The Corporation of London has presented to the Ecclesiastical Committee
of the two Houses of Parlia- ment a dignified protest against the Measure for the Disposal of City Churches. The Committee has agreed by a:majority to report favourably on the Measure, but the Commons will receive a petition to be presented by the Sheriffs at the Bar of the House. (It is hinted that precedent demands that the Sheriffs should entertain forty Members at dinner.) The arguments for and against the disposal of the Churches are well known. The changes of population and the urgent need to make :active use elsewhere of the wealth that lies in the property are obvious. The desecration of the sites and the graves of the dead beneath them, the rupture of history and the 'destruction, it may be, of architectural monuments are very serious steps. We would not oppose consideration on its merits of any proposal to sell a particular church, but we do not want to see taken any step that would make wholesale destruction possible (it is never likely under the Measure, as Lord Hugh Cecil pointed out in the Times), or would make any sale possible without full publicity and discussion.
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