Page:The Irish Church and its Formularies.djvu/21

 use it as a convenient instrument by which to push its personal advantage in England, without any overwhelming care for the result to Ireland and its church population. In a word, to use a metaphor now painfully significative, the war would not be localised, but the reverse.

But I am bound, in dealing with the future, to follow out the question into all its possible contingencies, and I will now suppose that all the preliminary difficulties have been overcome, and that the Committee has not only succeeded in framing a scheme of professedly undoctrinal reforms in the Prayer Book, but in persuading the General Synod to accept its proposals. What then will be the legal and practical weight of the new Prayer Book as compared with that of the existing one? It is not impertinent in me to assume after reading the debates in the Convention that the drift of the alterations will be in a direction favourable to the Low Church section of the community. That section as it is, finds without doubt much in the Prayer Book which it accepts with a preference, as in its opinion making for its side of the question. It also finds more or less which in its heart of hearts it might prefer had been otherwise put. But on the whole it accepts and works the book as it stands. The same statement without the alteration of a word also represents the position of the High Church section. Each section, it may be, attaches the most literal and stringent interpretation to its more favourite portions, and the most liberal and elastic to those which are the favourites of the other side. The result of this difference of treatment is that the Prayer Book as a whole, and as it stands, holds its own as a workable institution upon a basis of interpretation far less strict than that which any Act of Parliament would secure at the hands of any Court. But once this old book is thrown into the crucible, the document in its remodelled state will bristle with stringency in every line. Every sentence will have been assumedly revised