A living rule was to take the place of the dead hand. Representative men, and not the authority of an individual or of an old statute, were henceforth to control this State provision for the religious interests of the people, as a similar body, with manifest advantage, controls the State provision for the secular interests. A Committee of the Privy Council made up of the Ministers of the day, being professed Christians, together with some experts, is probably the best central authority to be devised. But when the Commissioners further proposed that after the expiration of their commission it should remain with Deans and Chapters to submit proposals for reform in the use of their cathedrals, they at once limited the utility of that central authority. Is it to be conceived that Deans and Chapters will promote necessary reforms? Can they be said to be in touch with the people? Will they, if they make wise and far-reaching suggestions, be trusted as representatives? The Commission aimed to create a living authority, and then proposed to bind it hand and foot; it set up a body of representative men capable of daring and of cautious action, and then limited the sphere of such action by the decisions of Chapters sometimes concerned for inaction. The obvious criticism is a testimony to the progress of the last few years. Education and the extension of local government have made all parties recognise that the voice of the people ought to be trusted, and can be trusted. Checks and safeguards are no longer thought to be so necessary. Interests once jealously preserved by the classes are now known to be safe in the hands of the masses. The Crown, property, order, are all safe grounded on the people’s will. It seems therefore out of place, in the eyes of the present generation, to safeguard every change in the use of the cathedral by trusting to those proposed by Dean and Chapter. The basis of government must be democratic. The people, and not any class, must have the chief voice in their control. The County Councils, by means of a committee of professed Christians, the Diocesan Council, or any body to which the people of the neighbourhood have free access, should be that empowered to bring suggestions before the central authority. In the Church of England, of which every Englishman is a member, and whose Prayer Book is an Act of Parliament, there is no new departure in making the County Councils the originating bodies to suggest uses for the cathedral.