THE COMPREHENSIVENESS OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. ,
[To THE EDITOR Or TEE •' SPROTAT011:9 Sia,—Perhaps you will allow me to inform your cone- spondent in last week's Spectator who signs himself "Presbyter" that the rubric at the end of the "Order of Confirmation," to which he refers, is not, as he seems to suppose, of universal obligation. Some of our wisest Bishops consider that the service as it stands was meant principally for those who, having been brought up from the first in the system of our Church and come to years of discretion, pro- ceed in due course to Confirmation. The case of any others does not seem to have been contemplated. When the rubric in question was enacted the Church was, at least in theory, coextensive with the State. There were, as a rule, none who had not been baptised in the Church as infants, and it was for children of the Church that the subsequent rite of Confirma- tion was prescribed. It was directed that they should "learn the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments," &c., and that " children " (so the service speaks of them) when "come to years of discretion" should "be brought to the Bishop to be confirmed." Surely some allowance must be made for the entirely altered state of things which has grown up in our land. The enormous increase of population and the fact of Nonconformity on its present scale have now to be taken into account. A considerable number of strangers present themselves in our town churches. Is it possible to examine every one of these, to inquire if each has been confirmed, and to refuse Communion to all who have not ? Would any precisian or rubricist venture to say of any who receive Communion without having been confirmed that they "presume to receive unworthily"? You are no doubt right in affirming that the only person whom we have any right to repel from the Holy Table is the "open and notorious evil liver." Archbishop Tait's opinion is well known. My desire not to encroach unduly on the space you may kindly allow withholds me from quoting it at length. It may be read at large in the second volume of his Life, pp. 71, 74. The Arch- bishop of York, in an address delivered in February, 1904, is reported to have said: "Were they right in supposing that
the law of the Church of England shut out from the Holy Table the most saintly Nonconformists because they had never been confirmed ? The direction referred to members of the Church, not surely to those whose Christian training had been under different conditions, and whose long years of faithful Christian life had assisted in already maturing Christian character." I might point out to "Presbyter" that if "sect" means something cut off from an original body, the Church of England cannot be so described. Our Church is not a sect among sects. It is not merely one among many denominations. Where is the Church from wide& it has cut itself off ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
G. J. COWLEY-BROWN. 9 Grosvenor Street, Edinburgh.
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