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ART. IX.-1. First Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c. according to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. London: Printed by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, Printers to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty. For Her Majesty's Stationery Office. 1867.

2. Second Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c. according to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. London: Printed by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, Printers to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty. For Her Majesty's Stationery Office. 1868.

3. Judgment delivered by the Right Honourable Sir Robert Phillimore, D.C.L., Official Principal of the Court of Arches, in the case of Martin v. Mackonochie, and Flamank v. Simpson. Edited by WALTER G. F. PHILLIMORE, B.A., of the Middle Temple, Fellow of All Souls College, and Vinerian Scholar, Oxford. Second Edition. London: Butterworth, 7, Fleetstreet, Law Publisher to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty. 1868.

It is not without design that we have again placed the First Report of the Ritual Commissioners at the head of an article for the Christian Remembrancer. Our readers will not have forgotten the notice of this document which appeared in October last, and, perhaps, some may be of opinion that we paid the subject more attention than it deserved. Neither do we mean now to waste our time and theirs by presenting them another Review of that manifesto. Of one thing we are certain, that all cool heads and logical judgments will acquit us of the charge of undue severity in our treatment of the document itself, or of any disrespect towards Her Majesty's Commissioners. We forbore to comment on the waste of time spent by those eminent individuals in feeling their way towards the position of knowing how to ask questions for the first three days of their session. We made no accusation against them of being forced

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by pressure from without to report, through their chairman, to the House of Lords, that at their seventh meeting they had ventured to entertain the hope that, at the very furthest, the week after 'next they might commence the consideration of their First 'Report.' We did not criticise the style of questions put to the different witnesses, and we passed by altogether unnoticed the absurdity of their being contented with haphazard information given by a dozen conspicuous members of the Ritualistic party after a vivá voce examination, for which neither party was at all prepared. Any Oxford examiner might have told them that, for an examiner to do his work properly, he must be thoroughly well up in his subject, and that but little of thoughtful explanation can be obtained from an examinee, however well he may be prepared, in his viva voce examination, compared with what he can produce on paper. We contented ourselves, as far as any strictures on the Report itself were concerned, with calling the attention of our readers to the information nine times repeated that the Commissioners deliberated,' and ventured to contrast the ten days' deliberation with the muscipular abortion' which was ushered into existence at the nineteenth meeting. We were not hard upon them. We made due allowance for the fact that bishops are too hard worked to be theologians, and deans too much absorbed in what they consider the normal condition of things in the different spheres, to be at all aware of the abnormal practices and beliefs which have made such rapid strides, the latter for forty years past, the former for ten years. There was room for severity, but we were sternly reticent; and many, perhaps, will have thought that the elaborate display which we made of the contradiction between the premisses and the conclusion of the argument was superfluous, because it was patent to everybody who had eyes to read the printed copy of the Report for himself; and that our own inference, that the celebrated conclusion of Restraint' was an à priori principle adopted by the Commissioners beforehand, because it could not be made to come out from the evidence, was too palpable to be worth insisting on.

After all, the Commissioners seem to have recognised that they had something as yet to learn for themselves as to what was the meaning of all this disturbance, whether it was mere much ado about nothing,' or whether serious consequences might not result from a continuance of practices which nobody seemed quite to understand. And the result was a good-natured bark, but as there was no attempt to bite, we were entirely at our ease as to the nature of any ulterior proceedings which next year's meeting might originate. The Commissioners had to stave off Lord Shaftesbury's bill, and they had entirely succeeded so

far; and though they recommended Restraint,' the very vagueness of the recommendation was in itself enough to prevent alarm, whilst the brilliant creation of the aggrieved parishioner,' -which had hitherto assumed the form of a fanatic English earl, a remarkable Irish marquis, or a mob of rioters,—was such a novelty as to create feelings rather of wonder than suspicion.

But the Second Report must be taken as a sequel to the first, and it is for this reason that we have commenced this article by saying that we had designedly placed the titles of both Reports together. We do not attempt to disguise the fact, that the bark has now developed into a bite; but we do not, therefore, now that we mean to attack Her Majesty's Commissioners, at all intend to take any undue advantage over them by picking to pieces the Second Report as a detached portion of their labours; but shall give them the advantage, such as it is, of standing upon their two Reports as representing in their combination one consistent whole. We will not take advantage, such as is often taken by the opponents of Christianity, and unfortunately frequently conceded by its defenders, by an attack upon one of the defences,-say prophecy or miracle,—who do what harm they may be able, trusting that there will be a tacit admission that, if the one argument is not conclusive, the whole fabric to be supported must crumble into dust, neglecting all the while the force of that argument from the effect of concurrent testimonies, which, to a fair mind, would be irresistible. No! We disdain the application of a process which we should consider in our own case utterly unfair, and the Commissioners on Ritual shall have all the benefit of the concession which they sorely stand in need of, of not being judged by this or that portion of what they have said, but by the whole in its unity and consistency.

