authoritatively excluded.”  Well, put the consolation at its best; make what you may of it; avoid, if you can, bitterly laughing at such a mockery of hope.  But even then, turn to the state of things if such an enactment take place; “a simple and positive enactment,” forbidding such “ornaments of the Church and ministers thereof” to be used “as were in use by the authority of Parliament in the second year of King Edward VI.;” and I ask again (for this is our real and great question) What would be the condition of the Book of Common Prayer?  Would it be what it is now, or would it be changed?  Would the present rule be “in abeyance”—that is, much unused, but still the law—or would it be repealed?  What is the difference between the proposed remedy and repeal?  It would be as if you made “a simple and positive enactment” that, “until further order,” no man should be arrested for debt; no man taken up for theft or violence; no man prosecuted for treason; no man hanged for murder.  You may call this, abeyance of the law in those cases, but it is a misuse of the term.  A thing is in abeyance which for any cause happens to be disused, not when it is by enactment forbidden to be used; as a title is in abeyance, not when there is no heir (in which case it is extinct), but when the heir is unknown, or the pretensions of two or more claimants undetermined; when the heir is not forbidden, as the heir, to take it if he be the heir, but only whilst there may be doubt whether he be the heir or not.  But here, it is assumed by the very act of legislation that something is known to be the law, so that you despair of getting rid of it but by altering the law; and therefore that, though it is known to be the law, and for the very reason that it is known to be the law, it is to be prohibited and excluded.  Can any man in his senses be made to believe that this is not repeal?