SUMMARY OF UNIVERSITIES TESTS ACT, 34 Vict. c. 26 (16 June 1871) § 3. Persons taking lay academical degrees or holding lay academical or collegiate offices not to be required to subscribe any formulary of faith or to make any declaration or take any oath respecting religious belief or profession, or to conform to any religious observance or to attend or abstain from attending any form of public worship, or to belong to any specified church, sect, or denomination. §§ 4-6. The lawfully established system of religious instruction and worship not to be interfered with. Religious instruction and public worship, according to the use of the Church of England, to be maintained in all existing colleges. § 7. No person to be required to attend any lecture to which objection is made by himself, or, if a minor, by his parent or guardian. AUTHORITIES.-As before, Chapter IX. H. Christmas, Hampden Controversy; Davidson and Benham, Life of Archbishop Tait; Lord Morley, Life of W. E. Gladstone; Goldwin Smith, A Plea for the Abolition of Tests, etc.; Report of Oxford and Cambridge Commission, 1852; Lewis Campbell, The Nationalisation of the Universities. CHAPTER XVI THE GORHAM CASE Baptismal Church. BAPTISMAL regeneration did not come prominently forward as a debatable question at the English Reformation. The language of the Fathers and the Schoolmen, as reproduced in Protestant formularies, was used by the doctrine of framers of our Prayer Book, though a new and less the English literal sense might be given to the words used. The doctrine of Trent is that 'Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration by water in the word,' and 'water is used in baptism to signify the washing of the soul which it effects.' The Ten Articles of 1536, coming from a Lutheran source, had asserted the necessity of faith and repentance and the cooperation of the grace of the Holy Ghost with the sacramental act. Hooker, while blaming those who 'elevate' (i.e. make light of) 'the ordinary and immediate [sacramental] means of life,' says that the eternal election 'includeth a subordination of means, without which we are not actually brought to enjoy what God secretly did intend.' The full Calvinist doctrine, as set forth in the Westminster Confession, is that in baptism are conferred 'ingrafting into Christ, regeneration, and remission of sins'; but only upon the elect. For those who are not elect Confession. the sacrament can do nothing; but to the elect prevenient grace is granted to enable them to have faith and repentance, the conditions of effectual baptism. Since, in this view, some infants not sinning are predestined to perdition, it follows that original sin is not remitted to all recipients of baptism. Luther and Melanchthon, and presumably the Church Hooker. Westminster Point left of England, held with the Church of Rome that baptism remits sin both original and actual, and that therefore all infants baptized and not actually sinning are saved. All agreed that those who come to baptism without faith and repentance do not receive the benefit of the sacrament. The undecided. question left undecided by the English formularies was this, whether the efficacy of baptism depended upon prevenient grace enabling to have faith and repentance, in which case the sacrament was only a symbol, or whether it depended upon the sacramental act, in which latter case grace, prevenient or co-operating, was imperfect till completed by the sacramental act. The Puritan doctrine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as expressed in the Westminster Confession, affected in this, as in other particulars, current belief in the Church of England. In a point of such high theology few Churchmen can have held very definite opinions. Baptism was considered necessary by all, but the precise method of its operation was not closely inquired into. The Methodists preached regeneration as a consequence, by divine grace, of conversion, a process in which the human will and divine grace cooperated, as something independent of baptism, which nevertheless worked efficaciously, but by inward grace, not as the opus operatum necessarily effected by a sacrament. The High Church school, represented by Richard Mant, afterwards Bishop of Down, Bampton Lecturer of the year 1812, taught that the sacramental grace of regeneration always accompanies the ceremony. Men may and do fall away, but regeneration or conversion in the Methodist sense, a conscious act of accepting and being accepted, is not necessary for all, since regeneration accompanies baptism, and many baptized persons do not fall away, and so do not need conversion. Mant's opponents Evangelical school. showed that in the texts quoted by him from Scripture the spiritual side is never omitted. They held baptism to be the seal of grace granted, the means and the declaration of grace, indissolubly connected with the grace