THEOLOGY UNDER ITS CHANGED CONDITIONS. 179 



On these passages the accusation was grounded 1. That the 

 preacher departed, and that knowingly, from the teaching of St. Paul 

 on the fall of Adam. 2. That he denied the fact of the resurrection 

 of our Lord. 3. That he claimed for the teachers of to-day to correct 

 the teaching of the apostles, and of the Church on various other 

 points. 



It is true that three of the six doctors whom the vice-chancellor 

 considered himself bound by the statute to appoint to inquire into the 

 complaint could not bring themselves to pronounce Mr. Fletcher's 

 teaching as free from the charge of being " dissonant or contrary to 

 the doctrine of the Church of England as publicly received " ; and that 

 he was acquitted only by the casting vote of the vice-chancellor. But 

 not only was the feeling of both residents and non-residents, of all 

 shades of opinion, strongly adverse to the proceeding, but (we quote 

 from the journal which represents the more conservative and clericalist 

 side of university opinion) " an opinion to this effect was conveyed to 

 Mr. Ffoulkes (the delator) in a letter signed by a number of those 

 whose judgment might be supposed likely to have weight with him" ; 

 and it is added, "Mr. Ffoulkes's action is entirely his own." We may 

 add that a certain sense of incongruity is imparted to the proceeding 

 by the fact that Mr. Ffoulkes was himself for some time the holder 

 of views within the Church of England which led him to become for 

 some years a Roman Catholic. But the prevalent feeling has been 

 that expressed by Trajan about persecution, " Non nostri sseculi est." 

 As Mr. Fletcher says in the preface to his published sermon : " It is so 

 incongruous with the ideas of our time that, even in serious people, 

 it excites a sense of humor. It is like fighting with bows and arrows 

 after the invention of cannon. Let us hope it will have the historical 

 interest of being the last instance of its kind ; the last flickering, ex- 

 piring flame of a fire which once burned so fiercely, and nowhere more 

 so than in Oxford." This feeling is shared by religious persons gen- 

 erally. It may rightly be said that almost any opinion, if put forward 

 with sincere conviction and in a becoming spirit, will be allowed an 

 unprejudiced hearing ; and that, whether in the university or in the 

 Church generally, prosecutions for matters of opinion are very unlikely 

 to be repeated. 



This conviction arises from the fact that this aversion from prose- 

 cution is not an isolated fact. It is connected with a spirit of tol- 

 erance which is wide-spread and well-grounded. Meetings like the 

 Church Congress and the Diocesan Conferences have made the clergy 

 and their adherents know and esteem one another, and Church parties 

 have not the bitter antagonism they once had. In clerical circles 

 this tolerance as yet hardly extends to Nonconformists ; the clergy 

 still to a great extent hold theories, and still more entertain exclusive 

 feelings, which separate them and those attached to their teaching 

 from co-operation in all spiritual things with dissenters. But there 



