The Privy Council held, however, that though Scripture contains the Word of ...

The Privy Council held, however, that though Scripture contains the Word of God, it is not in itself the Word of God, leaving it to the individual judgement and con-science, it must be supposed, to determine which part is and which part is not. To any Christian minister convinced that the Word of God to mankind is conveyed in the person, the example, and the teaching of Christ, the liberty of interpretation thus accorded would seem to be enough.' By this decision the Philosophic party, the party of Free Speculation, were kept within the Church.

The Sacramental school won their liberty in 1872 when the Privy Council acquitted Bennett, Rector of Frome Selwood, and authorized a view of the Real Presence as exalted as Posey or his teachers had ever entertained. The Privy Council had rendered it so difficult for a Churchman to be a heretic that prosecutions for heresy almost ceased,' and the public mind turned with the greater avidity to the persecution of ritualism.

It is worth quoting one passage to show what passed for heresy in 1864: 'When the fierce ritual of Syria, with the awe of a Divine voice, bade Abraham slay his son, he . . . trusted that the Father, whose voice from heaven he heard at heart, was better pleased with mercy than with sacrifice, and his trust was his salvation.' Of all the anfractuosities of the Victorian mind, none perplexes me more than Thirlwall's concurrence in the prosecution of the Essayists. The only one of consequence, the voysey case in 1871, elicited from the Privy Council the opinion that a clergyman may follow 'any interpretations of the Articles, which, by any reasonable allowance for the variety of human opinion, can be reconciled with their language'. But in the matter of ritual, the Court is bound itself to determine the meaning of rubric and enforce it.

'I do profess ex animo,' Newman wrote in 1862, 'that the thought of the Anglican service makes me shiver,' and, indeed, abstracted from the gregarious joy of hymn-singing, the Anglican rite as he had known it did little to evoke the imagination, to gratify the senses or to stir any but the soberest emotions.