From Dr John Mair
Sir, - Miss Prudence Dailey (Letters, 10
January) and Mr Alan Bartley (
Letters, 24 January) allude to the Gorham judgment. Mr Bartley
notes that Sir Robert Phillimore observed in 1895 that the views of
the appellant (the Revd George Cornelius Gorham) were "almost
impenetrable", but the fact remains that, 45 years previously, the
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had held (in April 1850,
after hearings in December 1849) that those views were not an
infraction of the doctrines of the Church of England as set out in
its official statements.
In the context of the present debate about baptismal rites, it
may be relevant and important to clarify the scope of the Gorham
judgment, which was essentially a legal determination that the
views ascribed to Gorham were compatible with the Articles and
formularies of the Church of England as by law established.
The Judicial Committee (whose first ecclesiastical cause to come
before it was this case, which was in the event spectacular) did
not, and did not purport to, define the truth of any doctrine in
itself.
The nature of the Committee's jurisdiction and of its judgment
was, however, widely (and in some cases wildly) misunderstood:
there followed vast public meetings of protest and shoals of
pamphlets and even secessions to the Roman Catholic Church. The
judgment was not a ruling on the abstract merits of particular
doctrines of baptism or of regeneration; but critics persisted in
seeing it as a theological rather than as a legal
determination.
This perception was probably heightened by the fact that almost
all church parties approached the matter with an outlook of
unqualified, and probably unselfconscious, theological realism,
which led them to consider that they were dealing with absolute
statements about metaphysical facts.
An appreciation of the intensity of the participants at the time
requires an act of imagination in our own day, when doctrines may
be seen as expressions of a kind of applied art rather than as
final definitions of matters of which many are unknowable.
JOHN MAIR (Reader emeritus)
67 Bromefield
Stanmore
Middlesex HA7 1AG