Two striking utterances in connection with Church contro- versies have
also to be noticed. The Rev. Alfred Rowland, President of the Congregational Union, after expressing the hope that the clergy and laity on the side of Protestantism would accept the Nonconformists as allies in the coming struggle, added : "Our anxiety arises from the fact that within the last quarter of a century the ritualists have become the dominant power in the Church, having digested the Broad Church party and ejected the Evangelicals," a witty, if not exactly decorous or accurate, summary of recent Church history. More worthy of the situation was the eloquent peroration of the address to his Synod by the Archbishop of Armagh, who said : "Ignorance of Reformation principles seems to account for a good deal of the Romanising extrava- gances so painfully prominent in some quarters. I am not afraid for England or her religion ; I do not believe that the great English Church will go to pieces over ignominious squabbles over curiously tessellated opinions and patchwork or piebald rites. When I look round Christendom, England is about the only country where faith is not afraid to reason, nor reason ashamed to adore." It is not often that a truth is expressed in a form at once so epigrammatic and dignified.
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