3. But, to return more directly to Bishop Ellicott; I must enter my protest against, and state my most absolute disbelief in, the correctness of his opinion as to the last danger indicated in the passage last quoted from his Charge, as to what would be the conduct of the ritualistic clergy under a legal settlement of points in dispute. {28b} It may be, indeed, that if judgment should go in favour of the Ritualists their opponents would be stirred up to any conceivable pitch of madness; but I must wholly disclaim all belief that the great mass of those who have adopted a high ritual would do other than accept the decision of the law courts, if duly arrived at. Even with our present most unsatisfactory Court of Final Appeal, I should expect this, though it might be under protest; but I do not believe they would refuse to submit to the decision, I mean as to ceremonial, or persist in usages declared to be not warranted by the present law of the Church. It would, of course, be another thing if any attempt were made to tie up their hands, or shut their mouth, as to doctrine; but in regard merely to ceremonial I do not believe they would justify the Bishop’s confident prediction, “force unwilling men to put the law in action against them, accept the issue, and leave the communion of the Reformed Church.” I do not believe this for a moment as the effect of a legal decision, duly given, or as duly as it can be at present, as to what the law really is; dealing only, I say, in its terms, with ceremonial, even though we should all perceive, it may be, that it had a connection with doctrine. Still this would not be the making a new doctrine, but only declaring that the law of ceremonies was less favourable to the expression by symbolism or otherwise of certain doctrines than it had been supposed to be. This, I think, they would endure. What might be their conduct, if you alter the law on purpose to catch them when they were not offenders under it; if you _change_ the Book of Common Prayer in an uncatholic direction, in a matter touching doctrine; if you do this for a party purpose, and to uncatholicize the Church of England, I do not pretend to say. I will venture no prophecy as to what some might be led to do under such an aggravated condition of injustice. I do not myself say, I do not myself think, that they ought, even then, to “accept the issue, and leave the communion of the Reformed Church.” But it needs no ghost to tell us that such action taken on the uncatholic side would be a step towards making catholic-minded men _despair_ of the Church of England; and if England’s Convocations and Legislature should do this, you may well judge, my friends, if they will not have gone near with many to sever the last strand of the rope which held them to her. No man, I will venture to say, leaves her till he despairs of her; and to alter the Prayer Book in a Puritan direction, and