fact—the adaptation of law to necessity—which led to the framing in 1603 of that Canon, (so often quoted of late) which requires parochial ministers to wear the surplice only in their ministrations, but directs that a cope shall be worn by the celebrant in cathedrals. The Convocation, it would seem to me, knowing how generally the vestments had been destroyed, or rapaciously seized for the sake of the gold and precious stones that adorned them, and how difficult it would be for the clergy generally to provide them afresh, appointed—what had long been the practice, and could in fact quote something like authority for itself in the Royal advertisements—that as a _minimum_ of vestment in ordinary churches a surplice should be worn, but in cathedrals, whose endowments could provide it, the most costly and splendid of all vestments—the cope—should be retained. Surely it could never have been intended to _insist_ that there should be a difference between the cathedrals and the parish churches of the same communion; far less to forbid as superstitious in the latter, what is positively enjoined in the former! But if it were so, the Canons, though in their spirit a rule to the Clergy and faithful laity, have no force by the law of this realm, and moreover they were almost immediately followed by a revised Prayer Book, which contains the rubric ordering all the ornaments which were in use in the second year of Edward VI. While at the very last revision of the Prayer Book, nearly sixty years afterwards, when our Church was only just lifting her head above the politico-religious revolution which had so nearly overwhelmed her, when so many reasons cogently pressed her to eliminate from her Book of Common Prayer all that was unnecessary, all that was questionable, all that she did not use or intend to use; when the Puritans put their finger on this very rubric, and required that it should be left out—for if it were retained it might bring back copes, albs and such like;—it was nevertheless deliberately determined that the rubric, made by verbal alteration more explicit than it had been before, should continue to be the written rule of our Church! _And_, _brethren_, _it is still the written rule_, _confirmed by Convocation_, _enjoined by the Act of Uniformity_.