On a cool but sunny day in early March, members of the Ecclesiastical Law Society gathered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, for its Annual General Meeting and Silver Jubilee Day Conference, entitled ‘Church and state: international and comparative perspectives’. Professor Mark Hill QC had conceived and arranged this return to Cambridge, where the Society had been founded 25 years before, and whether it was his careful planning, the efficiency of the College or the hard work of Andy Male and Sarah Neden, who provided the administration, the day proved to be a real treat. Refreshment and a buzz of engaged conversation welcomed participants on registration at the Old Library.

The AGM began promptly, in a comfortable modern lecture theatre, with an invitation from the Chairman for those members who had been at the inaugural meeting in 1987 to declare themselves. A significant handful stood to be acknowledged for their initial vision and continuing tenacity. Given the tight programme, the Chairman's and Treasurer's reports were taken as read, and further detailed amendments to the Society's constitution were proposed and accepted without demur. The report on this Journal had been prepared to be read but the Editor could not be kept entirely silent, capitalising on the Chairman's brevity to promote the publication of the proceedings of a conference last year on discrimination law of which the Society had been a principal sponsor.Footnote ¹ Even with this intervention, the business of the meeting was achieved within the 15 minutes allotted, something of a record.

The importance of timekeeping had clearly been impressed on the speakers in advance. When Professor David McClean QC, the chair of the morning session, introduced Professor John Witte Jr from Emory University, Atlanta, to provide the North American perspective on Church and state, the speaker assured us that his was a talk lasting precisely 42 minutes, a feat achieved only by taking its content at some lick. This nevertheless allowed for warm congratulations to the Society on its jubilee and to Mark Hill for the outstanding contribution made by the Journal. Our attention was grasped from the opening quotation concerning Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr that ‘the better the society, the less law there will be’, concluding that ‘in hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed’. Professor Witte's review of the academic study of law from the positivist theory of knowledge through the development of interdisciplinary legal study (including the study of law and religion) to the challenges facing us as Christian believers embraced a number of thought-provoking ideas which merit a more leisurely reflection, now possible with its publication in this journal.Footnote ²

Silvio Ferrari, Professor of Canon Law at the University of Milan, followed with the European perspective – meaning a continental Europe from which the UK was for the moment excluded. His contribution also demanded close attention.Footnote ³ His explanation of the need to keep religion out of the public sphere, which he argued must be secular so as to be grounded on natural principles that can be shared by all, was tempered by an understanding of the significant part played by Christianity in the Western history of which secularism has been the outcome.

After a short break, we reconvened in a sun-drenched chapel for a most uplifting Choral Eucharist with our Chairman as president and preacher and other prominent members of the Society contributing to the readings, prayers and administration of Communion. The college choir's sublime rendition of Haydn's Little Organ Mass, followed by Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus and the College Grace, enhanced our devotions. The Society sang the hymns with considerable gusto and broke into spontaneous applause after the recessional organ voluntary, Lefébure-Wely's Sortie in E flat, which brought to my neighbour's mind a funeral he had taken some years past of a fairground operator.

Following a convivial lunch in the Old Library, Mark Hill, as the chairman of the afternoon session, introduced Professor Julian Rivers of Bristol University to give the United Kingdom perspective. Professor Rivers argued that religious liberty and religious equality require the separation of Church and state, and considered the view that the secularisation of society means that faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others. He spoke persuasively of the futility of the Human Rights Act and introduced the phenomenon of illegality by surprise, giving examples of acts that had become unlawful without any change in the law.Footnote ⁴

To sum up, the day was a great, and most stimulating, success. The papers that were delivered are all reproduced in this issue of the Journal, being the final part of the specially commissioned 25th anniversary volume, so that even those who were not present at the Conference can enjoy them. Although it was suggested that this feast of scholarship could be regarded as inappropriate for a season of Lenten denial, it was surely entirely fitting for the Society's Jubilee celebration.