Untitled - Electric Scotland

1 86 1 -66] BISHOP GRAY S DISSATISFACTION 363
heresy to an Ecclesiastical Court in England, a conviction
would almost certainly have been obtained, not probably
on the ground of the Bishop s Old Testament criticism,
but of his teaching as to the Person of Our Lord. But it
was impossible for Bishop Tait, before whom the case
might have come in the Court of Appeal, to express at the
time any opinion as to the probable issue of a new trial.
Nor could the Bishop of Capetown, without stultifying his
previous management of the matter, have listened for a
moment to such a suggestion. He had, on his own
responsibility, taken an independent and, as Bishop Tait
thought, an irregular course, and it was now impossible for
the Church at home to extricate him from the position in
which he found himself.
Bishop Wilberforce s motion x was lost on a division,
and the House contented itself with affirming, what was
indeed undisputed, that the Church of England continued in
communion with Bishop Gray.
Even Bishop Wilberforce
declined to recognise the excommunication as fully valid. 2
He had, a year before, deprecated so extreme a step ;
3
but Bishop Gray was not to be restrained, and his con
temptuous carelessness as to what the English Courts,
either Ecclesiastical or Civil, might say, placed his friends
at home in a rather uncomfortable plight. He was now,
very naturally, disappointed and irritated by the marked
refusal of the Upper House of Convocation to indorse
what he had done. And he was in no way pacified by a
further resolution carried in that House, to the effect that
neither by electing nor by refusing to elect a new Bishop
would the Church in Natal sever itself from communion
with the Church of England. Archbishop Longley de-
1 See above, page 360.
1
Chronicle of Convocation, June 28, 1866, pp. 520-521, and February 21,
1868, p. 1292.
3 Bishop \yilberforce s Life, vol. iii. p. 128.