question having been raised and discussed as it was, is very hopeful of the spirit of the Confederate dioceses. A later number of the Church Journal contains the constitution of the 'Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America,' as proposed in this convention, and sent down for approval to the various diocesan conventions. The first thing that strikes the reader accustomed to the proceedings of the Church in the United States is, that the ugly term Convention, heretofore used for the synodical gatherings of the Church, is struck out, and the far more ecclesiastical word Council substituted. So there is to be a triennial General Council, which is first to meet in November, 1862, at Augusta, Georgia, and also Diocesan Councils. The lay representatives to this General Council are, we are glad to see, ordered to be communicants; an amelioration which is, of course, of great importance. There is also a somewhat ambiguous provision for erecting any State which shall divide itself into more than one diocese into an ecclesiastical province, and for creating a triennial Provincial Council. What, however, the relations of this Council are to be to the General Council are not defined, and cannot fail, we should think, to be embarrassing. In one of the latter clauses, they talk of the establishment of a Book of Common Prayer, &c., which, we trust, implies that the Southern Church intends to restore some of the omissions which the bad taste and worse theology of the closing eighteenth century made in the English Prayer-Book, as edited for the United States. If the book is taken in hand at all, it must, we believe, be altered for the better. Altogether, the details which we have given appear to establish that the prospects of the Church are more hopeful in the Confederate States than they were before the great disruption had thrown the Southerners on their own resources.
The Church Journal for December 4, which we have received since writing the above paragraph, extracts an article on this Convention, from the, Richmond Enquirer, the chief paper of the Confederate Capital, It says, 'In taking the necessary steps to form an independent Church organization for the Confederate States, everything was done with harmony and good feeling. The Missionary fund and work of the Church in the South, it was found, had suffered no decline since the separation from the North, but both were on the increase even under a provisional arrangement.'
America has, for the present, almost driven Italy out of the minds of stay-at-home politicians. What will come of the consolidation of the Peninsula—an event which, by the way, seems to us just as much to be accepted as the bi-section of the United
