There

were disputes as to the Canon of Scripture, what books were genuine and so forth. Therefore, to ascertain Scripture, you must have one article more, and you must define what that Scripture is which you mean to teach.' Burke continued:

There are, I believe, very few who, when Scripture is so ascertained, do not see the absolute necessity of knowing what general doctrine a man draws from it, before he is sent down authorized by the State to teach it as pure doctrine, and receive a tenth of the produce of our lands.

The Scripture is no one summary of doctrines regularly digested, in which a man could not mistake his way; it is a most venerable, but most multifarious, collection of the records of the divine economy; a collection of an infinite variety, of cosmogony, theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, apologue, allegory, legislation, ethics, carried through different books, by different authors, for different ends and purposes.

It is necessary to sort out what is in

tended for example, what only as narrative, what to be understood literally, what figuratively, when one precept is to be controlled and modified by another, what is used directly, and what only as an argument ad hominem, -what is temporary and what of perpetual obligation; what appropriated to one state, and to one set of men, and what the general duty of all Christians. If we do not get some security for this, we not only permit, but we actually pay for all the dangerous fanaticism, which can be produced to corrupt our people, and to derange the public worship of the country.

As soon as Burke had finished, he was replied to by a friend, both political and personal, the able, spirited, and munificent Sir George Savile, one of the members for Yorkshire. In his Bristol speech of 1780, Burke delivered a warm and characteristic eulogium on Sir George, as a true genius, with an understanding, vigorous and acute and refined, and distinguishing even to excess, and illuminated with a most unbounded, peculiar, and original cast of imagination;' as a man whose 'private benevolence, expanding itself into patriotism, renders his whole being the estate of the public, in which he has not reserved a peculium for himself of profit, diversion, or relaxation.' To the stock argument of his opponents, that men were not obliged to subscribe, and might avoid subscription by keeping aloof from the Church, Sir George Savile finely replied:

act.

6

It may be said, there is no compulsion on those who subscribe; it is a voluntary If there be sin, it is their own.' Undoubtedly it is. The man who yields to guilt is a sinner; but is the tempter exempt from guilt? The difference is altogether in favour of the former. The tempted, therefore, may find mercy, the tempter none. And whoever continues the temptation when it is in his power to remove it, participates in the original guilt.

Thus boldly, too, he met Burke's refinings on the 'multifarious' character of the Bible, and the necessity for creeds and formularies to fix its meaning:

Some gentlemen suppose that the Scriptures are not plain enough to be a rule and centre of union to the Church; they must have articles and creeds to supply defects. But if the things which are necessary to salvation are not plainly revealed, then

there is no way of salvation revealed to the bulk of mankind at all. Whatever is obscurely revealed, will be always obscure, notwithstanding our decisions. It can never be authoritatively determined by men. The only authority which can explain, and make the explication a test of faith, is the authority of God. As to what he has plainly revealed, it needs no articles to ascertain its meanings. We should not therefore adopt views and measures which are contracted and narrow. We should not therefore set bars in the way of those who are willing to enter and labour in the Church of God. When the disciples came to Christ, and complained that there were some who cast out devils in his name, and said, 'We forbade them, because they followed not us,' what did our Saviour do? Did he send them tests and articles to be subscribed? Did he ask them whether they believed this or that dogma of faith? Whether they were Athanasians, or Arians, or Arminians? No; he delivered that admirable and comprehensive maxim: He that is not against me is for me.' Go ye and say likewise.

