different persons to be more or less justifiable or unjustifiable within the letter of the doctrines of the Church, a Committee has been named for the purpose of suppressing or restraining those practices and teachings as by other means, so by such alterations, and such alone, in the Liturgy and other Formularies as do not touch doctrine—the doctrine itself being at this moment the one uncertain quantity by which these practices and teachings must stand or fall. Plainly then this Committee—hastily thrown together with an admitted party bias—must, by the terms of its appointment, become the supreme tribunal competent to declare what is, and what is not, the doctrine of the Church upon all the particular points which the records of parish disputations, of suits in the Arches Court, and before the Privy Council, of Royal Commissions, and of literature substantial or ephemeral, within our own lifetime, have shown to be the most difficult and the most exasperating of all the perils through which our Church is passing at a crisis which otherwise the shining catalogue of churches built, or raised from degradation, of schools created, of services undertaken and multiplied, of preachings strong in their wrestlings with the temptations and the infirmities of the human heart, of delicately nurtured volunteers devoting themselves to the work of the physician of soul and body and of the Christian almoner, of missions to the fallen at home and to heathen lands, all indicate as an epoch of brightness and consolation to the Church of the people.
The respect which I feel for the gentlemen thrown by the irony of fate into the false and hopeless position of being compelled to serve upon that Committee, restrains me from suggesting the bewilderment, the antagonism, the blank inability of hitting upon an acceptable common ground, the purposeless graspings after compromise which must haunt
