part really such; but on whom a certain degree of pressure has from time to time been brought to bear, and may be brought to bear again. But its actual _status_ is at any given time fairly ascertainable. It might be well, indeed, that all this occasional legislation should be digested by the only proper authority, viz. the conjoint spiritualty and temporalty of the realm, into one harmonious and duly authorised whole. But for the time being the position of things is sufficiently intelligible. And now to apply this view of Prayer-book law, so to call it, to the matter which especially engages attention at this moment,--that of the manner of administering the Holy Communion; and first to the vestments of the clergy. 1. Now, if there be any one point in which the English Church _is_, what she has most untruly been asserted to be in other points, namely, broad and _alternative_ in her provisions, it is this one of the ornaments or dress of her clergy. While, in the matter of doctrine, Heaven forfend that she should have two minds, and give her children their choice which they should embrace--seeing that so would she forfeit the name and being of a "Church" altogether;--certain it is, that, from peculiar causes, she does, in this matter of officiating vestments, give, by her present and already ancient provisions, a choice and an alternative. With her eyes open, and at periods when she was most carefully scanning, for general adoption, those provisions, has she deliberately left on her statute-book (meaning thereby her entire range of rules), and admitted into her practical system, two diverse rules or practices. We may confine our attention for the moment to the period of the latest revision of the Prayer-book in 1662. On that occasion the Fifty-eighth Canon of 1603,--derived from certain "Advertisements" of Elizabeth, and probably supported by the universal custom of the realm,--was allowed to stand unaltered. This Canon provides, as has been above mentioned, that "Every minister, saying the public prayers, or _ministering the sacraments_, or other rites of the Church, shall wear a decent and comely _surplice_ with sleeves;" only with a special exception, recognised in another Canon, in the case of Cathedrals. And yet on the same occasion was retained the rubric of Elizabeth (1559), about "the ornaments of the Church, and of the ministers thereof," with only such variation as fully proves that it was not an oversight, but a deliberate perpetuation of the law concerning _vestments_ more especially. For the previous form of it,--dating from 1603, and but slightly altered from that of Elizabeth,--was, that "the minister at the time of the Communion, and at all other times in his ministrations, _shall use such ornaments in the Church_ as were in use by authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI., according to the Act of Parliament set in the beginning of this Book." But