On the other hand, Bishop Fraser has written - a letter,
thanking a Manchester meeting for supporting him in refusing to institute Mr. Cowgill at Miles Platting. He assumes that if he had not tried to make Mr. Cowgill promise to con- form to the ecclesiastical law as it is now explained, before instituting him, he would have been virtually admitting that " all ecclesiastical order and authority had ceased in the land," —an admission of the reasonableness of which he does not :appear to have given the slightest explanation. In fact, we doubt whether Dr. Fraser is not breaking through true ecclesiastical .order, in making any conditions beforehand at all ; but, however that may be, no one doubts his absolute legal right to institute -ecclesiastical prosecutions against all who, after being instituted, do not conform to the existing law, if only he thinks it right so to do. As a matter of fact, however, the law gives him a perfect dis- cretion to prosecute or not to prosecute, as, in his own view of ecclesiastical policy, he may think fit. And if we find fault with him, it is for thinking fit to push hardly on men whom Dr. Tait thought it better to spare till some mode of relieving them from pressure could be discovered. In any case, how it can be truly maintained that, even if no legal proceedings were at present to be taken against a special class of law-breakers whom no Bishop is bound to proceed against unless he think it wise, all ecclesiastical order is at an end, we are wholly at a loss to conjecture. As a matter of fact, we have always understood that though Dr. Fraser unfortunately permitted the Church Association to take proceedings against Mr. Green, he has never before attempted to enforce for himself the ecclesiastical law against any one of these law-breakers. And yet he will not assert that " all ecclesiastical order and authority has ceased " in the diocese of Manchester ever since he became bishop there.
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