The Bishop of Manchester yesterday week convened a synod of
his clergy, not for discussion, but to receive his pastoral ex- hortation not to permit in any church of his diocese a ritual higher than that of the Cathedral. No minimum limit was prescribed, perhaps because the Evangelical clergy would cer- tainly have ignored it. We hardly understand the exhortation. It appears to make the ritual of all the churches in the diocese depend on that which the Dean of the Cathedral may choose to adopt, and therefore to ignore altogether the strict law of which we have hitherto heard so much, If the present High-Church Dean were to resign to-morrow and a Low-Church Dean were to succeed him, would the Bishop really have all the churches in his diocese at once conform to the ritual of the new Dean, whether legal or not ? Indeed, as we believe, the ritual of the present Dean is not strictly legal, according to the Court of Appeal, since the cope is not worn in celebrating the Holy Communion. That omission, of course, does not concern parish churches, ex- cept as showing that it is not the bvality of the cathedral ritual which makes the Bishop erect it into a standard for other churches, but simply the accident that he has selected it for his type. The new pastoral sounds to us like a confes- sion that a perfectly arbitrary rule, and that alone, can bring any order out of the reigning confusion.
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