THE RITUALISTS AID THE LAW.*

THIS handsome volume contains the illustrated history of a church which dates from the time of Edward the Confessor, and which is associated with some of the most striking events in English history. It is not for this reason, however, that we call attention to it at the present moment, but because it casts an important light on the Ritualistic controversy. But in order to appreciate the value of the evidence thus casually and incidentally produced it is necessary that we should have before us a clear view of the points at issue, and of the argu- ments on each side. The controversy turns, as our readers know, on the correct interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric. Now, with respect to that Rubric, the following facts are un- questionable :—First, its plain, grammatical meaning clearly sanctions the disputed vestments. This is frankly admitted in the Ridsdale judgment. Secondly, this plain grammatical meaning was the received. interpretation of the Rubric down to a few years ago. Thirdly, it was also the legal interpretation of it down to the Purchas judgment. How, then, does it happen that the vestments in question are now declared illegal, so that any of the clergy who wear them are liable to imprisonment and temporal ruin ? Because, say the Judicial Committee, Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity requires us to read a negative into the affirmative by ordaining "that such orna- ments of the Church and of the ministers thereof shall be retained and be in use as were in this Church of England. by authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI., until other order shall be therein taken by the authority of the Queen's Majesty, with the advice of her Commissioners ap- pointed and authorised under the Great Seal for causes eccle- siastical, or of the Metropolitan of this Realm,"—which "other order," they declare, was taken on the publication of the Advertisements. Let us examine this argument.

The questions here are :—(1) whether any "other order," in terms of this statute, was ever taken by authority of Queen Elizabeth ; (2), whether, assuming such "other order" to have been taken, it prohibited. anything sanctioned by the statute of Elizabeth ; (3), granting such " other order " to have been taken, and to have prohibited the vestments in dispute, can • The Chronicles of the Collegiate Church or Free Chapel of All Saints, Derby. By the Rey. J. Charles Cox, and W. H. St. John Hope, B.A. London : Bemrose and Son. 1881.

it be held to reverse the plain meaning of the Rubric of 1662, which sanctions anew the use of the vestments, has the force of statute law, and makes no reference to any " other order ?" The space at our disposal will not admit of our discussing the first question ; nor is it necessary, for its importance depends on the answer to be given to the second question. But thus much may be said in passing, namely, that the overwhelming balance of historical evidence, and a consensus of legal authority down to our day, are in favour of those who contend that no " other order" as to anything in the Ornaments Rubric, either was intended to be, or ever was, in fact, taken. Burn merely repeats the language of standard. authorities down to his time (1760), when he says :—" Which other order as to this matter [of ecclesiastical vestments] was never taken." (Ecclesiastical Law, Vol. III., p. 437.) On the other hand, it is contended in the Purchas and Ridsdale judgments that the so-called Advertisements of Elizabeth were, in fact, the "other order" promised in the statute. The evidence against this view amounts almost to a demonstration ; but it is not worth while arguing it, for the point is entirely irrelevant, as we shall now endeavour to show.

What was the object of the Advertisements ? And against whom were they aimed ? They owed their origin to a letter from Queen Elizabeth to Parker, dated January 25th, 1564-5. In that letter, the Queen enjoins Parker,-

" To confer with the Bishops, your brethren, and to ascertain what varieties, novelties, and diversities there are in our clergy, or amongst our people, within any of the said jurisdictions, either in doctrine, or in ceremonies and rites of the Church, or in the manners, usages, and behaviour of the clergy themselves, by what name soever any of them be called. And thereupon, as the several cases shall require reformation, so to proceed by order, injunction, or censure, accord- ing to the order and appointment of such laws and ordinances as are provided by Act of Parliament, and the true meaning thereof, so as uniformity of order may be kept in every church, and without variety and contention."

