Untitled - Electric Scotland

1860-64] PRIVY COUNCIL JUDGMENT 315
judgment, to which the Church, not of England only, but
of foreign nations also, had been looking forward with
intense expectation, was pronounced. No one who was
present can forget the interest with which the audience in
that crowded Council Chamber listened to sentence after
sentence as they rolled along from the smooth and silvery
tongue of the Lord Chancellor, enunciating with a lucidity
which made it seem impossible that any other statement
of the case was conceivable, and with a studied modera
tion of language which, at times, seemed to border on
irony first the principles on which the judgment was to
proceed, and then the examination, part by part, and
word by word, of each of the three charges that remained,
till, at the close, not one was left, and the appellants re
mained in possession of the field."
In judging the case, the Court declared its own powers
to be strictly limited :
"
It is no part of the duty of this Tribunal," said the Lord
Chancellor,
"
to pronounce any opinion on the character, effect,
or tendency of the publications known by the name of Essays
and Reviews. Nor are we at liberty to take into consideration
for the purposes of the prosecution the whole of the essay of Dr.
Williams or of the essay of Mr. Wilson. A few short extracts
only are before us, and our judgment must be by law confined
to the matter which is therein contained. If, therefore, the
book, or these two essays, or either of them as a whole, be of a
mischievous and baneful tendency, as weakening the foundations
of Christian belief, and likely to cause many to offend, they will
retain that character and be liable to that condemnation notwith
standing this our judgment."
Church has prescribed no rule, there is so far freedom of opinion
. . . "On matters on which the
that they may be discussed without penal consequences."
Proceeding to the charges in detail, and arguing each
separately with the utmost care, the Court declared itself
u unable to say that the passages extracted from the
essays" on the subject of the Inspiration
of the Bible