Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

312 Conclusion. CHAP. xi.
as are content to hold a mystery on this subject, and main
tain the Divine Power in conjunction with man s freewill.
Or, again, this article may be held as containing a complete
and whole truth; i.e. in a definitely predestinarian sense.
But as it would be unfair in the predestinarian to prohibit
the qualified, so it would be unfair in the advocate of free
will not to allow the extreme mode of holding this article,
or to disallow it as permitting and giving room for a pure
predestinarian
school within our Church. This wise and
just liberty has indeed at times offended those whom the
excesses of this school have roused to hostility, or whom
insufficient reflection and the philosophical bias of the day
have made too exclusive and dogmatic in their opinions
concerning freewill and at the close of the last ; century a
proposal was made by a Divine who became afterwards a dis
tinguished prelate of our Church, to ecclesiastical authority,
that the terms of the seventeenth article should be altered
and so framed as to give no further license to predestinarianism.
1 But a wise caution, if not a profound theology,
1 About this time a circumstance Article on Predestination and Elec-
occurred. which then excited con- tion more clear and perspicuous,
siderable interest, and in which the and less liable to be wrested by our
part that Dr. Porteous took has been adversaries to a Oalvinistic sense,
much misinterpreted and misunder- which has been so unjustly affixed
stood. The following statement in to it On these grounds we
his own words will place the fact in applied in a private and respectful
its true point of view : At the close manner to Archbishop Cornwallis,
of the year 1772, and the beginning requesting him to signify our wishes
of the next, an attempt was made (which we conceived to be the wishes
by myself, and a few other clergy- of a very large proportion, both of
men, among whom were Mr. Fran- the clergy and laity) to the rest of
cisWollaston, Dr. Percy, now Bishop the bishops, that everything might
of Dromore, and Dr. Yorke, now be done which could be prudently
Bishop of Ely, to induce the bishops and safely done, to promote these
to promote a review of the Liturgy important and salutary purposes.
the Arch-
and Articles ; in order to amend in The answer given by
both, but particularly in the latter, bishop, February 11, 1773, was in
those parts which all reasonable these words : "I have consulted
persons agreed stood in need of severally my brethren the amendment. This plan was meant
to strengthen and confirm the ecclebishops,
and it is the opinion of the Bench in
general, that nothing can in siastical establishment; to repel the
attacks which were at that time
pru-
dence be done in the matter which
has been submitted to our consideracontinually
made upon it by its
"
tion. Works of Bishop Porteous,
avowed enemies ; to render the 1 7th vol. i. p. 38.