A memorial has been addressed to the Archbishops and Bishops
of the National Church by the Dean of St. Paul's, Canon Gregory, Mr. T. T. Carter (Rector of Clewer), the Warden of Keble Col- lege, the Provost of Eton, and something like sixty other clergy- men of the High-Church party, and published in Thursday's Times, on the subject of the recent ritual prosecutions. The memorialists express their distress at the coercive measures re- sorted to for enforcing uniformity of ritual, and their belief that the motive which inspires the persons prosecuted in enduring to the utmost rather than submit to the judgment of the Court em- ployed, is the conscientious dislike to an authority which, rightly or wrongly, is regarded as "purely secular." They point out that the historical evidence got together to determine the interpretation put on the rubrics of the Church is often very unsatisfactory, and that there would be no occasion for it, if the Church simply used the power, which every Church that is living and not dead obviously has, to decide these questions not as questions of historical evidence, but as questions of ecclesiastical policy and authority, belonging not to the past, but to the pre- sent. They ask, therefore, that the Ritual of the Church should be decided not by obsolete law, but by the exercise of the power of the Church, through her Synods, with the approval of Par- liament. But for this purpose they maintain that the Church Synods must have co-ordinate power with Parliament. Parliament may reject a change on behalf of the State, and the Synods may reject one on behalf of the Church, but neither must make a change without the assent of the other. If the Synods of the Church really represented the laity as well as the clergy of the Church, in any sense at all resembling that in which the House of Commons represents the laity as well as the clergy of the
*nation, this proposal would have some reason in it, as we have shown in another column, revolutionary as it would be. But as the Clergy of the English Church would certainly never stand any thorough laicising of the Synods, and as the laity would cee- tainly never stand any clericalising of the Church, the proposal seems to be a hopeless one, and better calculated to encourage the advocates of disestablishment than the advocates of comprehen- sion and freedom.
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