ments is 6 6 6 'arbitrary and illogical reasons' (p. 35); that one of its judgan outrage on law, logic, and history' (p. 40); and is a 'marvellous exhibition of everything that a judicial decision should not be' (p. 41); that its 'decisions' are 'miscalled lawful' (p. 41); that the Lords of the Council find it impossible to evade the plain meaning of a rubric,' and have recourse to various expedients for explaining it away' (p. 48); that they are 'determined to find arguments to support a foregone conclusion' (p. 49); that no lawyer would dispute' a statement which (by the way) the Court, with two Lord Chancellors upon it, had ruled against (p. 61); that something else is 'in defiance of all probability and of the plainest facts' (p. 70); that it is 'hard to speak with patience of some passages' (p. 71). Waxing even warmer, he asks, 'How is it possible to treat respectfully the decisions of a Court which commits itself to statements like this?' (p. 72); he finds 'surprising ignorance of the whole subject' (p. 73); indeed, the ordinary instincts of common sense ought to have saved the Judges from the folly of supposing,' &c. (p. 72); that the Court flagrantly misquoted them' (p. 74); that, My Lord! this is simply scandalous' (p. 74); that the Council was so set on condemning that it adopted with careless avidity anything,' &c. (p. 74); and carelessness of this sort is a crime' (p. 74); that it was 'inexcusable not to have known' something which could not have been known, as we shall show that Mr. MacColl invented it since (p. 76). How often,' he asks with magisterial dignity, 'must I remind their Lordships that they cannot take as much of an argument as they please?' (p. 77). Again, the unhappy Lords of the Council are guilty of superficial trifling with historical facts,' and of 'habitual inaccuracy' (p. 77); and of extraordinary argumentation' (p. 81); and of an inveterate habit of misquotation' (p. 82); their 'conduct' is extraordinary' (p. 85); they were utterly at sea on the subject on which they were adjudicating' (p. 86); 'I hardly know how to deal with such an assertion in becoming language' (p. 87); they are grossly and even ludicrously inaccurate' (p. 91); when they very briefly correct a mistake of the Court below, the importance of which Mr. MacColl fails to appreciate, they are able to combine a suppressio veri' with a suggestio falsi;' their interpretation is forced into the rubric in support of a foregone conclusion, and in violation alike of the rules of grammar and the facts of history' (p. 96). 6 6 6 6 At the end of the first hundred pages we pause for breath. It is by eloquence such as this, applied to the highest Court in the realm, that a clergyman persuades himself he is refuting the the charge of lawlessness. Dr. Kenealy no longer stands When a respectable Scotch clergyman describes the prelates as unable to face their own examining chaplains, an ordeal which he himself has never faced, having been ordained elsewhere; and Lord Chancellors as contradicting the fundamental principles of English law, of which he has learned nothing; when he describes Chancellors and Bishops alike as having no better object in view than to find reasons for supporting a foregone conclusion; the first thought is one of utter humiliation at the failure of our social institutions. In voluminous judgments this writer has found no word to praise, no statement to welcome as true. All is barren. Once, we think, something was 'plausible,' but it was mentioned only to be dismissed; and once something was ' good,' but a footnote showed that it was not good at all. Amidst the crash of falling Chancellors and the collapse of unsubstantial prelates, one Scotch clergyman stands unmoved. A reconstruction of the social system with a very competent person as the new central figure, uniting in himself, according to ancient precedent, the highest judicial with the highest ecclesiastical functions; at that price, perhaps at no less, could we remedy the evils so vehemently denounced. Our new adviser, as far as can be gathered from public records—and privately we know nothing-was reared in the bosom of that much respected body, the Scottish Episcopal Church, and received his orders there. With his really fine powers of invective unabated by the tame training of an English University, he seems to have migrated to England, served as a Curate, and in 1871 was promoted, by favour of the Crown, to a benefice of some value in the City of London. He wrote two pamphlets, one on Mr. Gladstone, and his seat as member for Oxford, and the other on the disestablishment of the Irish Church. pamphlets may have been quite as good as the performance now before us. We doubt not that his parochial labours are much better. His The judgment on Mr. Purchas was delivered in February 1871, about two months before Mr. MacColl entered on his preferment in the English Church, and accepted her as a step-mother, leaving his proper mother for that purpose. So that the pranks of these monstrous Courts, which could arrive at no truth, and which sought no justice, were not only well known to him, but the Purchas judgment was in every one's mouth at the very time that he took so important a step. It was not the case of a man who, early ordained in the English Church, found it arriving at unexpected. legal legal conclusions, and himself involved in the painful alternative of obedience to rulings which he disliked, or forfeiture of a position and duties in the Church which he loved. Mr. MacColl sought out this Church with all her imperfections on her head. He put himself under the present Bishop of London, one of the judges in the very case which excites him the most, and promised reverently to obey that prelate in all lawful matters. He accepted the Acts of Uniformity by a very explicit and formal declaration; and of course he therein accepted the machinery by which the Acts of Uniformity are interpreted and enforced. It seems a pity that this gentleman's opinion of the Courts should be so uncompromising, and at the same time his acceptance of them so speedy and so complete. Mr. MacColl has written a book on a subject of which he knows little or nothing; and we are about to show a few of the errors which he has committed in the first 100 pages only. The first is a small matter. He says that surplice and alb are but two names for one and the same vestment.' This mistake is small, but it is a complete scholar's-mate. Over and over again he contradicts his own statement; he says that the alb was consecrated, and the surplice as such' (sic) was not (p. 66); and that 'the mass was never celebrated in a surplice, but almost invariably in the chasuble, etc.' (p. 67), and the ' etc.' is explained to mean ' alb and tunicle' (p. 66). The alb and surplice were different in shape, dignity, and uses. 