The members of the English Church Union held their annual
meeting on Monday, and were in the evening received by the President (Lord Halifax) at the Grafton Gallery. Six hundred delegates, clerical and lay, were present from all parts of the United Kingdom, and in all about one thousand five hundred persons were present. We have dealt elsewhere with the Statement, or rather Protest, put forth by the Union, and with the speech of the President, and will only give here the substance of one or two of the chief paragraphs in the Statement. The first point insisted on is that the rulers of England in the sixteenth century did not set up a new religious body, and only dissociated themselves from the Churshes of Italy, France, Spain, and Germany "in such particulars as these Churches had themselves departed from primitive antiquity." Another important point is the denial "that any interpretation of the Rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer can be legitimate, which relies on the principle that omission to prescribe is equivalent to prohibition to use. Neither can we admit that arguments founded on non-user, however long and continuous, can be legitimately adduced as evidence of what the Church of England forbids or enjoins." We have mentioned else- where the passage as to Disestablishment and the appeal to the rulers of the Church not "to curtail the glory and splendour of the Services," and we will only repeat here that we do not think that the " Statement's " conditional and pro- spective threats of disobedience need be taken too seriously.
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