a letter of mine to Mr. Davies, his Secretary, two days afterwards, June 6, 1853

"DEAR DAVIES,

"East Brent, June 6, 1853.

"Will you, throughout this business, bear carefully in mind the following facts:

"That the Correspondence which I sent to the Bishop, April 27, and which was in his hands when he wrote the letter to me of April 29, contains,

"1. Bishop Spencer's exposition of the Doctrine of the Real Presence.

"2. My exposition of the Doctrine.

"That I have made no statement anywhere of the Doctrine of the Real Presence which is not fully and definitely set out in Letter E. b

"That, therefore, the exact point at issue between Bishop Spencer and myself was fully and plainly before the Bishop when he wrote his letter to me of April 29. (See above, pp. 227, 8.)

"That I now understand for the first time, from the Bishop's letter, dated June 3, 1853, that he dissents from the exposition of the Doctrine made by me.

"These are the facts. I send a copy of this letter to Mr. Pinder.

"Yours truly,

"GEORGE A. DENISON.

"Edmund Davies, Esq."

Afterwards, in July, 1853, it became clear to me, through my dear friend John Horner, that what the Bishop had meant to pronounce against was, not my exposition of the Doctrine at all, but only against its being imposed upon the candidates as a sine quâ non; and that this had been said by the Bishop in a letter to Lord John Thynne.

Upon this, I wrote to the Bishop, July 1, 1853, to ask him to confirm this to me under his own hand.

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b The statement is, in all its substance, and almost in every word of it, identical with that published by me in 1851, in my Why should the Bishops continue to sit in the House of Lords?" before I was made Archdeacon of Taunton in the same year.

The same day Lord John wrote to me to say that the Bishop had said to him: "I never condemned George D.; but I do not think he should require it of all candidates.”

In reply to my letter of July 1, the Bishop writes

to me:

"What you heard from Horner is correct, that when I said I could not go so far as you did with regard to your statement of the Doctrine of the Real Presence, what I meant was, against its being imposed upon the candidates as a sine quâ non."

Now all that is necessary to say here upon this point is this; that not only had I never imposed it, but had never so much as thought of imposing it of my own authority.

The purpose was saddled upon me by Bishop Spencer and his correspondent, Mr. Fisher; but all the facts of the case are wholly irreconcileable with the allegation.

There was, therefore, here a very remarkable confusion; and, looking back upon all that passed, it is clear to me that, if the matter had been put upon this ground to me at Wells, June 4, I should not have resigned my Chaplaincy but it was never so put till it was too late.

In 1854, the Bishop's advisers, not a great many days before his death, with the object of getting rid of legal proceedings, by being able to produce some sort of Judgment of Bishop Bagot in the case, persuaded him to put his hand to a vague sort of quasi-censure and admonition, endorsing the strange blunder and jumble of 1853, touching my having imposed, or purposed to impose, of my own authority a new test upon candidates for Holy Orders. The reason, no doubt, was to see what could be done to "get rid of" the whole business, and the threatened legal proceedings, by shewing that all that could reasonably be asked for by my opponents had been done already ex cathedrâ. I knew that it was very kindly meant as towards myself personally.

But then the "business was one which was not a personal matter; one also which, in my hands, could not be

1

"got rid of," so long as life and strength of mind and body remained to me.

A test of truth of Doctrine is one thing; that it was my clear right and my duty to propound. A test of admission or rejection of candidates for Holy Orders is another thing; that is for the Bishop to impose, not for the Examining Chaplain. Neither Bishop Spencer, nor his correspondent, Mr. Fisher, nor indeed dear Bishop Bagot, or rather, I should say, his advisers, appear to have grasped the distinction.

It was an official severance, it was never anything more, full of great personal sorrow and distress. Beyond the personal sorrow and distress it caused to my dear old friend, dear Lady Harriet Bagot, and all theirs, as to ourselves and all ours, I have nothing in it to regret.

The same year I preached in Wells Cathedral, and published my Sermons on THE REAL PRESENCE; challenging, and eventually compelling, the public enquiry which I had demanded.

