Untitled - Electric Scotland

2i 4 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. x.
of guilty parties or not. ... I fear my
votes on this Bill
have given great offence to many, but I have acted according to
my conscience, and I pray God that all may go right."
A prominent share in another controversy, destined to
arouse a fiercer and more lasting blaze, he inherited
whether he would or no. It was certainly from no per
sonal inclination that he became a party to the Ritual
strife which had begun to agitate the public mind, and
which was to be prolonged with intermittent vigour
throughout his whole Episcopate. The facts of its origin
have recently been told with care in books accessible to
every one, 1 and the briefest summary will here be enough.
The famous * Gorham judgment of i8$o 2 had seemed
to give a signal triumph to the Evangelical party.
But in
the reaction against that judgment, the pendulum swung
far the other way. Old-fashioned Churchmen who had
no liking for the Oxford Tracts, or for Dr. Pusey,
were shocked at a sentence which seemed to them a
flat contradiction of the plain language of the Prayer-
Book, and the result among High Churchmen was a
wider tolerance for the vehemence, and even the
vagaries, of men who now set themselves to emphasise by
outward act as well as spoken word the Sacramental
doctrines which had, as they thought, been unjustly
assailed. With this encouragement there took place an
advance in outward ritual, which had been discouraged
1 See especially Canon Perry s Student s English Chtirch History, Period
in., chapters xvii. xxii. xxiii. See also Memoir of Bishop Blomfield,
vol. ii.
chapter vii.
- The judgment turned upon the point whether Mr. Gorham s published
opinions upon the subject of Baptismal Regeneration were or were not so
heterodox as to justify the Bishop of Exeter s refusal to institute him to the
Vicarage of Brampford Speke. The Privy Council decided, upon appeal,
"
that the doctrine held by Mr. Gorham is not contrary or repugnant to the
declared doctrine of the Church of England, and that Mr. Gorham ought not,
by reason of the doctrine held by him, to have been refused admission to the
Vicarage of Brampford Speke."