KING'S CONSCIENCE
Sm,—It was not shyness that prevented at least one correspondent from mentioning the Lord Chancellor's ecclesiastical patronage, to which Mr. Athelstan Rendall has made suitable allusion, but the view that that patronage is not the Chancellor's primary task ; and that in its initial stage it is in the hands of a special patronage secretary who submits for approval selected Rectors and Vicars. I doubt if even such active churchmen as Lord Chancellor Selborne, and later, Lord Sankey, could unaided have handled the detailed general work attached to some six hundred livings. That leaves quite untouched the question of whether a Catholic Lord Chancellor could, qua Catholic, present at all ; or if he were made legally able, whether other Catholics like the Duke of Norfolk, who has seventeen livings, would be able, or willing, to present a Protestant clergyman. A whole crop of secondary questions, awkward but not vital, would arise for a Catholic Lord Chancellor, not because of Catholicism but because of the Establishment. As to the Royal conscience, again if Gladstone had made Lord Russell of Killo%%en Lord Chancellor, no one would have been more amused than Pope Leo XIII if someone had said that Lord Russell had thereby become the moral monitor of Queen Victoria. I can well imagine Leo saying.
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