At a large meeting of the “English Church Union” it became evident that the changes in law procedure produced by the Public Worship Regulation Act are producing a murmur in favor of “disestablishment” within the Church of England herself. One of the reverend speakers at this meeting said that “the issue had now merged from one about the color of a stole to a question of church and state,” and the honorable chairman agreed that “establishment might cost too dear.” Archdeacon Denison declared that this case of “dear Arthur Tooth” would prove to be “a life-and-death struggle with Protestantism,” thus making the old mistake of putting mere ritualism in the place of the Catholic Church. Canon Carter moved that “the Church Union denies that the secular power has authority in matters purely spiritual,” upon which a journal reminds him that, from the days of the Reformation, it has been one of the conditions on which the state church enjoyed the emoluments and privileges of establishment that her clergy should perform certain duties in a way laid down by law. Whether, as in the case of Mr. Tooth, they have or have not done so is a matter which the law leaves a particular court to decide. If Mr. Tooth does not relish the action of these tribunals, two courses are open to him, and only two. Either he may give up those practices which they declare obnoxious within the pale of the Established Church, or he may leave the Establishment and continue them elsewhere. The latter step would entail the sacrifice of the endowment, or, as the Ritualists would say, it would involve the guilt of schism; in which case the whole matter resolves itself into a choice of sins: the clergyman must either commit the sin of obeying Lord Penzance, and so retain the endowment, or he must commit the sin of “schism” and fling the endowment away. Thus the Church Unionists are by no means logical in comparing their present position to that of Chalmers, Buchanan, Guthrie, Cunningham, and other leaders of the Free Kirk of Scotland previously to 1843; for these men gave up all thought of state endowment, or even of ministering in buildings dependent on the state, and purchased the independence of their ministrations at the cost of all state temporalities. This is a very different matter from attempting to have the temporalities and the independence together.[25] Footnote 25: Certain evicted Ritualists, however, do not appear to be much affected by the measures taken to repress them, if it be true that the Rev. R. P. Dale, who has been suspended for three years, and his former parish merged into another, takes the matter very philosophically, and, in default of his own parish, finds every Sunday in one place or another a complaisant brother-clergyman, who lends him his church and his pulpit, from which he braves the pseudo-episcopal thunders.