ensure

Mhg56 b 31

THE CENSURE OF 1836
lo STIEL NECESSARY.

The following Considerations are suggested to Members
qf Convocation on the subject qf the proposed repeal
of the Statute affecting Dr. Hampden.

1. It seems impossible to deny the general principle,
that, when opinions have been censured, the censure
should remain upon them till they are retracted, and
not be withdrawn before. The law indeed allows the
consequences of a criminal act to cease after a certain
time, but it would be wrong to draw any inference
from this without taking into account the dif
ference in point of permanency between acts and
opinions as subjects of censure or punishment. Could
we imagine any legal crime, instead of being done once
for all, permanently going on, it would be absurd and
ridiculous to suppose it capable, in that state, of
having its legal penalties remitted. But opinions
are analogous to such permanent acts; they remain
until they are abandoned, in the full original
force of their first conception. And therefore to
remove a censure from opinions, acknowledged to be
unsound in the outset, and still continuing unrecanted,
is simply anomalous and irrational. Nor can any re
cantation of opinions expressly censured be legiti
mately acknowledged, which is not as express, as
the censure passed upon them ; the popular recog
nised rule of judicial transactions demanding that

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the reparation should be as foi'mal as the injury, the
confession as the fault. These two principles then,
the first of which is an immediate conclusion of
reason, the second an universal maxim of law, con
stitute in the outset a clear irresistible general ground
against the proposed Statute, which must commend
itself to all who may wish to adopt a consistent
accountable line of acting. Nor can these reasons
be shaken, unless other as marked and definite ones
be brought on the other side; unless against this vast
preponderance of general ground against the measure,
there be discovered some particular, accidental rea
sons for it, making up by their casual importance
and intensity, for their entire contradiction to general
principle and acknowledged rule.
2. If it be replied that we should be content with
something short of absolute consistency, and that as
Dr. Hampden's publications since the Censure contain
orthodox opinions upon various points, these should
be regarded as in themselves virtual recantations of
his unorthodox ones ; before we allow this reason to
pass, it should be well considered, whether the former
at all come into contact with the latter statements; for if
not, the one cannot be a recantation, explicit or implied,
of the other. If his condemned opinions and his ortho
dox ones may be held together, then unquestionably the
latter amount in no sense to a denial of the former.
Now the opinions which were condemned by the
Censure of 1836, were not specific unsound doctrines
chiefly, but different forms of one great general prin
ciple, that no one statement of doctrine was necessary to

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be believed, all doctrinal inferences from the words of
Scripture being of equal intrinsic authority. It was
the Latiludinarian system which was condemned ; it
was the theory which, avoiding all attack on the
Articles of the Creed, simply denies their pecidiar
authority; admitting them, but giving them a place
amongst, not to the exclusion of, other and opposite
opinions. It is obvious that this theory allows Dr.
Hampden to hold any qf the orthodox doctrines for
himself, if only he may be excused from imposing them
as necessary upon others. And therefore the circum
stance that he has used strong language respecting the
Atonement, Justification by Faith, &c. &c. is no evi
dence of orthodoxy in him, because it does not at all
interfere with the Latitudinarian principle upon which
he holds these doctrines : he does not hold them in the
orthodox way, he maintains them as opinions only, not
as necessary articles of faith. It is certainly natural to
suppose, on first hearing orthodox doctrines preached
and insisted on, that they are held in the ordinary way
in which others of our Church hold them : but this is
only a proof that Continental Rationalism has happily
made as yet but little progress amongst us. Once
convict a man of the Rationalistic theory, and every
statement of particular doctrine that he makes after
wards goes for nothing as a proof of orthodoxy.
This principle, while it enables him to hold any
orthodox doctrine, incapacitates him for holding any
doctrine orthodox! y. The root itself is unsound, and
therefore all that grows upon it is unsound also.
The stream is poisoned at its very source, and or/ho-

doxy has ceased even before we come to the question
what particular doctrines are held or rejected.
3. But whatever reason there might be to suppose a
change in Dr. Hampden towards orthodoxy in con
sequence of certain passages in his later publications,
the inference has as a matter of fact been disallowed
by the Univei*sity, and disavowed by Dr. Hampden
himself. The University, by passing its Censure
after the delivery of the Inaugural Lecture, a
Lecture with much even of what may be called
display of orthodoxy, has committed itself to the
view, that such orthodoxy is in no sense to be
understood as a departure from, or recantation of, his
unsound opinions. And such an inference is altogether
negatived and disowned by Dr. Hampden himself.
The Regius Professor, so far from ever having de
clared his recantation, has, on the contrary, over and
over again, declared that he has not recanted, and
that he has changed none of his views. He declared
as much in his Inaugural Lecture, he repeated as much
in his Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, again
in his Preface to the Second Edition of the Bampton
Lectures, and finally in his Public Lecture delivered
yesterday. In the concluding part of this Lecture,
added expressly for the occasion, and certainly
written, if any composition ever had such an object,
for the particular purpose of righting himself in
public estimation — in this very Lecture, an expres
sion of readiness to acknowledge errors, had he
ever been guilty of them, was succeeded by the
ominous avowal, And I am not aware that I have.

