ABSTRACT
The Public Worship Act was to take effect on 1 July 1875; and it behoved the bishops to see that it was put into operation well. Two weeks after the Act came into effect, three parishioners of St. Peter's, Folkestone, encouraged by the Church Association, submitted a complaint about the manner in which their incumbent, the Rev. C. J. Ridsdale, conducted public worship. 1877, the year of the Ridsdale judgment, Tooth's imprisonment and eventual escape from the courts, and Redesdale's denunciation of The Priest in Absolution, exposed most of the rocks on which the barque of the Church of England could break up. A Reformed Episcopal Church, recently formed by secession from the Church of England's counterpart in the United States, attempted to extend the schism to England by winning over Evangelicals unhappy about the established Church's failure to check ritualism. Ecclesiastical comprehensiveness, after all, was an essential ingredient of his ideal of a national Church.
