WRITE as an ordinary lay member of the Church of Ireland and a rank and file Orangeman in reply to John Marsden's diatribe, against the Orange Order in last week's "Rite and Reason".

Reading through the minute books of my own lodge, which go back 10 years, I find that 100 years ago the members, who had not been holding an annual church service, were being encouraged to do so by the Church of Ireland rector. He was being true to the great commission of his Lord and Saviour, whose last words were: "Co ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" - presumably even to Orangemen.

He also said: "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance", and the rector was seizing his opportunity.

It should be remembered that the Orangemen of the Portadown district do not ask for the exclusive use of the parish church of Drumcree; they attend Morning Prayer at the normal time along with the choir and congregation, as they have done ever since 1808 Would Mr Marsden have them turn away at the church door like lepers in the Middle Ages and be compelled to peep through a hole in the wall?

It is very easy for Mr Marsden to blame all that happened at Drumcree on "sectarianism". He should pay more attention to the rector of Drumcree, the Rev John Pickenn who is not an Orangeman, but who said that the Protestant people had endured enough and were not prepared to be pushed around any further.

Any government can sooner or later expect trouble if it rides rough shod over the freely expressed wishes of the electorate; disbands their local security forces when most needed; destroys their democratically elected parliament; emasculates their local government and governs by the worst colonial system of appointed placemen.

This government has gone further. It has involved in Northern Ireland's internal affairs a hostile State with its' own "constutional imperative" to annex our territory. It has given that State's agents, bunkered at Maryfield, a greater say in our internal affairs than is enjoyed by our elected representatives.

It has also produced, in league with that hostile government, the Framework Document, a blueprint of a gerrymandered political system designed to frustrate the will of the majority. Finally, in consultation with Maryfield, it has tried to thwart the traditional expression of our identity through church parades by requiring the permission of Sinn Fein sponsored committees.

In all this, the Church of Ireland has behaved as though it was still the established church, as if (British) government could do no wrong. The church has given no leadership to its, flock while they have been slaughtered, driven from their farms and homes and seen their property destroyed. The voice of prophecy has been strangely silent, but then prophecy hardly goes with establishment attitudes.

ALL this came to a head at Drumcree when the Portadown Orangemen made a stand and said "thus far and no further".

The Orange Order is not sectarian being neither a sect nor a church with its own doctrine. It welcomes members from all the Protestant churches, each of which has its owns doctrinal standards. It is happy to accept members from any political parry so long as they support the Crown and Constitution. All sort and conditions of men and all races and colours are received as equals.

The Church of Ireland in the "preamble and declaration" written into its constitution in 1870 stated: "The Church of Ireland, as a Reformed and Protestant Church, doth hereby affirm its constant witness against all those innovations in doctrine and worship whereby the Primitive faith has been from time to time defaced or a overlaid and which at the Reformation the Church did disown and reject."

Is that, in substance, any different from the passage from "The Qualifications of an Orangeman" quoted by Mr Marsden?

It should be, recalled that Protestants were first so called at the Diet of Speyer in 15,26 when the Lutheran members refused to attend Mass and stated that "they must protest and testify publicly before God that they could consent to nothing contrary to his Word".

The Orange Order still holds to that and is grounded on the rock of scripture, not on the shifting sands of what Mr Marsden terms contemporary Anglicanism".

One would expect that an archcritic of the Order and a professional historian would at least have studied his subject before rushing into print. All those banners depicting Old Testament prophets which he so abhors belong to the Royal Black Institution, over which the Orange Institution has no control,

The only Orange banner in my district which has a scriptural painting is one showing the Resurrection with the caption: "He is not here, for He is risen." A triumph indeed, but hardly triumphalism or tribalism.

THE crux of John Marsden's article is the highlighted passage; "The cancer at the heart of Orangeism is its refusal to recognise its Roman Catholic neighbour as also a child of God."

This I utterly refute, as the Order takes no specific stance on the state of grace of anyone, Roman Catholic - or otherwise, of course, Roman Catholics are all God's features and He loves them all. Of course they have the same access as Protestants to the throne of Grace.

If, like the two men who went up to the Temple to pray, one pleads fasting and good works and nothing else he will be rejected. Being a Protestant will not save him.

If from a sincere and penitent heart he prays "God be merciful to me, a sinner", he will be heard and forgiven, be he Jew or Gentile, Roman Catholic or Protestant. That is Protestantism in a nutshell.

Perhaps I could end by quoting the former Unionist minister Roy Bradford writing in the News Lever about recent remarks by some southern Church of Ireland bishops: "What is not right and proper is that certain bishops should fall over backwards endeavouring to prove their enlightened ecumenism by seeking to ingratiate themselves through the kind of political misrepresentation such as we have witnessed over Drumcree, an attack which focused on entirely unjustified denigration of their fellow Protestants in the North. That can only sow the seeds of schism." {CORRECTION} 96111100046