_Value of the Science of Canon Law._

[Mr. Maurice] sets all lawyers at nought, and canonists he utterly
despises. Hastily, indeed, I think, and for the purpose of the moment only,
can he have given way to such feelings, for he needs not that I should tell
him that the Church of Christ rests not upon speculative truth alone, but
upon the positive institutions of our Lord and His Apostles. Surely, then,
to trace those institutions from the lowest point at which they come into
contact with human existence, up to the highest to which our eye can follow
them, the point of union with the unseen world in which they take their
rise, and from which they are the channels of grace and truth and authority
to the souls of men--to trace, I say, the outward and the visible signs of
sacraments, of polity, of discipline, up to the inward spiritual realities
upon which they depend, which they impart and represent to faith, or
shelter from profanation; to study the workings of the hidden life of the
Church by those developments which, in all ages and countries, have been
its necessary modes of access to human feeling and apprehension; to
systematise the end gained; to learn what is universal, what partial, what
temporary, what eternal, what presently obligatory, and wherefore; surely a
science such as this, so noble in its object, so important in its practical
bearings upon the unity and purity of the Church, and upon her relations to
the temporal power, is not one of which Mr. Maurice would deliberately
speak evil. Yet this is the science of the canonist. [Footnote: Mr. Hope's
pamphlet on the _Jerusalem Bishopric_, 2nd ed., p. 55.]

There are still portions of his correspondence with Mr. Newman, belonging
to the same period and subject, which must not be withheld:--


_J. R. Hope, Esq. to the Rev. J. H. Newman._