Upon this, the _Spectator_, a leading periodical of the Broad Church party, observes: “So far as the bill is intended to ascertain and enforce the existing law of the church in relation to public worship, the change (namely, from a bishop to a secular judge) makes the whole difference between a tribunal which Englishmen will respect and trust and one which they would hardly have taken the trouble even to consult, so deep would have been, in general, their distrust of the oracle consulted.... Lord Shaftesbury having provided a genuine judge, the complainant who prefers a bishop will not often get his antagonist to agree with him, and such complainants will be few.” Of this general mistrust of the Anglican bishops we have more to say, but for the present we keep to the consideration of the bill. Lord Shaftesbury’s suggestion was followed by one from Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, which, although not adopted, is too remarkable a specimen of Episcopal counsel to be unnoticed. (_The Church Times_ respectfully designates it as “one of the prettiest bits of log‐rolling ever seen”!) Bishop Magee proposed, and his proposal was “powerfully seconded by the Lord Chancellor,” that there should be “neutral regions of ritual laid down by the bill, within which a variety of usages as practised in many churches at the present time should _all_ be admissible, even though the actual directions of the rubric against some of them be explicit.” Whereupon the _Spectator_ goes on to suggest that a varied selection of “concessions” should be made, suitable to the divergent or opposite tastes of Extreme, High, Low, Broad, and No Churchmen; such as, for instance, the optional reading or omission of the words as to the regeneration of the child by the act of baptism, as a concession acceptable to the Evangelicals. For its own part it would like an optional reading or omission of the Athanasian Creed, and so on, and, “to make the compromise a thoroughly sound one,” the laity of each parish, it considers, ought to be consulted as to the usage to be adopted. It is hard to imagine anything better calculated to make “confusion worse confounded” than plans like these, at a time, too, when all the Anglican parties alike confess that “in no day has there been so wide a variety of tendency, opinion, and belief in the Church of England as now.”