The Question of Disestablishment The Commission does not advocate Disestablishment,
but recommends instead that Parliament be asked to give certain Church Measures the effect of statutes without itself passing them. Confined though this privilege would -be to " spiritual " measures -(certified as such by the Archbishops, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker), and hedged about even so with a multitude of guarantees, it is highly doubtful whether any House of Commons would concede such powers while memory of the Prayer-book controversy lasts. Whether it should is arguable. On the whole the step would be justified, provided the Church improved sufficiently its at present still very inadequate machinery for making the lay voice heard within its own organisation. Professor Ernest- Barker contends with reason in the Evidence volume that Parliament's true function has been to keep a balance on the lay side, and that it cannot be dispensed with until the internal balance of Church government is rendered less unequal. Meanwhile it is impossible to ignore entirely the remarkable body of witnesses in the Evidence volume, representing disestablished or unestablished branches of the English Church—in Ireland, Wales, Canada and South Africa. For they testify almost unanimously how in their own experience a Church that is not established can fare as well as a Church that is (and in many ways better). The report declares against disestablislunent, but it has in no sense banished the issue from discussion.
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