Mr. Gathorne Hardy proposed yesterday week to exchange - the
highest Court of Ecclesiastical Appeal,—the Judicial Com- • mittee of the Privy Council,—for the new Appellate Court, and found himself supported by personages as heterogeneous as Mr. Vernon Harcourt, Mr. Beresford Hope, Mr. Osborne Morgan, Mr. Cross, Mr. Cawley, Mr. Walpole, and the Prime Minister. It seems that for different reasons a great ' many different parties in the State wish to get rid of the Bishops now included in the highest Court of Ecclesiastical Appeal,—the Radicals, because they like to make theologians feel that theology is quite overridden by positive law in the Church of England ; the High Churchmen, because they like the Bishops to *ash their hands of all the State decrees about comprehension ; the Dissenters, because they like to strip the Bishops of dignities. Nevertheless, the change, if it is made, as it seems likely that it will be, must have a great effect in making it evident that ecclesiastical law, so far as it affects the Church of England, is a law indeed that binds cede- - siastics, but that is administered solely by laymen, in the interests of laymen, and by laymen not even infected with the ecclesiastical spirit.
