Page:Distinguished Churchmen.djvu/168

 "Oh! no doubt we are a lawless society, as law less as—what shall I say?—well, as lawless as John Hampden. Was there ever a more lawless man? There was a man flouting the King's judges, and actually declaring their interpretation of the law to be erroneous. He challenged neither their legal competency nor their legal capacity. He merely refused to accept their interpretation of the law. To-day John Hampden is recognised to have been right, and the judges wrong. He is a venerated patriot who, by his lawlessness, gave the death-blow to arbitrary taxation. I am afraid, though, that we are not quite as lawless as John Hampden. For he admitted the competency of the Court, whereas we denied the competency of the Privy Council on canonical, historical and constitutional grounds, and the evidence laid before the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission (1883) thoroughly vindicated our position. We 'smashed' the Privy Council, and there is an end of it."

"But what about disobedience to the Bishops?"

"Well, in those days the Bishops acted merely as the bailiffs of the Privy Council. As regards the Lambeth Opinions, the so-called Court had no canonical competency. The paragraph in the Prayer-Book referred to other matters, and even so, its provisions were not observed, whilst the conclusions arrived at were contrariant to the general law of the Church in both cases, and to the specific law of the Prayer-Book in one case. Apart from