'Item, an alb, whereof we have made a surplice,' is an example of a kind of entry very frequent in Mr. Peacock's accurate and important work.* alb and surplice are carefully distinguished in the first Prayer Book of Edward. This is a sort of mistake that the very beadle, who keeps the door of an ecclesiastical Court, would have avoided. Commenting on the dictum that in the performance of the services, rites, and ceremonies ordained by the Prayer Book, the directions contained in it must be strictly observed,' Mr. MacColl thinks that this would be absurd if applied to the old missals of Hereford and York. Very possibly it might also be inapplicable to the hymns of the Rig Veda. But no one did apply it to either. It is expressly connected in the Mackonochie judgment with the Act of Uniformity. The object of a Statute of Uniformity is... to produce "an universal agreement in the public worship of Almighty God." He is entirely unaware 6 * English Church Furniture,' p. 30. The spelling we have modernised. † Brook's 'Privy Council Judgments,' p. 119. that that the principle in question was first laid down by an ecclesiastical Court, in the case of Newberry v. Goodwin, about a generation before the present Committee of Council came into existence, so that when he says it is 'in contradiction with one of the fundamental principles of English law,' he is not launching this at the Privy Council, but at another and older tribunal. 'Our law,' he says, 'rests on the Roman, of which the maxim was, Qua lex non jubet permittit.'* The law permits what it does not order; by which rule one might officiate with a gold crown on the head. Out of church there is almost nothing which it would not cover. Here the writer does not know the judgment he is disputing, nor the origin of it; and loses himself in some general precept of Roman law till all meaning vanishes. As a proof that there were two measures of ritual, a maximum and a minimum, the author says that, concurrently with the rubric, which orders four chapters to be read in the two services, the Advertisements sanctioned a minimum which fell short of it in the express permission granted to the parochial and other clergy to "read duly at the least one chapter of the Old Testament and another of the New." Mr. Gladstone quotes this with approval.‡ It is a gross misrepresentation. The two chapters were for private study. 'I shall read daily at the least one chapter of the Old Testament and another of the New, with good advisement to the increase of my knowledge.'§ There is a separate pledge as to the use of the Common Prayer, 'I shall read the service appointed plainly, distinctly, and audibly, that all the people may hear and understand.'|| Thus what Mr. MacColl considers a choice between reading four chapters and reading two is really a pledge to read the four in church in addition to the two for private improvement. All things considered, this is rather hard upon Mr. Gladstone. The next point is of more intrinsic importance. The Puritan party at the Savoy Conference made an objection to the ornaments' rubric.' 6 What this was and how it was dealt with let a writer tell, who has shown how little he likes either the Privy Council or the Public Worship Regulation Act. 'At the Savoy Conference of 1661,' writes the Rev. Canon Trevor,¶ a different construction was first heard of' [i.e., one which regarded the rubric as making legal the vestments, &c.]. The Puritans objected that the rubric, as it had stood ever since the accession of Elizabeth, *Lawlessness,' p. 32. p. 217. "seemeth to bring back the cope, alb, and other vestments forbidden by the Common Prayer Book, 5th and 6th Edward VI." This language by no means implies that such was then the force of the rubric, or that any intention existed of making it so for the future. On the contrary, the objection assumes that the vestments were at the time illegal, and desires they may not be "brought back" by an undesigned construction. And there was good reason for such an apprehension, if Elizabeth's rubric, hitherto limited by the Advertisements and Canons, should be now re-enacted absolutely by Parliament. The remedy, of course, was to alter the rubric, but this was not what the objectors wanted. They demanded its entire omission, which would have left the Liturgy with no provision for any officiating vestments at all. It was, in fact, a further attempt to get rid of the surplice, to which they had before excepted unsuccessfully; and the bishops accordingly insisted on retaining the rubric for the sake of the surplice, without condescending to notice the ad invidiam argument about other vestments. In point of fact, however, the rubric was not retained after all. It was exchanged for another framed in the very words of the Proviso in Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity. But it is often overlooked that these words were not adopted without inserting a limitation directly to the point of the Puritan remonstrance. The insertion is shown in the italics :- "And here it is to be noted that such ornaments of the Church and of the ministers thereof, at all times of their ministration, shall be retained and be in use as were in this Church of England by authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI." Brief as this insertion is, it cannot be supposed to have been made without a motive, at a time when all change was so jealously resisted. Neither will anyone, who has observed the nice and marvellous accuracy of the revisers in their choice of words and the composition of sentences, overlook the importance due to the precise terms and place of the interpolation. If the intention had been to restore the eucharistic vesture of 1549, the wording should have been "at the several times of their ministration," or at least, "shall be retained and be in use at all times of their ministration." Rather, indeed, the old rubric would have been left as it had stood ever since the accession of Elizabeth, and as the bishops at first declared that it should still stand. The subsequent alteration is of itself evidence that on further consideration some different order was felt to be requisite. 'By substituting the words of the Act for that of the rubric in the old Book, three changes were effected at once. (1) The "ornaments became the nominative case, instead of the "minister; (2) The separate mention of the Communion Service was omitted; (3) The words "in use," inserted in the old rubric before " authority of Parliament," were removed. But this was not all: having made the ornaments the subject of the sentence, the revisers proceeded further to define them by introducing words of limitation. These, again (after the invariable manner), are taken from the old rubric, but |