the Commission, would not, it is to be feared, whichever way it might be, bring to us all the blessing of peace and settlement.  If it were for the Ritualists, a prompt effort would be made to set aside the rubric by legislation; and then bitterness, struggle, and all the evils above alluded to, in connection with a sense of injustice, would at once be in malignant working among us.  If it were against the Ritualists, I now sadly fear, after the painful language publicly used by many of them against those in authority, and the disregard of the Convocation Resolutions of last year, that they would decline to submit to the decision, force unwilling men to put the law in action against them, accept the issue, and leave the communion of the Reformed Church.”

There is much here from which I cannot do other than express most strongly my dissent; for—

1.  Why should the rabid violence of all that is uncatholic and unbelieving in the country be taken to be the voice of the country to which heed is to be given?  The Canon before quoted, when it speaks of offending the minds of men, is careful to say “the minds of sober men;” but here it seems that all which is most violent, unreasoning, and intemperate, is to be accepted as the mind of the country from which there is no appeal.  Nay, more, as is evident, this temper is hounded on to be even more violent and rabid, by such unseemly deference to its clamour, and by the pusillanimous assertion that law and order must be overridden because the impatience of such minds will not be content even to wait till the law courts have spoken.

2.  Why should we not wait, if it be needful to wait, in order to determine with all due care and deliberation what the law is upon the main points brought into controversy—what it allows and what it disallows?  This tremendous impatience, this overwhelming desire for exterminating obnoxious Ritual and Ritualists, this awe-struck terror that if these men, and their practices, and their teaching be only given fair play, their opponents of the uncatholic school will be defeated, and be found to have clamoured for illegal restraints—all this is surely the most wonderful admission against themselves and their cause, which men even pretending to seek truth and right could possibly make, and one least likely to commend their cause and mode of action to any just and honest mind.  Hear a few words upon this head from a venerable Archdeacon (venerabilis not merely by station and age, but by learning and Christian wisdom also), one of whom England may well be proud.  In the Guardian of November 6 you will find a letter from Archdeacon Churton, enforcing with very great weight Gamaliel’s advice, “Let these men alone,” at the present momentous crisis.  Allow me to read a few lines from it.  He says:—“The advice which alone can save the Church from a new schism is plainly Gamaliel’s advice.  I am very sorry that so many of our present bishops, younger men than myself, are averse from it, or uttering uncertain sounds which I could never adopt without suspecting my own magnanimity.  It is to be regretted that they do not rather seek to guide a movement which has in it too many elements of good to be rudely condemned; and that they do not speak first of vindicating the law before they alter it.  On the contrary, however, they seem to contemplate a new statute to establish, as if of perpetual obligation, certain vestments invented by clerical tailors of the last century, at which S. Ambrose would have stood aghast. . . .  One of our sacred legislators has declared himself above all things anxious not to allow the Ritualists time to plead their cause with the public.  It was the praise of Bishop Henry Spencer in King Richard’s time, according to Walsingham, that he gave the Lollards the shortest possible shrift-time for coming to their senses.”

There is a passage much to the same purport which will well repay perusal in the late Essay on “The Law of Ritualism,” by the Bishop of Vermont, the Presiding Bishop of the United States, from which several extracts are given in one of the Appendices to the Commissioners’ Report.  Consider the following passage in reference to the unjust impatience of the day, and the plea for the allowance of fair time to test the merits of the question.  His remarks are directed no doubt in the first instance to America, but there is nothing to confine the reasoning to America alone.  “Time,” says the Bishop, “and nothing but time, can decide the question whether an increase of Ritualism is advisable, or whether the present average of parochial practice is best fitted to carry on the work of the Church in such a country as ours.  I doubt whether any man can estimate with sufficient accuracy the various elements which belong to such a subject so as to form anything like a positive opinion.  Success after all must be the ultimate standard.  And that can only be determined by time, after a fair trial.” [26]  The Bishop proceeds to give his opinion, however, upon the matter, which is well worthy of our consideration.

“I am willing, however, to state my impressions, and the reader may take them for what they may be worth, according to his own judgment.  I incline, then, to regard it as most probable that this Ritualism will grow in favour by degrees until it becomes the prevailing system.  The old, the fixed, and the fearful will resist it; but the young, the ardent, and the impressible will follow it more and more.  The spirit of the age will favour it, because it is an age of excitement and sensation; the lovers of ‘glory and of beauty’ will favour it, because it appeals with far more effect to the natural tastes and feelings of humanity; the rising generation of the clergy will favour it, because it adds so much to the solemn character of their office, and the interest of their service in the House of God.  And the opposition arising from its resemblance to Romanism will die away, as men learn to understand that Popery does not consist in the Ritualism which it pleased the Lord to order for His own chosen people, but in Papal and priestly despotism, in false doctrine, in the worship of the Virgin and the Saints, in Purgatory and Indulgences, in Transubstantiation and pretended miracles, in persecution and intolerance, and in all the other perilous corruptions which are in direct conflict with the unerring Word of God.  These, and not matters of mere Ritual, are properly Romanism; and these, and only these, called for the work of Reformation.” [27a]

I cannot resist the temptation to add a few words more from the Bishop’s work, so aptly do they meet many of the popular prejudices and fallacies pervading the unreflecting or intolerant public mind at the present time.  After some excellent remarks upon the symbolism of the ministerial garments, their adoption under Divine command in the old dispensation, and their naturally passing from the Jews to “the Gentiles on the strongest ground of Scriptural consistency,” he adds, “there are many good and respectable Christians in our day who regard this matter of distinctive ministerial garments with contempt, and sometimes even with positive aversion, because they look upon it as one of the corruptions of Romanism.  But the ancient Church of God is not to be regarded with contempt by any man who professes to believe the Bible.  That sacred