lxxvi INTRODUCTION

satisfy the Bishop, who then refused to institute (1847). Gorham appealed to the Court of Arches, which supported the Bishop. The case was taken to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which, by a majority (with the two Archbishops as assessors), reversed the decision of the Court below, and Gorham was soon afterwards instituted (1850). The case convulsed the religious world. “Were we together,” wrote Gladstone to Manning (December 30, 1849), “I should wish to converse with you from sunrise to sunset on the Gorham case. It is a stupendous issue.”¹ Onlookers who are not actively enlisted in any one of the hostile parties within the Church Militant may find it difficult to rise to these stupendous heights. But the issues involved were certainly important. On the one hand, if Gorham had not won the day, the expulsion from the Establishment of Calvinists and Evangelicals might have followed. “I am old enough,” said Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, “to remember three baptismal controversies, and this is the first in which one party has tried to eject the other from the Church.” On the other side, the High Church Party were indignant at the submission of a question of Church doctrine to a Civil Court. The controversy continued to rage for many months after the Judicial Committee had delivered judgment, and was the immediate reason of Manning’s secession to the Church of Rome. Ruskin from his own detached point of view had caught the contagion, and wrote this “Essay on Baptism” as his contribution to the discussion. He did not publish his Essay; he perhaps felt that he had quite enough works at the time in the press or on the stocks. But that he took considerable pains with it, is shown by various notes and fragmentary drafts which have been found among his papers. The Essay itself is undated, but a water-mark on the paper of one piece of rough copy fixes the date as not earlier than 1850. He preserved the fair copy at Brantwood, and in going through his papers at some later date, wrote on the wrapper in which the MS. was rolled up, “Kept to see that I wrote worse once than now.” It is probable from other notes of the kind that Ruskin here referred to the handwriting (which in this Essay is somewhat cramped), rather than to the style. But the directly imperative mood in which his points are put is also somewhat lacking in his usual grace; the tone and argument of the Essay, however,-its close reliance upon the text of Scripture, its insistence upon works as evidence of faith-are thoroughly characteristic of his thought at this period, and it completes his contribution to the Church Controversies which then rent

¹ Morley’s Life of Gladstone, i. 378.

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