if he had not believed that he was executing an ecclesiastical sentence upon a convicted heretic. I cannot, my Lords and Gentlemen, believe that, great as are the privileges which the Right Reverend Bench has conceded to the Principal of King's College, their Lordships the Bishops ever intended to give him an authority superior to their own-superior to that of the Article by which they are bound; I cannot think that they wished to constitute him and the Council arbiters of the Theology of the English Church. Such a claim would be as alarming, I apprehend, to the public as to our ecclesiastical rulers. If some parents have been suspicious of the influence which I might exercise over their sons, I believe that there are few parents in England who will not complain that the College has departed from its original principle, when it gives such a scope to the private judgment of its chief officer, or even to the judgment of the body which manages its affairs. I think it due, then, to my own character as a Clergyman, to the interests of the College, and to the liberties of the English Church, that I should call upon the Council, if they pronounce a theological sentence upon me at all, to declare what Article of our faith condemns my teaching. I conjure them not to use any phrases in condemning me which they would reject as loose and vague, if the property or the life of a fellow-citizen were in question. Whether I have unsettled the faith of my Pupils, by giving an interpretation of the word Eternal which I had maintained to be true (and especially important for Students in Divinity) before I was asked to join the Theological Department, the after-lives of those Pupils must determine. But if I have violated any law of the Church, that law can be at once pointed out-the nature of the transgression can be defined without any reference to possible tendencies and results. It is this justice, and not any personal favour, my Lords and Gentlemen, which I now request at your hands. I have the honour to be, My Lords and Gentlemen, F. D. MAURICE. P. S. I have requested the Secretary to lay before the Council some copies of my Letter to the Principal, to which I have added some Notes. I would respectfully call the attention of the Council to the Note B, page 31 of the pamphlet. AFTER reading this letter, the Council decided that they did not think it necessary to enter further into the subject, and declared the two chairs held by me in the College to be vacant. LETTER, & c. DEAR MR. PRINCIPAL, In a letter dated Christ Church, July 14th (page 10 of our correspondence), you say: "Far be it from me to enter now or hereafter into a controversial argument with you on so awful a subject" (as that of Eternity or Eternal Punishment), "on which, so far as attempting to fathom the mystery, it seems to me the less said the better." Nevertheless, in a letter dated September (page 21), you enter into a very elaborate "controversial argument" on this subject, in the course of which more attempts are made to fathom the mystery than I should have thought at all desirable. I do not complain that you have departed from your resolution. I am thankful to have a definite statement of your objections to me, as well as of the opinions which you think I ought to hold. But I have a right to draw this inference from the alteration which has taken place in your intentions. If you had found a passage in any of our Formularies to which you could have pointed me, and said "that condemns you," you would have indulged your wish of abstaining from controversy. You have sought in vain for such a passage; therefore it has been necessary to establish a particular interpretation of the words in those Formularies and in the Bible, though in order to do so you have been obliged to say much on a subject on which you think that the less that is said the better. You have alluded (in your last letter) to the absence of a dogmatic statement on the meaning of the word Eternal in our Articles, and to the evidence which the existence of such an Article among the original 42 affords that the omission was deliberate. I hope that the reasons you assign for the course which our Reformers pursued are satisfactory to your own mind. I am most anxious that they should be carefully weighed by the Council of King's College and by the whole Church, as being the very best which, after a long consideration, a learned apologist was able to produce. They are these: (1) that the doctrine on the subject of punishment, which differs from yours, was an Anabaptist doctrine, and therefore needed not to be condemned after the first vehemence of the Anabaptist fever had subsided; (2) that the question had already been settled by the adoption of the Athanasian Creed in the 8th Article; (3) that some of the Reformers-Jewel, for instance-were very strong in condemning Origen; (4) that there may be many theological propositions which ought thoroughly to be received and believed though they are not contained in the Formulary which we have subscribed. To the first reason you have replied yourself in other parts of the letter; for you have stated that Origen in the third century, and not any Anabaptist in the sixteenth, was the author of the tenet which you disapprove.* To the second I have replied in a former letter, that the Athanasian Creed contains no explanation of the words Everlasting and Eternal, and that whatever sense of them we deduce from Scripture must be applied to them there. In my Essays I have stated my reasons for thinking that the sense of the words Eternal Life and Eternal Death which identifies them respectively with the knowledge of God and the absence of that knowledge, is the one which is directly suggested by the Athanasian Creed;† that the chief objections to it have arisen from the refusal to give the words that force; that unless we did tacitly acknowledge it, the expression "He who does not thus think concerning the Trinity" would become intolerable to the conscience of every minister and every hearer. To your third • See note A at the end of the letter. argument I reply, that if the Reformers did personally concur in your opinion and denounce the opposite, it is all the more remarkable that they were withheld (some might say by their good sense, I should say by a higher wisdom) from enforcing that opinion on the Church. Your fourth statement is immeasurably the most serious and important. The particular instance which you allege in defence of it strikes me as remarkably inappropriate; for the Resurrection of the Body is formally asserted in the Apostles' Creed, which, as you say yourself, is adopted in the 8th Article. But the general notion which you encourage that the King's College Council may demand of its professors an assent to a number of et cæteras not included in the Formularies to which, as churchmen and clergymen, they have set their hand-is one for which I own I was not prepared. It will alarm, I believe, many persons who differ very widely with me. I do not see how it can fail to alarm every man who attaches any sacredness to his oaths or his subscriptions. On this point I must insist very strongly. I said in a former letter that I accepted the words of our Formularies and of the Scriptures in what seemed to me their literal and simple sense, but that I would accept no new interpretation of them. In noticing this remark, you have availed yourself, of course unintentionally, of the equivocal force of the adjective "new." You say, "I wish for no new Articles nor any new interpretations of our Formularies," meaning that your interpretation is the old one. But I submit that everything is new to the subscriber of a Formulary which is not contained in that Formulary at the time he subscribes it, however old or familiar it may be. Our Catechism says that the "body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper." Long before that Catechism was composed, Paschasius had taught that the words "This is my body," "This is my blood," must mean that the Elements are transubstantiated; and nearly the whole Church has adopted his opinion. Yet if any one said to me, "This is what you must mean by the words in your Catechism," I should answer, "This is not what I mean by |