Rowland Williams

1867. PREFACE. THESE Sermons, or Essays, expanded for the most part from mere preaching notes of a simpler kind, pre serve their doctrine, but hardly their form, having undergone a change, the nature of which is expressed by their compound name. If the term quotKitualquot seems introduced with dis paragement, I wish it understood that I have not, except in Sermon XV, had existing controversies on that subject before my mind. A passage in vol. iv. ofM. Merle d Aubigne s His tory of the Reformation, in which that distinguished writer gives a highly coloured view of the effects of a decision by the Judicial Committee of Her Majesty s Privy Council, has been discussed in the Bishop of London s recent charge, kindly, and if not with the distinctness I might wish, with far higher authority than I could pretend. I might havewished it brought out, that the alleged charge as to the Atonement would not bear so much as submission to the tribunal that the denial of quot a fiction of merit transferquot by is held by the promoters of the suit, and by their spir itualkindred, far more emphatically than by the clergyman against whom they turned it into a crime while the scriptural explanations which even more than Inspiration formed the subject of the suit, are, if their truth is doubted, yet to this day as little refuted as if their suppression without refutation were the thing chiefly desired. Since the two Primates, whom M. d Aubigne esteems, though he desires the eminence of their office abolished, concurred in two-thirds of the judgment, he should either infer that it was not very wicked, or proceed to urge what he thinks so desirable, quot a public act, which would bring back quot thatChurch, quot i.e. the Anglican, bya clean sweep of Prelacy, to her holy origin, and would be a source quot of great prosperity to her.quot Book vi. chap. xvi. We may leave our Genevan critic his estimate of Episcopacy, and take time to consider his proposal for quot Deus non facit salvos fete peccatores, quot are the famous words of quot Deus non facit salvosjictt justos, quot might be a retorted sum Luther. mary of Dr. Newman s Lectures on Justification. Figment is the word with Bp. Bull, and with some of the Oxford school Jictwn, with Whately and F. Robertson. That a grave tribunal went out of its way to call one of the common .places of Divines on-all sides unbecoming is difficult to explain in any complimentary manner. Itwas the solitary redeeming feature of Dr. Pusey s aggrieved agita tion, in parallel with Archbishop Manning, that he abstained from being exceedingly shocked at the acquittal upon this head. It would have been a refinement of generosity, more to be desired than expected from him, to have come forward and said, quotDr. Williams has but quot quot what quot quot expressed lightly, in an obiter dictum, in a Review, a mild form of all our old moralizing Divines held, and what I and all my friends, including the Bishop of Salisbury, hold with far greater intensity, quot if not, he might have added, with Novatian rigour giving the Church a separate Parliament from the Nation butwe must wish that the historian of a great epoch had not neglected the accession of documentary evidence, which has thrown light in recent years upon his subject we might have spared his opinion upon a contemporary trial, until he had acquainted himself with the issue joined, the pleas submitted, thejudg ment given, and the parts taken in it by members of the tribunal whom he selects for exception...

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