"rescue and defend the conscience of the Church from the present hideous system." An agitation was set on foot, and several influential Anglicans, with Manning at their head, drew up and signed a formal protest against the Gorham Judgment. Mr. Gladstone, however, proposed another method of procedure: precipitate action, he declared, must be avoided at all costs, and he elaborated a scheme for securing procrastination, by which a covenant was to bind all those who believed that an article of the creed had been abolished by Act of Parliament to take no steps in any direction, nor to announce their intention of doing so, until a given space of time had elapsed. Mr. Gladstone was hopeful that some good might come of this—though indeed he could not be sure. "Among others," he wrote to Manning, "I have consulted Robert Wilberforce and Wegg-Prosser, and they seemed inclined to favour my proposal. It might, perhaps, have kept back Lord Fielding. But he is like a cork."
The proposal was certainly not favoured by Manning. Protests and procrastinations, approving Wegg-Prossers and cork-like Lord Fieldings—all this was feeding the wind and folly; the time for action had come. "I can no longer continue," he wrote to Robert Wilberforce, "under oath and subscription binding me to the Royal Supremacy in Ecclesiastical causes, being convinced:—
(1) That it is a violation of the Divine Office of the Church.
(2) That it has involved the Church of England in a separation from the universal Church, which separation I cannot clear of the character of schism.
(3) That it has thereby suspended and prevented the functions of the Church of England."
It was in vain that Robert Wilberforce pleaded, in vain that Mr. Gladstone urged upon his mind the
