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Church Politics and Church Prospects.

success of which was so very doubtful. So Dr. Lushington's Judgment on these points was closed with: the rest, being appealed against, went to the Arches Court, to meet with a second defeat; and then to the Judicial Committee, with what success is now matter of history. Bystanders might differently appraise the legal value of this incident, but those who were personally connected with it are fairly committed to uphold it in its integrity. In other respects a judgment which has exalted the cross in its place of honour, fenced the chancel, accepted the recognition of the Christian seasons in the changed altar vestments, and restored the table of prothesis to our sanctuaries, stands out a solid gain to the orthodox side.

Since this important settlement the Church has made good its advantage in another field where success might have seemed least likely, the general and semi-authoritative adoption of a hymnal, embodying, along with popular modern productions, translations of the masterpieces of the collective hymnology of the Western Church from the earliest ages. Twenty-seven years ago Dr. Newman, still firm in his allegiance to the Church of England, wrote, in a preface to a collection of Latin hymns, extracted from the Paris Breviary:—

'Our Church, with the remarkable caution which she displays so often, has not attempted it. She has received the Psalms and Songs from Scripture; and, rejecting the Roman hymns, has substituted in their stead, not others, but a metrical version of the Psalms. This abstinence has led on the one hand to some of her members on their own responsibility supplying the deficiency, and has incurred the complaint of others who argued that she ought to have taken on herself what, being right in itself, will certainly be done by private hands, if not by the fitting authority. But in truth, when it was necessary for her to abandon those she had received, nothing was left to her but to wait till she should receive others, as in the course of ages she had already received, by little and little. . . .

'We began the world again. This is the proper answer to inconsiderate complaints and impatient interference. There have before now been divines who could write a Liturgy in thirty-six hours. Such is not our Church's way. She is not the empiric to make things to order, and to profess to anticipate the course of nature, which, under grace, as under Providence, is slow. She waits for that majestic course to perfect in its own good time, what she cannot extort from it; for the gradual drifting of precious things upon her shore, now one and now another, out of which she may complete her rosary and enrich her beads, beads and rosary more pure and true than those which at the command of duty she flung away.'

Now-a-days the churches in which 'Hymns, Ancient and Modern,' are in use, are absolutely innumerable, and the publisher boasts that he has sold a million copies, while some of the translations, such as 'Jerusalem the Golden,' have per saltum taken their places among our classics by the side of the old familiar Christmas and Easter hymns. Too much praise cannot be given for this success to Mr. Neale, who is notoriously the chief