In the discussion of Thursday night on the Archbishops' Pub-
lic Worship Regulation Bill, the Duke of Marlborough's motion for delay was defeated by 137 votes against 29 ; while Lord Shaftesbury achieved a revolutionary victory for his amendment, carrying, by the vast majority of 112 against 13, his plan of refer- ring all complaints as to ritual to a regular Judge, with a salary of £4,000 a year, who should go' down to the place where the irregularity of worship complained of took place, like an election judge, and there give judgment on it. The Bishop will still have power, we believe, to decide on cases in which both parties agree to be bound by la decision without appeal, but such cases.will be cases, generally, of individual crotchets, not of strong popular feeling. A few of the Bishops grumbled a good deal over the professed distrust of their judicial powers betrayed by the Peers, but even they did not care much to vote against the amendment, or the minority would not have been so small. The Lord Chancel- lor's adoption of the Bishop of Peterborough's suggestion that certain rubrical regions should be neutralised under the Bill, and not permitted to become the subjects of ecclesiastical suits, has yet to be introduced into the Bill. Will the Die- establishment party in the House of Commons agree to this ? Will Mr. Leatham, for instance, who wishes to see the Church Establishment upset, by its internal discords or otherwise, agree to a collective guarantee of the neutrality of even a single patch of ecclesiastical borderland?
