In each of these three bodies the lay element possesses the virtual supremacy. In general convention, no law can be enacted, no lax discipline can be reformed, no erroneous doctrine can be corrected, without the express acquiescence of the lay-deputies. In the diocesan convention, no bishop can be elected, no delegates to the general convention can be appointed, and no local diocesan regulations can be established, until the laity agree. In the parish, no pastor can be called, no church-building be erected, no regular order be determined, while the people withhold their permission. And though, upon the face of it, this power may seem to be entirely negative, yet it is not so; for, in the right to choose their pastors and convention-delegates, the real control of the diocesan conventions, and, through these, of their bishops and the general convention, is placed ultimately in their hands, and, whenever they might choose to organize for such a purpose, a single generation would suffice to overturn the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the church itself. In this respect, also, the Episcopal Church has practically conformed herself to the model which our national institutions set before her. If she believes that, in religious as well as secular affairs, "all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," her system and belief are certainly consistent, but it can hardly be pretended that either of them is divine. {158} Nor will it be denied that all the objections to which the temporal is open on the score of instability and weakness are doubly pertinent to the ecclesiastical, so long as those whom Christ intended that his church should govern on the contrary really govern her. But however unstable and insecure in all her fundamental and organic principles the Episcopal Church has thus been rendered by the inherent nature of her system, she certainly is far from flexible in her methods of external operation. Here all the strength of her conservatism concentrates itself. The Prayer-Book is "the apple of her eye." It cost her less to blot out a creed in which the faith of ages was embodied, and rob her clergy of the power of absolution, than it would now to change a single syllable of her "incomparable liturgy." Yet nothing is more widely understood, even in her own borders, than that this very liturgy is the greatest barrier which stands between her and the masses of the people; and that her inflexible, unvarying use of it on all occasions is the great patent cause of her acknowledged failures.