CHURCH REFORM.
PTO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.”1
SIR,—In your short notice of the recent meeting of the Church Reform Conference, you give only one-half of the resolution proposed by myself and seconded by Dr. Martineau; and you ask how common worship is to be rendered possible without common faith, adding,—" Take away the Church Liturgy, for instance, and where would be the common life of the Anglican Church ? " The notion or idea of " taking away " the Church Liturgy was, and is, the furthest from my wishes or my thoughts ; and this subject was fully dealt with in the remarks with which I introduced the resolution.
These remarks, as I informed the Chairman at the outset, were read, not spoken, because I felt it my duty to guard myself against the misunderstanding and misrepresentations with which the subject of my resolution has been clouded.
From first to last, I insisted that I was doing nothing more than repeating what has been said again and again during the last thirty or forty years by Mr. Maurice and Dean Stanley. My paper was either a reproduction of their mind and their arguments, or it was nothing.
Of this fact you are either unaware, or you have suppressed it. In the latter case, I have to protest against a very serious instance of the misrepresentation for which I supposed that a written paper could leave no room.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Scrayinghans Rectory, York, April 9th. GEORGE W. Cox.
[Sir George Cox must know very little about us, if he thinks it possible that we could intentionally suppress anything any man had said, and then attack him on the ground that he had not said it. We do not in the least understand how the Liturgy of the Church of England is to be retained in its integrity, and yet the conditions of communion are to be so extended as to " embrace the whole Christian thought and life of the nation." How is Dr. Martineau to use the present Liturgy of the Church ? We had access only to a short report of Sir George Cox's paper, and had not the least idea that he insisted on the integrity of the Liturgy.—En. Spectator.]
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