Page:The Irish Church and its Formularies.djvu/26

 because the less formally proclaimed—that it finds the apology for its own position within the tolerant pages of those cautious and comprehensive formularies. But once erect the Liturgy and Formularies within the realm of Ireland into the monument of Low Church or of Broad Church victory, and then you convert the sympathy—moral or material—which members of the Church of England give to the Church which relies upon those documents in Ireland into direct aid and succour to those elements of the Low or of the Broad system which are most antipathetic to the other two systems. The repression, in comparison with the other allied Churches of the reformed Episcopal Communion, of the Irish Church will then become a politico-ecclesiastical necessity either of High in alliance with Low or of High in alliance with Broad against, as it may be. Broad or Low. In either case the co-operation of the two allies, according to the mathematical necessities of strategy, must inevitably overmatch the efforts of their unaided antagonist. The confusion so engendered will be worse confounded from the operation of the feelings so felicitously pointed out by your Grace during the debate, that any change made with an intention was evidence that the party against which it was directed had previously a legal standing ground. Whether the extreme section be kept within or excluded from the Church by any changes which might be initiated by the Committee, it will be certainly a position capable of cogent argument (supposing changes of any kind) that the party must hitherto have had a legitimate locus standi within the Church in the terms of the old Prayer Book. In addition, therefore, to the natural irritation arising out of changes directed against their own valued prepossessions, a special grievance will have been created founded on the patent fact that the whole procedure will be an example of that confusion of the judiciary and the legislative offices concisely summed up in the a well-known words of Virgil, castigatque auditque. The