The New Covenanters...

Oh dear. More trouble at t'Mill.

For we are, it seems, to have a New Covenant to bind us all. Which it won't of course.

And there was me but yesterday or thereabouts complaining that we Anglos didn't have a proper Rule Book about the place to which to refer on needed occasion. Well now we are to have one it seems and more's the pity say I, as one who wasn't asked for his opinion by the Bearded Bard.

Why though do I mourn the coming of the very thing for which I appeared to advocate? Because it won't make a halfpenny worth of tar's difference to the Big Issue - 'Gay: Forbidden or Compulsory?' - nor will anyone actually take any notice of it if it seems to inhibit their chosen line.

Want to hold communion services in saunas? You'll find the permissive interpretation you seek somewhere in the text. Wish rather to introduce public floggings of spinsters of a certain nervous disposition? You'll claim justification from the very same paragraph.

That, after all, has been the Anglo way from the beginning. We've allowed the Bible to mean what we want it to, we've bent over backwards - an awkward phrase indeed these difficult days - forwards and sideways to accommodate any sort of half-belief or indeed none at all. The only common ground we appear to have been left with is some vague yearning that it - the very ground of our communion - might after all exist somewhere in some form or another, though generally faraway and often long ago.

And now some idiot liberal - I use the words as sadly as I do wisely - has objected "But we do not have a hold on truth. We cannot claim an infallible source." Well sorry matey, if that's what you think then hand back your stipend this instant!

All in a huff right now I am. Third malt has not improved the temper I fear, as it ought and generally does. Am even minded to put it to H that we let go of this entire farrago and leg it over to Rome. Can be done these days I am told: Catholic priest, but yet with wife in tow. Would have to surrender the Rectory, but with the draughts that howl throughout over the winter months am not sure either of us would mourn the loss.

Would I swop the Bearded Bard for Benedict? In truth you betcha I would. At least I can understand what he says most of the time. German accented Latin is a breeze compared with Anglo-Celtic meanderings.

Let's see what the fourth malt advises.