A point of great weight surely is this:—that they are (even if really ambiguous when subjected to the searching eyes and acute minds of the most subtle lawyers: I use the word in no ill sense; yet) to all ordinary men, and ordinary unbiassed minds, so clearly on the catholic side, and so plainly to such minds convey nothing but the ancient doctrine of regeneration in baptism, that it is much more easy and natural to believe the Church never contemplated the ambiguity than that she did. Let it be remembered too that if now on the present appeal, the six eminent law officers who have heard the case do decide for the ambiguity, yet, so indistinctly is this ambiguity itself discernible, that not merely ordinary men, but one of the ablest and perhaps the most practised ecclesiastical lawyer of our day, had no doubt or hesitation on his mind when the case was argued before him as the Archbishop’s judge of doctrine in the court of p. 12Arches, that it did not exist; that there was no such approach even to ambiguous language as to make him have recourse to extraneous comment to guide him, or cause him to give in the very slightest degree a doubtful judgment; but on the contrary, thought there was no sense to be put upon the Church’s statements on this subject but the one catholic doctrine, which, a priori, we should suppose she would enunciate. Take with these general considerations the particular circumstance that if we assert the ambiguous animus, we must suppose the Church, not only in fact to have inadvertently qualified words naturally carrying the catholic meaning; but so to have intended to qualify them, that when she says “seeing this child is regenerate,” she meant “seeing he is not regenerate,” or, at the least, “seeing I have no reason to believe he is regenerate,” and shall we not have a sufficient case to prevent our feeling compelled to “think” that “evil,” that the Church had a double mind. To me, at least these thoughts bring home a satisfactory conviction that it is much more likely the Church herself has been ignorant of ambiguity, and did not mean to be indefinite, than that she purposely drew up her articles and services, with merely such a subtle and almost imperceptible residuum of doubtful words that it appears a mere chance, under a peculiar combination of circumstances that it ever comes to the light at all: that she so speciously concealed her own desire to include a second meaning, that taken “in her own craftiness” she deceived Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, so that even when her words were most elaborately sifted by him, this hidden sense escaped his observation; and is only now at last made manifest upon the most laboured and minute investigation in another court, p. 13where it is not too much to say there has been every inducement to the learned judges composing it to split hairs, and find an ambiguity if by possibility they could. I say this not as impeaching the impartiality of the tribunal, but yet as worthy of note by