state of things if such an enactment take place; “a simple and positive enactment,” forbidding such “ornaments of the Church and ministers thereof” to be used “as were in use by the authority of Parliament in the second year of King Edward VI.;” and I ask again (for this is our real and great question) What would be the condition of the Book of Common Prayer? Would it be what it is now, or would it be changed? Would the present rule be “in abeyance”—that is, much unused, but still the law—or would it be repealed? What is the difference between the proposed remedy and repeal? It would be as if you made “a simple and positive enactment” that, “until further order,” no man should be arrested for debt; no man taken up for theft or violence; no man prosecuted for treason; no man hanged for murder. You may call this, abeyance of the law in those cases, but it is a misuse of the term. A thing is _in abeyance_ which for any cause happens to be _disused_, not when it is by enactment _forbidden to be used_; as a title _is in abeyance_, not when there is no heir (in which case it is _extinct_), but when the heir is unknown, or the pretensions of two or more claimants undetermined; when the heir is not _forbidden_, as the heir, to take it if he _be_ the heir, but only whilst there may be doubt whether he be the heir or not. But here, it is assumed by the very act of legislation that something is known to be the law, so that you despair of getting rid of it but by altering the law; and therefore that, though it is known to be the law, and for the very reason that it is known to be the law, it is to be prohibited and excluded. Can any man in his senses be made to believe that this is not repeal? I think, sir, I need go no further as to proving that all these schemes, and this last just as much as the rest (all except the letting the courts of law settle what is the law, and then abiding by it), agree fully in this one point that they tamper with and alter our Book of Common Prayer. And all this, over and above the reason and common-sense of the matter, tells us what the next Report of the Ritual Commission will be, unless the Commissioners be duly impressed with the danger of the course which they are pursuing, and the enormous responsibility of trying to carry it out. And this brings me to a further practical point, which it is very fitting that I should lay before you. I mean the resistance proposed to all alteration in the Prayer Book by means of the public meeting so lately held in London; and the action to be taken in connection with the resolutions then passed as to memorializing the Royal Commissioners upon the subject.