I can see nothing here like an intended justification of your opinions. His Grace would give you it appears no decision in private, he nowhere led you to infer that he even approved of your opinions, and could hardly have intended you to conclude that he meant to justify them. He tells you “he could not see how your position would be mended by an open declaration of his opinion, even if favourable to that exposition which would suit your views,” [8] which seems at least to imply a doubt, and where there is a doubt, the judge usually directs the jury to give the prisoner the benefit of it, but this does not involve the judge’s approval or intended justification of the prisoner’s case.
Yet this is all that his Grace admitted,—and to what had this admission a reference? To a certain latitude of interpretation allowable under certain circumstances. And I think I can safely defy you to point out a solitary expression in his Grace’s speech on the 26th of May, 1840, in which he attempts to evade this admission, or, in the language of your accusation, “endeavours to crush the very idea of the same latitude which on other occasions he had unequivocally allowed and approved.” His Grace’s approval however is nowhere apparent.
His Grace addresses himself in his speech to the prayer of the petition, “which he apprehends their Lordships will not countenance in the least degree.” And what is the prayer? “It prays, amongst other things, your Lordships to consider what measures ought to be adopted to make the Prayer Book and the Subscription of the Liturgy consonant with the practice of the clergy, and the acknowledged meaning of the Articles of the church.” And what is the imputed practice of the clergy? According to the statement of the petitioners it is their “general practice to deviate from the authorised forms and positive obligations of the Church,”—when with reference to your own case, the three points on which you consulted his Grace, you can prove that to deviate from or omit the Athanasian Creed—the Absolution—and the words used at the Imposition of Hands—is the same latitude, which with reference to their interpretation, he had thought fairly allowable.—You may then boast that you have convicted the Spiritual Head of the Church of inconsistency and duplicity, and no one will attempt to controvert your insinuation that his Grace “has one opinion at Lambeth, and another in the House of Lords.” [9a]
Your charge as it affects the Bishop of London, rests on similar evidence. His Lordship’s conversation in 1829—a letter of 1830—and his speech in 1840. You consulted his Lordship in 1829 on the same subjects, and received in substance the same reply as had been given to you by the Archbishop. And I can as confidently defy you to point out in his Lordship’s speech in 1840, a passage that can give any colouring of justice to your charge; unless you can shew that to deprecate an alteration of our Articles and Liturgy is the same thing as to admit that certain parts of them may bear a difference of interpretation, or show that there is no difference between an existing “elasticity” and a further “expansion.”
Your evidence then, if anywhere, must be found in his Lordship’s letter of 1830. The letter of which you complain to the Archbishop as “unkind and inconsistent with former advice.” [9b]
But as you seem to me to have conversed with his Lordship on one subject, and to have written to him, the following year, upon another, I do not see how you make it appear that his Lordship’s letter was inconsistent with his former advice.
It does not appear that you had asked his Lordship “in what sense you would be expected to subscribe” in future, but whether having subscribed, certain opinions which you had taken up, were consistent with your Subscription. His Lordship thought that they were.
But nine months afterwards, on being called upon to renew your Subscription, you inform his Lordship that you had determined not to make it again but with a sort of protest.—By Subscription, you are called upon to declare that “the Book of Common Prayer and of ordering Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, containeth in it nothing contrary to the word of God, and that the Articles are agreeable to it:” but to this you will not assent, unless you may at the same time be permitted to declare that you do not believe it. You must explain, you tell his Lordship, the sense in which you shall have no objection to subscribe, and that through the medium of a petition to parliament. Now there appears nothing in your report of the conversation to lead to the inference, nor can I easily bring myself to think that his Lordship could have led you to infer that a qualified Subscription was admissible either from candidates for orders, or other clergymen. A different exposition of the general doctrine laid down in several of our Articles, may be fairly allowable; the letter of our Liturgy may in several parts admit of a different interpretation, and if taking our own views of these points, believing them not inconsistent with an allowable interpretation of the words, we can unreservedly subscribe, well and good—but for my own part, I should scarcely expect it of a Bishop to receive a qualified Subscription from me, the precedent I must think would be a bad one, and the practice subversive of the very object of Subscription, independent of the awkward acknowledgement it involves, that our Church exacts from her members a form of Subscription, which cannot be made without a salvo.
You scarcely could have inferred from his Lordship’s advice, that he “unequivocally allowed and approved of this latitude.” But as he had told you that he thought your interpretation of certain points admissible, and that you might openly hold your opinions, you might have inferred that he also considered them consistent with an “unreserved Subscription, and that according to the literal sense of the words”—for the question is, will not the literal sense of the words bear a different application? You subscribe unreservedly, at least you have given us no reason to suppose otherwise, to the Apostles’ Creed, in which we are told that Christ sitteth at the right hand of God, but the literal meaning of the words is at variance with the truth, that “God is without body, parts, or passions.” [11] I must think that you have conjured up a greater difficulty on the score of Subscription than in reality obtains. At all events you must detail some further particulars of his Lordship’s conversation, before you will enable us to detect its discrepancy with the subject of his subsequent letter.
But if his Lordship’s private opinion on the allowable interpretation of the points on which you consulted him, failed to remove your doubts and scruples, and you were after all fully persuaded in your own mind that the words in question could by no possibility bear the only interpretation with which you could conscientiously subscribe to them; I cannot see how the open sanction of the Church could affect you to the “easing of your conscience.” For surely if the words will not bear a certain sense, the Church cannot make them—the sanction of all the Bishops in Christendom could never make black mean white. If you are of opinion that it could, for a Protestant you must entertain rather high views of the power of the Church—and yet such would seem to be your opinion, for in the “Circular” which you sent a day or two before the presentation of the petition last year, to “all the Peers whose London residences could be ascertained;” after alluding to these opinions which you had received from the Archbishop and the Bishop of London, you say, “my answer was, if such be the case, let these statements be openly sanctioned, and I am content. But I cannot with truth and honesty subscribe, not according to the literal meaning of the words, unless such latitude be authorised by the Church.”