Unity and consistency! How, it will be asked, is it possible to vindicate the unity and consistency of two Reports, the second of which presents the absurd spectacle of a house divided against itself? The First Report was signed by all the twenty-nine Commissioners; and if there was a slight indication of a coming rupture, when three out of their number thought proper to protect themselves against being supposed to acquiesce in a possible prima facie interpretation of the words 'restraint' and aggrieved parishioners,' still the Report itself was, as we have observed, of the nature of a bark, and we know that the loudest and most persistent bark does not at all necessarily imply a bite to follow. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that the three Commissioners who understood their subject best, in stating what they appended to the Report, made a sort of apology to the public at large for signing so lame a document. We are not exaggerating our convictions when we say, that we believe it

was the most abortive production in the shape of a report that was ever laid upon the table of the House of Commons. As such it has enjoyed its superlative position for the space of nine months, and has now been obliged to yield the palm to its younger sister, the Second Report.

However, before we go on to treat of the two Reports in their entirety, it is quite necessary to settle the question of identity as to this younger sister. As we have said, twenty-nine Commissioners signed the first; but we can discover only twenty-three names appended to this latter, and even of these twenty-three, certain ominous marks prefixed to four of the names indicate differences of opinion which require a little investigation before we can pronounce upon the case. Neither shall we be thought to overstate the significance of the exception, when we remind our readers that these four dissentients or protesters or whatever we are to call them, are by no means amongst the ruck of the members of the Commission. No one, we think, will have the hardihood to say that the Bishop of Oxford, the Dean of Westminister, Mr. John Duke Coleridge, and the Dean of Ely, are insignificant persons, either in themselves or as members of Her Majesty's Commission. We shall presently refer again to the objections entertained by these four members, but we can scarcely be wrong in deducting their names from the twenty-three who have signed the Report, and in consequence reducing the number of those who give an unqualified adherence to the thirteen paragraphs into which the document is divided, to nineteen. We have no hesitation in saying this, because, as will be seen hereafter, there is a substantial agreement at the bottom of all that is alleged in the five protests which this document has produced from members of the very commission which drew it up, and which is responsible for it. So strong, indeed, is the feeling of four of the membersand amongst these four are the three gentlemen who, as we have said above, are incomparably above their fellow-Commissioners in real knowledge of the subject in all its bearings, that they state that their concurrence in the objection of the Bishop of Oxford and the Dean of Ely is a reason why they cannot sign their names to the Report. And most people will think their conclusion so obvious, as to wonder how the Bishop of Oxford and the Dean of Ely could have been induced to adopt. the words of a document which they so distinctly contradict.

But in fixing the identity of this document, we have yet to notice the most perplexing feature of all. The Report, as signed by the nineteen, or, in order not to take any undue advantage, by the twenty-three, occupies one-fourth of the space of the paper which has been addressed to Her Most Gracious

Majesty, the remaining three-fourths being taken up (1) by the objections alleged against it by the Bishop of Oxford and the Dean of Ely, which appeared to them to allow of their signing it, but which very same objections seemed to preclude Sir Robert Phillimore, Mr. Beresford Hope, Mr. Hubbard, and Mr. Gregory from accepting it; (2) by the protest of Mr. Coleridge and Dean Stanley; and (3) last, though by no means least, with the counter Reports of Lord Beauchamp and Mr. Perry, occupying together more than half of the space given to the whole subject, and more than double that occupied by the meagre Report of the majority of the Commissioners.

If, therefore, we are to take this Report of two-thirds of the Commissioners-vehemently objected to, or protested against, disowned, disavowed, and repudiated by the remaining third, or by some of them—as the sequel to the first Report, we do so simply for the sake of argument. We remember being taught, when we learned the Artis Logica rudimenta, according to Aldrich, the, in a logical point of view, somewhat questionable piece of information, that it was of the essence of a proposition to be affirmative or negative, but that it was a sort of accident that it should be true or false. Without, therefore, in the present instance, at first attempting to determine which part of the document contains most truth or falsehood, or which is the most intrinsically important and deserving of notice, not on account of its length, but of the matter contained in it, we will pass by the flyleaves of the document, if so we may call them, as being mere accidents, and treat the first of its four pages as being of the essence of the thing. And though the latter three-fourths may, perhaps, be thought to follow as legitimately, from the colourless recommendations of the First Report, as the first quarter, which emanates from the larger body of Commissioners, this, at least, will be admitted, that in examining them together as one uniform and consistent whole, we shall be doing no injustice either to the dissentients, of whom we desire to speak with the greatest respect, or to that respectable majority of whom we shall decline to speak at all, confining our remarks to the written documents which are signed with their names.

But before commencing our strictures, we think it worth while to observe, that in treating the two Reports as parts of a consistent whole,—although it is true that a larger number of Commissioners signed the First Report than chose to commit themselves to the latter-if the thing is to be considered as a wholeif there is any unity of design or consistency of plan about it, it is obvious that the very terms in which we are writing preclude us from admitting that more than two-thirds of the Commissioners give their adhesion any longer to the First