or very unable to perceive the corresponding advantage which had fallen to the lot of its antagonist. In the mean while the Broad Church section would have become disgusted and exasperated by the advantage which dogmatism would have gained in the person of High, or of Low, or of both; and either as the formal ally of one or the other side, or as a third and neutral party, equally unfriendly to both, would add a potent disintegrating element to the seething cauldron of confusion.
But so long as the Church hung at all together, the persons who would be really hardest hit by the procedure, would not be the headstrong and extreme clique who are truly responsible for the present general distemper. These men justify their eccentricities by appeals to a higher law, of which they have made themselves interpreters and judges. They do not pretend to look into the Liturgy and Formularies for the warrant of their proceedings. They assert that this or that thing is "Catholic," and they accordingly do or say this or that thing because their own higher law decrees its catholicity. Short, therefore, of turning these gentlemen out of the Church, you will not touch them by any changes in the Prayer Book. You may enlarge the apparent divergence between their actions and those of Prayer Book Churchmen, but the grounds of those actions will be unshaken. What you will do, however, is that, supposing you succeed in turning them out of the Church, you will have effected your object, by a permutation of the Prayer Book, so thorough and so dogmatic, as to import distress and perplexity into the minds and consciences of moderate High Churchmen, whose good and wholesome labours for the common cause rest upon their acceptance of the actual formularies.
After all, the position of any Church, in a country where open toleration exists as it does in England, must be re-
