footing in the parish by a legal fiction, as paying a school-building rate in the district, whilst he never attended St. Alban's Church. A similar hitch affected the Bordesley case.

On June 3, 1867, a "Ritual Commission" was appointed to report and "to suggest alterations, improvements, or amendments," in the Rubrics, orders, and directions of the Prayer-Book, "for regulating the course and conduct of public worship ... and more especially with reference to the ornaments used in the churches and chapels of the said united Church, and the vestments worn by the ministers thereof at the time of their ministration." Also as to alterations that might "advantageously be made in the Proper Lessons appointed to be read in morning and evening prayer on the Sundays and holidays throughout the year, and in the calendar with the table of First and Second Lessons contained in the said Book of Common Prayer." It was a fair attempt on the part of the government of the day to deal with the question, and the Committee, which comprehended representatives of all schools of thought, was not unfairly constituted. The Commissioners began their sittings on June 20, and held one hundred and eight meetings, the last being on June 28, 1870. They issued four reports: the first on August 19, 1867; the second, April 30, 1868; the third, January 12, 1870; the fourth, August 31, 1870. The first and second Reports led to no legislative results;

but in two respects the Ritual Commission did a useful service, and to it we are indebted for two important Acts of Parliament passed in compliance with the previous decisions of Convocation, viz. the New Lectionary Act, and the Act of Uniformity Amendment Act, commonly known as the Shortened Services Act: the former the result of the third Report sanctioning a New Table of Lessons, which on January 1, 1879, became the only legal Lectionary, and the latter the result of the fourth Report. By this last Act the Ordinary may on any Sunday, where the full Morning and Evening Services have been performed, authorize a third service constructed of Prayer-Book and Scriptural materials; and he may on special occasions allow the use of an extraordinary service similarly constructed.

From one cause or another amongst all classes of people, even those who have little sympathy with Ritualism, the P.W.R.A. and the Court established. by it have come to be regarded as a public scandal, we had almost said, a public nuisance. English people do not like persecution. Four Clergymen have been sent to prison for a matter of conscience, and another is threatened; Mr. Purchas, had he not been hounded to death, would probably have met with the same fate. The claims of the State and of the Law Courts are at variance with the basis on which the union of Church and State rests. The State claims "Magna Charta" as the foundation of

civil liberty; by it the rights of the Church are equally established; for the very first article of Magna Charta guaranteed "quod libera sit Ecclesia." The Act of Appeals in the reign of Henry VIII. decreed that there are in this realm two bodies; "the spirituality and temporality. The body spiritual whereof having power when any cause of the law divine happened to come in question, then it was declared, interpreted, and showed by that part of the body politic called the spirituality, which hath always been thought, and is at this hour sufficient and meet of itself to declare and determine such doubts as to their rooms spiritual doth appertain."

The Clergy, even when dealing with such an arbitrary monarch as King Henry VIII., refused to acknowledge his unqualified supremacy over the Church, and only consented to do so with the important proviso of "quantum per Christi legem licet" ("so far as is permitted by the law of Christ ").

A message sent by Queen Elizabeth to her Parliament stated, that her Majesty's pleasure was that "from henceforth no bills concerning religion shall be preferred or received into this house, unless the same shall be first considered of and liked by the Clergy." The Royal Declaration prefixed to the XXXIX. Articles sets forth, "If any difference arise about the external Policy, concerning the Injunctions, Canons, and other Constitutions whatsoever thereto (the Church) belonging, the Clergy in their Convocation

is to order and settle them, having first obtained leave under our Broad Seal so to do." And the XXXVIIth. Article declares, "We give not to our Princes the ministering either of God's Word, or of the Sacraments, ... but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in Holy Scriptures by God Himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be ecclesiastical or temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers."

So glaring had the anomalous state of things become, and so wide-spread a dissatisfaction was felt at the disrepute into which the law had fallen, that in 1881, on the application of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, a Royal Commission was appointed “to inquire into the constitution and working of the Ecclesiastical Courts, as created or modified under the Reformation Statutes of the 24th and 25th years of King Henry VIII. and any subsequent Acts." The Commission consisted on the whole of persons well qualified to take cognizance of the question to be submitted to it. It held its first session on May 30, 1881, and its last on July 13, 1883, holding in all seventy-five meetings, and showed an honest desire to arrive at the facts of the case: it was enabled to issue its Report in August, 1883. The early part of the Report states the objections which were brought against the existing Courts. These we briefly summarize :-That, the decisions given

by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council have been dictated by policy, and whilst being rigid in the enforcement of a Ritual conformity, they have been lax in heresy, and opposed to the principles of theological interpretations. That, the interpretations of the formularies, the exposition of the traditions, and the infliction of spiritual censures, have been entrusted to persons of no theological education; that, there is no representation of the voice of the Church except in the utterances of Episcopal Assessors, which may be utterly disregarded; that, no expression is given to differences of opinion which may exist amongst its members; and that, the Court may be packed by the high officer of State, who summons the members of the Judicial Committee as he thinks proper. Another objection was that, as an historical fact, it was never intended to give to the Crown the consideration of questions of heresy. There is no evidence that the Court of Delegates decided in doctrinal causes except in one or two questionable causes, and that at a period when the proper procedure

* Of the judgment in the Purchas Case, the late Sir J. T. Coleridge spoke as "repealing the rubric which it meant to interpret." Sir Fitzroy Kelly, one of the judges in the Ridsdale Case, said that judgment was "based upon policy and not law," and that it was "iniquitous." As far back as 1637, in the famous case of Ship-money (see Mac. Hist., i. 91), Lord Clarendon says the Judges of the Exchequer (acting on policy) "gave as law from the Bench what every man in the hall knew not to be law."