After much determined opposition from the Tories, with whom Mr. Gladstone acted on this occasion, the Government succeeded in carrying the appointment of a Royal Commission to inquire into the condition of the Universities--a proposal which had the warm support of the Queen and Prince Albert, in consequence of which some foolish people went about saying that there was a conspiracy on foot to Germanise the academic system of England. The Bishop of London’s Ecclesiastical Appeals Bill, which was introduced into the House of Lords on the 3rd of June, touched on matters regarding which the Queen has always been sensitive--the relation of the Church to the prerogative of the Crown. The principle of the Bill was that ecclesiastical appeals should be tried, not before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as representing the Queen, but before an assemblage of Bishops, whose decision should be binding, not merely on the Judicial Committee, but on the Queen also. This, of course, destroyed her supremacy over the Established Church of England, a prerogative of the Crown which has always been tenaciously guarded. The Bill was rejected. And here it may be well to record what it was that led to its introduction. It was introduced to tranquillise the High Churchmen and Tractarians, who were smarting over the decision of the famous “Gorham case.” Mr. Gorham had been presented by the Crown to the benefice of Bramford Speke in August, 1847. When the Bishop examined him, he found that he was an extreme Low Churchman, and that he denied that spiritual regeneration was conferred by the sacrament of Baptism; also that his views on other matters, such as predestination and election, were those of the narrowest Presbyterian Calvinists. The Bishop of Exeter refused to institute Mr. Gorham, and, after much litigation, the case was appealed by him from the Court of Arches to the Judicial Committee, who decided that Mr. Gorham’s views were not incompatible with the Thirty-nine Articles. The Judicial Committee on this occasion consisted of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of London. Associated with them were the Master of the Rolls (Lord Langdale), the Lord Chief Justice (Lord Campbell), Mr. Baron Parke, Vice-Chancellor, Sir J. Knight Bruce, Dr. Lushington, and the Right Hon. Pemberton Leigh. The complaint of the Churchmen was that the ruling of a Bishop and an ecclesiastical court on a disputed point of doctrine was not only considered, but actually reversed by a secular tribunal the large majority of whose members were laymen, and the clerical members of which could not vote, but merely gave their opinion to the lay members who formed the Judicial Committee. Churchmen passionately resented these proceedings, and the excitement they raised was fierce and uncontrollable. The Gorham Appeal Case was the badge of the Church’s servitude to the State. The Bishop of London’s Bill was an attempt to