any, who knowing what human nature is, would rightly weigh the circumstances of this decision before drawing further inferences from it. If I am at all correct in the argument I have attempted to draw out, that decision, if in Mr. Gorham’s favour, will decide the ambiguous language of the formularies, and nothing more. Abstract then your mind from the present judgment, and what will you say is the animus of the Church? Will it not be the same as heretofore; and that our estimation of our Church’s soundness in the faith is as yet unshaken? For should we, I boldly ask, judge that any friend of ours intended an indirectness or double dealing by us upon no better evidence? Should you so judge me, or I you, in any circumstances bearing even a distant analogy to these? and if not, how thus judge our mother, who has borne us unto Christ? An illustration from secular affairs may perhaps make my meaning in all this clearer, and, as it happens, there is one made ready to our hand. We all remember the act of Lord Ashley and the late Mr. Fielden, to prohibit the labour of young persons in factories, for more than ten hours a day. It was drawn up, no doubt, to the best of their ability to attain this object: to give persons under a specified age, rest and cessation from labour after ten hours at the mill. But as we well know likewise, an interpretation of the act grew into use among the mill-owners, by which they worked their factories twelve or fifteen p. 14hours a day, using the labours of the younger persons employed by relays; so that though no one of them was actually at work more than the ten hours, the object of the bill was frustrated, if it were to secure their being dismissed to their homes after so many hours at the mill. The resting them an hour, or two hours, in the middle of the day, whilst others took their place, to be also rested for the same time, at another period, did not secure to those young persons what was at any rate supposed to be the humane object of the framers of the bill, and the legislature which passed it; a return to their homes at such a reasonably early hour as might afford some time for relaxation, and some opportunity for mental cultivation. This usage however of the mill-owners did not pass unquestioned, and a case involving the principle of it, was first heard before an inferior tribunal, and, the decision being given there I think, against the legality of the system of relays, was brought afterwards by appeal before the Barons of the Exchequer. The jurisdiction, observe, of this court was beyond all question, and it applied itself to the decision of the case. Of course, (exactly as in the Gorham cause before the Privy Council,) the matter in hand was simply a question of the interpretation of the act of parliament. The judges had nothing to do with which arrangement might be most humane, nor even with which they imagined to be most accordant with the mind of parliament in passing the act, if the