[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—Permit me, while thanking you for the tone of your article- on the Ridsdale judgment, to make one or two studiously brief remarks upon it.
You say, and truly, that the Judges have pronounced the vest- ments illegal "by a very subtle and ingenious argument." But as the fact of wearing them was charged against Mr. Ridsdale as a criminal offence, subjecting him to severe penalties, the very circumstance that it was necessary to be "subtle and ingenious," to bring him in guilty at all, is the conclusive proof of a studied miscarriage of justice. This is not my plea, I beg to observe,—I am borrowing it from the now Lord Justice James, whom I heard arguing, some nine years ago, in Mr. Mackonochie's case, before the same tribunal, that if it took such a deal of pleading to estab- lish, not the performance of certain acts, which no one disputed, but their illegality, the presumption to any fair mind was that no- illegality at all had been committed. If a Low Churchman had been prosecuted for not wearing the vestments, and his counse had raised the issue in his defence which the Court has invented to create a crime, we might think it a clever thing, but even then no one, least of all a lawyer, would believe it.
The next point I wish to raise is that you have left out of account the main reason why it will be impossible for the Ritualists to acquiesce in the judgment. It is that now, for the first time, the Privy Council has gone beyond mere misinterpretation, to which we are accustomed, after twenty-seven years' unbroken precedents. It undertakes in this judgment to repeal part of the text of the Prayer-book, or rather to allege that the part so treated never formed an integral part of the Prayer-book at all. If we submit now, a future Court may say the same of the Connaunion office, or of the Ordinal, or of the Creeds, and treat our acqui- escence as their warrant for so doing. It was our refusal to obey the Purchas judgment which prevented Mr. Bennett from being condemned, just as it was our mistaken submission to the mis- carriage of justice in "Martin v. Mackonochie" which emboldened the Court to pronounce the Purchas finding. And as to policy, the best policy for the Church of England is the cessation of law- suits, which would at once have been secured by ruling all the points in Mr. Ridsdale's favour; since it is only the Low-Churn')
school which desires to prosecute, as High Churchmen read proselytism do their work far more quickly, widely, and effectively than prosecution could do, or has done, for their
9 Red Lion Square, London, W.C., Whit-Sunday, 1877.
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