It would be ridiculous for an outsider, like myself, to discuss the interior working of the E.C.U., so I avail myself of the testimony which has reached me from within.

“Like most men of his temperament, Lord Halifax seems now and again to be a little before his time.  On the other hand, it is remarkable that Time generally justifies him.  There is no question that he has always enjoyed the enthusiastic and affectionate support of the Union as a whole.”

It is true that once with reference to the book called Lux Mundi, and once with reference to the “Lambeth Opinions” of 1899, there was some resistance in the Union to Lord Halifax’s guidance; and that, in his negotiations about the recognition of Anglican Orders, he would not, if he had been acting officially, have carried the Union with him.  But these exceptions only go to confirm the general truth that his policy has been as successful as it has been bold and conscientious.

It is time to return, for a moment, to the story of Lord Halifax’s private life.  In 1869 he married Lady Agnes Courtenay, daughter of the twelfth Earl of Devon, and in so doing allied himself with one of the few English families which even the most exacting genealogists recognize as noble.[1] His old tutor wrote on the 22nd of April: 

[Footnote 1:  “The purple of three Emperors who have reigned at Constantinople will authorize or excuse a digression on the origin and singular fortunes of the House of Courtenay” (Gibbon, chapter xii.).]

“This has been a remarkable day—­the wedding of Charles Wood and Lady Agnes Courtenay.  It was in St. Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, which was full, galleries and all, the central passage left empty, and carpeted with red.  It was a solemn, rapt congregation; there was a flood of music and solemn tender voices.  The married man and woman took the Lord’s Supper, with hundreds of witnesses who did not Communicate....  Perhaps a good many were Church Union folk, honouring their Chairman.”

Of this marriage I can only say that it has been, in the highest aspects, ideally happy, and that the sorrows which have chequered it have added a new significance to the saying of Ecclesiastes that “A threefold cord is not quickly broken."[2]

[Footnote 2:  Charles Reginald Lindley Wood died 1890; Francis Hugh Lindley Wood died 1889; Henry Paul Lindley Wood died 1886.]

In 1877 Mr. Wood resigned his office in the household of the Prince of Wales.  It was the time when the affairs of St. James’s, Hatcham, and the persecution of Mr. Tooth, were first bringing the Church into sharp collision with the courts of law.  The President of the Church Union was the last man to hold his peace when even the stones were crying out against this profane intrusion of the State into the kingdom of God; and up and down the country he preached, in season and out of season, the spiritual independence of the Church, and the criminal folly of trying to