Dr. Pusey and Archdeacon Denison are both much disturbed At
the proposal for a Diocesan Council, with power to enforce a summary law compelling the clergy to obey the decisions arrived at by the highest Court of ecclesiastical appeal. Dr. Pusey wrote a letter to Thursday's Times to maintain that the proposed Council is inadmissible. And he urges this, first, because the laymen in it are to be elected by the Churchwardens of the diocese, one of them being often not a Churchman at all, but frequently a Dissenter or a heretic. That does not strike us as any objection in itself, the duty of the proposed Council being not to sanction new principles, but only to decide on the wisdom of applying the highest law of the realm to particular cases. Practically it would be the 'non-Churchman and the sceptic who would usually be least inclined to press the letter of the law too rigidly. Dr. Pusey objects to the proposed Council, in the second place, that its object seems to him to be to protect Low Churchmen in ignoring the ecclesiastical law, while compelling High Church- men not to go beyond it. That is an assumption which is not adequately justified. Nevertheless, for reasons explained elsewhere, we are not specially in love with the notion of leaving discretion in these cases to diocesan councils,—bodies which seem to us likely to be too wide for the purpose of accommodating new rules to oltpustoms, and too narrow for the purpose of determining the general policy of the Church.
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