With these words still ringing in its ears, the House next listened to a brief speech, against the petition, from Charles James Fox, who, however, had the good sense to protest against the absurdity of making striplings sign the Articles before their admission to Oxford. 'Charles Fox,' says the caustic Horace Walpole, did not shine in this debate, nor could it be wondered at. He had sat up playing hazard at Almack's, from Tuesday evening, the 4th, till five in the afternoon of Wednesday the 5th. An hour before he had recovered £12,000 that he had lost, and by dinner, which was at five o'clock, he had ended by losing £11,000. On the Thursday he spoke in this debate; went to dinner at past eleven at night; from thence to White's where he drank till seven the next morning; thence to Almack's, where he won £6,000, and between three and four in the afternoon he set out for Newmarket.' After Fox's speech, Alderman Sawbridge, the Radical (Catherine Macaulay's brother), kept the House in a roar, according to the MS. Cavendish reports, by insisting on his right to

* Ubi suprà, p. 12.

read the Articles aloud (by way of proving their absurdity), from a prayer-book which he pulled from his pocket. After eight hours of debate, a division was taken, when 217 voted against, 71 for the reception of the petition. The list of the minority includes the names of three Cavendishes, Lord George, Lord Frederick, and Lord John, of Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton, who had spoken strongly in favour of the petition; of Colonel Barré, and of at least one member of the Government, a Lord of the Admiralty, and he no other than Lord Palmerston, the father of the present Premier. So ended the first campaign of what Gibbon, the historian, calls in a contemporary letter, 'this holy war,' with a sneer_at Fox's preparation for it. The day after the debate, Horace Walpole thus chronicled it in one of his lively epistles to Mann:—

A

Yesterday there was a long debate for this session in the House of Commons. petition was offered from two hundred and fifty divines, for abolition of the Thirty-nine Articles-that summary of impertinent folly. It was rejected at eleven at night by a large majority; so much more difficult is it to expel nonsense than sense; for sense makes few martyrs. Will not the Jesuits think it hard upon them that we are more absurd than France, or even than Spain? I begin to think that folly is matter, and cannot be annihilated. Destroy its form it takes another. The Reformation was only a re-formation.†

A curious parliamentary incident nearly contemporary with this debate on the Thirty-nine Articles, is worth recording. On the preceding 30th of January, a Dr. Nowell had preached a sermon before the House of Commons at St. Margaret's, Westminster, and according to custom was duly thanked for it, and desired to print it. When the sermon had been printed, it was read, and found to contain a highflown justification of Charles I., and a most intemperate denunciation of the conduct and proceedings of the Long Parliament. On the 21st of

brought under the notice of the House. Tommy' Townshend went the length of proposing that it should be burnt by the common hangman; even Lord North condemned its doctrine; and without a division the vote of thanks to Nowell was formally expunged from the votes of the House. So little, even in the case of a divine preaching before the House of Commons, had the Thirty-nine Articles secured the absence of at least one form of the dangerous fanaticism' against which Burke professed to find a safeguard in subscription.

More than two years afterwards (May 5th, 1774), Sir William Meredith again proposed to the House of Commons to relieve the clergy from subscription to the Articles, and moved that the House should go into a committee of the whole with a view to consider the subject. The second debate is very briefly reported in the Parliamentary History. As on the former occasion, the chief speakers for relief were Sir William Meredith and Sir George Savile; Lord George Cavendish, however, not contenting himself with a silent vote, but declaring for one grand National Church.' Again Sir

Roger Newdegate, Lord North, and Burke, opposed the motion. Unfortunately for it, the mover had in the interval accepted the office of Comptroller of the Household; and Burke's speech seems to have been less on the motion itself than on the tergiversation of Sir William Meredith. During the first part of his speech, according to the Parliamentary History, the House was in a continual laugh.' When the question came to be put, according to the same authority, 'there did not appear to be above twenty ayes, and the noes made so strong a sound, that Sir William Meredith declined dividing the House.' Thus closed what we have ventured to call an Episode in the Modern History of the English Church. It is one comparatively little known, and yet is remarkable for the boldness of the declarations in favour of spiritual freedom which were made during its course by influential members of the House of Commons. This sketch of it may be acceptable at a time when thoughtful churchmen, both clerical and lay, are bent on procuring that deliverance from the tyranny of formularies which Parliament alone has the power to bestow.