THE RFD:MUSTS AND THE LIBERALS.
1VIANY Ritualists, and many who are not Ritualists, who are genuine Liberals, seem to feel that there is something thoroughly inconsistent with Liberal views in either advocating, or feeling satisfaction in, a decision which makes the Ritual of the Church so utterly inelastic as that of the Privy Council in the St. Alban's case. There is a disposition to sympathize with the clergymen who light up their altars more than ever since lighted candles on the altar have been condemned, and to rebel generally, whether on behalf of the Ritualists or on behalf of the Evangelicals, against the hardand-fast line which the St. Alban's judgment has drawn. The Guardian, which is usually moderate and disposed to respect the law, goes as far as intimating pretty confidently that the decision of the highest tribunal of the nation, against which there can be no appeal, is bad law, and quite indefensible intolerance as well, because it has pronounced Mr. Mackonochie guilty of an "indictable offence," on the strength of a "construction" and an "inference." It even accuses the judges of "stretching and twisting the words of a statute in order to -procure a conviction,"-.—a piece of violent accusation almost, we should think, unparalleled in that very grave, sober, and usually judicial paper. Now, we are as anxious as any one can be to see our Church truly comprehensive; but we hold very strongly that a general inflexibility in ritual and ceremony is absolutely essential to that comprehensiveness, unless we can take some guarantee that the ritnal, if relaxed, shall be relaxed only by the common request of clergyman and congregation as well. One would think, from the character of the complaints we now hear, that it is the violent restriction of some liberty of belief in the Ritualists, and not the condemnation of mere outward acts which are, in the first place, not essential to that belief, and, in the second place, are held by a vast number of people who do not agree in that belief to be representative acts done by the priest on behalf of the congregation, and not mere expressions of his individual faith, which the late judgment has declared. The true parallel, as it seems to us, to the restriction put upon the freedom of the Ritualists is obtained by :supposing that a party of Evangelical clergymen had introduced the custom of turning their backs pointedly on the elements during the prayer of consecration, in order to mark their private disbelief in the Bodily Presence. According to the argument of the Guardian, this not being forbidden by the Prayer Book any more than is the adoration of the elements by the Ritualists, they could not possibly be condemned for a change of posture intended by them, and under-stood by the congregation (some of whom might be conscientious believers in the Bodily Presence), to mark their rejection -of the doctrine. But would not such an act by the priest, who, in his administration of the liturgical service, is held by -all parties to be a representative of the people before God, practically curtail the liberty of the Church,—would it not drive sincere Ritualists away, would it not be held by them to be a sort of representative insult to their faith ? Or suppose that a party of Rationalists who did not accept the authenticity of the Pentateuch, or of all of it, were to adopt the fashion of saying, instead of "Here beginneth such and -such a chapter of the first book of Moses called Genesis," or merely "of Genesis," "Here beginneth such a chapter of the book erroneously attributed to Moses, called Genesis,"—would not all those of the congregation who accepted the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Old Testament, feel themselves -compromised and insulted in a manner which they would not feel to be at all applicable to an individual opinion expressed by the officiating minister in his sermon,—for which of course he alone is responsible? It seems to us that any such interpolations of significant gestures or descriptions not authorized in the ordinary rubric by Evangelicals or Rationalists, would at once be decried by the Ritualists as all but blasphemous, having an obvious tendency to commit the congregations under their charge to the opinions indicated by the priest thus acting in the service as their representative ; and very justly so. For, whatever we might think of the particular opinions thus indicated, it is quite certain that they are not imposed on the Church, that a very powerful section of the Church wholly disavow them, and that the priest, when -speaking, not for himself but for the congregation, has no right at all to narrow or specialize the interpretation of the aervice so as to offend any of the sectional views within the Church. But if this be so, how can it be denied that Ritualists are liable to the same charge, when they interpolate acts and gestures, not ordered by the rubric, which convey,—and are no doubt intended to convey,—to the congregation the view, not of the Church, but of a small section of it f We should maintain for the Ritualists the same liberty to expound freely their own personal views in the sermon, or at any other time, so far as they are legally within the letter of the law, as we should maintain for the Evangelicals or the Broad Church party. But we can assert for no party the right so to modify the general worship of the Church, as to make the representative acts of the priest mean, or seem to the worshippers to mean, something far more special, and sectional, than the authors of our Prayer Book intended them to mean. In point of fact, as every one knows, the administration of the Communion by the Ritualists in country parishes has been understood to put a peculiar interpretation on the service from which numbers of the laity have shrunk back in horror ; and it has not