Page:The Irish Church and its Formularies.djvu/14

 of Ireland, without arrière pensée or explanatory definition. Each body relies upon its antecedently recognised position, and their intercourse is the outpouring of confidential kinship, not the regulated correspondence of diplomatic amity.

But I may be told that I am forecasting a very complicated tangle of disastrous results from premises totally inadequate to lead to such monstrous consequences—I may hear that, after all, the Duke of Abercorn's Committee, in contrast to that which Master Brookes was originally desirous to appoint, is so fenced in and circumscribed by the terms of its appointment, that at the best or the worst, the reforms which it can suggest in the Prayer Book, even if adopoted in their fulnessfullness [sic], cannot affect the substantial identity, and the more than sisterly relationship of the two Churches. I shall not have recourse to the obvious rejoinder, that if the results are to be so slight, it was hardly worth risking the excitement which has attended the creation of the Committee, in order to compass such small advantages. It will be more satisfactory and more respectful to test the Committee in the terms of its own appointment, as those who may either have to serve upon it, or to probe its conclusions, will have themselves to do.

The peril which I mainly apprehend from the action of the Committee, is one which will easily arise from the dangerous ambiguity which has crept into the terms of its appointment. I cannot bring myself to believe that those who adopted it were aware, at the time they were voting, that they were actually constituting a tribunal empowered and instructed not only to interpret, but to create, the law which it could, without revision and without appeal, itself proceed to administer. The words which, by implication, convey these extraordinary powers are—“without making such alterations in the Liturgy or Formularies of our Church as would involve or imply a change in her doctrines.” The