ing development they belong. We have to admit the various tendencies in the teaching of the apostles; and, in regard to the central figure of all, to gain from books subject to the same incidents as other forms of literature, and written by men who imperfectly understood him, our consciousness of the value of his life, his character, his teaching, and of his relation to mankind and to God.
The early history of the Church has likewise been subjected to a minute criticism, which has been stimulated of late by the discovery of the "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." The result has been to give us a simpler view of the organization of the Christian societies and of their life and thoughts, to show the influence of various social circumstances working naturally upon them, and forming their institutions and their theology. It becomes less and less possible to attribute to the earliest period of the Church, as having been formally imposed or exclusively admitted, any of the theories of Church government which we now know, whether Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Independent, or the formed doctrines of later times, whether relating to the plan of redemption or to the Incarnation or the Trinity.
3. While the progress of science and criticism have thus made new conditions for theological thought, church-life has also undergone changes which allow of the necessary expansion. First, we must recall the formal liberation of opinion effected mainly by the judgment of the Privy Council, delivered in 1864, in the cases arising out of the "Essays and Reviews." The alarm excited ten years before by Mr. Maurice's theological essays, especially on the questions of the atonement and of eternal punishment, and by the works of Professor Jowett and Dr. Rowland Williams, found expression in Mr. Mansel's "Bampton Lectures"; and when there appeared successively the first volume of Bishop Colenso's work on the Pentateuch, which was practically a polemic against verbal inspiration, and the "Essays and Reviews," which were a distinct demand for liberty of thought in the authorized teachers of the English Church, this alarm showed itself in the shape of prosecutions for heresy. Out of the multitude of statements impugned in the "Essays" of Dr. Williams and Mr. Wilson three only remained on which the Privy Council were called to adjudicate; but they represented the three departments of theology on which liberty was most distinctly demanded: 1. The Atonement and Justification; 2. The Inspiration of Scripture; 3. Eternal Punishment. The charge relating to the first of these was withdrawn, and on the other two the judgment was in favor of the accused. Thus an almost complete liberty was won on the matters then under discussion, and the principles on which the judgment was based practically gave a similar assurance on other points. The tendency of the Privy Council, as representing the supremacy of the national over ecclesiastical law, has been almost uniformly in favor of liberty. It has been possible in a few extreme cases to procure the condemnation of cler-
