So far, in reviewing Bishop Gore’s published opinions, we are on familiar High Anglican ground.  But what is the Bishop’s seat of authority in doctrine?  He has shown himself willing, within limits, to apply critical methods to Holy Scripture.  He has very little respect for the infallible Pope.  And he would be the last to trust to private judgment—­the testimonium Spiritus Sancti as understood by some Protestants.  Where, then, is the ultimate Court of Appeal?  Bishop Gore finds it in the two earliest of the three Creeds, ’in which Catholic consent is especially expressed;’ and in a half apologetic manner he adds that this Catholic basis has been ‘generally understood’ to imply ’an unrealisable but not therefore unreal appeal to a General Council.’[36] No revision, therefore, of the Church’s doctrinal formularies can be made except by the authority of a court which can never, by any possibility, be summoned!  The unique sanctity and obligation which Bishop Gore considers to attach to the Creeds have been asserted by him again and again with a vehemence which proves that he regards the matter as of vital importance.  ’There must be no compromise as regards the Creeds....  If those who live in an atmosphere of intellectual criticism become incapable of such sincere public profession of belief as the Creed contains, the Church must look to recruit her ministry from classes still capable of a more simple and unhesitating faith.’[37] And, again, in his most recent book:  ’I have taken occasion before now to make it evident that, as far as I can secure it, I will admit no one into this diocese, or into Holy Orders, to minister for the congregation, who does not ex animo believe the Creeds.’[38] Dr. Gore has not spared to stigmatise as morally dishonest those who desire to serve the Church as its ministers while harbouring doubts about the physical miracle known as the Virgin Birth, and one of his clergy was a few years ago induced to resign his living by an aspersion of this kind, to which the Bishop gave publicity in the daily press.

Now it has been generally supposed that the Anglican clergy are bound to declare their adhesion not only to the Creeds, but to the Thirty-nine Articles, and to the infallible truth of Holy Scripture.  Bishop Gore, however, holds that when a new deacon, on the day of his ordination, solemnly declares that he ‘assents to the Thirty-nine Articles,’ and that he ’believes the doctrine therein set forth to be agreeable to the word of God,’ he ’can no longer fairly be regarded as bound to particular phrases or expressions in the Articles.’[39] And further, when the same new deacon expresses his ’unfeigned belief in all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments,’ ’that expression of belief can be fairly and justly made by anyone who believes heartily that the Bible, as a whole, records and contains the message of God to man in all its stages of delivery and that each one of the books contains some element or aspect of this revelation.’[40]