been regarded as the mere personal opinion of the officiating priest which was thus expressed, but rather as a solemn attempt to alter the drift and bearing of the collective act of worship in which the congregation itself was engaged. Nor can we see that there is any remedy for this except the rule now authoritatively laid down by the Privy Council,—that the Ritual of the Prayer Book must be strictly adhered to by all parties, and that any attempt to import significant variations into it is an attempt to narrow the ground of the Church, not to enlarge it. We feel perfectly certain that had the appeal been against. significant interpolations introduced with the drift not of Romanizing but of rationalizing the whole purport of the service, we should have heard nothing of this assertion that the judgment is an illiberal judgment. The Guardian would not have told us that the Privy Council had "stretched and twisted" the law in order to convict a man who had introduced into the service what the Prayer Book had not forbidden. We should have heard nothing but of the disgraceful attempt of the Rationalists so to slide their own views into the ceremonial of the Church as to offend the piety of ordinary Christians, and we should have quite assented to the justice of the criticism. For example, we personally regard the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed as not only spurious divinity, bad theology, and worse morality, but as something approaching to blasphemy. Still we have not a word to say in defence of those clergymen who omit it on the days on which it is appointed to be read. We wish, of course, to see the law of the Church altered in this respect. We hope to see Parliament suppress the Athanasian Creed, as the American Episcopal Church has already suppressed it. But we hold that the only true bulwark of the liberty of the Church is strict adherence to the law in its ritual, and if any minister may modify the services by either omission or insertion, at his pleasure, there is no guarantee for the comprehensiveness of the service. Those who most value special portions of the Liturgy and special symbolic acts may suddenly, and without a hearing, find themselves deprived of that part of the service which went home to their heart. Those who specially dread and dislike particular interpretations to which parts of the service may be considered open, though they may be equally open to quite other interpretations as well, may at any time suddenly find themselves participating in a form which says in dumb show, if not in some cases aloud, precisely what they protest with all their hearts against saying. We do not hesitate to assert that strict adherence to the letter of the Prayer Book is one of the best guarantees we can have for comprehension. Let the minister
use his fullest legal liberty in preaching, if he will. No one is committed by the sermon but himself. Every Sunday the doctrine of numberless jejune and dogmatic sermons de livered in the various pulpits of the land is questioned and rejected by thousands of hearers. But in conducting the worship the priest does not speak for himself alone, and has no right to engraft his own doctrines on those of the Prayer Book. He speaks as a representative, and must abstain from all implicit or explicit commentary which has a tendency to narrow the circle of the faith recognized by, and included in, our Church. But it is said that however true these remarks may be in relation to the parochial churches of rural parishes, they
have little or no application to the churches of great cities,—
such churches as St. Alban's, for instance,—where the process of "natural selection" brings together such congregations only as are really represented by the Ritualist priests in the glosses they put on the service as completely as the priests' own faith is represented by those glosses. Now, we admit that if all the churches of the land were in the same position as St.
Alban's, the argument against allowing suggestive glosses in the way of gesture and ornament, ezc., would be much less strong. But they are not ; and it seems perfectly obvious that to allow the different Anglican churches, even in great towns, so to modify the meaning of the ritual as to express significantly, the different shades of opinion of the worshippers, must bring on us a disintegrating process that cannot but end in splitting the Church into sects. You cannot permit these private glosses on the Anglican ceremonial to the Ritealiets, without permitting them precisely to the same extent to Low Church, or Broad Church, or Rationalists. If you permit them to all these, in the great towns, how are you to draw the distinction between the churches where these sectarian modifications of the worship are not inconvenient and those where they are ? The transition from such churches as St. Alban's to the lonely church of a whole country side is very gradual, and in the intermediate stages there will be all degrees of practical inconvenience up to the highest in allowing the minister to put a sectarian gloss on the worship. Besides, the example of sectarian worship is catching, and as we see at present, the practice in the Church of a set or clique, in a great city like London, will soon be emulated by the suburban church, containing people of all sorts of mixed theologies, and then by the country church whose worshippers can find no other within many square miles. It seems, then, clear on all sides that if the Church of England is to maintain its comprehension, it must assert the liberty of the minister only in his individual capacity as a preacher and thinker,—and keep him strictly to the letter of the law in that capacity in which he represents the congregation, and not himself,—namely, as the leader of its worship.
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