Sermon I. was preached August 7, 1853; Sermon II., November 6, 1853; Mr. Ditcher's letter asking me to retract, and my reply to it refusing to retract anything, the same day, January 16, 1854; Sermon III., May 15, 1854

I am not going in these "Notes" into any résumé of the history of the "legal proceedings" of four years; I shall touch some salient points here and there. But the history, both on my own and others' part, has long ago been published; and there is no room for, or if there were, no advantage in, republication of details; neither am I going into any discussion of Doctrine.

But, in order to make my position clear, I must go back a little to what was, and had been for some time, in my mind before the difference arose between Bishop Spencer and myself.

I had felt then, for some time, that in one grave particular my position as Examining Chaplain was an unreal and contradictory position. I was required to accept and to act upon definite and exclusive Doctrine in respect of

"Holy Baptism;" I was not required to accept and to act upon definite and exclusive Doctrine in respect of Holy Communion. More than this, it was assumed that it was wrong for an English Churchman, in an official position, so to accept and act in respect of "Holy Communion."

This position of things seemed to me, the longer I lived, to be false, and very dangerous to the holding of the Truth. The Doctrine of "Holy Communion," like all other Doctrine, was, I knew, one and indivisible; but in the Church of England it had been made, for three hundred years, not only more than one, and divisible, but many and wholly contradictory Doctrines.

I began to see that this was what lay at the root of the weakness of the Church of England as a Church, and of the unsoundness of the position of her Episcopate; and it forced itself upon me more and more year by year, that I must needs do what I could towards the recovery and specific affirmation of The " One Faith" in respect of the Sacrament of THE BODY and THE BLOOD; and, if I found that the Bishop, whose Examining Chaplain I was, was not prepared to assert this for his own diocese, in that case to withdraw from my official position. I had never "known" any Doctrine but one of the Sacrament of THE BODY and THE BLOOD, and I recoiled from my own position as that of a Priest who was, in his official position, doing what he was not doing in his parochial position, i.e. largely ministering to the growth of the "Indifferentism" so widely prevailing already in respect of that Doctrine. And I used to say to myself, If belief touching the Sacrament of THE BODY and THE BLOOD be a thing indifferent in the Church of England of the last three hundred years, what is the meaning of talking about "the Doctrine" of the Church of England? If this is so uncertain upon a primary point, why not upon all other primary points? It was nothing to say in reply, that the Prayer-Book and the Articles delivered expressly the Doctrine of THE REAL PRESENCE. Thousands of Priests, every Bishop, so to speak, used the Prayer-Book in common

with myself and others; but by some strange and curious process of interpretation, managed to read it differently.

And again, there was a specific demand upon belief in respect of one holy Sacrament, and no such demand in respect of the other: one was to mean one thing, and one only; the other was to mean almost anything a man pleased either to invent for himself, or to choose from among the "isms" of Century XVI. The historical account of this curious difference is no doubt to be found in the fact that the controversy of Cent. XVI., so far as it was "religious," centred in the Holy Eucharist; very little, if at all, in Holy Baptism.

My whole position, with all its surroundings, personal and other, was beginning to weigh upon me heavily, when Bishop Spencer's public charge against me in respect of a specific portion of the Doctrine of the Sacraments as stated to him by me, that such portion "is not the Doctrine of the Church of England,"-brought the matter to an unexpected issue; and I became free to contend earnestly for the Faith as best I could. I accepted the freedom as it was sent to me: it involved the pain of official severance from one whom I had always loved, and loved to the end with all my heart, and whose memory is to me and to my most beloved wife a very precious thing. But the official severance (it was never anything more) was to be; and I might not shrink from completing it; but I am bound to confess here, that if it had not been for Bishop Spencer's assistance, I should have gone on as I had done. I had said something to the candidates, at the Christmas Ordination of 1852, of what was in my mind; but not only had I not carried my conclusions into effect, but I had not matured my arrangements for making the attempt. The condition of the Bishop's health, and his frequently-enforced absence from the diocese, were elements of extreme difficulty. I paused, and hesitated.

After Mr. Ditcher's letter to me, January 16, 1854, and my reply to it the same day, the legal proceedings dragged their slow length along.