in the course of time its sounder and better supported view might prevail.  But now upon this state of things comes from without a dry, legal, narrow stereotyping, officially and by authority, of the sense to be put upon part of the documents in the controversy.  You appeal to the Prayer-book; your opponent tells you, Oh, the Court of Appeal has ruled against you there:  and that part of your case is withdrawn from you, and he need give himself no trouble to argue the matter with you.  Against certain theological positions, perhaps of great weight, and theological evidence, comes, not only the doctrine of theological opponents, but the objection that they are bad law.  The interpretation which, it may be, we have assumed all our lives, and which we know to be that of Fathers and divines, is suddenly pronounced not to be legal.  The decision does not close the controversy, which goes on as keenly and with perhaps a little more exasperation than before; it simply stops off, by virtue of a legal construction, a portion of the field of argument for one party, which was, perhaps, supposed to have the strongest claim to it.  The Gorham case bred others; and now, at last, after fifteen years, we have got, as may be seen in Messrs. Brodrick and Fremantle’s book, a body of judicial dicta, interpretations, rules of exposition, and theological propositions, which have grown up in the course of these cases, and which in various ways force a meaning and construction on the theological standards and language of the Church, which in some instances they were never thought to have, and which they certainly never had authoritatively before.  Besides her Articles and Prayer-hook, speaking the language of divines and open to each party to interpret according to the strength and soundness of their theological ground, we are getting a supplementary set of legal limitations and glosses, claiming to regulate theological argument if not teaching, and imposed upon us by the authority not of the Church or even of Parliament but of the Judges of the Privy Council.  This, it strikes us, is a new position of things in the Church, a new understanding and a changed set of conditions on which to carry on controversies of doctrine; and it seems to us to have a serious influence not only on the responsibility of the Church for her own doctrine, but on the freedom and genuineness with which questions as to that doctrine are discussed.  The Court is not to blame for this result; to do it justice, it has generally sought to decide as little as it could; and the interference of law with the province of pure theology is to be rather attributed to that mania for deciding, which of late has taken possession pretty equally of all parties.  But the indisputable result is seen to be, after the experience of fifteen years, that law is taking a place in our theological disputes and our theological system which is new to it in our theological history; law, not laid down prospectively in general provisions, but