Occasional Papers | Page 8

the Episcopate, they should not
withdraw from them when they arrive; and that there should be neither
shrinking nor rest nor compromise till the creed and the rights of the
Church entrusted to their fidelity be placed, as far as depends on them,
beyond danger.

II
JOYCE ON COURTS OF SPIRITUAL APPEAL[3]

[3] _Ecclesia Vindicata; a Treatise on Appeals in Matters Spiritual_.
By James Wayland Joyce. Saturday Review, 22nd October 1864.
Nothing can be more natural than the extreme dissatisfaction felt by a
large body of persons in the Church of England at the present Court of
Final Appeal in matters of doctrine. The grievance, and its effect, may
have been exaggerated; and the expressions of feeling about it certainly
have not always been the wisest and most becoming. But as the Church
of England is acknowledged to hold certain doctrines on matters of the
highest importance, and, in common with all other religious bodies,
claims the right of saying what are her own doctrines, it is not
surprising that an arrangement which seems likely to end in handing
over to indifferent or unfriendly judges the power of saying what those
doctrines are, or even whether she has any doctrines at all, should
create irritation and impatience. There is nothing peculiar to the
English Church in the assumption, either that outsiders should not
meddle with and govern what she professes to believe and teach, or that
the proper and natural persons to deal with theological questions are the
class set apart to teach and maintain her characteristic belief. Whatever
may ultimately become of these assumptions, they unquestionably
represent the ideas which have been derived from the earliest and the
uniform practice of the Christian Church, and are held by most even of
the sects which have separated from it. To any one who does not look
upon the English Church as simply a legally constituted department of
the State, like the army or navy or the department of revenue, and
believes it to have a basis and authority of its own, antecedent to its
rights by statute, there cannot but be a great anomaly in an arrangement
which, when doctrinal questions are pushed to their final issues, seems
to deprive her of any voice or control in the matters in which she is
most interested, and commits them to the decision, not merely of a lay,
but of a secular and not necessarily even Christian court, where the
feeling about them is not unlikely to be that represented by the story,
told by Mr. Joyce, of the eminent lawyer who said of some theological
debate that he could only decide it "by tossing up a coin of the realm."
The anomaly of such a court can hardly be denied, both as a matter of
theory and--supposing it to matter at all what Church doctrine really
is--as illustrated in some late results of its action. It is still more
provoking to observe, as Mr. Joyce brings out in his historical sketch,

that simple carelessness and blundering have conspired with the
evident tendency of things to cripple and narrow the jurisdiction of the
Church in what seems to be her proper sphere. The ecclesiastical
appeals, before the Reformation, were to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction
alone. They were given to the civil power by the Tudor legislation, but
to the civil power acting, if not by the obligation of law, yet by usage
and in fact, through ecclesiastical organs and judges. Lastly, by a recent
change, of which its authors have admitted that they did not
contemplate the effect, these appeals are now to the civil jurisdiction
acting through purely civil courts. It is an aggravation of this, when the
change which seems so formidable has become firmly established, to
be told that it was, after all, the result of accident and inadvertence, and
a "careless use of terms in drafting an Act of Parliament"; and that
difficult and perilous theological questions have come, by "a haphazard
chance," before a court which was never meant to decide them. It
cannot be doubted that those who are most interested in the Church of
England feel deeply and strongly about keeping up what they believe to
be the soundness and purity of her professed doctrine; and they think
that, under fair conditions, they have clear and firm ground for making
good their position. But it seems by no means unlikely that in the
working of the Court of Final Appeal there will be found a means of
evading the substance of questions, and of disposing of very important
issues by a side wind, to the prejudice of what have hitherto been
recognised as rightful claims. An arrangement which bears hard upon
the Church theoretically, as a controversial argument in the hands of Dr.
Manning or Mr. Binney,