Note 11 — SERMON.

Tract 90, p. 82. They affirm that their interpretation of the Articles was intended to be admissible, though not that which the authors took themselves. This is the old way of putting darkness for light further carried out. Dr. Powell, Archdeacon of Colchester, and Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, preached a sermon some forty years ago to instruct the University in the matter of subscribing to the Articles. And he says, “Where the original sense is one, and the received another, the subscriber is at liberty to use them in either.” But he never went so far as to say that the subsequently received sense was intended to be admissible by the compilers. And Dr. Hey, the Norrisian Professor, speaks of “a religious society changing its doctrines, and yet retaining the expressions by which they were defined;” and says, “In whatever degree the Articles grow obsolete, the Injunction, (that is, the Royal Declaration,) must grow so,” notwithstanding it commands interpretation in the literal sense; and “that a man, by speaking according to the literal sense, may speak falsehood.”—Lectures, vol. ii. p. 68, 72, 74. This mode of dealing with the Articles, when strongly carried out, as in the present case, issues, of course, in a total change. See Overton, p. 22–26.