The great scandal of the Congress appears to have been
the seleotion by the Committee .of Mr. A. J. Stephens, Q.C., to read a paper on " The.Improven;ient of the Process in Ecclesiastical Courts." This gentleman, who appears to be a strong anti- ritualist, seems to have spoken irreverently, in a recent speech, of the practice of mingling water with the sacramental wine, in conformity, as it is asserted, with the practice of our Lord Himself, and adopted to make the wine and water more completely typical of the blood and water issuing from His side on the cross. Mr. Stephens 'contemptuously called the mixed water and wine " negus," or as some assert, "grog." The expression was in exquisitely bad taste, just as it would be in a Jew to call the cross in our churches a gal- lows. But it probably implied no more than a profound dislike of the trifling with transubstantiation which goes on among so many Anglican clergymen. It was not " blasphemy" in Mr. Stephens, though it would be so in those who hold what Mr. Stephens denies, and who can scarcely hold it honestly in the English Church.
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