itself, but not to be confounded with it. Regeneration is possible without baptism, baptism without regeneration. Faith and repentance are necessary conditions of regeneration in High Church school. Bishop Mant. XVI GEORGE CORNELIUS GORHAM 321 baptism; and the Church charitably speaks of the baptized generally as regenerate, as in the Order of Confirmation, on the supposition that they have faith and repentance. This hypothetical principle, they said, pervades all the services of the Church, and they instanced especially the expressions of hope to be found in the Burial Service. Apart from theological subtleties, which, by defining too much, often put ignorance in the place of knowledge, the question is that of the efficacy of sacraments. The disparaging of ceremonies and exaltation of immediate grace is a note of the Reformation, and Pusey in his Tract on Pusey's Baptismal Regeneration (Nos. 67, 69) insists, against Tract on Regeneration. the Reformers, on the necessity of this sacrament and its mystical character. The language of Article XXVII. is, 'Baptism is . . . a sign of Regeneration or new Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Doctrine of Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church; the the Church of England. promises of the forgiveness of sin, and of our adoption to be the sons of God, by the Holy Ghost, are visibly signed and sealed.' It is obvious that this definition does not settle the question whether forgiveness of sin and adoption are conferred by means of this sacrament exclusively; which is a reasonable but not an inevitable conclusion from the definition in the Church Catechism that the two Sacraments are 'generally necessary to salvation.' G. C. Gorham. George Cornelius Gorham (1787-1857), Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, and a man of some university distinction, an antiquary and naturalist, was a Cambridge Evangelical, and therefore 'suspect' to High Church divines. He belonged to the school and the age of Simeon, and his doctrine might be expected to be limited and oldfashioned. He held the benefice of St. Just-in-Penwith, in the diocese of Exeter, and on his presentation by the Lord Chancellor in 1847, at the age of sixty, to another Bishop living in the same diocese, Brampford Speke, Bishop Phillpotts Phillpotts, who saw an opportunity of sifting him, subjected him to a searching examination in December, and again in March. In this he was following the example of Bishop Marsh of Peterborough, who in 1821 had issued a paper of eighty-seven questions to candidates for PART I 1847. Y Orders, with the intention of purging out Calvinism from his diocese. Marsh failed, and Phillpotts was to fail too. He improved on Marsh's precedent; for Marsh's examination was general, and came before admission to Orders, when it is the Bishop's duty to examine the candidates, Phillpotts's questions were addressed to a particular person, who had been in Orders for nearly forty years, and had been lately instituted by himself. The number of written questions propounded by the Bishop was no less than a hundred and forty-nine. They were not drawn up and presented beforehand, but arose out of the of Gorham, verbal examination, which in itself occupied alto1848. gether some thirty-eight hours. The examination, moreover, was intolerably inquisitorial; 'wholly unprecedented for length and severity,' as Gorham's counsel described it. Examination The main point involved in the controversy, for such it came to be, was whether regeneration in baptism is absolute or conditional on an act of prevenient grace. If the high sacramentarian view held by the Bishop had been declared by the authority of ecclesiastical law to be the doctrine of the Church of England, and no way of escape provided, there would thenceforward have been no place for the evangelical party in the Church of England. The controversy, therefore, was of great moment, and attracted much attention. Gorham v. Court of The Bishop having refused to institute (21 March 1848), on the ground that he had upon the examination found Mr. Gorham unfit to fill the vicarage by reason of his holding doctrines contrary to the true Christian faith and the doctrines contained in the Articles and formularies of the Phillpotts in Church of England,' Gorham instituted proceedings Arches, against him in the Court of Arches (15 June), the 1848. form of proceeding being, not under the Act of 1840, but by Duplex Querela; but the parties, instead of propounding a definite statement of doctrine on one side and the other, agreed to submit the whole volume of questions and answers to the decision of the Court. The Bishop's 1 i.e. a complaint made by any clerk or other to the Archbishop of the province against any inferior ordinary for delaying justice in any cause ecclesiastical; as to give sentence, or to institute a clerk presented, or such like' (Burns). |