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Why then force an inference upon Dr. Hampden,
which he himself disavows ? Why endeavour to make
out that he has shifted his opinions, modified his
principles, converted the theories of the Bampton
Lectures into the simplicity of Gospel truth? He
tells us himself with his own mouth, that he is not
aware he has ever put forth unsound statements. He
disclaims the very idea of any change having taken
place in his theology, and therefore of course deprecates
the inference that the views given in his more recent
publications, are to be at all considered in the light of
a recantation, of a rise from unsound to sound
teaching. He does not wish to throw his Bampton
Lectures aside ; far from doing so, he himself appealed
to them in his Lecture yesterday. No, whatever
some of his friends may say, he himself does not give
any sanction to the defence of a tacit retractation. He
no more allows an implicit, than he does an explicit,
retractation to be asserted of him.
4. So much then is clear and certain ; that the
Regius Professor himself, far from allowing any
departure in his later productions from the tone
of his Bampton Lectures, maintains their perfect
agreement and consistency, i. e. the perfect consistency
of the doctrinal viezcs of the former with the latitudinarian
principle of the latter. It is true he denies the construc
tion that was put upon his Bampton Lectures ; and this
denial may be interpreted into a claim and desire to be
considered orthodox. And so it is unquestionably : no
one doubts the Regius Professor's wishes on this head :
the question is, what admissions does he make, what

disposition, tacit or express, does he display to
abandon his opinions. To give up opinions, and to
stand out for never having held them, are very dif
ferent, nay, completely opposite lines of conduct :
the former sets a contest at rest, the latter fixes
and perpetuates it. Yet this latter is the line
which Dr. Hampden has adopted. Up to this very
hour, rejecting all the claim, which his subsequent
writings might have to be considered as a change in
his Theology ; and declining any defence but that of
soundness and consistency from the first, he throws
back the contest upon the original ground on which
it stood in 1836 ; he defends himself, not by pleading
any modification of his system after passing the
Censure, but by attacking the Censure itself. What
else could be the meaning of his strong and repeated
assertions yesterday, that the Censure was an unjust
tyrannical measure, the work of malice, ignorance, and
party spirit, concurring in the persecution of an
innocent man ? what else could be his meaning, when
he said, that the same cunning and artifice were at
work now to rivet his chains, which originally forged
them 1 This is certainly a recurrence to the original
ground, if any argument can be ; this is a simplifi
cation of the question for which we are greatly
obliged to the Regius Professor. Dr. Hampden
speaks in the tone of a man deeply injured, and
whom nothing will satisfy, but an entire removal of
the stigma, on the sole and simple ground of innocence.
He adopts no middle line, and therefore the oppo
nents qf the proposed Statute have no middle line to

oppose. Dr. Hampden simply attacks the Censure qf
1836, and therefore they have simply to defend it.
Let it be understood then that the question is fairly
relieved from the excrescences and incumbrances, the
conditions and modifications, which it may be sup
posed to have contracted. Let it be understood that
we are again in the Corpus Common Room, and that
the point at issue is the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of
the Bampton Lectures. This understood, we are
brought at once into contact with the only defence
upon which Dr. Hampden's cause ultimately rests,
viz. his denial of the construction which was put on
the works in question. Granting this construction to
be right, he admits that nothing has taken place to
interfere with the judgment of the University, but he
refuses to allow the original construction itself. And
this is a question which, after stating it, we leave to
be settled again, as it was before, between the general
sense of the Christian world on the one side, and Dr.
Hampden's individual assertion on the other. All
the world was then agreed on the latitudinarian and
rationalistic construction to be put upon the Bamp
ton Lectures. They bore it upon their very surface ;
they overflowed with it. Dr. Hampden had used no
disguise, and there could be no mistake about his
meaning, as soon as ever attention was drawn
to it : this was the general, the almost universal
view taken of them ; the author alone refusing to
allow it. Such being the state of the case, the
point was decided then against Dr. Hampden ; and as
neither side has shifted its ground since, we presume

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the same decision is equally rational now. The history
of doctrinal error certainly bears out the suspicion, that
the denial of a construction, is but too often only a form
of a refusal to recant what is involved in that con
struction. But be this as it may, it is only intended
here to state the point at issue between the two
parties, Dr. Hampden and the University. It
having been shewn that Dr. Hampden's later writings
involve no departure from his original system, that
the University has actually committed itself to this
view, and that Dr. Hampden himself acknowledges
it; the question is fairly and irrevocably thrown back
upon its old ground, which ground reduces it to the
very simple form in which we have put it — to a
contest between two rival judgments upon the same
works — that of Dr. Hampden the author on the one
side, and that qf the Church and University on the
other.

BAXTER, PRINTER, OXFORD.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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