Mr. Gladstone comes to the question with the feelings of a statesman,
conscious of the greatness and excellence of the State, and anxious
that the Church should not provoke its jealousy, and in urging her
claims should "take her stand, as to all matters of substance and
principle, on the firm ground of history and law." It makes his
judgment on the present state of things more solemn, and his conviction
of the necessity of amending it more striking, when they are those of
one so earnest for conciliation and peace. But on constitutional not
less than on other grounds, he pronounces the strongest condemnation on
the present formation of the Court of Appeal, which, working in a way
which even its framers did not contemplate, has brought so much
distress into the Church, and which yet, in defiance of principle, of
consistency, and of the admission of its faultiness, is so recklessly
maintained. Feeling and stating very strongly the evil sustained by the
Church, from the suspension of her legislative powers,--"that loss of
command over her work, and over the heart of the nation, which it has
brought upon her,"--so strongly indeed that his words, coming from one
familiar with the chances and hazards of a deliberative assembly, give
new weight to the argument for the resumption of those powers,--feeling
all this, he is ready to acquiesce in the measure beyond which the
Bishops did not feel authorised to go, and which Mr. Gladstone regards
as "representing the extremest point up to which the love of peace
might properly carry the concessions of the Church":--

That which she is entitled in the spirit of the Constitution to
demand would be that the Queen's ecclesiastical laws shall be
administered by the Queen's ecclesiastical judges, of whom the
Bishops are the chief; and this, too, under the checks which the
sitting of a body appointed for ecclesiastical legislation would