Here, then, we have the class of things and persons against which the Advertisements were aimed. They were aimed against " varieties, novelties, and diversities," which were contrary to the Act of Uniformity, and therefore meriting " censure " and " re- quiring reformation." But the Eucharistic vestments were not " novelties ;" their use, so far from being contrary to, was pre- scribed by the Act of Uniformity, and consequently the clergy who used them were not amenable to " censure " or " requiring reformation." The Queen's letter to Parker proves beyond all possibility of cavil that the Advertisements were not intended to abolish anything which the Act of Uniformity had sanctioned, but, on the contrary, to pull up transgressors to as near a con- formity as possible to the requirements of the existing law.

If the argument against the Purchas and Ridsdale judgments were to end here it would be amply sufficient to demolish them. But the argument is very far indeed from ending here. We have seen that the Advertisements were directed against those who broke, not against those who obeyed, the law ; in other words, against those who did not wear the vestments, not against those who did. Accordingly, we find that complaints, petitions, and controversy against the Advertisements came exclusively from the Puritans. There is no record of a single complaint or objection from any of the thousands of clergy all over the land who performed Divine Service according to the ritual of the First Prayer-book of Edward VI. This is absolutely incon- ceivable on the theory that the Advertisements prohibited that ritual. Some of the Puritan Clergy in the reign of Elizabeth were deprived of their livings and imprisoned for not wearing the vestments ordered by the Advertisements. No clergyman was punished or censured for continuing to wear vestments which the Advertisements abolished, for the simple reason that the Advertisements abolished no vestments. Let us take an illustration from our own time. A few years ago Archbishop Parker's successor in the Chair of Canterbury introduced into Parliament, with the concurrence of most of his Suffragans, a Bill which had for its object the restraining of novelties and lawlessness in the performance of Divine Service. The Prime Minister of the day was more explicit, and declared that the object of the Bill was to " put down Ritualism." The Bill became law ; it has been put in force against Ritualists exclu- sively, and the Ritualistic Clergy alone complain of it, and agitate against it. Now what should we say of a Court of Justice which, with these facts before it, calmly decided that the Public Worship Regulation Act was passed for the purpose of putting down the Evangelicals and forcing them into Ritualistic vestments? Yet this is a strictly accurate descrip- tion, matatis nrntandis, of the way in which the Purchas and

Ridsdale judgments have dealt with the Advertisements. But it is exceedingly hard to uproot a deep-seated prejudice, and therefore we give a few more samples of the overwhelming mass of evidence in favour of the grammatical and historical inter- pretation of the Ornaments Rubric.

It will hardly be denied that the members of the Royal Commission which drew up the Advertisements knew their meaning and legal value. One of the members of the Com- mission was Horn, Bishop of Winchester. He was a Puritan, who wished to do the best he could for his friends, and he evidently regarded the Advertisements as a compromise in favour of the Puritans,—that is to say, if the Puritans brought up their ritual to the standard of the Advertisements, they would be let off the additional requirements of the law. It never occurred to him to imagine that the Advertisements were intended to take away, or could in fact take away, anything that the Act of Uniformity had made legal. In a letter dated some months after the Advertisements were drawn up, with Horn's signature, together with the signatures of the other Commissioners, attached to them, Horn says explicitly that the clause in the Act of Uniformity which enjoined the vest- ments " cannot be repealed, unless by the agreement and con- sent of all the Estates of the kingdom, by whose concurrence it was enacted." This direct testimony from the pen of one of the authors of the Advertisements ought to be conclusive. But the partisans of the new-fangled interpretation of the Orna- ments Rubric defy the ordinary laws of logic as obstinately as the Russian soldiers, according to Napoleon, defied the ordinary laws of physiology. " It is not enough to kill them ; you must knock them down." We proceed, therefore, with our cumulative evidence.

