s" 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 coerce Christian consciences by
deprivation and imprisonment. The story went that an Illustrious
Personage said t