While reading Aidan Nichols’ book, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism (T & T Clark, 1993) I remembered the story of the country which decided that their young people should be taught to play football and that a national side should be fielded to compete with other countries. So they wrote to the Football Association in England for copies of the laws of football and sent them to their schools with instructions that the young people should learn the rules by heart, be tested in their knowledge and then be sent out to play. There was, apparently, some consternation in high places when chaos ensued and questions were asked as to why people who had learned the rules still could not play the game.

Aidan Nichols has certainly learned the rules of Anglicanism but still appears—at least to this Anglican reviewer who was taught the rules by one of those whom Nichols recognises as a “separated doctor” of the Roman Catholic Church, Eric Mascall—to be unable to play the game. For there is no doubt at all about Fr. Nichols’ scholarship and the acuity of his perspective on the history and development of Anglicanism since the Reformation. But none of his perception enables him to see how or why such a perverse—in his view—beast can continue to survive as it does with such vigour and obvious self-enjoyment, or why all right thinking Anglicans do not immediately see the error of their ways and at least join a Uniate Anglican Church and so regularise their position.