Untitled - Electric Scotland

518 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. XVIIL
the publication of your Remarks, no approval of them on my part
can be legitimately inferred, and I do not consider it necessary
now to reconsider the arrangement. But your note seems to
invite me to read your Remarks, and, I suppose, to express some
opinion upon them. I regret, for your own sake, as for the
Church, the publication of this pamphlet, and, since you wish me
to write, I dare not shrink from the disagreeable task of setting
before you what you have done, in the light in which, I believe,
it will appear to many of the best and most attached members of
the Church.
"
Of course it is not because you disapprove of some of Dr.
Stanley s writings that you have taken the unusual step of publish
ing this protest. You would allow that in a great National
Church like ours, necessarily and rightly including men of very
various sentiments, what is written by eminent and good men of
one school of theology often gives grief, and even trouble of
conscience, to many faithful members of the Church, who have
deeply-rooted convictions on the other side of the question at
issue. I suppose both you and I have often been pained, if we
have not been troubled in conscience, by the published words of
good men, both of the high sacerdotal and of other schools
within our Church nay, persons even of opinions like your own
often give great pain and trouble by their statements of doctrine.
"
It is not therefore in your own disapproval of Dr. Stanley s
writings that you seek the justification of your pamphlet. You
are understood as coming forward publicly to charge your future
Dean with unfaithfulness to the Church in which he has
ministered for twenty years, and in which he has long held
eminent and most influential offices.
u Now, I suppose no one doubts that you have acted con
scientiously, but very many do feel that your conscience is not
well instructed in this matter. What you have done will, I think,
appear to most good men in this light that, if you have not dis
tinctly stated, you have used words which imply
some of the
gravest possible charges against a brother clergyman, that you
have endeavoured to support these charges by extracts from his
writings which, being separated from the context, are greatly dis
torted from their real meaning ; and, as to several of the premisses
which you attribute to Dr. Stanley, you have sought to load them
with conclusions which, even taken as you have given them, they
will not bear. Good men will say that this might perhaps be ex-