24 APRIL 1947, Page 5

I like when possible to keep readers of this column

in the latest ecclesiastical intelligence. Here is some that has reached me this week from Madras, featuring one or two not unfamiliar personalities. It takes the form of a cutting (whether advertisement or news matter I am not quite clear) from the Madras Mail, and reads in part as follows:

" The Evangelical Church of India, Madras, will hence-

forward be known as The Indian Episcopal Church, with its headquarters at Bishopsbourne, Madras, under its Primate, The Most Rev. J. C. Ryan, M.A., D.D., Ph.D., D.Litt. Lord Archbishop of India and Exarch of the Catholicate of the West in the East Indies, whose ecclesiastical name and title is His Emminence Mar James, who is himself an Indian."

It is added elsewhere that His Emminence (freedom of spelling seems to be one of the tenets of this communion) Mar James is the first Indian Archbishop and Primate of this historic Apostolic Indian Episcopal Church—no connection, incidentally, with " Jacobitism, Monophysitism or Netorianism," et hoc genus omne. The whole thing is authenticated by the signature at the bottom—that of C. Leslie Saul, Bishop, English Commissary to the Archbishop of The Indian Episcopal Church. We seem to have heard of him before, and may

again.