whatever they please, if they wrap up what they say in devotional phraseology; in which there is liberty in the secret chamber, but not on the housetop; from which men strain out gnats whilst they swallow camels.

PART IV.

COUNTS 12 TO 15: GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON DR. WILLIAMS'S RELATION TO BARON BUNSEN, AND ON THE GARBLING OF THE PASSAGES CITED; EXAMINATION OF DR. WILLIAMS'S ACCOUNT OF THE DOCTRINES CONTAINED IN THE HIPPOLYTUS; EXAMINATION of His ACCOUNT OF THE CORRUPTIONS of the Mediæval ClerGY. -COUNTS 16 AND 17: SCOPE, TENDENCY, AND Design of the ESSAY; JUDICIAL LEGISLATION.

(Delivered in the COURT OF ARCHES, Jan. 8, 1862.)

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR LORDSHIP,

HAVING disposed of the charges relating to the Bible, I now pass to the remainder of the charge. I can understand, though I lament, the course the prosecution have taken as to the charges on the Bible. I know that the Calvinistic view of the infallibility of the Scriptures prevails so widely amongst unlearned people, amongst the laity at large, owing to the decline of theological learning, that, as Warburton said, it has almost come to be received as an article of faith. But with reference to the remaining articles, I cannot say that I can extend to them the same indulgence. They appear to me to be a deliberate attempt to punish a man who has said something unwelcome, though not unlawful, by tripping him up upon a bye point. They are an attempt to secure a conviction at all hazards; for to every expression capable of suggesting a heretical meaning to a suspicious mind

they have not scrupled to assign that meaning. Hitherto I have defended something tangible; but what I have now to defend is like defending the tone of a man's voice, or the expression of his face. Allow me to contrast the charges brought against Dr. Williams with the place from which they are extracted. They are extracted from a review of forty-three octavo pages. This review gives a sketch of the opinions of that voluminous and not equally luminous writer, Baron Bunsen, upon almost every subject that can be conceived; his opinions about Christianity in general; about the history of doctrine; about the meaning of theological terms; about the early history of Egypt; and about innumerable other subjects. It would be impossible to do justice even to Baron Bunsen's opinions in such a space. Much less would it be possible to give the whole of the opinions of Dr. Williams upon the subjects to which he refers.

man.

Here I must refer to a subject to which I referred slightly yesterday. I say Dr. Williams is not an unknown man. He has published a book since he was ordainedsince he became a clergyman, and a well-known clergyHe published a book of sermons, under the title of Rational Godliness, containing his opinions upon many of these subjects. He was liable to be prosecuted for that, but he never has been prosecuted. He became, no matter how, a beneficed clergyman of the diocese of Salisbury, and at the same time he published a book called Christianity and Hindooism, and in that volume is contained a statement of his views of the Christian religion, in a form which he thinks most suitable to convert Hindoos. For that book he has never been prosecuted, though every opportunity was afforded for prosecution; and though, as you will have gathered from the conversation between my learned friend and myself, the attention of the Bishop of Salisbury had

been directed, at the time of his institution, to the fact that his opinions were of a kind with which the bishop did not agree.

Then observe the gross injustice which is done to Dr. Williams. He has given in this essay a statement of Baron Bunsen's views: he has thrown in here and there views of his own. I think your lordship will not say that those views have not been explicitly avowed and manfully defended. But with regard to the rest of the charge, I say that he cannot be called upon to answer for the views of Baron Bunsen. He does not agree with many of them, or only partially, and with others he does not agree at all. When you pass from this general view of the subject to a more detailed one, you will find that it is greatly strengthened. With regard to the doctrine of the Atonement, what do they rely upon? Two garbled extracts (I use the word advisedly), separated by an interval of six pages, the first of which contains twenty words, and the second three lines. With regard to baptism, they rely upon a passage comprised in five and a half lines. With regard to the Incarnation, they rely upon a passage contained in one line and three quarters. With regard to the subject of justification, they rely upon a passage of eleven lines. Altogether, they extract three capital heresies from nine lines of print. Remember the case of Burder v. Heath. Recollect your own observations upon the difficulty you found in extracting Mr. Heath's views even from an isolated sermon upon the particular point in question, and then say whether it is possible to ascertain what Dr. Williams's views upon these allimportant subjects are from little incidental remarks like these about another man's writings.

I do not understand what conception of heresy, or what conception of criminal law, it was which presided over the composition of this indictment. The law forbids

impugning or denying the Thirty-nine Articles. The Thirty-nine Articles contain an elaborate statement of religious belief, and what the law punishes is the deliberate putting forward of any denial of those statements, or any opinion inconsistent with them. But can you, upon such evidence as this, venture to say that Dr. Williams has put forward any opinions whatever? Upon each of those subjects volumes might have been written, and volumes have been written, and it is most unfair and unrighteous to attempt to make a man answerable for expressions of this kind contained in a review of another man's book. Considering how clergymen write, and how they ought to write-considering what a subject theology is, and that a man in writing sermons upon such subjects is liable to be misconceived by every one upon every different point-remembering, as I entreat you to do, that some of the doctrines of the Christian religion, by the least distortion, may be made into positive immorality, and that others are liable, by the least distortion, to be made into superstition-remembering that the relations of all those doctrines to every subject of inquiry are innumerable, I ask you to hesitate before you convict a clergyman of heresy, because incidentally, upon most mysterious subjects, which have, as I say, a thousand relations, he happens to make use of a few expressions which give offence to his ecclesiastical superiors. No one would be safe if you were to do so. It would put the clergy under a despotism altogether intolerable if fragments of this character are to be treated as a deliberate assertion of doctrine.

All the expressions charged against Dr. Williams in these articles may be divided into two heads. There are five in all. Three of them come out of a sympathetic review of the opinions of Baron Bunsen in his work called