Mr. Gladstone comes to the question with the feelings of a statesman, conscious of the greatness and excellence of the State, and anxious that the Church should not provoke its jealousy, and in urging her claims should "take her stand, as to all matters of substance and principle, on the firm ground of history and law." It makes his judgment on the present state of things more solemn, and his conviction of the necessity of amending it more striking, when they are those of one so earnest for conciliation and peace. But on constitutional not less than on other grounds, he pronounces the strongest condemnation on the present formation of the Court of Appeal, which, working in a way which even its framers did not contemplate, has brought so much distress into the Church, and which yet, in defiance of principle, of consistency, and of the admission of its faultiness, is so recklessly maintained. Feeling and stating very strongly the evil sustained by the Church, from the suspension of her legislative powers,--"that loss of command over her work, and over the heart of the nation, which it has brought upon her,"--so strongly indeed that his words, coming from one familiar with the chances and hazards of a deliberative assembly, give new weight to the argument for the resumption of those powers,--feeling all this, he is ready to acquiesce in the measure beyond which the Bishops did not feel authorised to go, and which Mr. Gladstone regards as "representing the extremest point up to which the love of peace might properly carry the concessions of the Church":-- That which she is entitled in the spirit of the Constitution to demand would be that the Queen's ecclesiastical laws shall be administered by the Queen's ecclesiastical judges, of whom the Bishops are the chief; and this, too, under the checks which the sitting of a body appointed for ecclesiastical legislation would impose. But if it is not of vital necessity that a Church Legislature should sit at the present time--if it is not of vital necessity that all causes termed ecclesiastical should be treated under special safeguards--if it is not of vital necessity that the function of judgment should be taken out of the hands of the existing court--let the Church frankly and at once subscribe to every one of these great concessions, and reduce her demands to a _minimum_ at the outset.