Tea or Eucharist?

• The Faber Book of Church and Clergy edited by A.N. Wilson
  Faber, 304 pp, £17.50, November 1992, ISBN 0 571 16204 5
• High and Mitred: A Study of Prime Ministers as Bishop-Makers 1837-1977 by Bernard Palmer
  SPCK, 350 pp, £20.00, October 1992, ISBN 0 281 04594 1

‘We asked for bread, and you gave us a stone’: the cry that rang out from the gallery of Church House, Westminster, after one of the earliest debates over women’s ordination nearly twenty years ago demonstrates that even in Church politics you should never despair. The mills of God may grind slowly but they grind exceeding sure, or so those who fought for so long for the introduction of women priests into the poor old battered ecclesia anglicana may now feel entitled to claim.