would not preach at all without special license from the bishop, but “only read that which is appointed by public authority:” and further, that they would “observe, keep, and maintain, all the rites, ceremonies, good usages and order” set forth by the Act of Uniformity.  Here then was “Subscription” to the whole Prayer-book as it then stood.  And, indeed, even three years before, the “readers” in Churches were obliged, by “Subscriptions” to certain injunctions, to execute their office within prescribed and narrow limits.  The state of things doubtless was still felt on all hands to be but provisional.  The great Roman Catholic party waited, without separating formally.  The Puritans were stirring themselves in the cause of “Discipline:” it was hoped by both parties that some change might, from the lapse of a few years, better their position.  The latter reckoned on the more aged of the old Popish Clergy dying out; the former were encouraged by a fanatical prophecy to expect the death of the Queen herself in the twelfth year of her reign; but after that time the Puritan and Popish parties became openly defined, while the Church had as yet no such “Discipline” as could hold her members together at all, except by the Court of Commissioners.  It was to restrain both parties, then, that recourse was once more had to “Subscription.”

Can there be need, my Lord, to pursue any further an inquiry into so well known a piece of history as this?  I should not have said so much, had not the Ecclesiastical History Professor declared that Subscriptions and Declarations of Faith were “not in fact contemplated at the time of the first compilation of the Prayer Book and Articles;” that Subscription is “superfluous,” “needless,” “capricious,” “extrinsic,” and “accidental,” (pp. 38, 39), “and that the Church of England, as such, recognises absolutely no Subscriptions!”  I submit to your Lordship, that the Church of England “at the time of the first compilation of the Articles and Prayer Book,” encouraged no freedom whatever to diverge from the one or the other—demanded Subscription (by Cranmer) in 1553—obtained it from all the bishops and representatives of the clergy in Convocation in 1563—and laboured to restrain both Papists and Puritans within more and more rigid limits year by year, till by the thirteenth of Elizabeth “Subscription” was universally enforced, as the only practical substitute for that Ecclesiastical Discipline which was refused.

I have purposely abstained from here noticing minor inaccuracies which singularly abound in the learned Professor’s letter, and have kept to the main point.  His position is that since the twelfth year of Elizabeth, a stern and gradual growth of Subscription has superseded the liberal system of the earlier years in which the tolerant Church “knew absolutely nothing of Subscription!”  Without this, again I say, his argument comes utterly to an end.  It will be useless to weigh syllables, and retreat upon the ipsissima verba of the Letter.  The broad representation means this, or it is nihil ad rem.  And the whole history of the period is again, directly the reverse of the representation given by Dr. Stanley. [18]

The Primitive Church.

II.  I pass, then, to the next point—the alleged absence of Subscription in the primitive age.  Not content with the reference to the history of our own Church, Dr. Stanley says:—“I will not confine myself to these isolated instances, but examine the history of Subscription from the first.  For the first three centuries the Church was entirely without it.” “The first Subscription to a series of dogmatical propositions as such was that enforced by Constantine at the Council of Nicæa.  It was the natural, but rude, expedient of a half-educated soldier to enforce unanimity in the Church as he had by the sword enforced it in the empire.” (p. 35).  Again, I am painfully compelled to meet the statements of Dr. Stanley with a direct negative.  The case is not as he states it.  A “rude soldier,” in those days—(when comparatively few people wrote at all)—would not, I think, have been likely to invent this “expedient:” but, in fact, he did not invent it.

Council against Paulus Samosatemus.

I do not suppose for a moment that Dr. Stanley could care to make a merely technical statement as to the mode in which adhesion was signified to a dogmatic series of propositions.  No merely formal position of that kind could serve the argument.  The position which he lays down must be that, before the time of Constantine, there was that freedom allowed which is demanded by those who object to Subscription now,—that people were not, in those days, called on to profess their belief in any set of “dogmatical” statements as tests of orthodoxy.  If, then, he will look back sixty-six years before the Council of Nicæa, to the Council of Antioch (of which Constantine was quite innocent), against Paul of Samosata, there he will find the copy of a letter from certain orthodox bishops, Hymenæus, Theophilus, Theoctenus, Maximus, Proclus, and Bolanus, setting forth a series of dogmatical propositions, more minute and lengthened than those of Nicæa, and concluding with these words—Ταῦτα ἀπὸ πλείστων ὀλίγα σημειωσάμενοι, Βουλόμεθα μαθεῖν, εἰ τὰ αὐτὰ φρονεῖς ἡμῖν καὶ διδάσκεις, καὶ ὑποσημειώσασθαι σε, εἰ ἀρέσκη, τοῖς προγεγραμμένοις, ῆ οὐ.  If he would not write, he must make his mark—give some sign, at all events—whether he “held and taught” as there set forth in writing (προγεγραμμένοις)—yes or no; or submit to lose his office in the Church—(καθαιρεθῆναι.)—Routh’s Rel. ii. p. 465, &c.

Council against Noetus.

A few years earlier, the case of Noetus was treated in a similar way.  The assembled Presbyters, after confessing the orthodox faith, cast out the heretic for not submitting to it.  The Council of Eliberis, in Spain (before the Nicene Council), put out eighty-one canons, or chapters, of a mixed kind, dogmatical and disciplinary, “et Post Subscriptiones Episcoporum in vetusto codice Urgelensi leguntur sequentes presbyterorum,” &c.—Routh, iv. 44.  Doctrine of Novatian severity is there put forth: I refer to it not for any other purpose than to adduce the fact of Subscription—(and Subscription, too, in the presence of the laity),—or at least the fact, that there was no authorized laxity in those days, such as Dr. Stanley’s argument requires.

Discipline in the Church.

And here I would remark, my Lord, on the obvious difference between a state of the Church in which there was a system of Discipline holding together the whole body, and a condition like our own, when Discipline is acknowledged to be extinct among us.  When bishops met together periodically, as they then did, to regulate the affairs of the Church,—and stood in mutual awe of each other’s spiritual powers;—when dismissal from Communion was a chastisement shrunk from, by laity