One of the ablest leaders of the Puritans was George Withers. In a letter written after the formal publication of the Advertisements, he deplores the Popish ritual, as he deemed it, which was then prevalent. He speaks of the whole ritual of Edward VI.'s First Prayer-book as then, without exception, in legal use ; and he gives the current and obvious interpretation of the " other order," of which the Judicial Committee has made such perverse use. " Power, moreover," he says, " was given to the Queen and the Archbishop to introduce whatever additional ceremonies they might think proper ; and they immediately afterwards both discontinued the ordinary bread heretofore used in the administration of the Lord's Supper, and for the sake of a new reformation adopted the round wafer, after the pattern of that used by the Papists." The reservation in the Act of Uni- formity of the power to take " other order " was, beyond all doubt, for the purpose of imposing " additional " ritual, as Withers declares, and most distinctly not for the purpose of taking away anything that the Act of Uniformity had sanc- tioned. The Advertisements imposed a great deal in the way of ceremonial and apparel which was not provided for either in rubrics or statutes. But on one point they made a concession. While leaving the legality of the full vestments absolutely un- touched, they enforced the use of the surplice only in parish churches, and of the cope in addition in cathedrals and Collegiate churches. There is not a hint in the Advertisements that they were intended to abolish anything which was then legal. The Puritans, however, were very powerfully represented at Court, and their patrons there had interest enough with the Queen to prevent her giving formally her Royal authority to the Advertisements. But let us assume, for argument's sake, that the Advertisements had full Royal authority. Let us even assume that they had statutory authority. What then ? We put it to any lawyer whether even an Act of Parliament which, among a mass of other matter, reimposes a part of a previous unrepealed statute, thereby abolishes the remainder of that statute, though it makes not the slightest reference to it. This is the assumption of the Purchas and Ridsdale judgments, and we take the liberty of saying that it is in the teeth of all legal authority.

In 1611—that is, seventy-one years after the publication of the Advertisements—a Committee of the House of Lords, in- cluding ten Bishops, and assistef by the most learned divines of the day, suggested " whether the Rubric should not be mended where all vestments in time of Divine Service are now commanded which were used 2 Edward VI." Observe, the Committee do not argue the matter. They assume, as a patent, undisputed fact, that all the vestments of Edward's First Book " are now commanded,"—that is, in 1641, seventy-five years after they had been abolished, according to the Judicial Com-

mittee. In 1644, the recommendation of the House of Lords' Committee was carried out by Act of Parliament. Would Par- liament in 1644 have abolished what had no legal existence since 1566 ?

In 1662 Convocation and Parliament restored the legal use of all the ritual of the second year of Edward VI. So that, even if we assume, against all the evidence, that the Advertise- ments of 1566 did abolish the vestments, that abolition could not possibly avail against their restoration by Act of Parlia- ment, in clear and unambiguous language, in the year 166.2. Three successive Deans of the Court of Arches, so opposite to each other as Sir John Dodson, Dr. Lushington, and Sir Robert Phillimore, have laid down, with the sanction of the Judicial Committee, "that in reviving the Rubric of 1549, the Act of 1662 excluded and repealed all provisions whatever of Act of Parliament or Canon which had been made after 1549 and prior to 166:1." This is both law and common-sense, the Purchas and Ridsdale judgments notwithstanding.

We will now conclude with the evidence furnished by the Inventories in the Church of All Saints, Derby, and we will give it in the words of the editors of the volume which has suggested our criticism

"Those interested in the Vestment controversy' will find from these Inventories a remarkable confirmation of the common-sense view of the question, viz., that vestments were certainly not prohibited, but understood to be sanctioned, by the Ornaments Rubric ; yet that, in course of time, their use gradually died out in almost all churches, owing to the ascendancy of the Puritan spirit, and the great cost necessary for their maintenance. It will be noted that the vestments were used at All Saints' for more than a decade after the alleged Advertisements ' of Privy Council fame."

With the theological and ecclesiastical aspects of Ritualism we do not here concern ourselves. Our readers know our own profound indifference to the ceremonial aspects of the question. We have dealt with the subject in the interest of fair-play and historical truth, and in that alone. We do not in the least doubt the integrity and honesty of the Courts whose decisions we have felt bound to call in question. We attribute to them nothing worse than a domi- nant, albeit, unconscious, bias, which has blinded their eyes to the plainest facts. We have not the smallest doubt that if the Ornaments Rubric were in the prayer-book of a sect of Buddhists or Devil-worshippers, the Purchas and Ridsdale judgments would never have dreamt of " reading into" it an irrelevant document, for the express purpose of reversing its otherwise plain and undisputed meaning.